Susanna Kearsley - Named of the Dragon

Named of the Dragon, by Susanna Kearsley

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

The author would like to acknowledge the following source: R. J. Stewart and John Matthews, Merlin Through the Ages (London, 1995). Extracts from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, revised and edited by Richard J. Finneran, copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Company, copyright renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats, reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster.

NAMED OF THE DRAGON

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

First published in Great Britain 1998 by Victor Gollancz

Seal books edition / December 1998

Berkley edition / October 1999

All rights reserved.

Copyright 1998 by Susanna Kearsley.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 100(4.

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ISBN: 0-425-17345-3

BERKLEY Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 10 9876 5 4321

This one is for Ken

I

Shine, little lamp, nor let thy light grow dim.

Into what vast, dread dreams, what lonely lands,

Into what griefs hath death delivered him,

Far from my hands?

Marjorie Pickthall, "The Lamp of Poor Souls"

The dream came, as it always did, just before dawn. I was standing alone at the edge of a river that wound through a valley so lush and so green that the air seemed alive. The warble of songbirds rang over the tree-tops from branches bent low with the weight of ripe fruit, and everywhere the flowers grew, more vivid and fragrant than any flowers I had ever seen before. Their fragrance filled me with an incredible thirst, and kneeling on the riv-erbank I cupped my hands into the chill running water and lifted them dripping, preparing to drink.

A shadow swept over me, blocking the sun.

Beside me the grass gave a rustle and parted, and out came a serpent, quite withered and small. It slipped down the riverbank into the water and opened its mouth, and as I knelt watching, the serpent swallowed the river, and the flowers shrivelled and died and the trees turned to flame, and the songbirds to ravens, and everywhere the green of the valley vanished and the world became a wasteland underneath a frozen sky, and the riverbed a hard road winding through it.

And the serpent, grown heavy and large, slithered off as the ravens rose thick in a chattering cloud that turned day into night, and I found myself walking beneath a pale moon through the wasteland.

I was looking for somethingI didn't know what, but I'd lost it just recently...

And then, far off, I heard a baby crying in the night, and I remembered.

"Justin!"

The crying grew stronger. I started to run, with my hair streaming out like a madwoman, running, but always the cry came from somewhere ahead and I couldn't catch up with it. "Justin!" I called again, panicked. "Oh God, love, I'm coming. Hold on, Mummy's coming."

But already I was losing him, I wasn't running fast enough, and then the road fell away and I fell with it, spiralling helplessly down through the dark into nothingness, hearing the cries growing fainter above me, and fading ...

I woke with a jolt.

For a long moment I lay perfectly still, blinking up at the ceiling and forcing my eyes to focus through the stinging mist of tears. Outside on the pavement I heard footsteps pass with the brisk, certain ring of a businessman heading for Kensington station. The sound, small and normal, was something to cling to. I drew a deep breath... and another ... reached my hand towards the lamp.

Light always helped, somehow.

Clear of the shadows, my room felt less cold and less empty. I rose, and shrugged myself into my robe, and crossed to the window. The sulphurous glow of a late-November night had given way to hard grey light that flattened on the line of roofs and chimney-pots that faced me. In the street below, the stream of morning traffic had already started, sluggishly, as everywhere the houses yawned to life. It was morning, just the same as any other morning.

I pulled the curtain back an inch, and looked towards the fading morning star. It looked so small, so vulnerable.

Another hour, and it would be forgotten. There wasn't anybody in the flat who could have heard me, but I spoke the words quite softly, all the same: "Happy Birthday, Justin," I said, to the tiny point of light.

It winked back, faintly, and I let the curtain fall.

II

Go hence to Wales,

There live a while.

William Rowley, The Birth of Merlin

Oh, Lyn, you can't be serious." Bridget Cooper flicked her auburn hair back in a careless gesture that distracted every man within a two-table radius, and glanced at me reprovingly. "You look like death warmed up, you know. The last thing you should do is take another transatlantic flight."

With anybody else, I might have argued that I'd slept straight through the New York flight two days ago, and that my next business flight wouldn't be until the twenty-first of January ... but with Bridget, I knew, I'd be wasting my breath. Besides, I'd known her long enough to realize this was simply preamble.

Bridget never worried about anybody's health except her own. And she never rang me at nine on a Monday, suggesting we meet and have lunch, unless she had a motive.

Bridget was a one-off, an exceptionally talented writer with a wild imagination that made her books for children instant classics, and a wild nature that drove the poor directors of my literary agency to drink. In the four years since I'd signed her as a client, Bridget's books had earned a fortune for the Simon Holland Agency, but her unpredictability had caused much tearing of hair and rending of garments among my colleagues. My favourite of her escapadesthe day she'd kicked the BBC presenterwas now a Simon Holland legend. And I, who had survived four years and one week's holiday in France with Bridget, had risen to the status of a martyr.

Not that Bridget was so very terrible. In fact, if one didn't mind the occasional embarrassment, she could be tremendous fun, and time had taught me how to keep pace with her ever-shifting moods. Still, she did leave me wondering, sometimes, exactly who was managing whom.

Our lunch today had been a case in point. It had begun, reasonably enough, with a discussion of the plans for an animated television series based on the bestselling Llandrah books that had first launched Bridget's career. But by the time the waiter cleared away our starters, she had somehow shifted topics to the coming holidays.

"And anyway," she said, "who goes to Canada for Christmas?"

"Quite a lot of people, I'd imagine. All that snow ..."

"There won't be snow," she told me, very certain, "in Vancouver. Their weather's much too mild." Taking another slice of bread from the basket between us, she tore it neatly into pieces. "No, you ought to come with me, instead, to Angle."

"Angle?"

"Pembrokeshire," she said. "South Wales. You know, where they had that big oil spill a couple of years ago." Bridget's sense of geography was, I'd learned, invariably linked to the six o'clock news and the Sunday tabloids. Name any town or village and she'd pinpoint its location in relation to a murder or a scandal or a natural disaster. Odd, perhaps, but undeniably effective. As it happened, I did remember the oil spill in question, and my memory flashed an image of a rugged stretch of coastline as she took a bite of bread and went on speaking. "James is minding a lovely old house down therewell, it's sort of three houses, really, but two of them have been knocked together to make oneright by the sea, with an old ruined tower in the garden. You'd adore it. Anyway, he's asked me for the holidays, and he said I could bring you along, if you wanted to come."