Her back was cold. She was on the ground again, and her smock was off. So were Nuncle Bal’s britches, and she squirmed and fought but couldn’t get out from under his hands. His breath was on her face and he leaned in and pushed her legs far apart, too far. It hurt, and what was he doing, he was rubbing her secret place, the wrong way! And what, what—
NOOOOO!!
The scream wouldn’t come out of her throat. It was all inside her head, a shrieking pain, but not as bad as how he was hurting her down there. He was in her secret place that was supposed to be for her to share with her loved some day, and he was pushing himself inside. There was a horrible burning pain, again, and again, until she felt herself being torn open. There was a white-hot line of relief, then, and new agony stitching itself through the rest of the burning. It was sickening. She wanted to retch but couldn’t, his hand—
Tears rolled down the sides of her face, into her hair. After a while she couldn’t feel them or anything else, it hurt so bad— Inside she yelled and yelled for help, but no help came. They weren’t sensitives and they couldn’t hear her, any of them! He was pushing it in and out, hard. It hurt worse and worse, and he was breathing fast and hot right in her face. She was breathing his wet stale breath and that made her want to be sick too—and it hurt, it hurt, somebody make it stop! Somebody, Mama, Daddy, Goddess, please, please make it stop!
He slumped forward, and she thought she felt something shoot inside her, but she wasn’t sure because of the pain, the way it burned, her secret place that had always felt so nice. Broken, torn, she’d never be able to use it again. No one would love her, ever, hers was broken—and the Fire, when he hurt her, it came out, it was in the pain, part of the pain, no more, never, it hurt, horrible—
She lay there and sobbed for air, all the screams in her stifled by horror; and when he came around and knelt over her face and pushed the hard thing, all bloody, into her slack mouth, and rubbed it in and out, she let him. At least he wasn’t hurting her anymore. But when he turned her over and started to put it against that other place, she realized that he was going to hurt her even worse this time. No one was going to come help her now, either. She pushed her face down against the cold harsh dirt and tried with all her might to die.
It didn’t work. When her first scream broke free, he strangled it again. The terrible strength of his hand turned the world red and then black once more. The last thing she heard as she pitched forward into blackness was, very remote, the sound of some little girl screaming as the size of him tore her open the other way, too.
Eventually her hearing came back. She heard him pick up his rake and hurry away, pushing the rustling branches aside. Some while later, lying as she was with her face on the hard ground, she felt-heard hoofbeats, cantering, then galloping. He was gone. Very slowly she got up. It hurt, especially when she moved her legs at all. She pulled down her smock and scrubbed at her face to try to get the dirt off: her father didn’t like her to be dirty.
That roaring stayed with her all that day, as confusion and rage shouted all around her. It was in her thoughts now, dazed, shocked, going around and around in her head and coming back again to what she’d felt tangled up with the agony—the Fire—and shying away from the thought and coming back, endlessly.
When they finally put her to bed, full of some bitter herbal potion the Rodmistress had made her drink so she’d sleep, still her head roared behind the steady flow of her tears. Only later, after she had been staring for hours at the vague circles the candles made on the ceiling, did the tears flow more slowly. Gradually, the pain between her legs began to feel far away. The roar died to a whisper. But the whisper said the same thing she had been hearing all day, and by the sound of it, she fell asleep: No more. Horrible. All wrong. Never again.
And there was a quieter whisper beneath that, one so soft that she hadn’t heard it then, never heard it afterward, only heard it now with a Dragon’s impossibly sharp underhearing—a seed of rage, taking root in blood and battered flesh, burning dark with hate. Some day, when I’m big, I’ll kill him.
***
The pain, experienced at last, slowly fell away and left her among her mdeihei with the fiery tears running down her face. They held their silence, waiting to hear what she would sing before beginning to weave counterpoint or dissonance about it.
She was exhausted. It was fifteen years since that afternoon under the willow. Fifteen years since she had shown herself any more than Balen’s terrible smile, or thought of the experience as more than “the rape.” She had thought she was over it, past it all.
