Wings of Fire Part 11

I didn't hear a sound, but I felt as though I would have with my dragon ears. My human ears didn't swivel. I felt deprived. Father and I stood beside Stepmother and looked out to sea. Soon, the water turned silver with the arrival of fish, schooling so thickly one could have walked out to sea on their backs and not gotten one's feet wet. "Masery? Where is Masery?" Stepmother asked the fish. We both stared at all the fish, looking for my sister.

"Here," called a fish some distance out.

"Come closer," said Stepmother, "or I won't be able to change you back."

"You shaped me once, Stepmother, but never again will I let you do that. Leave me be."

"Masery, are you sure?" Father called.

"She has cast this grief upon me. Consider me dead to you, and blame her for it, Father," she called, and swam away. All the other fish swam away too.

"I did my best, Kendrick," said Stepmother. "You saw. She is wilfull and won't come home. But you have your son again. Isn't that enough?"

"No, Genevra, it is not enough. You need to suffer the way my children have." He took the wand from her and bound her hands behind her and led her toward the woods.

"Kendrick," she whimpered. "I am your son's mother."

"That's not enough to excuse your crimes. I've raised motherless children before," said Father, and then they had gone so far I didn't hear them any longer.

But you haven't, I thought. We were only motherless a year before you brought Stepmother home.

Everything had changed. I leaned against the oak and looked. My eyes were farther from the ground now, my ears and nose less sensitive. I tried to summon up my internal fire, and coughed. Only noise came out of my mouth. Could I be happy in this shape? Even the oak had gone dumb; the whisper of breeze in its leaves no longer made words for me.

Well, there was one thing I had wanted to do as a dragon that I couldn't manage. I could no longer smell the cinnamon scent that had told me night and day something of Stepmother's was up in the tree, but now I could climb. So I did: I shed Father's cloak and climbed up the tree, higher and higher, until the branches were slender and wouldn't support my weight. I wished again I could smell with the sensitive tip of my tongue, that wash of information from the air into my mouth and then my brain, but I couldn't. I searched through the tree's crown with just my hands, which were soon scratched and bleeding. How could anything be hidden up here? Maybe I had dreamed it.

But then I found it, tucked into a crotch of the tree, the branches almost grown over it: a small wooden box with ivory inlay in the shape of lilies on its top. I tugged at it. At first I thought the tree had grown too tightly around it to release, but then something shivered in the tree; I felt it in the bark against the soles of my feet, in my arms where I leaned against branches, in the air. The tree moved just enough to loose the box into my hand.

Somewhere in the distance the sound of crackling, burning. A shriek, and then a scream. Then another.

I climbed carefully down, the box in one hand. When I reached the ground, I sat on my father's cloak and opened the box. Inside was something black, repellent, and shriveled. I clapped the lid closed again. I couldn't look at the contents of the box without feeling sick to my stomach.

Screams from the forest, the scent of smoke, meat cooking. The same meat I had cooked in its own armor when I defeated the knights. "No, Kendrick, no," screamed Stepmother, and then a howl of anguish.

I flinched, though I had known without knowing what my father must be doing.

He doesn't even know what her real crime is, I thought. I wished I could warm myself with my own fire again, and listen to tree tales through the long winter night. She had given me that and taken it away.

I opened the box that held my stepmother's heart. As long as her heart was safe, she couldn't perish. She must be screaming just for show.

I closed my fist around my stepmother's heart and squeezed.

The Harrowing of the Dragon of h.o.a.rsbreath Patricia A. McKillip Patricia A. McKillip was born in Salem, Oregon in 1948. Educated at San Jose State University in California, she received a B.A. in 1971 and an M.A. in English in 1973. She published two short children's books, The Throme of the Erril of Sherill and The House on Parchment Street in 1973. Her first longer novel, the sophisticated young-adult fantasy The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, won the 1975 World Fantasy Award. She switched to children's mainstream for The Night Gift, but returned to young-adult fantasy in the Riddle of Stars trilogy.

