descriptions of the old tales. Its glossy, longnecked body was apparently clothed in sleek wet fur or dark feathers rather than scales, and its exhalations, while fetid enough, lacked the hot sulphurous taint of its mythical namesake. It was no fire-breather, but rather a creature of flesh and blood. During my long exile in southern Andradh, I’d heard sailors from the Malachite Islands sing songs about such fearsome predators, giving them another name. The creature menacing us had no wings, unlike its Andradhian counterpart, but its frightful conformation was almost identical. It was a dragon.
It spoke, and we heard it not with our ears but with our minds.
I command that you shall not move. I command that you shall not use the Salka moonstones, nor conjure any other sorcery against me.
Its windvoice was silken-soft, almost languid, full of arrogant confidence. Induna and I were helpless, incapable of fight or flight. I was aware of an awesome talent inspecting us as though we were novel and unsavory specimens on an alchymist’s bench.
‘We mean no harm,’ I managed to say. ‘We are only lost travelers, trying to find Castle Morass –’
Silence!
The great neck arched downward and the talons reached out and seized both of us. We clung tighter to one another and prepared to die. The creature pulled us toward its opening mouth. Its eyes were like blazing emeralds with central pools of darkness that grew to enormous proportions and then swallowed us whole.
In the earlier volumes of this Boreal Moon Tale, I told of my first years of service to Conrig Wincantor, nicknamed Ironcrown, High King of Cathra and Sovereign of High Blenholme Island. I, Deveron Austrey, was born with powerful uncanny abilities that were strangely imperceptible to the Brothers of Zeth, who examine small children for such traits and compel the windtalented to join their Mystical Order. One of my gifts, which I hardly understood during my boyhood, enabled me to detect magical potential in others.
At the age of twelve, when I was a lowly apprentice leatherworker in the Cala Palace stables and Conrig was Prince Heritor of Cathra, I chanced to look into the royal youth’s eyes as I helped him mount his horse. There I recognized the faint but unmistakable glint that marks a person possessing magical talent. Not knowing its importance, I blurted out my discovery to the appalled prince. Fortunately for me, no other person was near enough to overhear. So instead of having me killed, Conrig made me his personal snudge (or spy) and called me by that name.
I kept his secret, which would have disqualified him for the Cathran kingship even though his talent was very meager. In time, with a good deal of assistance from the powerful sorceress Ullanoth of Moss – and, I must admit, from me – Conrig inherited his father’s throne.
After winning a war against the forces of Didion, Ironcrown declared himself the Sovereign of Blenholme. A few years later he fulfilled his ambition to unite the four quarreling states of our island into a single nation. But this was to be only a first step toward Conrig’s ultimate objective: to emulate his ancestor, Emperor Bazekoy the Great, and conquer the rest of the known world.
Conrig Wincantor was a brilliant politician and a warrior of immense valor. Nevertheless he possessed a ruthlessness and an icy expediency that often troubled my over-tender conscience; but in spite of these misgivings, I served him faithfully throughout my adolescence. When I entered manhood at the age of twenty, Conrig knighted me, named me his Royal Intelligencer, and almost immediately entrusted me with a crucial new mission.
I was sent to the land of Tarn to search for the king’s vengeful divorced wife, Princess Maudrayne. Believed to be drowned, she had reappeared after four years and posed a unique threat to the Sovereignty. Not only had she covertly given birth to Conrig’s eldest son – who by law would take precedence over the king’s heirs by his second marriage – but she also knew that her former husband possessed weak magical talent. If she revealed his secret and convinced the Lords Judicial of Cathra that she spoke the truth, Conrig would lose his throne. Even if she were not believed, her mere accusation might fatally undermine the already wavering loyalty of the vassal states of Tarn and Didion and plunge the island into chaos.
Ironcrown was adamant that I should do whatever was necessary to guarantee Maudrayne’s silence, as well as eliminate the dynastic menace posed by her young son Dyfrig. I balked at the obvious solution – assassination – and conceived a plan that I hoped might save the lives of the princess and her little boy while still satisfying the king.
As I undertook the difficult task of finding the pair, I discovered that the stability of Conrig’s reign had a more overreaching importance: High Blenholme Island was about to be invaded by a horde of Salka monsters. Incited by the young sorcerer Beynor ash Linndal, deposed ruler of Moss and brother to his successor Conjure-Queen Ullanoth, the enormous amphibians intended to take back the island from which most of them had been expelled over a thousand years earlier by Emperor Bazekoy.
Both Beynor and the Salka planned to use moonstone sigils, instruments of sorcery empowered by the supernatural Beaconfolk, to bring about the reconquest. The auroral Beacons, who were also called the Great Lights, comprised two opposing factions that were embroiled in a mysterious New Conflict of their own. I had been drawn into it against my will – as had numbers of other humans who are also part of this Boreal Moon Tale – but by the end of the mission involving Princess Maudrayne and her son, I mistakenly believed I had escaped the Lights’ thrall.
The mission itself was both a success and a failure. With the help of loyal companions – and my reluctant employment of two moonstone sigils, which the ‘good’ Light called the Source had compelled me to accept – I rescued Maudrayne and her child Dyfrig from a strange captivity. I was able to convince the princess to recant her spiteful revelation of Conrig’s secret to the Sealords of Tarn. In turn, the High King agreed that young Dyfrig might be placed third in the Cathran royal succession, behind his twin sons Orrion and Corodon, born of his marriage to Risalla of Didion. The boy was to become the adopted son of Earl Marshal Parlian Beorbrook, a Cathran peer of uncompromising honesty. To assure the child’s loyalty to the Sovereign, Dyfrig would never see or communicate with his mother again.
Unknown to me, Ironcrown was too cynical to trust his former wife’s promise not to publicly reaffirm his secret talent. After having agreed that Maudrayne would be allowed to live in quiet exile with her Tarnian relatives, he arranged for her murder by poison, which was passed off as suicide. I was so disillusioned by the king’s perfidy that I left his service without permission. I fled to a remote region of western Tarn, accompanied by a young woman named Induna of Barking Sands, an apprentice shaman-healer who had earlier saved my life and also assisted in the rescue of Maudrayne and her son. For a few months I lived with Induna and her mother in a tiny village near Northkeep.
In the best of romantic endings I should have married Induna and made a new life for myself, secure from the Sovereignty’s tumult and intrigues as well as from the more subtle machinations of the Beaconfolk.
The reality was messier.
Shortly after my abrupt resignation from the intelligencer post, I sent a message to Conrig via his elder brother Vra-Stergos, Cathra’s Royal Alchymist, who had been friendly toward me during my years of service to the king. In it I apologized for my affront to the regal dignity (but gave no reason for my dereliction of duty), swore that I intended to continue guarding Conrig’s secret with my life, and said that I wanted only to be left in peace. I also returned the considerable sum of money vouchsafed to me by the Crown when I was granted knighthood.
There was no reply to my message, and none of my later attempts to windspeak Lord Stergos were successful. He and Conrig were occupied with more urgent matters. The king’s domestic enemies, Cathra’s Lords of the Southern Shore, had demanded that he defend himself against persistent Tarnian accusations that he possessed magical talent, was thus not the legitimate High King of Cathra, and therefore was unworthy of Tarn’s fealty.
The official inquiry was as brief as it was dramatic. No member of Cathra’s Mystical Order of Zeth could swear that they detected talent in the king. (The scrupulously honest Vra-Stergos was saved from having to condemn his brother because of the precise wording of the oath, even though he knew