Chapter 12: The Countess

The Countess of Stokvöllur was a stout woman, past the prime of youth but not yet old, of Northlander stock, with beady eyes that never stayed in one place for long, short, ring-burdened fingers which always swirled against one another, and pale lips pressed together in concentration. Her dress, as befit her status, was made of silk dyed indigo, over which she wore a wimple of plain white linen and a mantle of black mink. Lindír stalked towards her, causing her assembled knightly guard to melt away like so much ice, expecting to see her flinch at the realization that she was utterly defenseless.

She did not.

“I am the dragon,” Lindír said. “If there were another, I would know about them.”

“Then it is true that you are the one who has burned the villages of my people, and of my allies’ people, and burned their fields too, and stolen livestock, and slaughtered all who stood before you? Tell me, dragon: what is the root of this rampage?”

Lindír had not expected a question. An ultimatum, yes, or an outburst of rage, but not an earnest question. “The livestock I stole because I needed food. As for the rest…” He had hardly been able to think about Ámnistr for some time, and being forced to unearth that memory made his chest feel about to burst. “I was wounded,” Lindír said, finding his lips peeling back from his dagger-teeth as he spoke. “And being so wounded, was driven mad with fury. A dragon’s fury has but one outlet.”

The Countess considered his words for a moment, her brow furrowing in ever-deeper concentration. “If that is the case, then why are you here? I ordered my knights to return with you in chains, with your corpse, or not at all… Do my knights yet live?”

As if on a cue from a spectral director, Lindír’s entourage arrived. While he had been able to cross the distance from the dockside to the castle grounds in seconds, they had been forced to cross through the gate of the surrounding walls, and had done so in a chaotic sprint. Their swords were drawn, expecting battle, but they slowed with confusion as they realized that no combat had begun.

“Sheathe your blades,” the Countess shouted to them. “The dragon and I have found common ground to treat with one another.” She returned her gaze to Lindír and nodded for him to continue.

Lindír paused momentarily. The proper relationship between a monarch and a dragon was similar to that of the relationship between a hawk and a rabbit. And yet, before he could speak, he found a new urge growing within him. The urge to be unburdened. So he spoke part of the truth.  “The madness has passed, I think,” Lindír said thoughtfully. “Fighting your armies would be a waste of blood, both mine and theirs, though of course I would win that fight. The only clear alternative to fighting was to come quietly, and perhaps to an accord.”

“What sort of accord?” said the Countess.

“Peace, I suppose. I think I have no more reason to burn any more villages or fields, but I doubt that will be enough for you humans. I don’t want to have any more men in armor coming along to try to kill me, because that would be an annoyance. So what do I have to do to make things right?”

The Countess frowned for a moment. Then, with the gesture of one finger, she summoned one of the finely-dressed men standing at her side, some adviser or lesser lord. The two conversed in whispers for a time, before he returned to his position. The Countess then cleared her throat and said,

“We shall consider it a crime of property. It isn’t, of course, in actuality it is much closer to an act of war, but for the sake of avoiding any further conflict, we shall consider it a crime of property and leave it at that. Given that you are a dragon, I believe the easiest way to remedy the whole affair would be a fine in gold, taken from your no-doubt considerable hoard…”

“I have no hoard,” Lindír said immediately. “I am a nomad. I have nowhere to keep one.”

Lindír had never thought about having a hoard. Or rather, he had, but only ever as a secondary concern. He always thought that the time would inevitably come when he would lay siege to some hellira kingdom, or destroy the castle of some greed-stricken king, or unearth an ancient burial mound, and find a hoard to claim as his own. At no point had he ever thought about hoarding for hoarding’s sake, until that very moment. Lindír felt a pang of absence in his stomach, and his mind was briefly distracted by yearning.

“Then that complicates matters,” the Countess said smoothly. “There are other punishments, of course, for those who steal from the crown. I do not imagine any of them would be suitable, or, indeed, even applicable.”