McKillip followed that with Stepping from the Shadows, an adult contemporary novel with some magic realist elements, and then YA science fantasy duology Moon-Flash, and The Moon and the Face. Her adult SF novel Fool's Run was followed by YA fantasy The Changeling Sea, fantasy duology The Sorceress and the Cygnet and The Cygnet and the Firebird. In 1995 she published The Book of Atrix Wolf, the first in a sequence of remarkable stand-alone fantasies marked by great sophistication and elegance, which include Winter Rose, Song for the Basilisk, The Tower at Stony Wood, World Fantasy Award winner Ombria in Shadow, In the Forests of Serre, Alphabet of Thorn, Od Magic, Solstice Wood and The Bell at Sealey Head. Her short fiction was collected in Harrowing the Dragon. Coming up is a new novel The Bards of Bone Plain. McKillip was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.

Once, on the top of a world, there existed the ring of an island named h.o.a.rsbreath, made out of gold and snow. It was all mountain, a grim, briny, yellowing ice-world covered with winter twelve months out of thirteen. For one month, when the twin suns crossed each other at the world's cap, the snow melted from the peak of h.o.a.rsbreath. The hardy trees shrugged the snow off their boughs, and sucked in light and mellow air, pulling themselves toward the suns. Snow and icicles melted off the roofs of the miners' village; the snow-tunnels they had dug from house to tavern to storage barn to mineshaft sagged to the ground; the dead-white river flowing down from the mountain to the sea turned blue and began to move again. Then the miners gathered the gold they had dug by firelight out of the chill, harsh darkness of the deep mountain, and took it downriver, across the sea to the main-land, to trade for food and furs, tools and a liquid fire called worm-spoor, because it was gold and bitter, like the leavings of dragons. After three swallows of it, in a busy city with a harbor frozen only part of the year, with people who wore rich furs, kept horses and sleds to ride in during winter, and who knew the patterns of the winter stars since they weren't buried alive by the snow, the miners swore they would never return to h.o.a.rsbreath. But the gold waiting in the dark, secret places of the mountain-island drew at them in their dreaming, lured them back.

For two hundred years after the naming of h.o.a.rsbreath, winter followed winter, and the miners lived rich isolated, precarious lives on the pinnacle of ice and granite, cursing the cold and loving it, for it kept lesser folk away. They mined, drank, spun tales, raised chil-dren who were sent to the mainland when they were half-grown, to receive their education, and find easier, respectable lives. But always a few children found their way back, born with a gnawing in their hearts for fire, ice, stone, and the solitary pursuit of gold in the dark.

Then, two miners' children came back from the great world and destroyed the island.

They had no intention of doing that. The younger of them was Peka Krao. After spending five years on the mainland, boring herself with schooling, she came back to h.o.a.rsbreath to mine. At seventeen, she was good-natured and st.u.r.dy, with dark eyes, and dark, braided hair. She loved every part of h.o.a.rsbreath, even its chill, damp shafts at midwinter and the bone-jarring work of hewing through darkness and stone to unbury its gold. Her instincts for gold were uncanny: she seemed to sense it through her fingertips touching bare rock. The miners called her their good luck. She could make wormspoor, too, one of the few useful things she had learned on the mainland. It lost its bitterness, somehow, when she made it: it aged into a rich, smokey gold that made the miners forget their sore muscles, and inspired marvellous tales out of them that whittled away at the endless winter.

She met the Dragon-Harrower one evening at a cross-section of tunnel between her mother's house and the tavern. She knew all the things to fear in her world: a rumble in the mountain, a guttering torch in the mines, a crevice in the snow, a crack of ice underfoot. There was little else she couldn't handle with a soft word or her own right arm. Even when he loomed out of the darkness unexpectedly into her taper-light, she wasn't afraid. But he made her stop instinctively, like an animal might stop, faced with something that puzzled its senses.

His hair was dead-white, with strands bright as wormspoor running through it; his eyes were the light, hard blue of dawn during suns-crossing. Rich colors flashed out of him everywhere in her light: from a gold knife-hilt and a bra.s.s pack buckle; from the red ties of his cloak that were weighted with ivory, and the blue and silver threads in his gloves. His heavy fur cloak was closed, but she felt that if he shifted, other colors would escape from it into the cold, dark air. At first she thought he must be ancient: the taper-fire showed her a face that was shadowed and scarred, remote with strange experience, but no more than a dozen years older than hers.

"Who are you?" she breathed. Nothing on h.o.a.rsbreath glittered like that in midwinter; its colors were few and simple: snow, damp fur and leather, fire, gold.

"I can't find my father," he said. "Lule Yarrow."

