The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  Adara’s hands were cool and gentle, and she could hold the lizards as long as she liked without harming them, which always made Geoff pout and ask angry questions. Sometimes she would lie in the cold, damp snow and let the lizards crawl all over her, delighting in the light touch of their feet as they skittered across her face. Sometimes she would wear ice lizards hidden in her hair as she went about her chores, though she took care never to take them inside where the heat of the fires would kill them. Always she would gather up scraps after the family ate, and bring them to the secret place where her castle was a-building, and there she would scatter them. So the castles she erected were full of kings and courtiers every winter; small furry creatures that snuck out from the woods, winter birds with pale white plumage, and hundreds and hundreds of squirming, struggling ice lizards, cold and quick and fat. Adara liked the ice lizards better than any of the pets the family had kept over the years.

  But it was the ice dragon that she loved.

  She did not know when she had first seen it. It seemed to her that it had always been a part of her life, a vision glimpsed during the deep of winter, sweeping across the frigid sky on wings serene and blue. Ice dragons were rare, even in those days, and whenever it was seen the children would all point and wonder, while the old folks muttered and shook their heads. It was a sign of a long and bitter winter when ice dragons were abroad in the land. An ice dragon had been seen flying across the face of the moon on the night Adara had been born, people said, and each winter since it had been seen again, and those winters had been very bad indeed, the spring coming later each year. So the people would set fires and pray and hope to keep the ice dragon away, and Adara would fill with fear.

  But it never worked. Every year the ice dragon returned. Adara knew it came for her.

  The ice dragon was large, half again the size of the scaled green war dragons that Hal and his fellows flew. Adara had heard legends of wild dragons larger than mountains, but she had never seen any. Hal’s dragon was big enough, to be sure, five times the size of a horse, but it was small compared to the ice dragon, and ugly besides.

  The ice dragon was a crystalline white, that shade of white that is so hard and cold that it is almost blue. It was covered with hoarfrost, so when it moved its skin broke and crackled as the crust on the snow crackles beneath a man’s boots, and flakes of rime fell off.

  Its eyes were clear and deep and icy.

  Its wings were vast and batlike, colored all a faint translucent blue. Adara could see the clouds through them, and oftentimes the moon and stars, when the beast wheeled in frozen circles through the skies.

  Its teeth were icicles, a triple row of them, jagged spears of unequal length, white against its deep blue maw.

  When the ice dragon beat its wings, the cold winds blew and the snow swirled and scurried and the world seemed to shrink and shiver. Sometimes when a door flew open in the cold of winter, driven by a sudden gust of wind, the householder would run to bolt it and say, “An ice dragon flies nearby.”

  And when the ice dragon opened its great mouth, and exhaled, it was not fire that came streaming out, the burning sulfurous stink of lesser dragons.

  The ice dragon breathed cold.

  Ice formed when it breathed. Warmth fled. Fires guttered and went out, shriven by the chill. Trees froze through to their slow secret souls, and their limbs turned brittle and cracked from their own weight. Animals turned blue and whimpered and died, their eyes bulging and their skin covered over with frost.

  The ice dragon breathed death into the world; death and quiet and cold. But Adara was not afraid. She was a winter child, and the ice dragon was her secret.

  She had seen it in the sky a thousand times. When she was four, she saw it on the ground.

  She was out building on her snow castle, and it came and landed close to her, in the emptiness of the snow-covered fields. All the ice lizards ran away. Adara simply stood. The ice dragon looked at her for ten long heartbeats, before it took to the air again. The wind shrieked around her and through her as it beat its wings to rise, but Adara felt strangely exulted.

  Later that winter it returned, and Adara touched it. Its skin was very cold. She took off her glove nonetheless. It would not be right otherwise. She was half afraid it would burn and melt at her touch, but it did not. It was much more sensitive to heat than even the ice lizards, Adara knew somehow. But she was special, the winter child, cool. She stroked it, and finally gave its wing a kiss that hurt her lips. That was the winter of her fourth birthday, the year she touched the ice dragon.

  The winter of her fifth birthday was the year she rode upon it for the first time.

  It found her again, working on a different castle at a different place in the fields, alone as ever. She watched it come, and ran to it when it landed, and pressed herself against it. That had been the summer when she had heard her father talking to Hal.

  They stood together for long minutes until finally Adara, remembering Hal, reached out and tugged at the dragon’s wing with a small hand. And the dragon beat its great wings once, and then extended them flat against the snow, and Adara scrambled up to wrap her arms about its cold white neck.

  Together, for the first time, they flew.

  She had no harness or whip, as the king’s dragonriders use. At times the beating of the wings threatened to shake her loose from where she clung, and the coldness of the dragon’s flesh crept through her clothing and bit and numbed her child’s flesh. But Adara was not afraid.

  They flew over her father’s farm, and she saw Geoff looking very small below, startled and afraid, and knew he could not see her. It made her laugh an icy, tinkling laugh, a laugh as bright and crisp as the winter air.

  They flew over the crossroads inn, where crowds of people came out to watch them pass.

