Wings of Fire Part 9

Will did not ask the revered hag how she had found him. Wise-women had their skills; nor did they explain themselves. "I'll come when I'm ready," he said. "My task here is not yet completed." He was busily sewing together leaves of oak, yew, ash, and alder, using a needle laboriously crafted from a thorn, and short threads made from gra.s.ses he had pulled apart by hand. It was no easy work.

Hag Applemere frowned. "You place us all in certain danger."

"He will not destroy himself over me alone. Particularly when he is sure that I must inevitably return to him."

"It is true."

Will laughed mirthlessly. "You need not ply your trade here, hallowed lady. Speak to me as you would to any other. I am no longer of the dragon's party." Looking at her, he saw for the first time that she was not so many years older than himself. In a time of peace, he might even have grown fast enough to someday, in two years or five, claim her for his own, by the ancient rites of the greensward and the midnight sun. Only months ago, young as he was, he would have found this an unsettling thought. But now his thinking had been driven to such extremes that it bothered him not.

"Will," she said then, cautiously, "whatever are you up to?"

He held up the garment, complete at last, for her to admire. "I have become a greenshirtie." All the time he had sewn, he was bare chested, for he had torn up his dragon sark and used it for tinder as he needed fire. Now he donned its leafy replacement.

Clad in his fragile new finery, Will looked the truth-teller straight in the eye.

"You can lie," he said.

Bessie looked stricken. "Once," she said, and reflexively covered her womb with both hands. "And the price is high, terribly high."

He stood. "Then it must be paid. Let us find a shovel now. It is time for a bit of grave-robbery."

It was evening when Will returned at last to the dragon. Tyrant Square had been ringed about with barbed wire, and a loudspeaker had been set upon a pole with wires leading back into his iron hulk, so that he could speak and be heard in the absence of his lieutenant.

"Go first," Will said to Hag Applemere, "that he may be rea.s.sured I mean him no harm."

b.r.e.a.s.t.s bare, clad in the robes and wide hat of her profession, Bessie Applemere pa.s.sed through a barbed-wire gate (a grimpkin guard opened it before her and closed it after her) and entered the square. "Son of Cruelty." She bowed deeply before the dragon.

Will stood hunched in the shadows, head down, with his hands in his pockets. Tonelessly, he said, "I have been broken to your will, great one. I will be your stump-cow, if that is what you want. I beg you. Make me grovel. Make me crawl. Only let me back in."

Hag Applemere spread her arms and bowed again. "It is true."

"You may approach." The dragon's voice sounded staticky and yet triumphant over the loudspeaker.

The sour-faced old grimpkin opened the gate for him, as it had earlier been opened for the hag. Slowly, like a maltreated dog returning to the only hand that had ever fed him, Will crossed the square. He paused before the loudspeaker, briefly touched its pole with one trembling hand, and then shoved that hand back into his pocket. "You have won. Well and truly, have you won."

It appalled him how easily the words came, and how natural they sounded coming from his mouth. He could feel the desire to surrender to the tyrant, accept what punishments he would impose, and sink gratefully back into his bondage. A little voice within cried: So easy! So easy! And so it would be, perilously easy indeed. The realization that a part of him devoutly wished for it made Will burn with humiliation.

The dragon slowly forced one eye half-open. "So, boy..." Was it his imagination, or was the dragon's voice less forceful than it had been three days ago? "You have learned what need feels like. You suffer from your desires, even as I do. I... I... am weakened, admittedly, but I am not all so weak as that! You thought to prove that I needed you--you have proved the reverse. Though I have neither wings nor missiles and my electrical reserves are low, though I cannot fire my jets without destroying the village and myself as well, yet am I of the mighty, for I have neither pity nor remorse. Thought you I craved a mere boy? Thought you to make me dance attendance on a soft, unmuscled half-mortal mongrel fey? Pfaugh! I do not need you. Never think that I... that I need you!"

"Let me in," Will whimpered. "I will do whatever you say."

"You... you understand that you must be punished for your disobedience?"

"Yes," Will said. "Punish me, please. Abase and degrade me, I beg you."

"As you wish," the dragon's c.o.c.kpit door hissed open, "so it shall be."

Will took one halting step forward, and then two. Then he began to run, straight at the open hatchway. Straight at it--and then to one side.

