Dragon Queen Read Free Page B

among waist-deep bracken. The air smelled of old earth and mushrooms.
    For a moment fear got the better of him. They were going to kill him. ‘What do you want from me? What have you done to me? Are you going to kill me?’ He gulped at the air like a man drowning.
    The Picker snorted. ‘Kill you? You gone daft? What I want is for you to be good and quiet till I get you where you need to be. And what I done is give you a taste of something. Tolds you I knowsa blood-mage. So you'll not be doing them sorts of tricks like you tried before, not any more. Keep your blood nice and quiet. Likes my life easy, I do.’
    ‘Why are you doing this?’
    The Picker sighed. He turned his back and waited a while until Bellepheros stopped struggling, then heaved him over the back of the horse again like a dirty old carpet and tied the sack over his head once more. He left the gag off this time.
    ‘No one here, old man. Shout all you like. You's clever enough, though. You'll see where this is going if you stops to think.’
    They rode on. After maybe an hour it started to rain. Bellepheros heard the soft hiss of it on the leaves overhead, the pitter-patter of drips coming down off the trees, felt wet splats now and then on his hands and his legs. Afterwards the air smelled of trees, the rich tang of wet leaves. So they were on the fringes of the Raksheh, maybe, since that wasn't far from where the Picker had kidnapped him. Stupid thoughts buzzed in his head: he liked the Raksheh. He had fond memories of times years ago, wandering the edge of the forest, picking mushrooms and searching for roots and flowers. The Raksheh was a paradise for alchemists, full of interesting plants and strange crawling, slithering creatures. A delight as long as you kept a sharp eye on the lookout for the snapper packs.
    In the middle of the afternoon they stopped and the Picker let him go and have a piss behind a tree and gave him some water. ‘Nothing in it, not this time,’ he said. Bellepheros wasn't sure whether to believe him, but he was thirsty enough to drink it when he saw the Picker drink it too. When the Picker threw him back on the horse, he forced himself to be an alchemist again, to think the way he'd been taught, the way he now taught others: sum the actions of the Taiytakei over the years. Arrange them with method and logic. They wanted dragons and they always had. To control a dragon, you needed an alchemist.
    He tried asking questions. ‘Have you already got them? Are they hatchlings or are they still eggs?’ Others, anything he could think of, looking for a response, but the Picker never answered. Maybe he was thinking about it all wrong. Maybe they'd take an alchemist first, before the dragons. It made more sense.
    He wondered, vaguely, about whether he might escape. Didn'tsee how, though. He needed to work his blood. Without that he was useless. And there were ways to take away a blood-mage's powers – he knew several and he knew how to get round most of them too – but without knowing how the Elemental Man had done it, and being tied to the back of a horse as he was, all that knowledge was useless.
    They stopped before dark at some old hut deep in the forest. The Picker took off the sack and untied his hands and locked him inside. When he rattled the door, it was shut fast. He tried shouting a few times for help but no one came, and for all he knew the Picker was right outside. He huddled in a corner and spent most of the night shivering, too cold to sleep.
    In the morning he tried to work his blood again. Still nothing. He tried running when the Picker opened the door but that just made him look an idiot. The Picker watched, laughing probably, then vanished and appeared right in front of him and tripped him and tied him up and left him flat on his back while he went to fetch the horse. Bellepheros listened to the calls of the birds and the hiss of the wind among the trees. It wasn't the Raksheh, he decided. For what that was worth.