Chapter 10

IN THE DARK ALLEY behind the church, Selendrile resumed dragon shape so the two of them could leave Griswold without having to wait for the gate to open in the morning.

"Try not to pull my arms out of my sockets this time," Alys grumbled. With her back to him, she couldn't tell whether he'd already changed into a dragon and couldn't answer or if—still human—he simply chose not to.

In another moment she felt his talons wrap around her waist, enclosing her. She felt a twinge of panic and dug her fingers tighter into the bundle of his clothes, but she didn't have time to shut her eyes before her feet left the ground.

With slow, powerful beats of his wings, Selendrile carried her up, higher than the town walls, higher than the trees, higher than the church steeple. At first she was disoriented, looking down on everything from the air, trying to make sense of half-familiar streets and buildings dimly lit by candles and torches and hearth fires, till her eyes began to cross and dizziness bubbled up in the space behind her eyes. As soon as my stomach catches up to the rest of me, I'm going to be in serious trouble, she thought.

But in another moment they'd left the town behind and were in the countryside and higher yet. Now the ground was too far away and too unreal to be frightening. Selendrile stretched his wings to catch an updraft, and fields and woods unrolled beneath them as he glided effortlessly on air currents. His grip around her waist was firm without being painful, and steady enough that she didn't worry about slipping loose. At die speed they were traveling, the rush of the wind past her ears was deafening. Still, by the time she saw that Selendrile was getting closer to the ground, she suddenly realized how disappointed she was at that thought. She laughed out loud at herself, and the sound was strange to her ears and, a moment later, was left miles behind.

With her feet once more on the ground, Alys again found herself dizzy, but this time it was a giddy, pleasant sensation. She let Selendrile's clothes drop to the ground so that she could hold her arms out and spin around, with her face up to the stars, wishing she could hug them to herself. "That was wonderful!" she announced. "I love flying!"

She let herself fall to the ground and lay on her back watching the sky spin above her.

When things were finally standing still in their proper places again, she pointed up to a dark wisp of cloud shrouding the moon. "Next time"—she giggled—"if there is a next time—wouldn't it be fun to fly through a cloud—like diving into a big pile of unspun wool?"

Selendrile sat down beside her to pull on his boots. "You can't feel them."

Alys rolled over and propped herself up on an elbow. "What do you mean? Are they too high up for you to reach?"

He shook his head. "I can reach them. But they don't feel like anything. Well," he amended, "some of them are a bit damp. What's the second part of your plan?"

Slowly Alys sat up. The silhouettes of the hills to her left were suddenly familiar, and she realized Selendrile had brought them to land just a short walk from the village of Saint Toby's. She rubbed her chilled arms. "I don't think," she admitted, "I'll be able to use the same disguise as I did in Griswold. I've lived with these people all my life, and men's breeches and a hat aren't going to fool anybody."

"All right," Selendrile said equably.

She sat looking at him, and he sat looking at her.

"Well?" she finally asked.

He sighed. "Assuming we can work around people recognizing you, what would you like to see done?"

Alys considered. "Gower wanted my father's land so that he could expand his own shop. His wheelworking is very important to him. I think I'd like to see him lose his shop, ruin his reputation."

"Easy to do. What about the daughter?"

Alys remembered the glee with which Etta had embellished the false accusations her parents had made, and how she'd suggested burning Alys at the stake. She felt a tightness in her chest and was suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. "I want her to be accused of the same thing I was, to know that she's innocent and to have nobody believe her. I want her to be just as scared as I was."

Selendrile smiled. "And the mother?"

Alys jumped to her feet. "I don't know," she cried. "It's not going to work anyway. They'll recognize me as soon as they see me. Why are you doing this?"

The dragon-youth looked at her calmly, and whether he was considering the nature of clouds or thinking that he could have saved himself a lot of trouble by eating her on the mountain that first night, Alys couldn't guess.

He said, "It's not that late. I'll go to the village now and tell Gower that I need a wheel for a farm cart. Then, tomorrow, we'll both go to the village." He kept on talking though she had started to shake her head. "We'll place a bandage around your head and face so that nobody can get a proper look at you, and tell them your jaw is broken so you can't talk. I'll tell them you were injured when the wheel we bought from Gower broke. That way we've already started to chip away at his reputation and we'll say that we have nowhere to stay so Gower—feeling guilty—will have to put us up."

"Gower has never felt guilty about anything in his life," Alys said.

Selendrile shrugged, an indication, Alys supposed, that they'd worry about that when they came to it.

Alys once again tipped her face up to the night sky, annoyed that he could take all this so lightly. "The rest of it could work," she conceded.

When he didn't answer, she looked and saw that he'd never waited for her decision but had already started walking toward the road that led to Saint Toby's. Alys had to run to catch up. "Am I supposed to wait here, or what?" she demanded.

"Your decision," he said. "Though I'd have thought you'd be interested." He was making it sound as though she'd been wheedling not to go.