  They flew above the forest, all white and green and silent.

  They flew high into the sky, so high that Adara could not even see the ground below, and she thought she glimpsed another ice dragon, way off in the distance, but it was not half so grand as hers.

  They flew for most of the day, and finally the dragon swept around in a great circle, and spiraled down, gliding on its stiff and jittering wings. It let her off in the field where it had found her, just after dusk.

  Her father found her there, and wept to see her, and hugged her savagely. Adara did not understand that, nor why he beat her after he had gotten her back to the house. But when she and Geoff had been put to sleep, she heard him slide out of his own bed and come padding over to hers. “You missed it all,” he said. “There was an ice dragon, and it scared everybody. Father was afraid it had eaten you.”

  Adara smiled to herself in the darkness, but said nothing.

  She flew on the ice dragon four more times that winter, and every winter after that. Each year she flew farther and more often than the year before, and the ice dragon was seen more frequently in the skies above their farm.

  Each winter was longer and colder than the one before.

  Each year the thaw came later.

  And sometimes there were patches of land, where the ice dragon had lain to rest, that never seemed to thaw properly at all.

  There was much talk in the village during her sixth year, and a message was sent to the king. No answer ever came.

  “A bad business, ice dragons,” Hal said that summer when he visited the farm. “They’re not like real dragons, you know. You can’t break them or train them. We have tales of those that tried, found frozen with their whip and harness in hand. I’ve heard about people who have lost hands or fingers just by touching one of them. Frostbite. Yes, a bad business.”

  “Then why doesn’t the king do something?” her father demanded. “We sent a message. Unless we can kill the beast or drive it away, in a year or two we won’t have any planting season at all.”

  Hal smiled grimly. “The king has other
concerns. The war is going badly, you know. They advance every summer, and they have twice as many dragonriders as we do. I tell you, John, it’s hell up there. Some year I’m not going to come back. The king can hardly spare men to go chasing an ice dragon.” He laughed. “Besides, I don’t think anybody’s ever killed one of the things. Maybe we should just let the enemy take this whole province. Then it’ll be his ice dragon.”

  But it wouldn’t be, Adara thought as she listened. No matter what king ruled the land, it would always be her ice dragon.

  Hal departed and summer waxed and waned. Adara counted the days until her birthday. Hal passed through again before the first chill, taking his ugly dragon south for the winter. His wing seemed smaller when it came flying over the forest that fall, though, and his visit was briefer than usual, and ended with a loud quarrel between him and her father.

  “They won’t move during the winter,” Hal said. “The winter terrain is too treacherous, and they won’t risk an advance without dragonriders to cover them from above. But come spring, we aren’t going to be able to hold them. The king may not even try. Sell the farm now, while you can still get a good price. You can buy another piece of land in the south.”

  “This is my land,” her father said. “I was born here. You too, though you seem to have forgotten it. Our parents are buried here. And Beth too. I want to lie beside her when I go.”

  “You’ll go a lot sooner than you’d like if you don’t listen to me,” Hal said angrily. “Don’t be stupid, John. I know what the land means to you, but it isn’t worth your life.” He went on and on, but her father would not be moved. They ended the evening swearing at each other, and Hal left in the dead of night, slamming the door behind him as he went.

  Adara, listening, had made a decision. It did not matter what her father did or did not do. She would stay. If she moved, the ice dragon would not know where to find her when winter came, and if she went too far south it would never be able to come to her at all.

  It did come to her, though, just after her seventh birthday. That winter was the coldest one of all. She flew so often and so far that she scarcely had time to work on her ice castle.

  * * *

  —

  Hal came again in the spring. There were only a dozen dragons in his wing, and he brought no presents that year. He and her father argued once again. Hal raged and pleaded and threatened, but her father was stone. Finally Hal left, off to the battlefields.

  That was the year the king’s line broke, up north near some town with a long name that Adara could not pronounce.

  Teri heard about it first. She returned from the inn one night flushed and excited. “A messenger came through, on his way to the king,” she told them. “The enemy won some big battle, and he’s to ask for reinforcements. He said our army is retreating?”

  Their father frowned, and worry lines creased his brow. “Did he say anything of the king’s dragonriders?” Arguments or no, Hal was family.

  “I asked,” Teri said. “He said the dragonriders are the rear guard. They’re supposed to raid and burn, delay the enemy while our army pulls back safely. Oh, I hope Uncle Hal is safe!”

  “Hal will show them,” Geoff said. “Him and Brimstone will burn ’em all up.”

  Their father smiled. “Hal could always take care of himself. At any rate, there is nothing we can do. Teri, if any more messengers come through, ask them how it goes.”

  She nodded, her concern not quite covering her excitement. It was all quite thrilling.

