Last Dragon 7: The Fire Ascending

by Chris d'Lacey

  I started to fish for an explanation, but thankfully she went on to say, “Whatever you’ve heard about sibyls in the past, forget. Gwilanna’s been healing people in the valley ever since I’ve known her. She cured my ailment, didn’t you?”

  “Your ailment?” I said.

  “The girl has an eye condition,” said Gwilanna, “which could lead to blindness, if left untreated.”

  “They change color,” said Guinevere. “Green to violet. Violet’s bad. That’s why I take these.” She went into the pouch at her waist and pulled out a piece of shriveled gray material. “Dried mushrooms. Strange cure. But they seem to work.” She popped the piece into her mouth and swallowed it.

  “There is a chamber behind this one,” Gwilanna said, tilting her head toward the rear of the cave. “You’ll find furs. Nothing worse than you’ve slept on before. If you want to relieve yourself, go outside.”

  “And him?” I nodded at Gawain.

  “Take the wearling for company if you wish, but a dragon will always come back to a flame.”

  “Nothing’s going to harm him,” Guinevere insisted, shooing me away. “I sleep in this chamber. I’ll be here all the time. Rest, Agawin. And tonight, we begin our adventure!”

  “Wait, boy. You’re forgetting something.” The sibyl picked up a cloth, thick and grubby with ash, and lifted the potions dish from the fire. She set it down at her feet, then poured some of the brew into a drinking vessel. She added a measure of cooling water and a sprinkle of some kind of herb. She held it up to me. “Drink.”

  I looked at Guinevere. “Drink,” she urged.

  This is unwise, the Fain cautioned me.

  But I felt I owed Guinevere a measure of trust. So I took the vessel — and drank the potion.

  The Fain went to work on it straightaway. Every part of my head began to buzz as they searched for ill effects on my mind. Galen wasn’t slow to react in me either. A little burp of wind erupted from my mouth as he hardened the soft walls of my gut, preparing for a possible poison attack. Several embarrassing muscle twitches followed. Guinevere folded her arms and sighed. When the twitching was done and I was still alive, she pointed tersely behind me and said, “Your bed’s that way.” She settled down on a hide by the fire, pulling another one over her. “Sleep well, Agawin. Try not to snore.” She pushed her hair off her face and promptly turned over. I considered myself dismissed.

  The only fur I could find was riddled with fleas and there was water dripping where I lay my head and the whole chamber stank of mold, but I did manage to sleep. My mind was active and my dreams were strong. I had never had a dragon in my auma before and Galen was making his dominance felt. Through his eyes I saw a gathering of dragons. Twelve of them, assembled in an ice-cold cave lit violet purely by the brightness of their eyes. Burned into the barren walls around them were marks like the three-lined symbol I had seen. One by one, each dragon came forward and shed its fire tear into a hollow in the wide cave floor. The only dragon present that did not shed its tear was the queen, Gawaine. I recognized her from Grella’s tapestry. She, with one snort, imbibed the whole pool and turned herself into a dragon beyond dragons. She grew by half her size again. One beat of her mighty wings shattered ice spears hanging from the roof of the cave. Her eyes burst into golden flames. Dragontongue glowed in the walls behind her. Her scales rippled and shone so brightly that even in the dream I was almost blinded. I was terrified. I kicked out, wanting to wake. Then a scent as sharp as an arrow hit my nostrils. And I settled again. And the dream changed course.

  I saw Gideon, in his new form, sitting in the window of a strange dwelling place, made from materials vaguely like stone. It had many, many windows, this place. Too many to see at once. I began to draw back from it. Back. Back. Floating, lighter than a mote of dust. The farther I retreated, the more windows I saw. The more birds, like Gideon, sitting in the windows. Until I was so far back that the building stretched from the ground to the clouds, and still, it seemed, it was higher than the clouds. I floated to the ground, where I found myself in a field of daisies. I picked one and looked into its yellow center. There was Grella, holding Gwilanna. The baby’s face was wrinkled and old. Then I heard laughter all around me. In the middle of every flower was the image of the skull. The jaw was moving, laughing at me. I stamped on the flowers, but the laughter kept coming. And I didn’t know why but it sounded like the way Gwilanna might laugh. And once again I was restless and fearful. I smelled mold and knew I was close to waking. But the dream had one more twist for me yet. The last thing I remembered before I stirred was the image of a darkling flying low across the daisy fields. Closing, closing …

  Bang! Its claws were in my chest! I cried out and my hand closed around a stone. But as I brought the stone up to pummel the creature my eyes flashed open and there was Guinevere, kneeling beside me. Gawain was on my chest, raking his hooks through my covering fur.

