Dragonwitch

  Mouse, standing undecided, suddenly saw a light, far away, almost hidden by the trees, so faint it might have been no more than a flickering candle. It grew steadily brighter and, she thought, drew nearer.

  A whirring and shushing filled the air, as of trees speaking to one another in voices of leaves and bark and branches. Roots lifted from the soil and, grasping and coiling, pulled the trees away, parting them to create a path, and even the river itself seemed to rise up and alter its course. The ground beneath Mouse’s feet shifted, though she herself remained where she stood, staring at that approach of light that was more than light, for it did not merely strike her eyes but penetrated down to places in her being that she had not known existed, perhaps that never had existed until now.

  And suddenly the blue star stood before her.

  In the shadows of the trees it stood, gleaming so brightly that it should have blinded her except that she did not see it with her eyes. It was not a being that could present itself in a mortal’s view, so it presented itself in her heart, in the fantastical realm of her fancy, yet no less real. Its flanks were white but shone blue, and they were dappled like a starry night. A long, luxurious tail and a rich mane of light flowed like clouds behind it. Its eyes were like the depths of the sky, but also full of light and, more vividly, full of song made visible to the eyes of her heart.

  Why are you following me? it said.

  It spoke as though even when standing alone it still sang in unison with the whole starry host of the heavens. The sound of its voice sent her to her knees. But there were tears upon her cheeks because it was so beautiful and so good. And its body was fire from its dainty, cloven hooves to the tip of its graceful horn, which rose from the middle of its forehead like a battle standard.

  I watched you, it said. I watched you even as I danced across your mortal sky, and I lingered long after I should have pursued my brothers and sisters into the west. I watched you follow me. But you are no sailor, and you are no hero. So tell me why.

  She could not speak before such a being. Even in her wildest dreams of stepping into the presence of the Flame, Mouse had not imagined this feeling of utter insignificance that overwhelmed her now.

  Those deep-as-night eyes blinked slowly, long lashes covering their depths for an instant. Then it spoke again.

  Poor little thing. It has been so long since I spoke to a mortal. I forget how frail you are. Does this help?

  Without any apparent change taking place, a different being stood before Mouse. It was still a strange, phenomenal creature, but not so terrible, not so overwhelming. Rather than moving and existing in a place beyond worlds, its form was solid and it stood upon the ground. It reminded Mouse, rather oddly, of nothing so much as a goat.

  Not entirely a goat, of course. Perhaps a little of a deer as well, and of a much larger animal for which she had no name. The feet were cloven, prettily feathered, the legs delicate and thin. A beard wisped daintily from the end of its chin, and the tail was long and sweeping. Its face was much longer, much more noble than a goat’s, and its ears were upright, oval, and soft as kitten fur. White lashes framed its black eyes, and the flanks, still dappled, were faintly blue.

  It was a beautiful, frightening, wonderful creature. A desperate feeling, rather like love, rose in Mouse’s breast, and she found herself exclaiming, “Oh! What are you? Please tell me!”

  The beast looked down and around at itself and flicked its ears, rather like a shrug. When it spoke, its voice was singular, no longer the voice of millions, and she heard it with her ears, not her heart.

  “I suppose, in this form, you would call me a unicorn,” it said.

  Mouse had heard of unicorns before. But she had always believed they were creatures of the water, for so her Granna had told her. This, however, was a creature unbound by water, fire, air, or stone. “You’re lovely!” she said.

  It bowed its head as though embarrassed. “I feel a little lost,” it said, “without my brothers, my sisters. It’s not often that I take on flesh. Stars don’t, you know, especially not for mortals. I only do so now because you are a pure maiden. Would you like to touch me?”

  How did it know that she was longing with all her heart to plunge her hands into the silky strands of its mane, to wrap her arms around that powerful neck? Though the thought frightened as much as thrilled, Mouse was on her feet in a second. It bowed its head, and she shied away from that sharp horn. Then, her fear stepping back to make room for her desire, she put out her hands and stroked the velvety nose and gently caressed the soft oval ears.