What idiocy.
As she grew, she had quickly given up thinking much about sharing her body with others. Her agemates indulged in all the delightful anticipation of adolescence—the feeling that something magical awaited them when sharing began. But she had already been plunged into an experience that had about it nothing whatsoever of magic. When she came of age, every sharing, however innocent, had a touch of the sordid about it, a taste of fear which made her want to get it over with quickly. Afterwards, she would inevitably plunge into another sharing, in search of what had been missing. She never found it. Nor, as she got close to the brink of focusing, had she ever managed that, either. How could she, when sharing felt so much like Fire?
It’s so simple. Since the Fire feels like loving, allow yourself only sharings that can’t work, or won’t last. Reject those who love you, pursue the uninterested. That way you’ll never have to do much of what feels like the Fire, but isn’t. And let that furious, hating part of your mind betray your Fire every time it’s close to focus, forcing it to starve away to nothing, so you won’t have to spend the rest of your life with that inside you—what feels like loving, and isn’t.
She could just hear the Shadow laughing.
Slowly Segnbora lifted her gemmed head, and sang relief and grief and weary regret at the walls. From the shadows her mdeihei took up the dark melody and shared it with her in compassionate plainsong. “Oh Immanence,” she sang, “I’m full of Power, and in danger of running forever dry; I’ve shared a hundred times, and I’m virgin still; I walk on water, and yet thirst…” She brought her wings down against the floor in a gesture of bitterness.
“And the nightmare was right, too. I’m a killer. The Shadow has merely to touch that memory ever so lightly, and I kill yet again. Is this my destiny, then? To be a clockwork toy that can be set to killing by anyone who happens to find the key?”
In ruthless but regretful honesty her mdeihei answered her in one long note that shook the cave. “Yes!”
“Or so it seems…” Hasai said.
She looked over at her mdaha, catching for the first time the unease that had always been in his voice. Segnbora had never before been Dracon enough to hear it. He gazed back, gentle-eyed, huge, terrible as a thundercloud with wings. And yet, to Dracon eyes, he too was frightened, crippled, shadowed. Looking at him now, a question Segnbora had idly toyed with once or twice before suddenly changed its shape and became essential.
“Mdaha,” she said, bending her head down close to his. “Hasai sithesssch—what were you doing at the Morrowfane?”
He made as if to back away and then stopped, apparently unwilling to disturb the tiny human figure that rested against his right forelimb, watching them. “Going rdahaih, I thought. Until you came along—”
“But a Dragon always knows the details of when he’ll go mdahaih. It’s the first scene one sees when one becomes able to remember ahead.” She leaned closer still, curled her tail around to pinion the other’s and stop its unnerved lashing. Whose body was this she was wearing, scaled in star-emeralds fiery green as new spring growth, spined in yellow diamond? And why did the sight of it make Hasai so nervous? “Mdaha,” she sang, staring at him golden eyes to silver ones, “your becoming mdahaih in me, it was no accident! You knew! You always knew, from when you were a Dragoncel.” She looked at him more closely. “And Dragon or human,” Segnbora said, “those who climb the Fane are given wh
at they need…”
Hasai turned his head away. Segnbora arched her neck around, not allowing him the evasion. “‘Share our memories,’ you’re always saying. But even for you, there are memories that are only words: no images. Ihr’Hhaossia,” she said. The Worldwinning—
Hasai winced, negation again. The mdeihei were as still as a held breath.
“You knew this would come,” she said. “Now you have no choice either. You strove for us to be one, Hasai, and now we are. You are me, and at Bluepeak the Shadow will strike at you too. If you succumb, so do I. Then Lorn dies, and the Kingdoms founder, and I’m forsworn. And far worse than that will follow. The green place you fought for, the world you treasure so, will fall under the Shadow’s domination, and not even Dragons will be safe. We must settle what’s under your stone, now, or the Shadow will settle it for us!”