  “Hey!” the girl barked. “What are you doing?”

  She slapped my hand aside and I dropped the stone.

  I was sweating. Panting. Still waking up. “I was … dreaming,” I said. “I’m … sorry.”

  She scowled and picked Gawain off me. The dragon made a quiet, guttering sound as she stroked his spine to comfort him. He clamped his feet to the perch of her wrist and tested his juvenile wings. He had grown a little, which seemed impossible in such a short space of time. And yet there were two clear bumps on his head, the first defining features of a dragon: his horns, or primary stigs. “It’s time,” said Guinevere. “Are you sure you can travel? Gwilanna says you were talking in your sleep.”

  Was that the value of her potion? I wondered. A serum to make me speak? “Where is she?”

  “Outside, on the hill.”

  I sat up quickly and pushed the fur aside. “I need to look at the skull.”

  “What? No! Gwilanna will roast you on a spit if she sees you.”

  “I have to do this. I knew Grella.”

  That brought a puzzled frown to her face. “How?”

  “I’ll tell you later. When we’re on the move.”

  “Agawin?” she called. But I was already gone.

  The fire in the main chamber had been built up again. As I swept past and knelt beside the skull, a few flakes of ash spiraled up toward the roof. “Grella,” I whispered, half-hoping her face might appear to me, “is this you?” I ran my thumbs along what would have been her cheeks.

  “Are you mad?” Guinevere appeared at my side. “Put it back,” she hissed, “or there’s going to be trouble.”

  She is wise, said the Fain, swarming into my consciousness as if they had only just woken, too. Do not provoke the sibyl.

  And I was all but set to do as they wished when my gaze fell upon the cloth the skull had been resting on. To Guinevere’s dismay, I put the skull on the ground and picked up the fabric. Slowly, I unfolded it.

  There in my hands was the tapestry I’d started in Grella’s krofft. Finished. Stitched. In astonishing colors. An image so alive I could almost fall into it.

  “Oh,” said Guinevere, slightly overcome.

  “You’ve never seen this before?”

  “No,” she said. “Who are these people? What does it show?”

  And a new voice said, “It’s a battle, girl. Surely that much is obvious?”

  I whipped around. Gwilanna was perched on her stone on the far side of the fire. She must have crept in with the stealth of a fox, for not even Galen had warned of her approach. “This is how you repay my hospitality, boy? You eat my food, take refuge in my home, then steal what few possessions I have?”

  “I drew this,” I said.

  “What?” said Guinevere, calming Gawain. The raised voices were beginning to agitate him.

  “I drew it and Grella stitched it,” I said. “This does not belong to you, sibyl.”

  “You forget,” she snarled, “that a child inherits what its parents want to give it. My mother begged me in my crib to protect the tapestry. If you value your
life, you’ll put it straight back.”

  “In your crib?” said Guinevere.

  And perhaps, like her, I should have paid attention to Gwilanna’s strange admission, but I was too far down my chosen path. I said, “Tell me how she died or it goes on the fire.”

  “Agawin! Have you lost all your senses?” Guinevere quickly shifted position to put herself between me and the fire. “Give the tapestry back to Gwilanna.”

  “But …”

  “Do it — or you leave here without me tonight.” She offered Gawain up to show she meant it.

  “All right.” I folded the tapestry and put it back, placing the skull on top of it again. But when I turned I said to the sibyl, “Grella was my friend. Tell me how she died.”

  Guinevere switched her gaze between us.

  I watched Gwilanna skewer some bread onto a stick and begin to toast it against the flames. “You should beware of this boy, Guinevere. His knowledge is far greater than he likes to make out.”

  “Can I trust him?” she said. A harsh question, perhaps, but I understood why she needed to ask it.

