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Chapter Five:
The Olden Oak

Somebody was following them. Or something. Rainer was sure of it. He—or it—was being quiet, but Rainer heard the faintest clank of metal on metal. Maybe a sword in a scabbard. Maybe a knife getting drawn. And when he and Wulf stopped to figure out where they were and find their way, he heard footsteps. He’d have to be on guard. It was for sure Wulf would not be. He was deep in the trance he went into whenever, as he said, the dragon called him.

Rainer loosened the dagger in his belt scabbard.

Don’t want it to get stuck when I need it, Rainer thought. Having a weapon you couldn’t use was the same as not having that weapon at all. Speaking of weapons, what else could he do if they got attacked?

Rainer considered the options.

The cloak, if he could get it off in time. Whipping a piece of clothing at somebody you were fighting could be a very effective distraction. He’d done it before in practice rounds during afternoon training at the castle.

There were also loose cobblestones. You could pick one up and bash somebody’s brains out.

Stay aware of whatever is around you and use it to your advantage.

Rainer could just hear Koterbaum, his arms instructor, lecturing on the subject—maybe after some boring match where both of the guys had been whacking around hopelessly. “A weapon doesn’t have to look like a weapon,” said Koterbaum. “Lose a fight in the yard and you walk away defeated. Lose a fight in battle and you don’t walk away at all.”

Koterbaum might be a dandy with that waxy moustache of his, and a suck-up to aristocrats, but Rainer still thought he was the best trainer he could ever have, and he felt lucky to be Koterbaum’s student. In fact, he had to admit he practically worshipped the guy, at least as a teacher. Rainer had asked around and heard stories of some of the things Koterbaum had done in real war, like in the Little War when he had killed five guys who were surrounding him and trying to slaughter him. They story was Koterbaum walked away without a scratch. You had to respect that, and you were an idiot if you didn’t listen when a man like that was talking about fighting.

Rainer and Wulf padded their way along narrow passages between buildings, feeling their way with the toes of their boots as much as moving by sight. Though the moon was up, not much of its light got through the cracks between the topmost floors of the buildings. They were taking darker streets on purpose, streets where the buildings leaned into one another and shut out the sky.

Most of Raukenrose’s lanes were barely wide enough for an ox cart to pass, and definitely not wide enough for two carts to pass side by side. There were a few wide boulevards and several open squares, usually built around a central water supply, but the idea tonight was to avoid such places.

There was fog rising from the river. The fog made the air chilly and moist, and the cobblestones that lined the alleys were slippery. Everybody had emptied out his or her chamber pot from the upstairs windows before going to bed, and there was sewage slicking the street, some of it trampled down to a brown paste, some of it still in chunks. Even though the streets were usually washed down in the morning by the town guild’s command, the air stank. Mixed-together urine, nightsoil, and dirty dishwater was a familiar smell in town.

You did get used to it. Sort of.

It was early winter, the first of Gormanuder, the month before Yule. The only people officially allowed out after curfew were members of the town guard and the nightsoil men.

In one or two windows along the lanes, candles burned as the tenants of the house took care of whatever chores they had that might be keeping them up late into the night. Rainer was grateful for these small lights, because they kept the alleyway from being completely dark. Whenever he had stray light from one of these candlelit windows, he took the time to look behind them. Nothing there.

But there was. He could sense it.

Finally they got to Allfather Square. It used to be the center of town long ago, but Raukenrose had built out in all directions in a crazy-quilt way. Now the square was in the southeast area of the town. Regen’s Fountain was still a main water source for the township, though.

On the other side of the square was Allfather Cathedral, with its great central nave and tower topped by the Elder Bell. The cathedral was huge and beautiful—but unfinished. There were still years left of work to do on it. Cathedrals could take a century or more to build.

Saeunn would live to see it done, but Rainer figured none of his other friends would, and neither would he.

In the middle of the square was a big rock sticking out of the ground. It was about ten elbs high, as high as two men standing on one another’s shoulders. The rock looked like a gigantic chunk of greenish quartz.

Wulf had claimed it actually was the upper barb of a dragon’s back spine, and even that it was connected below to the Great Land-dragon of Shenandoah. Rainer wasn’t sure what the rock was made of. He’d grown up in mining country, and he could see that it wasn’t quartz. Too glassy. But it wasn’t volcanic, either, like obsidian. It was tough as granite, and you could not chip pieces off with a hammer like you would have been able to do with quartz. If you could, the whole rock might have been taken as relics and souvenirs by now.

The Olden Oak grew partly around this large rock. The tree looked like it had sprouted in the ground on one side of the rock, but over the years it had wrapped itself around the green rock until it covered a lot of the surface of the rock—and covered it without the slightest gap between the wood and the rock. You could barely tell where rock ended and tree began.

The tree was allegedly planted by somebody named Thornfoot or Thornbush, something like that, one thousand years ago. It was supposed to have already been a thousand years old when it grew the Dragon Hammer.

Where dragon spoke

From in the bark

To old Duke Tjark

Who made the choice

To heed the voice

A tree, but not this one, Rainer thought. He had a hard time believing an oak could get to be a thousand years old, much less two thousand.

Anyway, Wulf would know the history. He knew lore like that backward and forward. There wasn’t a saga that Wulf hadn’t read, either, and he could do long quotes from a bunch of them. And not just the easy parts, but stuff like the lists of dwarves or dragon names. Wulf also had a feeling for the rules and laws of the land like he was born knowing them. Which didn’t mean he was mature enough to really get how people actually acted.

