Last Dragon 7: The Fire Ascending

by Chris d'Lacey

  I sensed a battle coming.

  I dropped to my knees in front of Hilde. My hand was weak and my brain even weaker. But as I opened my fingers and the tornaq tumbled out, somehow it turned itself in the air and made its way back to her pouch. Once again, Yolen threw his arms around me. “Are you done?” he spat at the sibyl.

  “Speak, boy, what did you see?” she demanded.

  Nearly all of it had blurred, like mist upon the mountains. But I remembered the dragon and what it had said. As my breath came back I described the dragon’s shape. All she did was sneer and say to Yolen, “You were right, the boy is simple.”

  Then she placed her foot upon the body by her feet and with one kick sent it rolling to the river. As it tumbled, the limbs began to crack and break away. By the time the water took it, the body had split into ash and small parts. They fizzled on the water before they sank.

  Yolen and I looked in terror at Hilde.

  “He was old,” the sibyl said. And with the briefest of laughs, she pulled her cape around herself and melted into the background of trees.

  Yolen quickly took my head into his hands and used his thumbs to pry my eyes wide. “Whatever you saw was a fantasy,” he said.

  “But —?”

  “You must let go of it. These women are deceitful.”

  “But I saw a dragon writing,” I said. And I bent down and drew the symbol in the earth. The wind stirred the tall green pines of Horste. Yolen spoke fiercely under his breath and put his sandal across the marks. He rubbed them out and pulled me away. “It was a fantasy,” he said. “Do not speak of it again.”

  And I had to ask myself as we set off down the path, If there was nothing unnatural about my vision, why does my master wish me to be silent?

  We walked through the morning and into the afternoon, this time with only the river for company. I wanted to talk, about Premen and the horse and the vision I had seen. But if I opened my mouth to muse upon these things, Yolen threatened to fill it with river mud and grass. So I did what my keeper wished of me. I walked straight and tall toward Kasgerden, now and then hearing Galen’s soft roars as he sang his lament to his oncoming death.

  By the late afternoon we arrived at the old stone bridge of Taan. The followers from Horste had made their way across it to the fertile farmlands on the other side. The Taans, like many of the ancient tribes, dwelled in places constructed of wood, usually cut from the forest of Horste. There was no thievery or conflict among the two peoples, but there was a sharp and persistent trade. What Horste gave in wood, Taan gave in sheep. One tribe slept among needles of pine; the other within timbers from the trees that dropped them. As we came upon the first of the kroffts, I noticed that the people, even the elderly, were leaving their dwellings and joining the Horste on the grassy undulations that were a feature of this land. Many of them were lying facedown upon the earth with their hands and feet spread out like stalks.

  “What are they doing?” I asked.

  Yolen shook his head and muttered to himself, “This is not right. Why are these people still here?”

  There was a quiet roar in the distance. Dusk was drawing its dim skies upon us, but there was no mistaking the dark silhouette on the peak of Kasgerden. The followers, all of them, Horste and Taan, began to babble in appreciation. From a Taan woman’s mouth, a song came forth. A strange, intoxicating hum that was taken up by most of the pilgrims present, especially the older ones.

  Yolen dropped to his knees.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  He nodded at the grassland and bade me place my hands upon it. And that was the first time I truly encountered the power of a dragon. Despite the season, the crispness in the air, the ground beneath my hands felt warm.

  I took off my sandals and walked upon the grass. I danced. I laughed. There was fire in my feet. “How?” I said. “How is this possible?”

  My keeper caught the hem of my robe and pulled me down. There was anger rumbling in his throat when he said, “You are a goat herder, not a god. In the presence of Gaia, you will kneel like the rest of us.”

  “This is Gaia?” I whispered, pressing the ground again.

  “This is Galen,” he said, through teeth bound with grit. “He is calling upon Gaia to draw up fire from the core of the Earth. It is a signal that he’s ready to go back to the force that created him.”

  I let my fingers idle on the grass. Fire, coming up from the center of the Earth? Now my excitement was tamed a little. “How high will it rise?” Were we all to be consumed in the dragon’s auma?