  The sibyl threw a short laugh into the air. “He intends you no harm and would even have you love him. But he will keep things from you. Can’t you feel his delicate auma? It radiates such purity of spirit — a quality rarely found outside of dragonkind …”

  “Tell me how Grella died,” I growled.

  She pulled the bread off the stick and turned it over to toast the other side. “I will tell you something, boy, and that might be enough. My mother, as you know, was meant to return to Mount Kasgerden on the anniversary of your ‘death.’”

  “And show you to the Taan.”

  The sibyl nodded. Guinevere was looking dreadfully confused. But she held her tongue while the story unfolded.

  “She did go back,” Gwilanna confided. “But she did not take me with her.”

  “And they killed her? For that?” My knee joints locked. There was pain in my shoulders. Had there been wings on my back, I would have been tenting them now. Galen, as always, was ready to fight.

  Gwilanna sighed with impatience. “No. For many years, she took another child in place of me. She made an arrangement with a local tribeswoman. A new dress in temporary exchange for her baby. Grella, as you know, was skilled with a needle.”

  “But … why swap a child for you? Why would she need to go to such lengths?”

  “Look at me,” Gwilanna said. The fire sizzled as her spittle fell across it. “I was like this from the day I was born.”

  I had seen it in the daisies. The baby, horribly wrinkled. Old, I wanted to say. But despite my intense dislike of this woman, I could not stoop to such cruel remarks.

  “If Grella had shown me, a prune, to her father, I would have fallen under his sword.”

  “Gwilanna, your bread,” said Guinevere.

  “What?” the sibyl grunted.

  “It’s burning.”

  With a rumble of annoyance, Gwilanna whipped her stick to one side. The bread hit the wall, flaring on impact. As it dropped toward the ground, Gawain skittered out of Guinevere’s hands. Even though he was just a few hours old, he instinctively unlatched his jaw and just about caught the bread in his mouth. It was a comical sight. A young dragon stumbling around the cave with a piece of burning bread too big to swallow. He thrashed it to the floor and began to shred it. Only Gwilanna did not seem amused. “Dragons …,” she muttered.

  “You seem to know a lot about them, sibyl.”

  “Do not try to belittle me, boy. I know what you are.”

  “What is he?” said Guinevere, looking at me hard.

  But neither I nor the sibyl would answer that. “If Grella’s father did not end her life, what did? Did she die a natural death, or was she slain?”

  The sibyl gave another derisive laugh. “Would you seek to avenge her, Agawin?”

  “I would try,” I said bravely.

  To which she said, “Pah!”

  “Why do you react like that?” asked Guinevere. She tossed her hair, looking incensed. “Does it not demonstrate Agawin’s courage that he would seek to put right any ills to your mother?”

  “I told you, he is full of deceits,” Gwilanna snapped. She found another piece of bread to toast. “He knows of the past but keeps it from us. He knows things about me he will not confess.”

  “If I am full of deceit,” I said, “what do you see in the mirror of my eyes?”

  “Have a care, boy.” She pointed her stick in the region of my heart. “You fascinate me, true, but you are nothing I could not do without.”

  And this was clever, for it riled me just enough to blurt: “Grella was not your mother.”

  A mistake. A terrible mistake. One that would come to haunt me for as long as I was to know Gwilanna. The Fain, who until that point had been quietly absorbing the dialogue, suddenly switched to full alertness.

  Why have you spoken of this?

  Pure vanity. I hung my head.

  Guinevere said, “Agawin, you must explain this.”

  I shuddered. The only bright spark of relief was seeing Gawain burp a cloud of smoke as he chomped on the last of the smoldering bread.

  With my head still down I said to Gwilanna, “Your mother was a sibyl called Hilde. Your father, Voss, was oppressed by a force called the Ix. I do not know exactly how you were conceived but he used the auma of a dark unicorn. All of them died on Kasgerden that day. Grella rescued you and claimed you as her own. That is all I know.”