He found himself standing before the featureless iron of the dragon's side. Quickly, from one pocket he withdrew Sergeant Bombast's soulstone. Its small blood-red mate was already in his mouth. There was still grave-dirt on the one, and a strange taste to the other, but he did not care. He touched the soulstone to the iron plate, and the dragon's true name flowed effortlessly into his mind.

Simultaneously, he took the elf-shot from his other pocket. Then, with all his strength, he drew the elf-shot down the dragon's iron flank, making a long, bright scratch in the rust.

"What are you doing?" the dragon cried in alarm. "Stop that! The hatch is open, the couch awaits!" His voice dropped seductively. "The needles yearn for your wrists. Even as I yearn for--"

"Baalthazar, of the line of Baalmoloch, of the line of Baalshabat," Will shouted, "I command thee to die!"

And that was that.

All in an instant and with no fuss whatever, the dragon king was dead. All his might and malice was become nothing more than inert metal, that might be cut up and carted away to be sold to the sc.r.a.p-foundries that served their larger brothers with ingots to be re-forged for the War.

Will hit the side of the dragon with all the might of his fist, to show his disdain. Then he spat as hard and fierce as ever he could, and watched the saliva slide slowly down the black metal. Finally, he unb.u.t.toned his trousers and p.i.s.sed upon his erstwhile oppressor.

So it was that he finally accepted that the tyrant was well and truly dead.

Bessie Applemere--hag no more--stood silent and bereft on the square behind him. Wordlessly, she mourned her sterile womb and sightless eyes. To her, Will went. He took her hand, and led her back to her hut. He opened the door for her. Her sat her down upon her bed. "Do you need anything?" he asked. "Water? Some food?"

She shook her head. "Just go. Leave me to lament our victory in solitude."

He left, quietly closing the door behind him. There was no place to go now but home. It took him a moment to remember where that was.

"I've come back," Will said.

Blind Enna looked stricken. Her face turned slowly toward him, those vacant eyes filled with shadow, that ancient mouth open and despairing. Like a sleep-walker, she stood and stumbled forward and then, when her groping fingers tapped against his chest, she threw her arms around him and burst into tears. "Thank the Seven! Oh, thank the Seven! The blessed, blessed, merciful Seven!" she sobbed over and over again, and Will realized for the first time that, in her own inarticulate way, his aunt genuinely and truly loved him.

And so, for a season, life in the village returned to normal. In the autumn the Armies of the Mighty came through the land, torching the crops and leveling the buildings. Terror went before them and the villagers were forced to flee, first into the Old Forest, and then to refugee camps across the border. Finally, they were loaded into cattle cars and taken away to far Babylonia in Faerie Minor, where the streets are bricked of gold and the ziggurats touch the sky, and there Will found a stranger destiny than any he might previously have dreamed.

But that is another story, for another day.

The Laily Worm Nina Kiriki Hoffman Nina Kiriki Hoffman was born in San Gabriel, CA, and grew up in Santa Barbara. Her first story, "A Night Out", appeared in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Tales by Moonlight anthology. The first of her nine novels, Child of an Ancient City (with Tad Williams), appeared in 1992 and was followed by Bram Stoker Award winner, The Thread that Binds the Bones, Nebula and World Fantasy Award nominee The Silent Strength of Stones, A Red Heart of Memories and Past the Size of Dreaming, A Stir of Bones, and Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award nominee A Fistful of Sky. Hoffman then turned to SF with Philip K. d.i.c.k Award nominee Catalyst: A Novel of Alien Contact before returning to fantasy with Mythopoeic and Endeavour Award finalist Spirits that Walk in Shadow and her most recent novel Fall of Light. Coming up is a new novel, Thresholds. Hoffman's more than 250 short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards and are collected in Legacy of Fire, Courting Disasters and Other Strange Affinities, Common Threads, and Time Travelers, Ghosts, and Other Visitors.

In addition to writing, Hoffman does production work for F&SF, teaches writing at her local community college, and works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

After our mother died, our father married the worst woman the world did ever see.

My sister Masery and I didn't suspect this at first. Stepmother was nice to us before she had her own child, nice in ways we weren't used to. Most of the things we did with her were never things we had done with my own mother while she lived. Stepmother took us hunting in the forest, taught us to shoot bows and handle knives when my sister was ten and I was eight. "You'll need skills," Stepmother told us. "You can't count on finding the perfect husband, Masery, nor you the perfect wife, Perry, in spite of your royal blood."