  “I love you,” she said without a thought.

  It chuckled. “Little maid, you don’t know what love means. But you will. Now tell me, what is your name?”

  She told him. She had not told anyone her true name since she came to the Citadel, and she was certain no one but Granna remembered it. But she told the unicorn without a thought. And it nodded solemnly, accepting the knowledge with quiet grace. What a strange sensation to be known by name to a star!

  “What is yours?” she asked then.

  “You could not say my name,” it said. “You do not speak the language of stars, nor have you or your kind heard our songs since the last House of Lights was closed. But you may call me Cé Imral, as the Faerie folk do.”

  She whispered it. The name was strange on her tongue, and she stumbled over it. The unicorn laughed, a sound at once like water and fire and springtime. “Close enough,” it said. “But tell me, mortal, why are you following me?”

  Her trust complete, and her fingers twined with white-blue strands of silk, Mouse told the star. She told it everything about the Silent Lady and the dungeon and the Diggings and the message for Etanun.

  “Ah!” Cé Imral said when she spoke of Etanun and the sword. “Of course. I have sung this chorus and will sing it again, but for you the time has come. The Murderer will return, the Smallman will claim Fireword, and kingdoms will, for a breath, be established. This is much for you to understand, is it not?”

  Mouse did not understand, but she didn’t really care. “Can you help me?” she asked. “Can you lead me to Etanun?”

  “Yes. But if I do, will you then fulfill what you have purposed in your heart?” Cé Imral asked.

  Mouse bowed her head, wondering why she should suddenly feel ashamed. “I must . . . I must do as I am told. I am not a great lady, and I am not wise or strong. I must do as I am told.”

  “As must I,” said the unicorn. It tossed its mane, and Mouse stepped away, though without fear now that she’d touched it. It could have run her through with that glorious horn, and she would not have made a sound.

  “You stand in the Between,” Cé Imral said. “On both sides of you are the Near World and the Far, all close and all more distant than you can imagine. I will lead you through the half-light and bring you to where Etanun awaits your coming. But once there, I will return to the heavens and you will be alone.”

  Mouse nodded. “I understand.”

  “No. You don’t.”

  And the unicorn turned and started through the Wood. The trees backed away, bowing reverently after it, and the river laughed and waved as though pleased to see an old friend; for rivers, even the deadly ones, love the stars and feel close kinship with the sky. Mouse followed in the unicorn’s wake. They did not move in Time, or not in a flow of Time familiar to Mouse. But she was not afraid, though perhaps she should have been. When she dared snatch a look away from the unicorn’s streaming tail, she caught glimpses of vistas she had never imagined, waterfalls and forest glades and desolate shadows. Sometimes she even thought she peered into other worlds entirely, so strange and unearthly were the sights she saw.

  At last the unicorn turned to her, and those deep eyes filled her vision, love driving out her fear.

  “Here I leave you. Here you will find what you seek,” Cé Imral said.

  The next moment, it was gone.

  Mouse found herself standing on the edge of a small, sparse copse. Dead le
aves of autumn littered the ground, and a sudden biting wind blew through the branches. She was no longer in the vast Wood. She stood on the borders of low fields, gazing out across a winter-tinted landscape to a river, a rise, and a high stone castle, above which gleamed a shining blue star.

  1

  FIRE! FIRE! FLAME AT NIGHT!

  Hri Sora, they called me, and they spoke rightly! My delicate feathers burned away, replaced by the mighty sweep of leathery dragon’s wings, and the boiling of jealousy and rage inside me was replaced by a furnace that demolished my heart and pumped lava through my veins.

  A woman’s body cannot support such heat, so mine gave way into the scale-armored form of a vast dragon. I became that which had lurked deep inside me since I first drew breath.

  “Sister. Child,” the Dragon called me. “My beautiful firstborn.”

