Son of the Hero

"Are you married? Do you have children of your own?"

He shrugged. "I've never been married formal-like. As to brats, who can tell?"

The willows and birches that flanked a creek alongside the path gave way to oaks, chestnuts, and firs. The air cooled a little in the shade.

"Do you know Castle Thyme?" I asked.

"I've been there, lord," Lesh admitted. "It's not much of a castle, not nearly so grand or strong as Castle Basil. Thyme is little more than a single tower with a puny curtain wall behind a dry ditch."

"Not much to the eye but important," Parthet contributed. "It has been fought over so often that the magics around it are quite unpredictable."

"Let's leave that till tomorrow," I suggested. I didn't want to cram my head full of porcupines yet. Magic. So far, all I had seen was the doorways, and while I couldn't explain them logically, that didn't mean that there was no logical explanation-something out of science fiction maybe, something like folded space.

"How far have we traveled?" Timon asked when we took our first break. The boy was dressed in forest green, in an outfit that looked as though it had been handed down several times. He wore a long dagger on his belt. Timon was ski

"About seven miles," Parthet said.

"I've never been this far before." Timon didn't seem nearly as awed by being assigned to serve the heir of Varay as he was at being seven miles from home.

"And what's your life been like, Timon?" I asked. I was sitting on the ground, leaning back against a cedar, trying to put my weight on parts of my butt that the saddle hadn't chafed. A difficult quest.

"My mam works in the kitchen at the castle. I've been scrubbing pots as far back as I know."

"You get any schooling?"

"I can read a little, and write my name," Timon said proudly.

"Education is a practical matter here," Parthet said. "Children learn what they need to know by doing it, by apprenticeship and imitation."

"No need to sound so defensive, Uncle," I said, not even glancing his way. "I wasn't going to criticize. It's a good way to learn practical affairs. As long as you're not building computers or H-bombs."

"We have no need of those things here," Parthet said.

"No H-bombs?" No kidding, I thought. "That may be the best news I've heard since I left school. What would happen to the buffer zone if my world blew itself to hell in a nuclear war?" Parthet sat next to me. I was confident that he knew what I was talking about. He had visited us often enough in Louisville.

"I've wondered about that more often than you might imagine," he said. "I don't have an answer, though." He looked off into the trees, and his voice got reflective. "It frightens me when I think about it. I fear that Fairy would overflow us and move into the void. What might happen then, I can't even guess. I don't think it's something I'd care to experience."

Timon looked back and forth between us, his eyes wide with wonder. It may have sounded like gibberish to him. Or maybe he simply assumed that we were discussing magics beyond his capacity. Maybe we were, come to think of it. Nuclear winter sounds beyond the limits of objective possibility to me too, like witches and wizards and elflords out of Fairy. I wondered how the buffer zone's translation magic had rendered "H-bombs" and "nuclear war."

"Whenever your world is at war, Fairy grows stronger here," Parthet said. He shrugged. "Of course, there is always war of one dimension or another going on there, but major war is what I'm talking about. I remember your Second World War. I think that's what your father called it. Before he was born. The seven kingdoms were all hard pressed to hold their own against a series of invasions out of Fairy-that's when your mother's parents were killed-and we're still trying to clear out the last of the dragons and a few outlaw bands of elves."

I missed something in that at the time, the bit about my mother's parents being killed during the Second World War, which meant that she was also older than I'd thought. I didn't recall what Parthet had said until much later.

"Shouldn't we be moving on?" Lesh asked.

I looked up and nodded. We had taken more of a break than I had pla

"Is that what you call a dragon?" I asked.

"You saw one of those near my cottage?" Parthet asked, a bit stridently.

"Two of them, one in the forest and another in the cave where I came through from our basement. Were those dragons?"

"Dragonkind, but not dragons. Bad enough if you're not careful. You saw one of those near my cottage?" he asked again.

"Yes, not too far off. What's wrong with that?"

"There shouldn't be any of those creatures within fifty miles of my home, that's what's wrong. They usually don't stray far from Battle Forest."

"They didn't look all that dangerous," I said, crossing my fingers mentally. The one in the cave had looked dangerous enough at the time.

"Those beasts can bite you in two like that." Parthet slapped his hands together. Timon's pony shied at the noise. The heavier chargers didn't pay any mind. And Parthet's Glory just pointed his ears, as if he didn't have the energy to get upset at the noise. I swallowed, remembering my first encounter with one of the lizards.

"They can be hunted at least," Lesh said before I could wander too far down memory lane. "But they make foul eating, nothing you'd care to taste if you had any choice." He looked at the sky. "They can be hunted, not like a real dragon. A real dragon hunts you."

"How big?" I asked, not at all certain that I wanted to know. I looked at the sky myself.

"Like a castle with wings," Lesh said.

"Try thinking of something like a 747 with bigger wings and a badly swollen gut," Parthet suggested. "A pregnant 747. That would make a small dragon. They're hungry all the time. The four of us and our horses wouldn't make a decent bedtime snack for a dragon." After that, there were three of us looking at the sky. Only Parthet didn't bother.

"How many dragons are there?" I asked.

"One's too many," Lesh said.

"They don't exactly fill out census questio

"Where do they live?"

"Anywhere they want to," Lesh said with an explosive laugh.

Parthet scowled at him but nodded. "Sometimes they come in from the Mist. Sometimes they seem to nest in the Titan Mountains. They can fly from Mist to mountains in an hour."

"What does it take to kill one?"

"A bigger dragon." That was Lesh's contribution. The subject of dragons really pushed all his buttons.

"They have been killed by mortals," Parthet said.

"Can you show me one who did and lived to tell about it?" Lesh challenged. "Introduce us and I'll buy his beer for ten years."

The way Parthet tried to fade into his saddle, I knew he couldn't.

Precarra seemed to change its nature every few miles. It wasn't a homogenous forest at all, more like a number of different forests tacked together. For a time it would look tame around us, like a city park, and then the forest would go suddenly berserk in a mass of tangled underbrush. Groves of oak gave way to soaring fir trees, which gave way to willow and birch every time we came to a waterway. Creeks, some of them looking more like drainage ditches in a drought, were common. There were no bridges out in the country, only traces where generations of Varayans had forded each stream. The road-the others insisted on calling the rutted cart path we followed a road-wound through the forest from one ford to the next. So, though we were heading generally east, we might be moving in almost any direction at any given moment. Several times we saw smaller paths leading away from the road, narrow tracks as overgrown as the path to Uncle Parthet's cottage. Once I spotted a field of young corn in a clearing ringed by burned stumps.