Before she transformed us, I had thought Stepmother was teaching us lessons just because we needed them. After, when I had plenty of time to think, I realized she was telling us her own woes. Stepmother had royal blood in her veins; she was born in a foreign court. Our father was royal, too, right enough, as had been our mother, cousins of the king; but Father had quarreled with the queen just after he married Stepmother, and so we were all exiled to Hopelost Keep, a drafty castle in the north, told to watch the wild seas for reivers. Who would rob us here, when the land yielded barely enough for our little settlement to live on? Winters were long and harsh, summers sweet and too soon fled. The growing season was so short we had trouble storing up enough to get us through each freezing winter. Even the animals were skinny and tough. The Nors.e.m.e.n pillaged farther south, where they could find gold and iron, better-stocked cellars and warmer women.

Still, Father took his duties seriously, and led his lean and silent soldiers on patrols up and down the coast, watching, always watching. Always absent.

At first Stepmother pined for court life, but then she warmed to me and Masery. She made no friends among the villagers--they thought her too strange, with her slanting eyes and her accent that changed words into something else. Masery and I were the only ones she talked to, with Father on patrol most of his days and sleeping away from us most nights.

Stepmother taught us foreign witcheries, knots to tie in your hair to keep a lover true, knots to tie in your lover's hair to send him away from you. Herbs she taught us as well, those to send others to sleep or sweeten their tempers, those to brighten the eye and shine the hair. All manner of glamours she taught my sister Masery and since I was there, I learned as well, though many of these things weren't skills suitable for boys or princes to learn. She taught us the art of the needle, and kitchen mysteries.

I believed she loved us. All the things she taught Masery, I believed she thought of Masery as her own daughter. As for me, I knew she thought of me as an afterthought and a tagalong, but still, she ruffled my hair sometimes, dropped careless kisses on my cheek, gave me sc.r.a.ps of praise when I managed a trick well. Especially she liked my gift with light, to make it dance in darkness, to bend it to shine where no light had shone before.

All this changed when, three years after she married my father, Stepmother became pregnant. Instead of coming to our rooms in the morning to dress Masery's hair and help her tend to her clothes, Stepmother stayed away from us. Masery asked me to help her comb and braid her hair and b.u.t.ton her b.u.t.tons, and in return, I sought her help with mending the knees of my trousers and the elbows of my shirts, which tore and frayed often. Stepmother no longer bought me new clothing when I outgrew the old, and I was growing.

We didn't know why Stepmother stopped caring for us until her belly grew. Then I lived in hope of a brother or sister, someone smaller than I on whom I could practice some of the tricks Stepmother had taught me, as Masery had practiced her arts on me.

One day when Stepmother was in her seventh month, she called me and Masery to her and said, "It is time for you children to go to court and foster with the king."

I wondered how we were to go to court when the queen had banished our family. Perhaps Stepmother had corresponded with someone at court, gained us a pardon and positions. Masery and I asked no questions; we had learned not to question Stepmother. She could be kind, but when the mood was on her, she could be cruel too.

"Perry, you will be a page, in training to be a knight, and Masery a lady-in-waiting. Walk with me. Let me give you one last blessing before you go."

We left the castle, walked beyond the battlements out to the road that led to southern settlements and into the forest where people went to cut wood. Though she was heavy with child, Stepmother walked quickly and well. She took the northern fork to the harbor, then branched away from the road on a narrow track that led to the top of a cliff overlooking the sea.

We stood and looked out to sea. Clouds hung low over the long gray distances, but breaks in them flooded the sea with scatters of silvery sunlight. Waves surged, grew whitecaps; wind blew spray up into the sky. The air was damp and smelled salty.

I wondered when I would come home, and thought: I used to be homesick for our house near the king's castle, where life was easy and the food was rich and we had a garden where fruit trees grew, and servants who smiled. And yet, with all that Stepmother had taught me, I had learned to love this harsh land as well. I could hit a flying duck with an arrow if luck was with me, and knock over a hare with a stone. I knew the names of plants, which ones to eat, which to make into tinctures or ointments to cure ills. I knew a few words of the language of fire; I could coax a log to burn even after it had charred. I could translate some of the whispers in the walls of the keep: I had heard stories of others who had lived there ages earlier. In the long dark winter nights, I had learned a little of the language of snow, and heard tales of heaven the snowflakes whispered as they fell. This place, too, was home.

