Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan; Marianne S. Jablon

  “They didn’t find you.”

  The oracle-glass was maddeningly literal, capable only of answering the question one asked, rather than that which one wanted answered. But Will persisted. “Why didn’t they find me?”

  “You weren’t here.”

  “Where was I? Where was my Granny?”

  “You were nowhere.”

  “How could we be nowhere?”

  Tonelessly, the mirror said, “The basilisk’s explosion warped the world and the mesh of time in which it is caught. The sarsen-lady and you were thrown forward, halfway through the day.”

  It was as clear an explanation as Will as going to get. He muttered a word of unbinding, releasing the invigorating light back to whence it came. Then, fearful that the blood on his hands and clothes would draw night-gaunts, he hurried homeward.

  When he got to the village, he discovered that a search party was still scouring the darkness, looking for him. Those who remained had hoisted a straw man upside-down atop a tall pole at the center of the village square, and set it ablaze against the chance he was still alive, to draw him home.

  And so it had.

  Two days after those events, a crippled dragon crawled out of the Old Forest and into the village. Slowly he pulled himself into the center square. Then he collapsed. He was wingless and there were gaping holes in his fuselage, but still the stench of power clung to him, and a miasma of hatred. A trickle of oil seeped from a gash in his belly and made a spreading stain on the cobbles beneath him.

  Will was among those who crowded out to behold this prodigy. The others whispered hurtful remarks among themselves about its ugliness. And truly it was built of cold, black iron, and scorched even darker by the basilisk’s explosion, with jagged stumps of metal where its wings had been and ruptured plates here and there along its flanks. But Will could see that, even half-destroyed, the dragon was a beautiful creature. It was built with dwarven skill to high-elven design—how could it not be beautiful? It was, he felt certain, that same dragon which he had almost-seen shot down by the basilisk.

  Knowing this gave him a strange sense of shameful complicity, as if he were in some way responsible for the dragon’s coming to the village.

  For a long time no one spoke. Then an engine hummed to life somewhere deep within the dragon’s chest, rose in pitch to a clattering whine, and fell again into silence. The dragon slowly opened one eye.

  “Bring me your truth-teller,” he rumbled.

  The truth-teller was a fruit-woman named Bessie Applemere. She was young and yet, out of respect for her office, everybody called her by the honorific Hag. She came, clad in the robes and wide hat of her calling, breasts bare as was traditional, and stood before the mighty engine of war. “Father of Lies.” She bowed respectfully.

  “I am crippled, and all my missiles are spent,” the dragon said. “But still am I dangerous.”

  Hag Applemere nodded. “It is the truth.”

  “My tanks are yet half-filled with jet fuel. It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to set them off with an electrical spark. And were I to do so, your village and all who live within it would cease to be. Therefore, since power engenders power, I am now your liege and king.”

  “It is the truth.”

  A murmur went up from the assembled villagers.

  “However, my reign will be brief. By Samhain, the Armies of the Mighty will be here, and they shall take me back to the great forges of the East to be rebuilt.”

  “You believe it so.”

  The dragon’s second eye opened. Both focused steadily on the truth-teller. “You do not please me, Hag. I may someday soon find it necessary to break open your body and eat your beating heart.”

  Hag Applemere nodded. “It is the truth.”

  Unexpectedly, the dragon laughed. It was cruel and sardonic laughter, as the mirth of such creatures always was, but it was laughter nonetheless. Many of the villagers covered their ears against it. The smaller children burst into tears. “You amuse me,” he said. “All of you amuse me. We begin my reign on a gladsome note.”

  The truth-teller bowed. Watching, Will thought he detected a great sadness in her eyes. But she said nothing.

  “Let your lady-mayor come forth, that she might give me obeisance.”

  Auld Black Agnes shuffled from the crowd. She was scrawny and thrawn and bent almost double from the weight of her responsibilities. They hung in a black leather bag around her neck. From that bag, she brought forth a flat stone from the first hearth of the village, and laid it down before the dragon. Kneeling, she placed her left hand, splayed, upon it.

  Then she took out a small silver sickle.

  “Your blood and ours. Thy fate and mine. Our joy and your wickedness. Let all be as one.” Her voice rose in a warbling keen:

  “Black spirits and white, red spirits and grey,

  Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may.”

  Her right hand trembled with palsy as it raised the sickle up above her left. But her slanting motion downward was swift and sudden. Blood spurted, and her little finger went flying.

  She made one small, sharp cry, like a sea-bird’s, and no more.

  “I am satisfied,” the dragon said. Then, without transition: “My pilot is dead and he begins to rot.” A hatch hissed open in his side. “Drag him forth.”

  “Do you wish him buried?” a kobold asked hesitantly.

  “Bury him, burn him, cut him up for bait—what do I care? When he was alive, I needed him in order to fly. But he’s dead now, and of no use to me.”

  “Kneel.”

  Will knelt in the dust beside the dragon. He’d been standing in line for hours, and there were villagers who would be standing in that same line hours from now, waiting to be processed. They went in fearful, and they came out dazed. When a lily-maid stepped down from the dragon, and somebody shouted a question at her, she simply shook her tear-streaked face, and fled. None would speak of what happened within.

  The hatch opened.

  “Enter.”

  He did. The hatch closed behind him.

  At first he could see nothing. Then small, faint lights swam out of the darkness. Bits of green and white stabilized, became instrument lights, pale luminescent flecks on dials. One groping hand touched leather. It was the pilot’s couch. He could smell, faintly, the taint of corruption on it.