She stared at him, amazed that his colors had their beginnings on h.o.a.rsbreath. "He's dead." His eyes widened slightly, losing some of their hardness. "He fell in a crevice. They chipped him out of the ice at suns-crossing, and buried him six years ago."

He looked away from her a moment, down at the icy ridges of tramped snow. "Winter." He broke the word in two, like an icicle. Then he shifted his pack, sighing. "Do they still have wormspoor on this ice-tooth?"

"Of course. Who are you?"

"Ryd Yarrow. Who are you?"

"Peka Krao."

"Peka. I remember. You were squalling in somebody's arms when I left."

"You look a hundred years older than that," she commented, still puzzling, holding him in her light, though she was beginning to feel the cold. "Seventeen years you've been gone. How could you stand it, being away from h.o.a.rsbreath so long? I couldn't stand five years of it. There are so many people whose names you don't know, trying to tell you about things that don't matter, and the flat earth and the blank sky are everywhere. Did you come back to mine?"

He glanced up at the grey-white ceiling of the snow-tunnel, barely an inch above his head. "The sky is full of stars, and the gold wake of dragon-flights," he said softly. "I am a Dragon-Harrower. I am trained and hired to trouble dragons out of their lairs. That's why I came back here."

"Here. There are no dragons on h.o.a.rsbreath."

His smile touched his eyes like a reflection of fire across ice. "h.o.a.rsbreath is a dragon's heart."

She shifted, her own heart suddenly chilled. She said tolerantly. "That sounds like a marvellous tale to me."

"It's no tale. I know. I followed this dragon through centuries, through ancient writings, through legends, through rumors of terror and deaths. It is here, sleeping, coiled around the treasures of h.o.a.rs-breath. If you on h.o.a.rsbreath rouse it, you are dead. If I rouse it, I will end your endless winter."

"I like winter." Her protest sounded very small, muted within the thick snow-walls, but he heard it. He lifted his hand, held it lightly against the low ceiling above his head.

"You might like the sky beyond this. At night it is a mine of lights and hidden knowledge."

She shook her head. "I like close places, full of fire and darkness. And faces I know. And tales spun out of wormspoor. If you come with me to the tavern, they'll tell you where your father is buried, and give you lodgings, and then you can leave."

"I'll come to the tavern. With a tale."

Her taper was nearly burned down, and she was beginning to shiver. "A dragon." She turned away from him. "No one will believe you anyway."

"You do."

She listened to him silently, warming herself with wormspoor, as he spoke to the circle of rough, fire-washed faces in the tavern. Even in the light, he bore little resemblance to his father, except for his broad cheekbones and the threads of gold in his hair. Under his bulky cloak, he was dressed as plainly as any miner, but stray bits of color still glinted from him, suggesting wealth and distant places.

"A dragon," he told them, "is creating your winter. Have you ever asked yourselves why winter on this island is nearly twice as long as winter on the mainland twenty miles away? You live in dragon's breath, in the icy mist of its bowels, h.o.a.r-frost cold, that grips your land in winter the way another dragon's breath might burn it to flinders. One month out of the year, in the warmth of suns-crossing, it looses its ring-grip on your island, slides into the sea, and goes to mate. Its ice-kingdom begins to melt. It returns, loops its length around its mountain of ice and gold. Its breath freezes the air once more, locks the river into its bed, you into your houses, the gold into its mountain, and you curse the cold and drink until the next dragon-mating." He paused. There was not a sound around him. "I've been to strange places in this world, places even colder than this, where the suns never cross, and I have seen such monsters. They are ancient as rock, white as old ice, and their skin is like iron. They breed winter and they cannot be killed. But they can be driven away, into far corners of the world where they are dangerous to no one. I'm trained for this. I can rid you of your winter. Harrowing is dangerous work, and usually I am highly paid. But I've been looking for this ice-dragon for many years, through its spoor of legend and destruction. I tracked it here, one of the oldest of its kind, to the place where I was born. All I ask from you is a guide."

He stopped, waiting. Peka, her hands frozen around her gla.s.s, heard someone swallow. A voice rose and faded from the tavern-kitchen; sap hissed in the fire. A couple of the miners were smiling; the others looked satisfied and vaguely expectant, wanting the tale to continue. When it didn't, Kor Flynt, who had mined h.o.a.rsbreath for fifty years, spat wormspoor into the fire. The flame turned a baleful gold, and then subsided. "Suns-crossing," he said politely, reminding a scholar of a sc.r.a.p of knowledge children acquired with their first set of teeth, "causes the seasons."

