Dragonslayer by Wayland Drew

Author:Wayland Drew [Drew, Wayland]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 034529694X
Publisher: Del Rey Books
Published: 1981-06-27T22:48:44+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Despite Tyrian’s warning, the weeks that followed were the happiest Galen had ever known. He never thought of leaving Swanscombe. For the first time in his life, he felt at home. He accepted Simon’s invitation to move into Simonburgh and to learn the working of silver and gold, a craft that seemed to Galen almost as splendid as sorcery. He helped with all the summer labor of the village—the sowing and planting, the cultivation and the reaping, the building of new houses, and the tending of cattle and sheep on the slopes. He took his place as a man that summer among the Swanscombe villagers, and when he and Valerian became lovers that too was accepted as naturally as sunrise or the turning of the leaves in fall. To mark the occasion, Simon crafted him a bold and magnificent silver ring.

There were, of course, some wounds that did not heal and would never heal. When Galen and Valerian went to see Melissa’s parents—something which she felt she had to do—they found Melissa’s mother hopelessly crazed, talking brightly to and about her daughter as if the girl were sitting with them; but when Valerian gave her the ring that she had found in the Blight on the day of their return, reality struck the woman like a lash. For a moment she sat quietly holding the ring in the palm of her hand, and then she stood up and flung it at Valerian, and spat, and uttered such foul abuse that Melissa’s father came shuffling from his workshop to restrain her. “Go, please,” he said.

Nor was this incident the only cloud on Galen’s horizon that summer. He was aware of Tyrian’s surveillance. Although he heard nothing further from either the centurion or the king, several times when he looked up from the task in hand he saw a dark horseman—a member of Tyrian’s troop—on the horizon or at the edge of the forest, and he knew that the watch was being kept both on himself and on the brooding lair of Vermithrax. One day, he and Valerian walked west from Swanscombe. They intended to picnic in the hills, but they grew so absorbed in their conversation that before they realized it they had passed the Blight, descended the long slope into the valley of the Varn, entered the woods oblivious to the clucking warnings of Gringe, and emerged on the bank of the River Varn itself. Through the shallows a large, gray heron was stalking a frog sunning on a log. Something about that heron, some familiar oddity in the way it held its neck, caught Galen’s attention. But it was not the bird which jolted both him and Valerian back to reality. A horseman was coming across the ford toward them. This was no ordinary traveler, of which there had been several through Urland that summer; this was one of Tyrian’s cavalrymen and he was advancing at a brisk trot, lance lowered, horse’s hooves splashing in the sun. Furthermore, there were others farther upstream, alerted by their colleague’s sudden activity.

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