  In the weeks that followed, the thrill wore off, as the people of the area began to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster. The king’s highway grew busier and busier, and all the traffic flowed from north to south, and all the travelers wore green-and-gold. At first the soldiers marched in disciplined columns, led by officers wearing golden helmets, but even then they were less than stirring. The columns marched wearily, and the uniforms were filthy and torn, and the swords and pikes and axes the soldiers carried were nicked and ofttimes stained. Some men had lost their weapons; they limped along blindly, empty-handed. And the trains of wounded that followed the columns were often longer than the columns themselves. Adara stood in the grass by the side of the road and watched them pass. She saw a man with no eyes supporting a man with only one leg, as the two of them walked together. She saw men with no legs, or no arms, or both. She saw a man with his head split open by an axe, and many men covered with caked blood and filth, men who moaned low in their throats as they walked. She smelled men with bodies that were horribly greenish and puffed-up. One of them died and was left abandoned by the side of the road. Adara told her father and he and some of the men from the village came out and buried him.

  Most of all, Adara saw the burned men. There were dozens of them in every column that passed, men whose skin was black and seared and falling off, who had lost an arm or a leg or half of a face to the hot breath of a dragon. Teri told them what the officers said, when they stopped at the inn to drink or rest: the enemy had many, many dragons.

  For almost a month the columns flowed past, more every day. Even Old Laura admitted that she had never seen so much traffic on the road. From time to time a lone messenger on horseback rode against the tide, galloping towards the north, but always alone. After a time everyone knew there would be no reinforcements.

  An officer in one of the last columns advised the people of the area to pack up whatever they could carry and move south. “They are coming,” he warned. A few listened to him, and indeed for a week the road was full of refugees from towns farther north. Some of them told frightful stories. When they left, more of the local people went with them.

  But most stayed. They were people like her father, and the land was in their blood.

  The last organized force to come down the road was a ragged troop of cavalry, men as gaunt as skeletons riding horses with skin pulled tight around their ribs. They thundered past in the night, their mounts heaving and foaming, and the only one to pause was a pale young officer, who reined his mount up briefly and shouted, “Go, go. They are burning everything!” Then he was off after his men.

  The few soldiers who came after were alone or in small groups. They did not always use the road, and they did not pay for the things they took. One swordsman killed a farmer on the other side of town, raped his wife, stole his money, and ran. His rags were green-and-gold.

  Then no one came at all. The road was deserted.

  The innkeeper claimed he could smell ashes when the wind blew from the north. He packed up his family and went south. Teri was distraught. Geoff was wide-eyed and anxious and only a bit frightened. He asked a thousand questions about the enemy, and practiced at being a warrior. Their father went about his labors, busy as ever. War or no war, he had crops in the field. He smiled less than usual, however, and he began to drink, and Adara often saw him glancing up at the sky while he worked.

  Adara wandered the fields alone, played by herself in the damp summer heat, and tried to think of where she would hide if her father tried to take them away.

  Last of all, the king’s dragonriders came, and with them Hal.

  There were only four of them. Adara saw the first one, and went and told her father, and he put his hand on her shoulder and together they watched it pass, a solitary green dragon with a vaguely tattered look. It did not pause for them.

  Two days later, three dragons flying together came into view, and one of them detached itself from the others and circled down to their farm while the other two headed south.

  Uncle Hal was thin and grim and sallow-looking. His dragon looked sick. Its eyes ran, and one of its wings had been partially burned, so it flew in an awkward, heavy manner, with much difficulty. “Now will you go?” Hal said to his brother, in front of all the children.

  “No. Nothing has changed.”

  Hal swore. “They will be here within three days,” he said. “
Their dragonriders may be here even sooner.”

  “Father, I’m scared,” Teri said.

  He looked at her, saw her fear, hesitated, and finally turned back to his brother. “I am staying. But if you would, I would have you take the children.”

  Now it was Hal’s turn to pause. He thought for a moment, and finally shook his head. “I can’t, John. I would, willingly, joyfully, if it were possible. But it isn’t. Brimstone is wounded. He can barely carry me. If I took on any extra weight, we might never make it.”

  Teri began to weep.

  “I’m sorry, love,” Hal said to her. “Truly I am.” His fists clenched helplessly.

  “Teri is almost full-grown,” their father said. “If her weight is too much, then take one of the others.”

  Brother looked at brother, with despair in their eyes. Hal trembled. “Adara,” he said finally. “She’s small and light.” He forced a laugh. “She hardly weighs anything at all. I’ll take Adara. The rest of you take horses, or a wagon, or go on foot. But go, damn you, go.”

  “We will see,” their father said noncommittally. “You take Adara, and keep her safe for us.”

  “Yes,” Hal agreed. He turned and smiled at her. “Come, child. Uncle Hal is going to take you for a ride on Brimstone.”

  Adara looked at him very seriously. “No,” she said. She turned and slipped through the door and began to run.

  They came after her, of course, Hal and her father and even Geoff. But her father wasted time standing in the door, shouting at her to come back, and when he began to run he was ponderous and clumsy, while Adara was indeed small and light and fleet of foot. Hal and Geoff stayed with her longer, but Hal was weak, and Geoff soon winded himself, though he sprinted hard at her heels for a few moments. By the time Adara reached the nearest wheat field, the three of them were well behind her. She quickly lost herself amid the grain, and they searched for hours in vain while she made her way carefully towards the woods.