He started to draw downward, away from her touch. “There’s yet time—”
“No there’s not!”
Hasai lashed free of her tail, began to rise slowly from his crouch, wings lifting, the diamond sabers of the forefingers coming around to threaten her.
Segnbora gazing up, unmoved. “I am you, sithesssch,” she said. Beloved.
Hasai moved not a muscle. As the momentary anger slowly ran out of him, his eyes changed. They were no less afraid, but room was growing in them for something else.
“Now,” Segnbora whispered. “Quickly.”
The fluid, black-glittering splendor of him made itself into a curve, a pounce, a terrible striking downward, a living knife. She arched herself, struck downward with him. Stone sliced open like parting flesh, the blood was memory, it leaped—
***
Their Sun ate their world. They saw it happen. They had had warning—both ahead-memory of the actual incident, and years of wild starstorms, during which the Sun’s light was too intense to drink without dying, and every Dragon had to leave the Homeworld for a time, waiting far out in the cold for the Sun’s fire to die down.
Shell-parents grew infertile, and eggs that should have hatched roasted in the stone instead. At last came the final storm they had dreaded. In haste, all of Dragonkind streamed off their red-brown world and hung helpless in space, watching their star swell to a hundred times its size and devour their Homeworld. They were orphans.
But they weren’t homeless. Wisely, the older Dragons had looked to the youngest Dragoncels to see what they ahead-remembered of their own going-mdahaih. What they had found was the place they would later know as mdeihei—an odd, cool little world, greener than theirs, covered with a strangeness called water and inhabited by life of bizarre and fascinating kinds.
One Dragoncel, however, remembered more than the others. He knew the way, and would die upon reaching their goal. His name was Dahiric. The Dragons gave him another name: Worldfinder. They put him at their head and he led them out into the Great Dark.
How long they travelled there, none of the Dragons were ever sure. Many died along the way—starved for Sunfire in the empty wastes—but Dahiric, a doomed and purposeful green-golden glimmer at the head of ten thousand others, never veered from the memory he followed. Born only to die, and to make this journey, he was determined to succeed.
Finally, after what might have been ages as humans reckon time, they found the place. It was all that the mdeihei-to-be had seen: strange-colored, but alive; a home at last; stone to sink their claws into. They dropped down toward it—
—and found what Dahiric, and many more, were to die of. From the dark side of the world, where it had been hiding, what seemed like a dark foul air came boiling out toward them. It was blacker than the space in which they hung, and it was alive. It hated thought and light and any kind of life but its own. It was also vast enough to swallow the bright little planet whole—a project on which it had been working for eons. It didn’t relish the Dragons’ interruption.
Dahiric knew his duty. Gripping a double wingful of the little planet’s field of forces, he dove down into the roiling blackness, flaming. The Dark drew back, and the Dragons saw Dahiric drive a long tunnel down into it. At the tunnel’s bottom his light blazed like a falling star. But Dahiric was young, his fire limited by his immaturity. His flame went out, and the Dark closed behind him. After a little while he came floating out of the boiling blackness, dead.
Had there been air to carry the battlecry the Dragons raised, stone would have shattered across the world. Ten thousand strong, they dove at the Dark from every angle, flaming as best they could. Their fire was in short supply, however, since they had been out in the night so long, and ten thousand Dragons were not enough. The Dark opened before them, swallowed them, spat back the dead.
Soon there were nine thousand, seven thousand, fewer.
Many had no offspring yet and went rdahaih in a second, without time to make their peace with the Universe from which they were departing. Some went mad from the strain of having so many relatives become mdahaih in them in so short a time. Others so afflicted flung themselves into the Dark and were lost too.
A few simply fled, and lived.
