Read Online Everran's Bane by Sylvia Kelso - Free Book Online Page A

wonder, “How did you know that?” she looked at me as if I were an idiot, and replied, “It’s in all the songs. Dragon poison thins the blood.”
    For three days after that he lay at the river’s brink. Considering the handling I gave him, it is a Sky-lords’ gift that he lived so long. Thassal applied fresh poultices, and fed him honey thinned with water and mixed with yeldtar juice, which she made him swallow by stroking his throat. “Yeldtar to keep him quiet. Water because he’s bled. Honey’s quick strength.”
    Unlike me, she never despaired. “He’s a fighter,” she said, watching his death-white face against the pillow. “He’ll fight.” And, as the cocks crew in Astarien’s bleak dormitory-like streets four mornings later, he opened his eyes.
    Thassal promptly pushed me behind the lamp. “You he knows.” She fed him again, quietly but relentlessly making him finish the whole cup, then gently lowered his head. But when his eyes had closed, she stood there a long moment, and then she said a curious thing.
    â€œSo,” she murmured. “They are green.”
    She probably saved his life times over as he mended, for a more fractious patient never filled a bed. He was hardly conscious when he tried to talk, and the smoke must have held poison, for it had seared his throat. Then nothing would do but wax tablets and stylus, and of course, being right-handed, he could not write. When he started to beat the bed-clothes Thassal hauled me upstairs, commanding, “Tell him the tale. Naught else to do.”
    So I told him. He turned his face to the wall and lay the rest of the day like a skinned pup, with Thassal seated silently by the bed. Coming up at lamp-time, I heard when she finally spoke.
    â€œKing,” she said, “this won’t do. Live folk need you. Those don’t.”
    He did not move. But next morning he was propped up with the tablet against his knees and his lopsided turban making him look like a mad Quarred sheep lord, as he doggedly, grimly taught his left hand to write.
    * * * * *
    His first demand was a move to the lookout tower. Thassal shrugged. “He’ll fret silly else.” With that achieved, he summoned Sarras and Gerrar and me to a council, and then I had to contend not only with the rest of Everran but with a demonically active king.
    First he summoned engineers, then ordered them to build a catapult. “We’ll jam stones in the bastard’s gullet.” Informed that, unlike the dragon it would be immobile, he wrote in furious jagged capitals, “Then build one that’s not!” While they digested that he sent for armorers to forge unbreakable sarissas, herb-doctors to compound a dragon-poison, hunters and more engineers to design a dragon pit, and Four knows what else. Between times he took over the evacuation, deployed the levies, dismissed the Regent, summoned the Council to Astarien, set a permanent dragon-watch, quelled the lords, expelled the royal physician who had been slung in a mule-litter and sent north so fast he was only fit to wring his hands, threw his tablets at me for suggesting he should rest, and requisitioned Gerrar’s scribes so he could deal with the Confederacy.
    After he regained his voice things speeded up. But when, not a month after the battle, he announced he was ready to get up, Thassal calmly demolished him.
    â€œYou have no clothes,” she told him from the tower door. “And no one will bring you any. And if you try to get some I’ll take that nightshirt off you as well.”
    Healthy, he would have laughed and admitted defeat. As it was, he lay back and said in that strained whisper, “You cursed woman. You should have been a general. Thank the Four you’re not.”
    An hour later he had sent a mirror-signal for the Treasurer’s inventory and was waving his tablets at me, saying, “Here, Harran, you’re