    Lindír had a suspicion about which punishments she was referring to. In his journeys across the North, he had seen a wide variety of punishments for thieves and arsonists. Thralldom, branding, stockading, the lash. “I am not becoming your servant,” Lindír said, and the words emerged from his throat flanked by a guttural hiss which made the knights reach for their blades and the Countess’s face go momentarily pale.

But her composure returned quickly enough, and the Countess once more stopped to consider for some length of time. She consulted none of her advisers, and nobody said a word, every person present from the lowliest page to Lindír himself afraid to interrupt her thoughts. Various emotions flitted across her attractive features, deep focus primary among them, but also frustration and occasional bursts of inspiration. At long last, she came to an accord with herself, and nodded to nothing with a slight smile upon her lips.

“Swear to me an oath of alliance,” the Countess said. “You are free to leave my domain whenever you wish, but should ever my call for aid reach you, no matter where you may be, you will be honor-bound to heed it. And, of course, you will be honor-bound not to harm my people or lands for the remainder of your days.”

As Lindír came to understand what exactly she was offering, pride welled within him. This was a suitable oath for a dragon. A binding oath, yes, but one which bound only his fate, not his person, and an oath whose fulfillment would bring only glory, not drudgery and pain. It reminded him of the oaths which men swore to one another in some of Ámnistr’s songs, the songs of epic feuds and eternal loves, of wars and blood-soaked revenge.

“I shall swear it,” he said, bowing his head. “I’ll have to figure out how to eat without stealing, but that can’t be half as hard as killing your armies and burning your castle would be, so I’ll bear it.”

“Very good!” the Countess said. She rose from her chair, clapping her hands together as she addressed the general court that had assembled out on her yard. “The matter is settled. Someone take all these things back inside before they get rained on. Dragon, come with me; we’ll have to have the oath officiated by a priest.”

“My name is Lindír. Lindír Heimirsson. It would be inappropriate for you to simply call me ‘dragon’ if we’re going to be making oaths with one another.”

If the Countess recognized the origin of Lindír’s patronymic, she showed no sign of it. Instead she gathered four knights about her, a paltry guard, and began to cross the field for the castle gate. “Halldis Fast-Tower,” she said. “But do not make that name too familiar to you.”

Lindír followed after her, but did not think to ask where they were going. Instead, he found himself consumed by the riddle of her name. As the Countess moved to the gate of Stokvöllur Castle and spoke with a footman, he pondered it. While horses were provided for her and her knights and they all set off for the city, he instead tried to remember his early childhood lessons for some information which might explain it. While townsfolk looked on in awe at the sight of a dragon cantering along behind their own Countess’s steed, he rubbed his teeth together in frustration at the impossibility of it.

Finally, the Countess and her guard all dismounted before a tremendous high-roofed church, much to the shock of the terrified and awe-struck acolytes who kept the door. She did her best to calm them, asking if the high priest was present and how quickly they could prepare for an oath-forging. They replied that he was not particularly busy, but that it might take some time to prepare with so little forewarning. And then they left. The knights took up positions at some distance from their Countess, and the people of Stokvöllur were as inclined to approach Lindír as they might have been to approach a ton of burning hair; he and the Countess were effectively alone.

Lindír could hold back the question no longer. “Countess, how can a tower be fast?”

She looked up at him first with a slack-jawed expression, before she burst out laughing. “Oh, goodness, I suppose my name might be odd to a dragon. A tower can be quite fast indeed when it is a little figure carved from walrus ivory and placed upon a checkered board.”

Lindír felt tremendously stupid. He sat down on his haunches and flexed his shoulders, tossing his head slightly as he did so. “They don’t make chess sets sized for dragons, you know. The pawns would have to be half an arm tall.”

“A shame that giants don’t play chess,” the Countess said. “Perhaps you could go to the nisken of the mountains, convince them to make you a chessboard.”

“Perhaps,” Lindír said with a nod. “What point is there in going to a church in order to swear an oath?”

The Countess briefly shot Lindír an irritated glance, then turned to look up at the high stone wall of the church. “An oath sworn on some grassy field in front of my castle would be merely words. An oath sworn before the gods… now that is binding.”

