Murtagh

With an extra-deep breath, Murtagh cleared his lungs and lengthened his strides. It was true that stepping outside the main current of events in Alagaësia had helped calm his mind, but he still felt twisted up inside, him and Thorn both.

It might take years for either of them to unknot, if ever they did.

An owl hooted from a nearby tree, and somewhere in the brush, an animal darted away. Maybe a rabbit. Maybe something worse. A Svartling perhaps. The small, dark-skinned creatures were said to help with household chores if given gifts of bread and milk, but they were also said to treat travelers with cruel and often dangerous tricks.

Whatever the sound, Murtagh didn’t want to meet its author in the middle of a night-bound field.

He slowed as he climbed the hill where they’d landed earlier, weaving between the crags of rock and the thickets of hordebrush.

At the crest, he found Thorn crouched, ready to spring into the air. The dragon’s eyes outshone the werelight, and his scales flashed and flared with renewed brilliance. Great furrows scarred the earth around him: the tufts of grass torn, hordebrush uprooted, rocks split.

Thorn’s tail twitched when he saw Murtagh, and he shivered with an excess of unburnt energy. A snarl wrinkled his muzzle.

Murtagh eyed the furrows but made no comment.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Seriously.” He turned in a circle, arms outstretched. “The blood isn’t mine.”

Thorn sniffed him and growled slightly before settling back on his haunches. His muzzle smoothed, but Murtagh could still feel his fear, frustration, and anger. I should have come to help you.

“It’s all right. Really.” He stroked Thorn’s neck before continuing to the saddlebags, where he removed Zar’roc, unwrapped the crimson sword, and—with a sense of relief—strapped the weapon to his waist.

“We’d best find somewhere else for the night,” he said, climbing up Thorn’s back to the saddle strapped between the large spikes on the dragon’s shoulders. Once in place, he snuffed the werelight.

Always you stir up the ant-nest cities, said Thorn.

“I know. It’s a bad habit. Let’s go.”

Another growl, and with a great gust of wind and surge of steely muscles, Thorn leaped into the night air, the thud of his wings an invisible hammer blow.

Three more beats carried them into the clouds. The mist was cold against Murtagh’s cheeks, but not unpleasantly so after his run. It tasted of moss and fresh-cut grass and new beginnings.

***

Thorn flew east for a seemingly endless while. At last, they descended to settle on a flat-topped knoll with a commanding view over the landscape. Dark though it was, Murtagh could just make out the forest of Du Weldenvarden farther to the south—a long black smear that extended across the land, like a great arm pointing back toward Ceunon.

The cold stung his skin as he dropped his cloak and pulled off his bloodstained shirt, trying to avoid touching the spots of gore. “Hvitra,” he murmured as he imposed his will on the garment.

The cloth shimmered slightly, and the blotches of red faded.

Murtagh stroked the linen. It looked clean enough, but he still intended to wash the shirt before he wore it again.

He stored the shirt in a saddlebag and removed his one other garment: a thick woolen top—knitted, not woven—dyed a dark brown with interlaced patterns of red along the wrists and neck. The wool was itchy, but it was his preferred wear for flying, as it was far warmer than the linen.

Eager to cover his skin, he donned the top and again wrapped himself in his cloak.

Since a fire might draw attention, Thorn curled into a tight ball, nose to tail, and Murtagh crawled under his right wing and laid out his bedroll next to the smooth scales of Thorn’s underbelly.

Was it worth it? Thorn asked.

“I think so,” said Murtagh. Opening his mind more than felt safe around strangers, he shared his full memories of Ceunon.

They were not very good, said Thorn, fixing on an image of Sarros’s guards.

“No, they weren’t. Lucky for me.”

A faint growl, and the dragon drew his wing tighter around Murtagh. I see now there is a storm set before us.

“But how big, how bad? We still don’t know.”

But it exists.

“Yes.”

Thorn’s plated eyelid closed and opened with a slight nack. You wish to fly into the storm.

“Maybe not into it, but toward it, yes. What say you?”

The dragon coughed with his peculiar laugh. That we should take the stone to Tronjheim and have the dwarves carve it into something pretty for us.

Murtagh snorted. “With our heads on pikes to watch?”

A faint scent of dragon smoke filled the space around them as a thread of crimson flame flickered in Thorn’s nostrils. No? Then I say we should sleep and speak of it in the morning.