Stepmother brought out the silver wand of transformation. Masery and I held hands and stood before Stepmother. What would she turn us into? Would she make me stronger, and Masery more beautiful, so we would find favor in the eyes of our cousins at court? Could she give me the tongue of a diplomat, or Masery the skill of a musician? Perhaps she would transform our clothing so we would be more worthy of being seen in royal places. Since Stepmother's pregnancy, despite Masery's and my skill with the needle and other arts Stepmother had taught us, we had not been able to keep our clothes from wearing out, nor our hair from tangling.

"Live your natures, my sometime children," whispered Stepmother. She tapped me thrice with the wand.

A horrible, strange thing happened. Inside me something huge awoke, and looked out through my stomach with burning orange eyes. It laughed, and the laugh came out of my throat; and then it crawled up out of my mouth, its head dark silver, spiky and glistening. I didn't know how it happened, but for a brief time I was still myself, staring at this worm as it poured out of my throat and mouth, only how could it come from inside me, when it was larger than I was? And then I looked through other eyes, and the body I had been growing into all my days melted into the scales and spines of the dragon.

Stepmother tapped Masery thrice with her wand.

A great silvery scaled snout stuck out below my eyes. Long whiskery things trailed from it, waving with a life of their own. I opened my mouth, and oh, it opened wider and wider: I felt my own maw, gaping, a cut in my head that sliced back into my throat, reached almost to my spine. The tip of my new tongue flickered out. It was long and black, split at the tip like a snake's.

I tasted a hundred things on the wind: coming snow, sea salt, crushed wet leaves that carpeted the forest floor behind us, wood smoke from the keep below, blood from the fall butchering of pigs, the cinnamon, musk, and amber scent of Stepmother. And something else, something new, an oily, fishy scent. I bent my heavy head and with one eye looked before me. A large fish the size of a human child flopped on the rock, mouth gaping and closing.

Fish--I was hungry; fires lit in my belly--and something more. The scent of Sister.

A hiss poured out of my throat.

Stepmother took two steps back and laughed. "Why, Perry, how fine you are, and how strange. I so expected a mouse!"

Fire roared up my throat. I closed my mouth a moment, gathered fire on my tongue, then opened my mouth to breathe on Stepmother.

She held up the wand. "No!" she cried. "No!" She tapped me thrice with the wand. "Resistance, transform into obedience! Perry, you are mine now, mine! You will do my bidding. You will not hurt me!"

I felt invisible chains drop onto me, lock into my will. I swallowed my own fire.

"You will do this work for me. Guard that tree." She pointed down the coast to where an ancient oak spread its branches. The tree was so old and so long settled that the sea had eaten inland to it; some of its roots stuck out of the low cliff it stood on and dangled toward the small crescent of beach below. "Live there. See that no one approaches it; kill any who dare. That's my good and n.o.ble Perry." She stroked my head.

How I longed to burn her hand with my skin! But she was unscathed, though I knew my body hosted heat inside and out.

"As for you, Masery, this form too I didn't expect for you. I thought you might become a cat, and hoped I could take you home with me. But you can't be my pet, so get you gone. Perry, toss her into the sea."

I could hardly understand what I had become, let alone that this giant fish was my sister. I didn't need to understand anything but Stepmother's orders, though. I reached out, saw my own dragon hand for the first time: fingers as long as my arms used to be, tipped with claws of dark jewel; a scaled palm engraved with the lines of folds. I grasped my sister gently, her scales to mine, and lifted her as carefully as I could, for within Stepmother's order there was this much flex, that I could choose my grip. I carried my sister to the edge of the cliff and threw her as far out to sea as I could, hoping and praying she would be able to breathe water now, and would know how to swim.

Then I turned away from Stepmother and walked on my new four feet, dragging my spiky tail, down the cliff path toward the tree she had told me to guard.

Stepmother laughed. "Good boy," she cried. I did not look back.

I wrapped myself around the foot of the tree. The tree sang to me, a soothing, welcoming song whose words I did not yet understand, though I took their tone.

