An eagle was passing a mile and a third away, flying southeast at thirty-two—no, thirty-one—knots. Farther out a flock of ptarmigans was scattering to the wind. The dragon discarded the thought. She did not know if she was capable of flight yet; one of her wings ached with an infuriating stiffness and hung off-kilter, likely a result of whatever wound had scarred it so deeply. She would have to seek food on the ground for the time being. She concentrated harder.
A glacial stream ran through her lands, she realized, the water silver-gray and cold, having been ancient blue ice a moment before it turned to runoff and slipped, laughing, down the frozen hillsides. She might find food there, she thought, but discarded the notion a moment later. Winter was coming; the great red and silver fish had come and spawned, laid their eggs and died, having completed what life expected of them. There would be nothing to ease her hunger in the gray water now.
Then, tickling the very edges of her consciousness, she felt something else.
Near the river’s edge, tucked away beneath a wide, sheltering ridge, was a small hunting camp.
Men. Humans, from the smell that the dragon sense inspired in her nostrils.
At first the thought repulsed her. She was, or at least had been, a being like them once herself, a woman, though not human—her blood was much older than that, she suspected. Dimly she recalled words spoken to her by another dragon, a beast she believed might have been related to her; her mother, perhaps. Hate, bitter and foul-tasting, came to her mouth at the memory.
If they are encroaching on your lands, why do you not just eat them? she heard herself saying in the voice of a child.
Eat them? Do not be ridiculous, the wyrm had said. They are men. One does not eat men, no matter how much they may deserve it.
Why not?
Because that would be barbaric. Men are alleged to be sentient, though I admit I have not seen evidence of that. One does not eat sentient beings. No, my child, I limit myself to stags, sheep, and tirabouri. They digest well, and carry none of the guilt that men would in the stomach.
I know no guilt, thought the dragon bitterly. Only hunger.
She allowed her dragon sense to explore further, to wander closer to the hunting camp, where the snow had walled the huts inside the ridge, forming a frosty barrier between the humans and the river. They had dug a pathway—four feet, three and three-quarters inches wide, seven feet, four and five-eighths inches high, her dragon sense noted—between the camp and the river. In her mind’s eye she could see the footsteps that had tramped to the water’s edge, and the skids where the buckets had been hauled back.
With the rising hunger and the expansion of her dragon sense, the wyrm’s eyes narrowed in thought.
I have no such qualms about men, she ruminated. They are a large source of meat, warm of blood and thin of skin. I imagine they roast nicely, and will keep well.
And I am famished.
The decision was an easy one.
Open, she commanded the doors of the castle in a voice that rang with bloody intent. They slammed open in response; the icy wind blew in, swirling angrily through the cavernous hall.
Spurred by hunger, and the desire to vent her pain in destruction, the beast slithered out through the doors into the dusk, over the battlements, and down into the crevasse, where she disappeared into the earth beneath the snow.
7
The Rampage of the Wyrm was an epic poem penned in the Cymrian era, inscribed on an illuminated scroll and found, after centuries uncounted, hidden deep in the vaults of the library of Canrif by Achmed, who presented it, with wry amusement, to Rhapsody just before she undertook a long journey with Ashe to find the dragon Elynsynos. The Bolg king had sat smugly, scarcely able to contain his glee, watching her expressive face as she read the tale, which told of the murderous exploits of the dragon she was about to seek.
Elynsynos, the wyrm for whom the continent was named, was older than Time, the manuscript said. It related in breathless detail the story of the primordial dragon, said to be between one and five hundred feet long, with a mouthful of teeth the size and sharpness of finely honed bastard swords. As dragons possess some of each of the five elemental lores, she was able to assume the form of any force of nature, such as a tornado, a flood, or a blazing forest fire, the manuscript said. She was wicked and cruel, and when her lover and the father of her three daughters, the sailor Merithyn the Explorer, did not return to her as he promised, she went into a wild fury and rampaged through the western continent, burning it with her caustic breath and decimating the lands up to the central province of Bethany, where her fire sparked the eternal flame which burned to that day, in Vrackna, the basilica consecrated to the element of fire.
Rhapsody was quick to point out to the gloating Bolg king that the account was mostly nonsense, which was evident to her without even meeting the dragon. As a Namer she was familiar with folklore as well as lore, the first told by untrained storytellers and woven over time into tales that tended to be filled with falsehoods and exaggerations, as opposed to the latter, which was as pure as possible, related by those trained to keep the history accurate.
Even so, the descriptions in the tale carried enough possible truth to make her nervous.
Sometime later, when she finally did meet the wyrm in her lair, Elynsynos quickly debunked the manuscript and its false account of history.
You’ve been reading that tripe, The Rampage of the Wyrm, haven’t you?
Yes.
It’s nonsense. I should have eaten the scribe who penned it alive. When Merithyn died I thought about torching the continent, but surely you must be able to tell that I didn’t. Believe me, if I were to rampage, the continent would be nothing but one very large, very black bed of coal, and it would be smoldering to this day.
The continent and its people, for all their fear of the dragon legends, for all the tremulous whining in the manuscripts that recounted their history, had never in fact seen the immolation the tales told of, had never lost more than a stray sheep to the beasts, and certainly had never experienced a true rampage.
And therefore were totally unprepared.
The men of the Anwaer village in the midlands of the Hintervold were a quiet lot.
Unlike the seasonal nomads who spent the summer culling fish from the area’s fertile streams and trapping fur-bearing animals, then relocating to the southern part of the realm when autumn came, the families of Anwaer braved the bone-chilling cold and the towering snowfall to stay together in their ancestral lands. They were all related in some manner, and found the beauty of the isolated tundra, the verdant forests of spiraling spruce, and the silence that reigned unchallenged by any but the mountain winds to be reason enough to endure the harsh winter in the place their families had called home for generations.
So when the autumn came, and the nearby villages thinned out, Anwaer ended its season of transport of skins and fishing and prepared to hunt.
Usually the hunting time lasted only a few weeks, less than one turn of the moon. With the heat of the summer fading and the merciless swarms of blood-sucking insects dispersed by the approaching cold, the game animals of the Hintervold would come out from their summer hiding places, down from the summits of the white crags and into more sheltered areas, seeking vegetation or prey, and a more hospitable clime for the coming winter.