  Before Yolen could speak, something whistled past my head at high speed. There was a thud against the side of the shelter nearest me. I looked up to see the bloodstained shaft of an arrow. A dead raven was pinned to the wall of the krofft, the head of the arrow right through its throat. The eyes of the bird had been removed. Three more arrows rained down and from each of them dangled a similar corpse. In the panic that followed I was drawn into a nearby krofft, for safety. As well as Yolen, three Taans were with us. A man, his wife, and their youthful daughter.

  “Are they coming again?” asked the woman. She gathered the girl to her. They were very fine-looking, as Taans often were. The girl had eyes like the sheep she surely tended, large and soft and void of harm — but not of spirit.

  “I don’t think so,” said the man. He had long yellow hair and a beard the same color. He was peering through a shuttered gap in the wall. “I can’t hear their horses. But this is clearly another warning.” He stepped away from the shutter but did not close it, allowing some light to fall across our faces. “You are welcome to shelter with us,” he said. “Unless you confess to be allies of Voss.” From his belt, he drew a large hunting knife.

  “Rune!” gasped his wife. She could see the wild innocence splashed across my face and was shocked by her husband’s show of aggression. He quickly relented and slid the knife back.

  “Forgive me.” He bowed his head. “Such a show of hostility shames the good name of the people of Taan. Twice today our homage to the dragon has been disturbed by riders bent on evil.”

  “We met them by the river,” Yolen said. He briefly told the story. “You know this man as Voss?”

  “That is how he announced himself to us. Voss, from the territory of the same name. You must have wondered why our people are still rooted here and not at the skirts of the mountain by now.”

  Yolen nodded. I remembered his puzzled question on the bridge.

  Rune checked the shutter again. “He threatened us. Anyone leaving the district of Taan in search of fraas would be put to death.”

  “On whose authority?”

  “On his. Did you see the black horse he rides?”

  “I saw the horse.” Yolen’s back had been turned when the horses had charged us. But not mine.

  I glanced at the girl. She was behind her mother, but her sheep’s eyes were heavily intent on me. “It had blood in its eyes and a stump in its head.”

  The Taan man knotted his hands in anger. “That it did, boy. That it did.”

  Yolen shook his head, hardly able to believe this. “Are you saying it was a healing horse?”

  Rune gave a grim-faced nod. “A unicorn, aye, from the slopes of Kasgerden, violated in the most appalling way. Its horn was sheared off at the base. Voss wielded the remnant at us. He commands some sort of dark power with it.”

  “Is he Premen?”

  That word again. I was desperate for a meaning, but I held my voice in check.

  Rune stalked sullenly across the room, stopping to light the wick of a candle with a splinter of wood he had taken from the fireplace. Above the fire hung a painted hunting bow. “I know nothing of Premen. But if the rumors of these … supermen are true, then Voss has turned all that is good in them to malice. No one dares leave the settlement. The leader of the Horste is aware of the threat. They have ended all thoughts of a pilgrimage for now and are looking to their sibyl for guidance. But I tell you, stranger, this sibyl will be no
match for Voss.”

  And there were four dead ravens outside to prove it. Hilde’s enchantment with the dead man’s eye had failed.

  A heavy hand pounded the door. Without invitation, another man stepped in. He put a fist to his heart: the standard Taan greeting. “Rune, pardon this intrusion.” His accent was more prominent than any Taan I had yet heard. A farmer, perhaps. A man of the fields. “The men are gathering now in the motested.” He stared at Yolen and briefly at me. “Both tribes. No women — unless they be sibyls.” He thumped his heart again and withdrew.

  “What is a ‘motested’?” I asked.

  “Their meeting hall,” said Yolen.

  A meeting. A debate upon how to deal with Voss. My breathing quickened, but Yolen soon slowed it. He turned and put a firm hand on my shoulder. “Agawin, you will stay here.” He glanced at the woman, who nodded her consent.

  “No. I want to hear what is decided.”

  “You are two years from manhood. You will do as I command. Be aware that you are a guest of these people. You will ask nothing of them except their good grace.” He ran a hand through a side of my hair. Then he headed for the meeting house with Rune of Taan.