“But they’re the gods of humanity. Why would they care for any oath I swore?”

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Halldis seemed actually perturbed by the notion, and bit her lip about it for a moment. “Well, you’re swearing an oath with a human. I imagine our gods will take note of that. And certainly their ability to strike you with ruin and death is by no means diminished merely because you are a dragon. Ólor, our god of war, he is infamous for…”

“I know the story of Ólor,” said Lindír. “I have heard it too many times.”

“Indeed. Do dragons have their own gods, then? I know the nisken do, and the hellira, but I never paused to think on the spirituality of dragons. They always seemed too haughty for worship.”

Lindír had, in the past, heard of dragons having their own gods. Certainly his parents had made it clear that he had a pantheon to which he could pray for relief, though neither he nor they knew even the slightest detail about draconic divinity.

“We do, of sorts,” he lied. “We have our gods.”

“What sorts?”

“Well, I for one favor the worship of Sivnis,” Lindír said. The lie flowed much too easily from between his teeth.

“Sivnis, really? If gods cannot truly die, then perhaps…”

Lindír did not wish to speak any more of gods. He slunk away from the Countess, leaving her to her own thoughts and himself to his. He silently contemplated the stained glass window in the Red Citadel’s chapel, casting his memory back to those early days of captivity. No experience since then had come even close to the awe which he had felt, a small child gazing up at the slightest sliver of potential.

And then the priest returned, his acolytes flanking him, and said that the oath could be sworn. Lindír had to squeeze very tightly through the front doors of the church. Oaths were exchanged: the Countess spoke of peace and safety for the dragon, and the dragon spoke of loyalty and aid to the Countess, both of them with their hands placed upon a bronzed oak-tree branch taken from a distant glade. And then the priest brought out a box of wooden rods, each carved with old symbols. He cast them upon the ground of the church and stood over them, and with his eyes shut he picked up the first three rods his hands encountered. Reading from the rods, he announced that the gods favored this oath, and would keep it. The oath was made.

As Lindír and the Countess returned to Stokvöllur castle, Lindír realized that he wished to stay. He had always wandered, whether on his own or at Ámnistr’s side; but having seen nearly the whole of the breadth of the North, all wanderlust had fled from Lindír’s heart.

So Lindír turned to the Countess and said, “May I be your guest, here, at your castle?”

“You may,” she said. “Though you’ll have to earn your keep, and I cannot offer you any room large enough for a creature of your size. I suppose I could give you the right to hunt game on my lands, so long as you don’t deplete the herds.”

“I don’t think I’ll deplete the herds. A buck or hind can feed me for some days at a time, and the forest near to the castle looks large enough for…”

“Do not hunt there!”

The Countess’s harshness startled Lindír, for in an instant she had gone from being perfectly congenial to an almost fearful snappishness. “Did you not just tell me that I could hunt in your lands?”

“The wood near to the castle is not my land,” the Countess said. “There are other woods across the river, such as the one where my knights found you, and yet more about a score of meadows upstream. Hunt there. But do not interfere with That Wood.”

Lindír waited for there to be more explanation, but none was forthcoming. The other woods would be enough, especially if he could find a way to supplement his diet with livestock without resorting to theft. For the rest of the return journey, he turned his attention to the matter of sleeping, and forgot about the woods entirely.

The news of the oath sworn between Lindír and the Countess, and the further news that he would be staying as a guest at the castle, was met with quite a bit of unease. Everyone had heard about Lindír’s rampage across the land. A few openly called him a liar and a beast, and called for a champion to rise up and save them from the dragon’s depredations. Others kept their objections more veiled, merely voicing their concerns with handkerchief-covered mouths and half-averted eyes. The greatest portion were those who didn’t know what to think, more awestruck by the presence of a four-ton reptile in their presence than by any political implications in either direction. The Countess treated them all with the same stoic certitude. Lindír had sworn an oath to her, after all, and so was to be treated as a guest.

