Fanuilh by Daniel Hood (ebook reader with highlight function TXT) 📗

do, I swear I'll leave you alone here to starve to death, do you hear!"

He felt better when he had shouted, and though he would have preferred it if the dragon had showed any reaction other than stony calm, it was enough. The last dregs of his anger swirled away.

"Don't the lights in here ever go out?" he asked after a while.

It was important to know. The hero was the minstrel.

"Really? They don't ever go out? How interesting!" He chuckled wryly to himself, since Fanuilh would not do it for him.

I will tell you about the house when you live here. When you have fulfilled your bargain, you will be master.

"And you'll stay out of my head and show me many things I never dreamed of and all will be well with the world," he said wearily. "Let's not go into that again."

You will have to stay here tonight. It is too late to return to Southwark. You should go to sleep now, so that you can meet the merchant in the morning.

"It's not my house."

It is, but for the moment that is not important. You should sleep.

He suddenly felt wide awake. The icy cold was leaving his bones, his numbed fingers and ears were thawing, and he felt more awake than he had in the theater.

"I'll sleep here, but first ... "

He left the room briskly and went to the kitchen. The house felt strange, full where he had expected it to be empty. There were none of the flat echoes one finds in abandoned rooms. As though it were waiting, he imagined, and drove the idea away with the image of a jug of chilled red wine, beads of moisture trickling down its sides. He was careful not to look at the jug· by the stove for a moment, but when he did its sides were slick, and an exploratory finger came up wet with wine. And excellent wine, by the taste of the drops sucked off his finger. Shaking his head, he dispelled the wine and conjured a raw haunch of meat, feeling a little ridiculous as he closed his eyes and bunched his face with effort.

With the haunch on a wooden platter thoughtfully provided by the magic oven and his own imagination, the jug under his arm, Liam returned to the workroom. He dropped the platter in front of Fanuilh and sat crosslegged on the floor by the table.

"Eat up, familiar of mine. I need you to clear up some points for me, and you'll need your strength." He started to go on in the same vein, but stopped and changed tracks. "How is your strength? How are you?" The thought blocked immediately.

Better, but not completely well. I cannot fly yet, though I can move a little. Perhaps a week more.

An image of the tiny dragon skimming over the sand and looping up to dart out over the sea entered his head, and he remembered seeing it fly during the summer, silhouetted by. the sun. He had been greatly impressed when he first saw it, but over the course of the summer had come to take Fanuilh for granted, another possession of Tarquin's, like the wizard's fantastic beach house.

Liam nodded as though something important had been decided.

"Well, I think I'll stay here for a week then, and nurse you lovingly back to health."

That would be good. The house is yours. Now you wish to clear some things up.

Toneless though the thought was, it nonetheless conveyed to Liam that the dragon knew exactly what he wanted to discuss. How could it not, when it could read his mind?

"I certainly do. Your memory's far from perfect, familiar of mine, and things are moving a little quickly for me to be wandering around with an incomplete schedule of events. Let's begin from the beginning, shall we?"

There were two events around which to arrange Fanuilh's imperfect sense of time: the death of Tarquin and the disappearance of the Teeth. It had apparently flown over the Teeth the day before, and, returning the next day, noticed their absence.

Between Liam's coaxing and puzzling and the dragon's willing answers and descriptions of the weather, they formed a sketchy timeline, to which Liam added his own observations.

Three days before the Teeth disappeared, Ancus Marcius had appeared at the door of the beach house with his thugs, rude and demanding. He had left after a short time, and his feelings about the interview were not apparent to Fanuilh, though Liam added that only a day before a rich ship of his had been smashed to splinters on the Teeth.

On the same day in the afternoon, Lons sought the wizard out, and remained closeted with him for some time. Fanuilh, told off and bored with waiting, had flown down the beach, and did not see him leave.

Two days later the most violent of a season of violent storms raged all day long, from early in the morning until just after dark. That evening, the woman with the seductive voice had come, and Fanuilh had been shut out again. And she was hooded and cloaked, it explained, so it had not seen her face.

"Even if she had been naked," Liam said consolingly, though nothing in the thought had conveyed regret or a sense of guilt on the dragon's part, "you probably wouldn't have seen her anyway. It was pitch dark all day, and the night was worse." He himself had endured most of the storm wrapped in a blanket in his garret, watching quietly as the Storm King howled and· spat his defiance at the world.

Tarquin spoke with her at some length, and Fanuilh was only allowed in the house several hours later. Liam coughed over this, wondering if they had done much talking, but he let it pass. The wizard had been preparing something since the day Ancus and Lons had visited him, and that night he set Fanuilh to watching the house for spirits.

"Spirits?"

They can ruin a great magic. The power draws them from the