"Not here," Ryd said. "Not on h.o.a.rsbreath. I've seen. I know."

Peka's mother Ambris leaned forward. "Why," she asked curi-ously, "would a miner's son become a dragon-harrower?" She had a pleasant, craggy face; her dark hair and her slow, musing voice were like Peka's. Peka saw the Dragon-Harrower ride between two an-swers in his mind. Meeting Ambris' eyes, he made a choice, and his own eyes strayed to the fire.

"I left h.o.a.rsbreath when I was twelve. When I was fifteen, I saw a dragon in the mountains east of the city. Until then, I had intended to come back and mine. I began to learn about dragons. The first one I saw burned red and gold under the suns' fire; it swallowed small hills with its shadow. I wanted to call it, like a hawk. I wanted to fly with it. I kept studying, meeting other people who studied them, seeing other dragons. I saw a night-black dragon in the northern deserts; it scales were dusted with silver, and the flame that came out of it was silver. I saw people die in that flame, and I watched the harrowing of that dragon. It lives now on the underside of the world, in shadow.

"We keep watch on all known dragons. In the green mid-world belt, rich with rivers and mines, forests and farmland, I saw a whole min-ing town burned to the ground by a dragon so bright I thought at first it was sun-fire arching down to the ground. Someone I loved had the task of tracking that one to its cave, deep beneath the mine-shafts. I watched her die, there. I nearly died. The dragon is sealed into the bottom of the mountain, by stone and by words. That is the dragon which harrowed me." He paused to sip wormspoor. His eyes lifted, not to Ambris, but to Peka. "Now do you understand what danger you live in? What if one year the dragon sleeps through its mating-time, with the soft heat of the suns making it sluggish from dreaming? You don't know it's there, wrapped around your world. It doesn't know you're there, stealing its gold. What if you sail your boats full of gold downriver and find the great white bulk of it sprawled like a wall across your pa.s.sage? Or worse, you find its eye opening like a third, dead sun to see your hands full of its gold? It would slide its length around the mountain, coil upward and crush you all, then breathe over the whole of the island, and turn it dead-white as its heart, and it would never sleep again."

There was another silence. Peka felt something play along her spine like the thin, quavering, arthritic fingers of wind. "It's getting better," she said, "your tale." She took a deep swallow of wormspoor and added, "I love sitting in a warm, friendly place listening to tales I don't have to believe."

Kor Flynt shrugged. "It rings true, la.s.s."

"It is true," Ryd said.

"Maybe so," she said. "And it may be better if you just let the dragon sleep."

"And if it wakes unexpectedly? The winter killed my father. The dragon at the heart of winter could destroy you all."

"There are other dangers. Rock falls, sudden floods, freezing winds. A dragon is simply one more danger to live with."

He studied her. "I saw a dragon once with wings as softly blue as a spring sky. Have you ever felt spring on h.o.a.rsbreath? It could come."

She drank again. "You love them," she said. "Your voice loves them and hates them, Dragon-Harrower."

"I hate them," he said flatly. "Will you guide me down the moun-tain?"

"No. I have work to do."

He shifted, and the colors rippled from him again, red, gold, sil-ver, spring-blue. She finished the wormspoor, felt it burn in her like liquid gold. "It's only a tale. All your dragons are just colors in our heads. Let the dragon sleep. If you wake it, you'll destroy the night."

"No," he said. "You will see the night. That's what you're afraid of."

Kor Flynt shrugged. "There probably is no dragon, anyway."

"Spring, though," Ambris said; her face had softened. "Sometimes I can smell it from the mainland, and, and I always wonder. Still, after a hard day's work, sitting beside a roaring fire sipping dragon-spit, you can believe anything. Especially this." She looked into her gla.s.s at the glowering liquid. "Is this some of yours, Peka? What did you put into it?"

"Gold." The expression in Ryd's eyes made her swallow sudden tears of frustration. She refilled her gla.s.s. "Fire, stone, dark, wood-smoke, night air smelling like cold tree-bark. You don't care, Ryd Yarrow."

"I do care," he said imperturbably. "It's the best wormspoor I've ever tasted."