"That's not—Oh, never mind." With his longer stride, it took all her breath just to keep up without looking like a silly little puppy.

"Through the woods here." She pointed to where the road began the final curve before the village.

They stayed to the perimeter of Barlow's pasture so that the trees would hide them from anyone looking out a cottage window, for the moon was full and the night was bright. Then they cut across the corner of Wilfred's wheat field and so came upon Saint Toby's from behind.

"This is as far as I dare go," Alys whispered, crouching between rows of black currant bushes to make herself as small as possible. Selendrile stooped down also, resting his hands on her shoulders to look beyond her to where she pointed. "That's Gower's house, the one with the wagon wheel by the right-hand corner." Candlelight peeked out through the chinks by the window, though it must be getting close to bedtime. Next door, dark, was the house in which she'd been born and had lived all her fifteen years. Loneliness—the yearning for her father, for things to go back to the way they had been—swept over her. The house was close enough that—except for the fear of being seen—Alys could have run up and touched it in the time she would need to count to twenty.

Selendrile showed no inclination to move, so Alys said, "If you're going to be telling them that you're—we're—from one of the farms between here and Griswold, you'd better circle round to the front and approach openly."

He gave her a cold look, which could have meant that he'd thought of that already, or that she was being too loud, or any of a dozen other things. Without acknowledging her suggestion, without even standing, he moved back and disappeared between the bushes. Only he could have made such a move look graceful. If she had tried it, she'd have pitched forward onto her face.

Eventually Alys gave up trying to catch some telltale movement or rustle to betray his passage, and she sat down to wait, trusting that there was no reason for him to abandon her here. She propped her chin up on her hands and enjoyed the quiet of the night and the reassuringly familiar smell of good farming earth. She found her head beginning to nod when suddenly she caught sight of Selendrile approaching Gower's house, walking next to Gower's wife. Presumably Una had been out late visiting one of the households on the edge of the village when Selendrile had entered, and she must have offered to guide him to her husband's wheelwright's shop. But to Alys's dismay, she realized that while she could see well enough, she could hear absolutely nothing.

All unsuspecting, Una led the dragon-youth to her door. She turned back to say something to him—Alys could see the flash of her smile in the moonlight—then she went in while Selendrile waited outside, never glancing in Alys's direction. Gower came out, and in an agony of frustration she watched the two of them talk. Gower kept shaking his head, but after a few moments, he entered his shop, and Selendrile sat down on the ground, leaning his back against the wall. That had to mean everything was going smoothly. Didn't it?

The back window opened, and daughter Etta dumped out a panful of water before securing the shutters again.

Una came out of the house carrying a steaming bowl, presumably left over from supper, and handed it to Selendrile.

Hmph! thought Alys, who had never gotten a free meal from Una despite the nearly dozen wheels she and her father had paid Gower to make.

Una went back inside and Selendrile tossed pieces of whatever it was Una had given him out into the street, where a suspicious, but apparendy half-starving, dog gobbled them up, coming closer and closer, but warily.

You'll be HIS dinner next, Alys mentally warned the dog.

Una came back out, fanning herself with her hand as though the house was too warm, which Alys didn't believe for a moment. She'd seen the way the women of Griswold had looked at Selendrile, and even from this far away she could recognize that Una was giving him the same look. Maybe if Alys hadn't known what he was, he'd have had the same effect on her. But, she told herself, she wouldn't have been so obvious about it.

Gower came out of the shop, rolling a wheel before him. Selendrile returned the bowl to Una, no doubt with his usual charming smile. Alys could see him pay Gower, then lift the wheel up onto his back and start off down the road to the outskirts of the village.

Alys crawled along the row between the bushes, then cut off through the wood to meet him just beyond where the road curved.

Either he heard her coming despite the fact that she had deliberately moved as quietly as possible, or being a great hulking dragon had given him steady nerves, for he didn't flinch when she jumped out of the dark at him.

"I couldn't hear a thing," she told him. "What did he say?"

Selendrile positioned himself so that he was facing in the direction of Saint Toby's. He set the wheel down on its edge and looked at her over the top. "The shop closes at sundown and I have a lot of nerve interrupting a hardworking man's rest."

Alys glanced meaningfully at the wheel. "Obviously something changed his mind."

"The wife."

Alys snorted. "I can imagine."

Selendrile seemed to shift intent between the breath he took and the words. "Is there something specific you want to argue about, or are you just being generally unpleasant?"

Alys squirmed, but couldn't bring herself to apologize. "They didn't seem to suspect anything?"

"No."

"Una seemed in a rare talkative mood. What did she say?"

He looked beyond her as though to make sure no one from the village had followed. "All of it?" He sighed.

She tried to stifle a smile. "Just the important parts."

"There weren't any important parts."

This time Alys laughed, and Selendrile's attention shot back to her. "She was flirting with you," Alys explained, lest he think she was laughing at him. "She liked you."

Selendrile considered. His expression never changing from thoughtful innocence, he looked back toward Saint Toby's and said, "Maybe we can use that against her."