  “Agawin. That is a noble name.” The woman spoke as the door closed in my face. I turned to look at her. It was impossible not to be impressed by her beauty. Her hair fell in two sweet braids to her shoulders and there were trinkets of bone in the lobes of her ears. Her dress was like nothing I had ever seen. Unlike the Horste women, whose legs below the knee were always exposed, the Taan wore gowns of decorated flax that bustled at their shoulders and swept around their ankles. At her waist was a graceful pouch, hung by a long strap across her breast. She put her hands into her sleeves and bent her knees slightly. It made me feel a little less anxious to leave. “I am Eleanor,” she said, “and here is my daughter, Grella.” I looked into her eyes. They drilled me with suspicion. She was older than me, but not by much, possibly just of marriageable age. Her hair was fair and tied back in a tail. Her skin, like her mother’s, was delicate and pink, as if she had been fashioned from fresh flower petals. She, too, wore a dress that reached her ankles and a pouch that was a little less subtle than her mother’s. It was sewn with the same interlocking pattern that trimmed the neck and hem of her dress. “Please, sit,” Eleanor said. She pointed to a flat seat carved from pine. It was covered with the brushed woolen hide of a sheep.

  As if to claim an early advantage, Grella moved to the seat herself. But instead of sitting, she picked up something from it. A cloth, bound within a wooden frame. Strands of loose thread were hanging from the underside of the cloth. On its surface was stitched a picture of some kind.

  “You like our tapestries?” Eleanor asked, as my eyes followed Grella to the better-lit side of the room. The girl tossed her hair and sat, cross-legged, on a low-slung bed freely covered with hides. She placed the tapestry frame across her lap. More examples of her work were pinned to the wall above her.

  “Stop,” she said as Eleanor drew me near. Grella held up a needle, made from a splinter of polished bone. “He’s a cave boy. He smells of dung. I don’t want it catching in the tapestries, Mother.”

  Her mother looked set to protest this rudeness but I countered it with a remark of my own. “Don’t worry, my eyes are sharper than your nose. I can see your tapestries perfectly from here.” And I stood where I was, some paces from the bed, and looked at the beautiful pictures they had made.

  Scenery, mostly. Kasgerden and the white-tipped hills around it. The river. The settlement. The sheep being herded. The fields being worked. But the ones that opened my young eyes widest, and made me wish I hadn’t planted my feet so far away, were those that pictured dragons.

  When she saw where my gaze had wandered, Grella leaped up and stood before the tapestries. Her eyes were the color of amber stones.

  “Have you met with all these creatures?” I asked. There were many types of dragon here, of many different shades, all in various stages of flight.

  Eleanor answered for her. “The dragon that sits on Kasgerden is the first that Grella has truly glimpsed. But she has seen them in her mind ever since she was a child.”

  “How?” I asked the girl.

  “I don’t want him here,” Grella hissed at her mother. “He asks too many questions.” She lifted the needle, as if she’d like to prick my eye.

  “He is a pilgrim,” said Eleanor. “He has as much right to observe Galen as anyone. Be kind, Grella. Before this day is out, we might need all the friends we can get.”

  The girl wrinkled her nose. For one brief moment I thought I saw a glint of violet in her eyes, much as I had seen in the sibyl Hilde. She sat again and attended to the cloth, thrusting her needle into it with great ferocity, as if she wished she was stitching my eyelids together.

  “Would you like to try it?” Eleanor said. She drew me away from Grella and opened a box in which there were a host of colored threads and needles. She picked a fresh cloth from a sleeve inside the lid. “Stitching is a Taan tradition.” She invited me to sit with her on the pine seat. “Like most tribes, we remember our history in words, but we also preserve it on cloth. And everyone, even a boy from a cave, has to have a story to tell.”

  Across the room, Grella gave a sharp grunt.

  Eleanor dipped into the box again. From a small compartment, she picked out a short black stick, whittled at one end to a dull point. It dirtied her skin as she rolled it through her fingers. “We call this a krayon. When moved across the flax it leaves a mark, which we then stitch over with a colored thread. Can you draw, Agawin? If I asked you to make a likeness of something — Kasgerden, for instance — could you do it? On the cloth?” She offered it to me.

