Page 2 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
“Everyone knows that dragons protect treasure.” Walters dipped the quill once more, wiping the trails of blood down the boy’s forearm. The repetitive abrasion over the fresh wounds inflamed the skin. Resisting the urge to grind his teeth to nubs, the boy bared his teeth in the semblance of a smile.
“Exactly,” he validated through a jaw that wouldn’t unbind. “Claudius was poisoned before he could ever return to Britannia, and the only clue he left was this sigil.”
Both men gazed down at the seal. The figure of a serpentine dragon with four claws and a tongue snaking between fearsome teeth snarled beneath the etching of two words.NIGRAE AQUAE.
The boy had hoped when his blood brother, Dougan, had taught him to read, that he’d finally be able to make out what the words meant, but no such luck. They certainly weren’t English.
“So, wot’s the sigil got to do with the map?” Walters prodded, as he finished the forked lines in their exactitude, and began to etch the sigil into the boy’s raw skin.
“Nine hundred years later, King of the Danes Sweyn Forkbeard invaded Britain. Only one bridge stood over the terrain, and three heroic Anglo-Saxon warriors held that bridge with but a few of the village men, fending off all two thousand marauders. It is said they protected a secret wealth, a buried magic treasure that lent them indefinable strength and stamina.
“Thus defeated, the Danes took sanctuary on a small island, where they found a cave protected by a dragon.Thisdragon. Inside the cave was treasure too large to be conducted back to Denmark by a fleet of ships carryingtwo thousand men,can you imagine?”
“Indeed, I cannot.” Walters’s bulbous, bald head swung back and forth on something too short and thick to truly be considered a neck as he etched the words beneath the crease of the boy’s elbow.
Impassioned and a little drunk on pain, the boy barely felt the meticulous punctures anymore. “Invigorated by his find, King Sweyn attacked Maldon, and was paid off by KingÆthelred the Unready to leave Britain. King Sweyn was never able to retrieve the treasure and it remains in that spot to this very day. The one marked by the dragon on this map.”
“’Ow do you know that?” Walters queried.
“Because Sweyn left this map with his daughter, but she hated and distrusted her father, and never came to look for it. So, it sat in a royal library in Denmark until recently.”
“I don’t know… these don’t look like any roads ’round here, and I’ve been all over.” Walters skeptically gestured to the strange branching lines.
“I don’t think they are roads,” the boy speculated. “The Vikings were seafarers, sailors, so it makes sense that their maps did not depict roads, but rivers.”
Walters froze, studying his work with new eyes. “Well… buggar me both ways.”
“Exactly.”
“So you’re going to ’unt this treasure when you’re released in a month?”
“I’m not going to stop hunting this treasure until I find it,” the boy vowed.
By the time Walters finished, the boy’s nerves were as frayed as a tired gallows rope, but the tattoo was some of the finest work he’d ever seen.
Packing his implements into a loose stone crevasse in the floor, Walters asked, “Are you going to tell Dougan?”
“Of course I’m going to tell him, just as soon as we are able to switch cells again.” The boy moved to the far wall, to Dougan’s pallet, and slid a stone free of its place in the wall. Reaching in, he pulled out some contraband, and then removed one more stone behind that.Therelay the hideaway no one thought to look for after discovering the initial alcove. “I’m leaving this map and sigil forhim. For you, and Murdoch, and Tallow. But Dougan has three years left on his sentence, so I’ll be searching while he’s still incarcerated. Maybe I’ll have found it by the time you’re all out. I’ll send word, of course. I’ll come back for you all.”
“Sure you will.”
The boy looked up sharply, ready to deliver a reprimand for the disrespect he heard in Walter’s tone. But the hint of melancholy etched into the craggy lines prominently displayed on the forger’s filthy face turned any words to ash in his mouth.
Walters had lived long enough to doubt every man’s word. He regarded the boy with pity, but no scorn. With kindness, but no faith.
“I’ll. Come. Back.”
Walters turned away. “You’ll want to wrap that before we start work on the rails in the morning. Don’t want it going putrid.”
He’d show Walters, the boy thought. He’d blow the walls of this place wide open. He wouldn’t leave his family behind.
Swallowing his frustration, the boy carefully replaced the stones over the map, placed the contraband in front of it, and then secured the outer stone.
He’d tell Dougan where to find it in the morning.
Walters blew out the candle he’d worked by, and stowed it somewhere the guards wouldn’t think to look for it.
Stretching his long body out on the pallet, the boy laced his fingers over his empty stomach and contemplated the darkness. He counted moments by the throb of his new tattoo. The acrid scent of candle smoke was a welcome temporary balm over the ever-present wreak of dank humanity clinging to these ancient walls.