  The cat sat with his eyes half closed, his tail curled about his paws as it twitched slightly at the tip. Surrounding him was the Haven, a place of comfort, of familiarity, yet it was made strange now. Without Imraldera, it felt as foreign to him as the court of the Mherking.

  He watched Mouse as she told her tale. He was not naturally intuitive, for cats tend to live in the moment, and the moment is focused on self. But he was more than a cat these days. He was a Knight of Farthest Shore, and as such he had begun to learn what it meant to put himself in another’s shoes. Not like Imraldera. No one, he believed with something close to religious conviction, could possibly be as empathetic as she, able to weep at the death of monsters, able to look in the face of hell’s hounds and see something to love!

  But he was learning.

  It wasn’t love he felt for Mouse as he watched her, however, only deep suspicion. He flicked one ear when she told of the unicorn. In all the long ages of his immortal life, he had never seen one of Hymlumé’s children come down from the heavens. Yet the girl’s face was full of earnest honesty that he could not help believing. Who could invent a lie so fantastic?

  The cat’s tail lashed once, then wrapped tightly against his body. If only Imraldera were here! She would know what to believe and what not. Or would she?

  After all, she’d believed the Murderer.

  Mouse came to the end of her story. Other than when speaking of the unicorn, she’d kept her eyes downcast to her folded hands, as though afraid of seeing the Haven around her, of glimpsing too much of this strange half-light world.

  Or she might be feeling the pressure of Alistair’s gaze, which never once left her face.

  “I think you know the rest,” she said quietly. “Even after returning to the mortal world, I followed the star as the Silent Lady had told me, all the way to Gaheris. And there you, sir”—she flashed Alistair the briefest of looks, though she did not meet his gaze and hastily lowered her chin—“you let me through your gates and established me in the castle keep. So I began my search for Etanun.”

  Alistair nodded. “Did you find him?” he asked. It was a straightforward question, but Eanrin had to chuckle a little. Up until scarcely more than a few hours ago, Alistair had not believed Etanun existed outside fiction. But he was a straightforward individual, ready to believe much sooner than he was ready to doubt.

  Especially if the girl is sweet, Eanrin thought, perhaps unfairly.

  Aloud he said, “Of course she found him. Have you paid no attention to recent events? She found him, and in a dramatic twist of fate he told her the heir to the sword was your diminutive cousin. Not someone reasonable, no. Etanun couldn’t be bothered to pick an heir one might actually expect to . . .”

  He trailed off and looked about the hall, as did Alistair and Mouse. For the Chronicler was nowhere to be seen.

  “Dragon’s teeth and tail,” Eanrin muttered. “Where has the imp got off to?”

  The corridors of the Haven were wondrous indeed, more wondrous by far than any description the Chronicler had ever read or copied. And they were far away from the strange tale being told, a tale that felt to him like chains as solid as Corgar’s clamping on his neck and weighing him down until he could scarcely move.

  Smallman.

  Flame at Night.

  It was all too much, so he sought the soothing quiet of the halls, stately forests of shimmering green. Here sunlight touched the leaves and turned them golden, and sometimes they looked like colored-glass windowpanes. Not a single bird’s song disturbed the silence.

  He came at last to the library of Dame Imraldera. There he stood, his breath quite taken from his body, and stared.

  For many years, by the Near World’s count, the lady Knight of the Farthest Shore had been at work on this room. When she and Sir Eanrin, newly knighted, had made their way to the Haven of the Brothers Ashiun and rebuilt what had been left in ruin, they found the Wood encroached deeply on the once-solid structure. But the Haven was still there, beneath the growth, beneath the shadows.

  So, Imraldera and Eanrin had set to work, binding back the trees gently, so as not to hurt them, but firmly, making clear that this was not their domain; it belonged to the Lumil Eliasul. The Wood had obeyed. Though Imraldera was no more than a slip of a mortal girl, the trees had backed away, drawing their shadows with them. Not even Eanrin, an immortal who had lived since before these trees put down their first tentative roots, could command their obedience as thoroughly as she did.