Also, there was a scent from higher up. I could taste it: a cinnamon scent. Somewhere in the tree's crown was something that belonged to Stepmother.

The tree had scattered acorns all around it. As a boy, I had never eaten them, but now I was so hungry, I decided to try. I could tell, when I had licked up a mouthful of gritty little orbs, that my teeth were not shaped to crunch such things, but I bit down on one anyway. Bitter filled my mouth. Fire shot up my throat and roasted the acorns on my tongue, and then, ah, then they fell apart and tasted better, a little like porridge, a little like roasted chestnuts. I roasted and ate many of them, then curled around the tree's foot.

The night was cold, but I did not feel it; I only knew because with every breath I breathed out, steam rose from my nostrils. I slept before the moon rose.

In the morning I felt stiff with cold--not as though I were freezing, more as though my body had begun turning to stone. While I was flexing muscles I did not know from my previous life--how many ribs did I have? The tail moved when I wanted it to, but how could that work? How did I know how to make my tail behave? Did my fingers really have extra joints, and how was it that I had muscles in my nose that could send my new whiskers twitching?--I noticed people across the way, creeping through the forest's fringe.

"Hey," I called. Was that the baker's son Fon? The miller's daughter Kiki?

"Fon, Kiki," I cried "Halloo!"

Only, what erupted from my throat was a fountain of flame, and my voice came out a growl.

Both of them screamed and ran away.

Oh, dear.

And yet, now I was warm again. I stretched, shifted, and flamed. Warmth settled into my belly, and all my muscles moved as though oiled.

My stomach growled, and small flames puffed from my mouth. I searched the ground for acorns and realized I'd eaten all the nearby ones the night before. I cast farther afield.

To one side of my tree was the low cliff that dropped away to the ocean. Waves fretted its base only ten feet below. I peered over the edge but saw only very shallow water, nothing to eat. I turned toward the forest instead.

Some of those trees were oaks. I left my post and ambled over, filled my mouth with acorns, roasted, crunched, and swallowed them. A hare startled as I approached a bush, and I was so surprised I opened my mouth and flamed it. Ah, the scent of charred hare. Delicious. I ran to it and ate it. Caught, killed, cooked in one move. For the first time, I was happy about one of my new abilities. I wanted to hunt again, but the rumbles in my belly had quieted, and the tree called me back.

I made a ring around its base with my body and lay, looking out to sea.

I discovered my new life: the tree called me to lie near it. Only when hunger overpowered me could I leave the tree. The farther I went from it, the worse I felt. Once in a while, when the tide was high, I could lean down into the water and s.n.a.t.c.h unwary fish; sometimes I steamed them with my breath until they floated to the surface, and then they were easy to catch.

Four days after my transformation, Masery came ash.o.r.e.

She was a bigger fish than any I'd seen so close to the cliff. At first, when I sensed her, that flickering movement unexplained by water's workings, I was excited; hunger always lay in the back of my throat, and I was ready to eat again. Then I sensed the sister in her, and waited. I had thought of her now and again during my vigil by the tree, wondered if she had survived her transformation and my treatment of her afterward, the far toss into rough waters.

She swam right up until she had beached herself. I watched in alarm, wondering if she was killing herself, wondering whether to reach down and flip her back into the water. Her scent changed, though, and then she also changed. She shapeshifted back into her human self, naked, shivering, her hair a tangled mess. Gasping, she sat up, then stood. She faced me, took a staggering step back. "Brother?" she whispered.

Masery, I thought. I was afraid to speak. I remembered how I had tried to speak to Fon and Kiki, only to flame at them.

"Is it really you?" She crept closer. "Brother?"

I lowered my head and looked away. In the first days of my enchantment I had not thought much about my appearance, only tried out my new body and wondered how I could change back into myself. Did I really want to, now that Stepmother openly hated me? Father had not been home in months. What did I have to go back to? Masery and I had a few friends in the village, the children, whom we had sometimes snuck out to meet when Stepmother was brooding over her spellbooks. I had tried to greet them, and look what had happened. What else was there for me but to guard this tree and hunt?

"Brother," said Masery. She stood at the base of the low cliff and raised her arms. "Lift me up."

How brave, my sister, to face a dragony worm like me. I reached down and wrapped my hands around her waist, lifted her up and set her beside me.

"Oh," she said. "You're warm." She leaned against my flank.