  For a moment, the only sound in the cave was the crackle of wood and Gawain scratching dough from his primitive teeth. Then the sibyl opened her mouth and out of it came a howl so loud that the flames retreated high up the wall. Guinevere screamed and grabbed Gawain, running with him toward the cave exit. I backed away, too, fearing that the sibyl would come for me now. Instead, she stepped straight through the flames and snatched up the skull. Her hands shook as she put her thumbs into its eyes. A jagged line ran down the back of the head. With a crack, the skull split in half. The sibyl dropped it into the fire.

  Gwilanna’s eyes rolled. They were dark, almost black. The wrinkles in her face were like old battle scars. Her matted hair was fizzing where the fire had singed it. A small lick of flame had caught her robe. “Get out,” she hissed, in a voice that reminded me all too well of her evil father. “Take your wearling and run while you can. Dark times are about to come down on you, boy. Our story isn’t done.”

  She howled again and I felt the rocks move.

  I needed no more reason to flee from her than that.

  We ran into the moonlight, Guinevere, Gawain, and I, where we were almost struck by another foe. The brown bear reared before us, roaring and flashing its great hooked claws. I had no time to imagineer. All I could think to do was punch its nose and hope to get away. But as I raised my fist Guinevere cried, “No!” She stayed my arm. “I think he’s reacting to the wailing, not us.”

  Sure enough, the creature dropped to its haunches. It squinted in abstract wonder at Gawain, then tried to peer beyond us into the cave.

  A little recklessly, perhaps, I slapped its shoulder.

  It threw its head sideways and opened its jaws, letting out a growl that practically shook my teeth from my gums. The foul stench of its breath was enough to knock ten men off their feet, but my nostrils closed like a dragon’s spiracles and I survived the blast with a passing grimace. “Guard,” I told it, pointing at the cave. I raised my fists as if I’d like to box. “You. Bear. Stop sibyl coming.”

  “No. She’ll kill him,” Guinevere said. She gave Gawain to me and put her hand on the bear’s thick flank. “Go back to your home.” She made signs with her hands. “Do not attack the sibyl. We must leave.” (She indicated me and herself and Gawain.) “We go to the sea, to the island of your ancestors.”

  “We go to an early grave if we don’t get out of here.” I could still hear Gwilanna ranting in the cave.

  Guinevere made another “home” sign, then ges
tured me away with a tilt of her head. We left the puzzled animal behind.

  Or so we thought.

  We’d gone barely six paces when we heard him speak. “Thoran come.”

  “Huh?” I grunted.

  Guinevere paused. A smile lit her face. “So he does speak.” We glanced at each other and turned to look back.

  The bear lumbered toward us, stopping to urinate against a rock. “Thoran lead way. Guard girl. Guard dragon.”

  “What about guarding Agawin?” I muttered. “I was the one who gave him berries.”

  He blundered past us, bobbing up the slope like a weighty moth.

  Guinevere gave a delighted smile.

  “Is this wise? He’s going to slow us down.”

  “He knows the land,” she said. “He’s strong. We could do worse.”

  I heard Thoran snort. Already he was looking back, waiting for us.

  “Why is he taking us up the hill? Surely it’s better to go through the valley to reach the sea.”

  He is using the stars to guide him, said the Fain. I looked up. The sky was full of bright points, like fish dancing in a giant ocean. The moon, too, was unusually bright.

  Guinevere said, “There are many routes to the Great Sea from here. I’m willing to put my faith in him.”

  Thoran curled his paw to beckon us to hurry.

  As we set off after him I said to Guinevere, “Are you happy to carry Gawain?”

  “Yes,” she said, taking him back. “He’s so warm. I can feel his auma right down to my toes.”

  I nodded and thought about my dream. Gawain must have inherited his mother’s fire, and therefore the power of a whole Wearle. The transformational effect on Gideon was clearly a result of that. I glanced at Guinevere again and thought about what she’d said, about feeling Gawain’s heat throughout her body. What would the auma of twelve fire tears do to a human form? I wondered.

  “Before we go on, just two things.” Her eyes made open contact with mine. “No more secrets, please? I want to know your story, especially how you got here —”

  The tornaq! I scrabbled in my robe and thankfully laid my hand on the charm. For one horrible moment, I thought Gwilanna might have stolen it. “Sorry,” I said, hugely relieved. “Go on.”