"And I put a dragon's heart into it." She saw him start slightly; ice and h.o.a.r-frost shimmered from him. "If that's what h.o.a.rsbreath is." A dragon beat into her mind, its wings of rime, its breath smoldering with ice, the guardian of winter. She drew breath, feeling the vast bulk of it looped around them all, dreaming its private dreams. Her bones seemed suddenly fragile as kindling, and the gold wormspoor in her hands a guilty secret. "I don't believe it," she said, lifting her gla.s.s. "It's a tale."

"Oh, go with him, la.s.s," her mother said tolerantly. "There may be no dragon, but we can't have him swallowed up in the ice like his father. Besides, it may be a chance for spring."

"Spring is for flatlanders. There are things that shouldn't be wak-ened. I know."

"How?" Ryd asked.

She groped, wishing for the first time for a flatlander's skill with words. She said finally, "I feel it," and he smiled. She sat back in her chair, irritated and vaguely frightened. "Oh, all right, Ryd Yarrow, since you'll go with or without me. I'll lead you down to the sh.o.r.es in the morning. Maybe by then you'll listen to me."

"You can't see beyond your snow-world," he said implacably. "It is morning."

They followed one of the deepest mine-shafts, and clambered out of it to stand in the snow half-way down the mountain. The sky was lead grey; across the mists ringing the island's sh.o.r.es, they could see the ocean, a swirl of white, motionless ice. The mainland harbor was locked. Peka wondered if the ships were stuck like birds in the ice. The world looked empty and somber.

"At least in the dark mountain there is fire and gold. Here, there isn't even a sun." She took out a skin of wormspoor, sipped it to warm her bones. She held it out to Ryd, but he shook his head.

"I need all my wits. So do you, or we'll both end up preserved in ice at the bottom of a crevice."

"I know. I'll keep you safe." She corked the skin and added, "In case you were wondering."

But he looked at her, startled out of his remoteness. "I wasn't. Do you feel that strongly?"

"Yes."

"So did I, when I was your age. Now I feel very little." He moved again. She stared after him, wondering how he kept her smoldering and on edge. She said abruptly, catching up with him, "Ryd Yarrow."

"Yes."

"You have two names. Ryd Yarrow, and Dragon-Harrower. One is a plain name this mountain gave you. The other you got from the world, the name that gives you color. One name I can talk to, the other is the tale at the bottom of a bottle of wormspoor. Maybe you could understand me if you hadn't brought your past back to h.o.a.rs-breath."

"I do understand you," he said absently. "You want to sit in the dark all your life and drink wormspoor."

She drew breath and held it. "You talk but you don't listen," she said finally. "Just like all the other flatlanders." He didn't answer. They walked in silence awhile, following the empty bed of an old river. The world looked dead, but she could tell by the air, which was not even freezing spangles of breath on her hood-fur, that the winter was drawing to an end. "Suns-crossing must be only two months away," she commented surprisedly.

"Besides, I'm not a flatlander," he said abruptly, surprising her again. "I do care about the miners, about h.o.a.rsbreath. It's because I care that I want to challenge that ice-dragon with all the skill I possess. Is it better to let you live surrounded by danger, in bitter cold, carving half-lives out of snow and stone, so that you can come fully alive for one month of the year?"

"You could have asked us."

"I did ask you."

She sighed. "Where will it live, if you drive it away from h.o.a.rs-breath?"

He didn't answer for a few paces. In the still day, he loosed no colors, though Peka thought she saw shadows of them around his pack. His head was bowed; his eyes were burning back at a memory. "It will find some strange, remote places where there is no gold, only rock; it can ring itself around emptiness and dream of its past. I came across an ice-dragon unexpectedly once, in a land of ice. The bones of its wings seemed almost translucent. I could have sworn it cast a white shadow."

"Did you want to kill it?"

"No. I loved it."

"Then why do you--" But he turned at her suddenly, almost an-grily, waking out of a dream.

"I came here because you've built your lives on top of a terrible danger, and I asked for a guide, not a gad-fly."

"You wanted me," she said flatly. "And you don't care about h.o.a.rsbreath. All you want is that dragon. Your voice is full of it. What's a gad-fly?"

"Go ask a cow. Or a horse. Or anything else that can't live on this forsaken, frostbitten lump of ice."