One of these was the youngest of the Homeworld’s Dragoncels. He had never been quite normal. When he had become fully sdahaih at last, and his shell-parents and relatives had asked him when and where he would go mdahaih, his answer frightened them all. What he foresaw was darkness and cold and terrible pain; then the odd, crippled body of an alien, one who was certain she would go rdahaih and take all the mdeihei with her. It was a terrifying vision, and all rejected it.
He grew, and the vision did not change. Slowly he became resigned to being a curiosity among his own kind. As befitted a Dragon, he came to make light of the difference, submerging it in placidity. But he did not realize that the way he did this—by learning to stand a little aloof, even from his mdeihei—also encouraged other Dragons to stand aloof from him as well.
Hasai became estranged from his own kind. He took no mate. He held his peace. He flew alone. And when he finally found himself facing that same awful blackness that in minutes had killed half his race, with no comrade who would admit to fear, and so support him toward courage, terror blinded Hasai and he fled.
The rest of Dragonkind, fortunately, had not exhausted their options. There in empty space they convened in body and mind, and held Assemblage—the last full Assemblage that would be held for a generation or two, until the Advocate summoned them again two thousand years later. They paid the price of Assemblage—the lives of the DragonChief and the Eldest—and then all those left alive turned their hearts inward and gave their Will and power over to the Immanence.
None of them saw where the Messenger came from. She was a Dragon in shape, but even the webs of Her wings burned intolerably bright. Her every scale was a star, a point of power so terrible it could be felt through Dragonhide. The Messenger wheeled and dropped through the massed Dragons, scattering them—then halted above the raging, boiling immensity of the Dark. Through their othersenses, the Dragons could feel the Dark’s alarm as it reached up to snuff out this troublesome intruder. And then they heard its silent scream of pain as the Messenger flamed, letting loose a torrent of Dragonfire as potent as a star’s breathing.
The Dark writhed convulsively, ripped away from the world with a jerk and a soundless howl of rage. It streamed toward the Messenger to engulf Her utterly, but the Messenger only spread wings and claws and seized it. Working at the forces in space with fiery wings, She drew the Dark away from the world, screaming and struggling. Together they dwindled, drawing farther away from the little blue world, until all that could be seen of them was a light like a dwindling star. Those who dared to follow came back and reported that the Messenger had plunged, together with the Dark, into the heart of the nearby yellow Sun. Neither came out again.
Later, the survivors found Dahiric’s body among those of the slain. The others they burned in Dragonfire, as was the custom on the old Homeworld, but Dahiric they bore down to the surface of the new world. There they found a fair p
lace at the endpoint of a great spur of land, where water washed it. They uprooted a mountain, as had been done on the Homeworld for Phyiril and Saen and others of the Parents, and they laid it over him, melted it around him, and made a dwelling there for the new DragonChief. Thereafter the Dragons began settling into their new young world, and watched humankind come slowly out of the caves into which the baleful influence of the Dark had driven them…
…and behind the rest of the Dragons, a silver-and-black Dragoncel drifted to earth like the last leaf of autumn. His shame at his cowardice gripped him like the pain of giving-up-the-body, and would not leave. True, no other Dragon accused him of fear, but no one comforted him, either. He was alone, as always—alone with a new shame, and with his old deep-hidden terror of the day he would finally go mdahaih in a human.
All these burdens he buried under layers of Dracon placidity. The centuries went by. He maintained his dignity, flew alone, kept silent. Finally his life became reduced to a weary waiting for the stars to assume the proper configurations. This they did. At last, his luster dimming, Hasai spiraled down to the Morrowfane by night and crept into a cave there, to wait for the seizures, and for the one who would come…
He looked across the cavern at her now, head held high, waiting for her to disapprove of him and pronounce a sentence worse than death: eternal imprisonment with a sdaha whose opinion of him was not passive placidity, but active scorn. Behind him, the mdeihei were silent.
“You ran,” Segnbora sang.
He said nothing.
“And you’re of value nonetheless,” she said, weaving around the words such melody as meant she was not speaking lightly. “You did what you did, and here you are. And here am I, too…or should I say, here are we.”