  I stared at it for several moments. At first, my mind was completely blank. I could picture my cave and the goats and the river — the great mountain, as Eleanor had said — but none of these held much appeal for me. Then an image did drift behind my eyes and I set the krayon to work on the cloth. Grella’s curiosity hovered like the promise of brooding thunder, but she sat where she was until my drawing was done. It was only when her mother said, with some hesitation, “Is that … a new breed?” that the girl could no longer keep her distance. I had drawn, with some faith, the dragon I had seen on my journey with the tornaq. Grella snatched it from me. She studied it furiously and turned away to view it in a better light. “Where have you seen this?” She began to compare it to the tapestries already fixed to her wall.

  Before I could speak or her mother could scold her, the door opened and Eleanor’s man walked in. Yolen was a pace or two behind him.

  Eleanor stood up. “Are you met so soon?”

  “The meeting continues,” Rune said brusquely. “The sibyl Hilde is asking for Grella.”

  The girl turned to look at him, her hand clenched tightly around my drawing.

  Eleanor was at once both cautious and fearful. “What would a sibyl want with our daughter?”

  Rune went to the girl and stroked her hair. “She wishes to engage with an innocent.”

  Eleanor of Taan at once shook her head. “But there are many young girls in the settlement. Rula. Katrina. Why choose Grella? She does not even know her.”

  “I offered her,” said Rune. “The sibyl wants a girl that has been touched by a unicorn.”

  “Touched?” I muttered, but no one paid me heed.

  “For what reason?” Eleanor asked her man.

  “A way to reach Voss,” he said.

  For a moment our breaths fell as silently as snowfall. Then Eleanor spoke again, her voice charged with tension. “No. I forbid it. Let this … Voss have the fraas. Our daughter’s life is more important than an old dragon’s death.”

  “This is not just about the dragon,” said Rune. He began to pace the room, pushing a hand through his thick yellow hair. He took my drawing from Grella and turned it through his hands, frowning as though it was the work of a goat. He put it on the seat where his wife had been sitting. “More pi
lgrims have joined us from Trooven. They come with a dire tale: Voss is attempting to seize control of all the settlements along the river.”

  “Control?” Eleanor was shocked. The word was in our language, but we rarely heard it used in the context that Rune was now implying.

  Yolen said quietly, “All that has stopped him from attacking Horste and Taan is the appearance of Galen. But the dragon may be just a temporary distraction.”

  Rune poured himself a cup of water from a flagon. “Tell her the rest.”

  Yolen drew himself up to his full height. He looked frail and old beside the Taans. “The sibyl has cast the bones of a raven.”

  One of those that had been slain? I felt my knees weaken. She must have torn the bird apart to separate the bones.

  “She reads in them Voss’s greater intent.” The walls seemed to lean in as Yolen took a breath. “He plans to slay the dragon. If he’s successful, the prizes he will gain — scales, claws, any amount of fraas — will make him the most powerful man ever to walk the Earth.”

  “Stronger than Gaia herself,” Rune growled, throwing back his drink.

  “I will go to the motested,” Grella said bravely. She stood forward. Her mother held her back.

  “No, Grella.”

  “But the dragon must be saved.”

  “The dragon is in no danger.” Eleanor frowned at the men as if they had dropped their wits in the river. “How can a man, even one with a tainted unicorn, get close enough to drive a spear through a dragon? At the first scent of evil it would turn him to ash.”

  A simple point, but a perfect argument. Even I had heard it said that dragons did not need to waste their energy commingling with men to read their intent. They could detect any hint of malice in a man simply from the odor given off from his skin. In Voss’s case, that was as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise. My confidence was lifted. But not for long.

  Yolen nodded politely and said, “Yes, I would agree — if the dragon was whole.”

  Once again, a wary silence gripped us. I had fully expected Yolen to announce that the burning of Voss would be just a merry spectacle, a blessed relief to faithful pilgrims and a lesson to foolish and arrogant men. But now I was reminded of his look of concern when the followers had discussed Galen’s white undersides. Could the dragon that was singing his flamesong on the mountain really be vulnerable to some devilish attack?