  And so they reclaimed the Haven, and Imraldera built her library.

  When she first entered the service of the Lumil Eliasul, she could neither read nor write in any known language. But she had quickly learned. “Records must be kept,” she had told Eanrin. “We cannot have the worlds forgetting as they are so inclined to do. And since you can’t be bothered to take time from your songster ways, I shall have to do it.”

  Now the great pillared room in which the Chronicler stood was filled with scroll after scroll of her hard labor. Prophecies both fulfilled and unfulfilled, legends of heroes and monsters, true stories, false stories, stories that were both. All could be found in this library, where Dame Imraldera could always be found at her work.

  Except today. As the Chronicler entered into that solemn glory of written words, he felt the lack of the dame though he had never met her. The lady knight who lay curled up in a dungeon crawl space, lost in the darkness of mortality, lured away, perhaps, by the cunning petitions of the Murderer.

  For how could anything this so-called Etanun said be true? If all else proved real, and there was a sword and a lost House of Lights and a twice-dead dragon alive for a third time . . . if all that was true, how could it be that he, the rejected son of a mortal earl, was the heir to Halisa?

  It must be a lie. And the Murderer, Etanun, must be no more than a wicked trickster playing games with mortal lives.

  The Chronicler approached Imraldera’s desk with something close to reverence and fear. It was made of cherrywood, but the wood looked alive, a tree twined into the shape of a desk. The dame’s work lay across it.

  Written in Faerie letters was the same rhyme he had found copied in Lady Pero’s hand.

  The heir to truth, blest blade of fire

  He finds in shielded shadow light.

  “An impressive sight, eh, Chronicler?”

  The Chronicler turned around, startled, and saw Eanrin sitting in cat form at the far end of the tall chamber. “Rivals your own library, doesn’t it?”

  Paling, the Chronicler stepped away from the desk. He glanced at the trove surrounding him. “I never thought to see so much captured in writing,” he said. “How many scribes did it take to document all that I see here?”

  “One,” said the cat. “But she’s an industrious little bee.”

  “It must have taken . . .” The Chronicler shook his head, staggered at the enormity of work surrounding him. “It must have taken decades!”

  The cat shrugged, twitching both his tail and ears. “I couldn’t say. We don’t keep track of Time as such here in the Between. It might have been decades. It might have been minutes. Really, does it matter?”


  “Perhaps not,” the Chronicler said, glancing again at the wonders around him: the tall trees, the piled scrolls. He looked at the parchment on the desk, the rhyme with which he had become so familiar over the years, as though it haunted him. “Smallman,” he whispered. A shudder passed through his frame. “So that is supposed to be . . . me.”

  “How should I know?” said the cat. “I didn’t write that one. I’ve written much fine poetry in my day, I’ll have you know, mostly romantic verse, all excellent quality, bound to make my name even in the Near World one day. But I don’t write nursery rhymes.”

  “I don’t believe in any of this,” the Chronicler said, staring at the words on the page. As the speech of Faerie made itself understood, so did this fey writing. The characters seemed to rise off the page as he looked at them, rearranging themselves and playing through his mind like images, like tastes, like smells. It was the way music speaks without language but communicates more than words.

  Yet the end result was the same. The end result was the nursery rhyme of his childhood.

  The Chronicler drew a long breath. “I don’t believe in chosen ones. In prophecies. In destinies.”

  Eanrin padded into the room. “Neither do I,” he said mildly. “On principle, I’m against them. Inconvenient, nonsensical things, and a cat does like to be master of his own fate, you know?” Then he put his ears back and gave the Chronicler a pointed look. “But what I believe or don’t believe has little to do with the truth of the matter.”

  The Chronicler ground his teeth. “I’ve fought against believing things I could not understand, and I laughed at those who clung to Faerie stories.” His voice was bitter as black tea. “Faerie stories are the last thing the likes of me needs to believe.”