That’s why I’m along, Rainer thought. I’ve got a year on him, and you can figure out a lot in a year, and not just the things the schoolmaster told you, either. Besides, he’s my brother. I am going to protect him, no matter what he tells me to do.

Wulf wasn’t a bad fighter—anybody that trained as much as they did would have a lot of basic ability with arms—but he was not going to be able to stand up to some dirty-fighting, experienced cutthroat in a dark alley.

I figure I can probably handle that for us both.

For whatever reason, Tretz had gifted him with super-quick speed and sharp senses. It was really hard for anyone to get the jump on Rainer.

Well, whether it was this tree or one of its ancestors, Duke Tjark was supposed to have broken off a war hammer that had grown from the trunk of the Olden Oak like it was some kind of branch. That had been over six hundred years ago. He’d used that war hammer to take on the evil shape shifters and the Snakeband Skraelings who had been terrorizing the valley. Tjark had done it, too. He had driven them out, and founded the Mark of Shenandoah.

Rainer thought it probably was a made-up story. After all, where was this great hammer? You didn’t misplace something like that, and nobody had it.

The Olden Oak was real, though. It was right there in front of them.

In addition to the weird way it grew around the green rock, it was also the biggest, most gnarled oak Rainer had ever seen. The canopy was huge, but the limbs had only a few clinging dead leaves by the time the month of Gormanuder came around. Right now, the Olden Oak looked like the skeleton of some gigantic beast against the starry sky, and the Moon seemed caught in its branches.

“Here’s your magic tree,” Rainer said.

“It’s just a tree,” Wulf said.

“Just a tree wrapped around a dragon that grew a hammer from its side.”

“Or a hammer was stuck in the living tree by Sturmer himself,” Wulf said. “That’s what it says in one of the sagas.”

He’ll tell me which one, Rainer thought. He can’t help himself.

“Arinborn’s, in case you wondered.”

Rainer did not believe in the divine beings. Or at least he didn’t believe they should be worshipped. Wulf had once tried to tell him that it didn’t really work like that, that the divine beings that he believed in wanted devotion, not worship, and there was supposed to be this big difference. Rainer hadn’t seen it.

Any nature god was limited. There were things a god like that could not do.

There was only one true God.

And this God had sent a son named Tretz. Tretz was not a human, but a Tier. His kind were the strangest and rarest Tier of all, the mandrakes. Half-human, half-dragon. Man-dragons.

Rainer touched his right arm. Underneath the cloak and his tunic sleeve he had the six-point star symbol, Tretz’s aster, tattooed on his forearm. The castle contingent called it a butthole. Rainer didn’t care. Most people knew what the tattoo meant.

Tretz had been yanked apart by six great chains attached to his legs, his neck, and his tail, each pulled tighter and tighter by huge ratchet wheels until he was torn into six pieces. And then he had miraculously reassembled, and come back to life even greater than before.

“All right, tell me. What happens in the saga?” Rainer asked, mostly to pull Wulf back to reality. His friend was lost in a trance, standing and staring at the Olden Oak.

“The saga? Oh, right.” Wulf shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “Five hundred men tried to break the Dragon Hammer off,” Wulf said.

“And your great-great-great-great-granddad was the one who did it, right?”

“Duke Tjark.”

“Must be nice to have your relatives in the old stories.”

Wulf nodded. “True. But Tjark broke it off of the tree. He didn’t put it in,” Wulf said. “Not like me.”

“Better get tree stabbing, then,” Rainer replied.

Wulf approached the tree. Rainer could tell that the dragon-call had him completely now. Wulf unsheathed his dagger and stepped up to the tree with it. To somebody else, it might have looked like Wulf was up to some prank, that he was about to carve his name into the tree, or maybe the name of a girl or something. People did that. The tree had a lot of scars.

Instead, Wulf drew his arm back and plunged the dagger into the oak, point first.

And in it went.

This amazed Rainer every time he saw, and he’d seen it more than a half-dozen times.

Not just the dagger tip, but the whole blade sank in, up to the hilt, like it was passing into butter. Wulf should not have been able to do this.

I couldn’t do it, Rainer thought. No man nor even any of the bigger Tier was strong enough. Well, maybe a bear man. But it didn’t seem like Wulf was straining in the least. No, he looked like somebody who was fitting a key into its lock.

It wasn’t a miracle or the act of some god or divine being or whatever, though. Rainer was sure of that. No, it was magic. Magic wasn’t a miracle. Their lore tutor, Master Tolas, had taught them that magic could be figured out. But Rainer had to admit he sure hadn’t figured this magic out yet.

Wulf was gone, mentally. Connected to his dragon. Or to the land. He wasn’t Wulfgang von Dunstig.

He was some kind of half-man, half-tree as far as Rainer could tell.

Out of it.

The shuffling again.

There in the township shadows. Somebody followed us.

Rainer couldn’t shake the certainty he felt about that.

Now I have to be totally on guard, Rainer thought. He pulled his own dagger clear of the scabbard and held it loosely in his right hand. He took a deep breath and looked carefully around.

Be aware of everything. Like your life depends on it.

The footsteps again, the very faint ones he’d heard before. Whoever it was had one of the lightest steps Rainer had ever heard.

You don’t fool me, whoever you are. I know you’re out there.

Suddenly, there was a soft whoosh and a thunk. Rainer spun to see that a black crossbow bolt had embedded itself in the Olden Oak barely a fingerbreadth from Wulf’s head. The pale moonlight glinted off the shaft darkly.

The footsteps from across the square grew closer.

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