Most of the objections took place well outside of Lindír’s earshot, of course. The Countess did her politicking in the halls of her castle, or meeting in the homes of the various aldermen of the city, and Lindír held firm to his promise to treat human affairs with vague disdain. But on the fifth day after his arrival, a feast was held to commemorate the occasion.

As Stokvöllur castle was built by humans, its corridors could not have fit Lindír even as an adolescent. But the great hall of the castle, with its huge double doors and high ceiling, was more than large enough to fit him. So, as the trestle tables were unfolded and arranged for the welcoming feast, a large space was set aside near the door, just large enough that Lindír could coil up against the wall and eat a whole roast pig from a silver platter.

The feast itself was something of a disappointment. The meat was succulent and well-spiced, and more than enough to make a meal, but Lindír found himself feeling less like a participant and more like a particularly lively form of decoration. None of the assembled nobles and notables ever talked to him, only about him, debating the pros and cons of his presence in whispers that they seemed to believe he could not hear. Lindír ended up falling asleep well before the feast was over, lulled by the gentle strings of the mandolin players and the babble of conversation. When he awoke, it was well into the night and the hall was empty, leaving him only to slip into the night and be on his way.

Lindír avoided the great hall whenever he could. He much preferred to make as his domain the skies and forests of the land which had made him its guest: the Flaxenvale. The Flaxenvale was a large, flat country, a pan of river-washed farmland swaddled between the coastal Fortjalds and the inland Tinker’s Hills. Despite the name, the Flaxenvale grew little flax. The name came instead from the color of the vast fields of barley and wheat which grew there in the spring and summer months, which floated down the Flaxenvale’s many rivers on great barges and fed the cities and livestock of neighboring countries. Lindír would fly over the fields and think for a moment that the villages were small fleets of ships upon a sea of liquid amber.

The forests, too, were rich and fine hunting grounds. The Flaxenvale was further north than Hvalheim, and although its summers were warm and verdant, its winters were utterly cold, meaning its forests more closely resembled the widely-spaced conifer stands of the distant taiga than they did the wet woodlands of Lindír’s youth. But forests were forests, and though the deer and boar and oxen had slightly different colors to their coats, they were still deer and boar and oxen, and upon the herds Lindír ate very well.

Sometimes he would visit the outlying villages around Stokvöllur, just for the novelty of it, though the guilt of what he had spent the last few months doing to villages much like those ones stung at him whenever he saw one. He would land in their squares or at their outskirts, and yell at the houses with the shut doors that he meant them no harm. Sometimes when he was hungry he would ask for food, which typically took the form of the scrawniest goat one could imagine, or any beasts of burden which had been recently lamed. Once, an old man came out to yell at him, that if having a dragon about was to be anything more than a gilded prize for the nobility to parade about, then Lindír could do something about the boulder that had broken Loftur’s plow. The boulder proved to be a difficult challenge. It was embedded quite deeply in the earth, and it was still large compared to Lindír; but after a touch more than an hour of scratching at the dirt and heaving away with his shoulder, Lindír did shove it out of the way, filling in the hole with river-mud. The old man grumbled, and Loftur made honey cakes a fortnight later.

On many nights, Lindír would sleep out on the fields and hills of the country. But as he was the Countess’s guest, he made at least some effort to return to the castle every night. At first he would lay himself out on the nearby field, but that soon proved to be unpleasant, as he obstructed the passage of people in and out of the Countess’s dwelling, and the dried mud of the field irritated the edge of his patch of skin. It was not until nearly a full month after his arrival that he found the perfect sleeping spot.

One of the larger towers of the castle keep had a conical roof decorated with grey slate tiles. In a fit of boredom, Lindír found himself climbing that tower. Though the stones of the tower itself complained if he moved too quickly, the tower held; and the roof supported his weight well enough. The tiles themselves were comfortable, and the circumference of the roof was such that he could coil most of the way around it, with room remaining for growth. When the sun set on that day, Lindír refused to leave. Although several people, the Countess included, complained when they found him sleeping on the castle roof in the morning, the warmth of the dawn-time sun on Lindír’s wings was too soft and soothing to resist.

 

 

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