Chapter 102: The Village - Part 1
ULF
Shingle gave way to a path of crushed shell that announced every step I took. Somewhere behind the houses a dog was going out of its mind. Net frames ran the length of the street, the mesh stiff and white with salt, and past them a smokehouse breathed herring into the cold.
The village elder was an old man named Corwen, and he didn't wait for me to knock.
He came out into his doorway wrapped in a rough blanket against the night chill, and his eyes went from my face to the sword at my hip to the beach and back. I'd never met him. Every dealing I'd had with this place had gone through intermediaries, through Harwin's men, through a factor in Duskendale who believed he was buying salt fish for a merchant house. But the old man knew what I was to him. Or he knew that someone with more gold than sense had been paying to keep a village nobody had ever bothered to tax.
"You're the benefactor."
"I am."
"There are dragons on my beach."
"There are."
He looked past my shoulder for a while. "And people. A woman. Children."
"Yes."
Behind him the house was waking up. A board creaked, a woman's voice asked something twice, a child got hushed. He didn't turn around.
"What do you want?"
"Sanctuary. For myself and the people I brought. No questions asked. No names shared. Complete discretion." I held his gaze. "You've taken my gold for months. Now I need something in return."
Corwen chewed the inside of his lip. Out on the strand Vermithor made a low sound that carried through the ground rather than the air, and every dog in the village stopped barking at the same instant.
"The dragons."
"Will stay on the beach. They won't harm anyone unless threatened."
"The people?"
"Are refugees. That's all you need to know."
"How long?"
"As long as necessary."
Neither of us said anything for a while. Down the street the doors were opening, barefoot men with gaffs and gutting knives, women behind them holding lamps hooded in their fingers, all of them drawn toward the impossible thing on their beach.
"I'll need more gold," Corwen said at last. "Feeding extra mouths, housing them, keeping secrets. It costs."
"You'll have it. Everything I promised and more."
"Then you have your sanctuary." He stepped clear of his own doorway and stood aside. "My house is largest. Take it. We'll find other arrangements."
"I wouldn't..."
"You would. And you'll need the space." He tipped his chin down toward the water. "Those children looked terrified. They need walls and warmth, not a blanket on the sand."
He's a good man. Practical, but good.
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. This village has never hidden from the world before. Let's see if we can learn." He got two steps into the street and stopped. "Is the city gone, then?"
I didn't answer him. He nodded as though I had, and went on down to the beach to look at my dragons.
Moving the family up from the shore took an hour.
The children were asleep on their feet by then. Two fishermen carried Maelor and Jaehaera on their shoulders, men who'd woken expecting weather and got royalty instead, and neither of them said a word about it. Jaehaerys walked on his own and refused to be carried. Helaena walked between them with salt drying white in her hair.
The house was rough. Two rooms, a packed-earth floor, furniture built to be used rather than looked at, a fire banked low in a stone hearth with a fish kettle hanging over it on a hook. The window had a shutter and no glass. It was warm. It was private. It was ours.
"This will do," Helaena said softly. "This will more than do."
We settled the children first. All three of them went into the one bed, Jaehaera's arm thrown over Maelor, Jaehaerys pressed to the wall. They were asleep before I had the blanket over them.
Resilient. Children are always more resilient than we expect.
Helaena sat on the edge of the bed and watched them breathe.
"We should establish a cover story," I said quietly. "Before too many people start asking."
"What story?"
"You're a noblewoman. Minor house, somewhere far enough off that nobody here could ever check. Your husband died in the riots. You fled with your children. I'm..." I heard how thin it was before I finished it. "A family friend. A protector."
"The truth, essentially. Just incomplete."
"The best lies always are."
She nodded without looking away from them.
"And the dragons?"
"Mine. War refugees, like us. The villagers will learn to accept them."
"Will they?"
"They'll have to."
The wet nurse came at dawn.
I'd put Dalla on the far side of the village before the boy was born, close enough that Harwin's guards could stand between her and anything that came, far enough that nobody would ever draw a line from her to the rest of what I kept here. Her cottage sat at the ragged edge where the tide chewed the pilings under the floor, three rooms of salt-eaten timber with the nets hung across the seaward wall to dry. She had no idea who I was. No idea whose child she fed at her breast alongside her own daughter.
But I knew she'd come. Two dragons on the strand would have brought out the dying.
She came up the track with both babies bundled against her chest, her own girl and her nephew, the orphan she was paid to raise, and she talked to the pair of them the whole way about nothing at all. Which nets wanted mending. What oil cost in Duskendale now.
My son. Aegon. Three months old.
I watched from Corwen's doorway while she came on with the other villagers, all of them craning to see the beach.
Helaena stepped out beside me.
Her body went rigid. Her hand found the doorframe and stayed on it.
"Is that—"
"Yes."
"He's so close. He's right there."
"I know."
"I could just... if I could just hold him for a moment—"
"Too risky. Too many eyes."
The sound she made came out halfway between a laugh and a sob.
"Too risky. My son is fifty feet away and I can't touch him because it's too risky."
"Helaena."
"I know. I know why. I know the reasons." Her voice cracked in the middle of it. "But knowing doesn't make it easier."
She turned and went back inside before anyone in that crowd could see her face come apart.
The days that followed were an exercise in careful performance.
I made myself the village's authority, not by force but by necessity. The dragons needed space. The refugees needed feeding. The villagers needed telling that their world hadn't ended in the night.
I gave them all three. Gold came out of the caches I'd buried months back, under the floor of the salt house and in two crab pots sunk off the point. Harwin's fishermen kept order without once looking like guards. The dragons stayed on the sand and ate what the boats brought in, and the occasional sheep bought inland at three times its worth, and by the fourth day the village boys were daring one another to run within twenty paces of Silverwing's tail.
And through all of it, I watched Helaena break slowly.
She couldn't acknowledge Aegon. Couldn't claim him. Couldn't sit with him a moment longer than a stranger's child allowed.
But she couldn't stay away either.
So I arranged what could be arranged. Dalla was told the noblewoman had lost a great deal and found comfort in children, that holding a baby steadied her against her grief. Dalla accepted it without a blink. Nobles were strange. Everyone knew that.
So Helaena held her son. Fed him. Sang to him, low, the same three lines over and over. Learned his three-month-old face by heart, every day, because every day it was a slightly different face.
Then she gave him back.
Every time. Every day.
And every night, she cried in my arms until exhaustion finally claimed her.
"This can't continue," she whispered one evening. "I can't keep giving him back. I can't keep pretending he's not mine."
"I know."
"How long? How long until it's safe?"
"I don't know."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
She turned away from me and curled into herself, facing the shuttered window.
"I used to dream about holding him. All those months after he was born, I dreamed about finally getting to hold my son. And now I do, every day, and it hurts more than the dreams ever did."
I had no words for that.
So I put my arm over her and kept it there, and the fire went down to coals, and outside the tide came in over the stones where the dragons lay, and when the grey came through the shutter we got up and began the performance again.