  “Sit.”

  Clumsily, he climbed into the seat. The leather creaked under him. His arms naturally lay along the arms of the couch. He might have been made for it. There were handgrips. At the dragon’s direction, he closed his hands about them and turned them as far as they would go. A quarter-turn, perhaps.

  From beneath, needles slid into his wrists. They stung like blazes, and Will jerked involuntarily. But when he tried, he discovered that he could not let go of the grips. His fingers would no longer obey him.

  “Boy,” the dragon said suddenly, “what is your true name?”

  Will trembled. “I don’t have one.”

  Immediately, he sensed that this was not the right answer. There was a silence. Then the dragon said dispassionately, “I can make you suffer.”

  “Sir, I am certain you can.”

  “Then tell me your true name.”

  His wrists were cold—cold as ice. The sensation that spread up his forearms to his elbows was not numbness, for they ached terribly. It felt as if they were packed in snow. “I don’t know it!” Will cried in an anguish. “I don’t know, I was never told, I don’t think I have one!”

  Small lights gleamed on the instrument panel, like forest eyes at night.

  “Interesting.” For the first time, the dragon’s voice displayed a faint tinge of emotion. “What family is yours? Tell me everything about them.”

  Will had no family other than his aunt. His parents had died on the very first day of the War. Theirs was the ill fortune of being in Brocielande Station when the dragons came and dropped golden fire on the rail yards. So Will had been shipped off to t
he hills to live with his aunt. Everyone agreed he would be safest there. That was several years ago, and there were times now when he could not remember his parents at all. Soon he would have only the memory of remembering.

  As for his aunt, Blind Enna was little more to him than a set of rules to be contravened and chores to be evaded. She was a pious old creature, forever killing small animals in honor of the Nameless Ones and burying their corpses under the floor or nailing them above doors or windows. In consequence of which, a faint perpetual stink of conformity and rotting mouse hung about the hut. She mumbled to herself constantly and on those rare occasions when she got drunk—two or three times a year—would run out naked into the night and, mounting a cow backwards, lash its sides bloody with a hickory switch so that it ran wildly uphill and down until finally she tumbled off and fell asleep. At dawn Will would come with a blanket and lead her home. But they were never exactly close.

  All this he told in stumbling, awkward words. The dragon listened without comment.

  The cold had risen up to Will’s armpits by now. He shuddered as it touched his shoulders. “Please…” he said. “Lord Dragon… your ice has reached my chest. If it touches my heart, I fear that I’ll die.”

  “Hmmm? Ah! I was lost in thought.” The needles withdrew from Will’s arms. They were still numb and lifeless, but at least the cold had stopped its spread. He could feel a tingle of pins and needles in the center of his fingertips, and so knew that sensation would eventually return.

  The door hissed open. “You may leave now.”

  He stumbled out into the light.

  An apprehension hung over the village for the first week or so. But as the dragon remained quiescent and no further alarming events occurred, the timeless patterns of village life more or less resumed. Yet all the windows opening upon the center square remained perpetually shuttered and nobody willingly passed through it anymore, so that it was as if a stern silence had come to dwell within their midst.

  Then one day Will and Puck Berrysnatcher were out in the woods, checking their snares for rabbits and camelopards (it had been generations since a pard was caught in Avalon but they still hoped), when the Scissors-Grinder came puffing down the trail. He lugged something bright and gleaming within his two arms.

  “Hey, bandy-man!” Will cried. He had just finished tying his rabbits’ legs together so he could sling them over his shoulder. “Ho, big-belly! What hast thou?”

  “Don’t know. Fell from the sky.”

  “Did not!” Puck scoffed. The two boys danced about the fat cobber, grabbing at the golden thing. It was shaped something like a crown and something like a bird-cage. The metal of its ribs and bands was smooth and lustrous. Black runes adorned its sides. They had never seen its like. “I bet it’s a roc’s egg—or a phoenix’s!”

  And simultaneously Will asked, “Where are you taking it?”

  “To the smithy. Perchance the hammermen can beat it down into something useful.” The Scissors-Grinder swatted at Puck with one hand, almost losing his hold on the object. “Perchance they’ll pay me a penny or three for it.”

  Daisy Jenny popped up out of the flowers in the field by the edge of the garbage dump and, seeing the golden thing, ran toward it, pigtails flying, singing, “Gimme-gimme-gimme!” Two hummingirls and one chimney-bounder came swooping down out of nowhere. And the Cauldron Boy dropped an armful of scavenged scrap metal with a crash and came running up as well. So that by the time the Meadows Trail became Mud Street, the Scissors-Grinder was red-faced and cursing, and knee-deep in children.

  “Will, you useless creature!”

  Turning, Will saw his aunt, Blind Enna, tapping toward him. She had a peeled willow branch in each hand, like long white antennae, that felt the ground before her as she came. The face beneath her bonnet was grim. He knew this mood, and knew better than to try to evade her when she was in it. “Auntie…” he said.

  “Don’t you Auntie me, you slugabed! There’s toads to be buried and stoops to be washed. Why are you never around when it’s time for chores?”

  She put an arm through his and began dragging him homeward, still feeling ahead of herself with her wands.

  Meanwhile, the Scissors-Grinder was so distracted by the children that he let his feet carry him the way they habitually went—through Center Square, rather than around it. For the first time since the coming of the dragon, laughter and children’s voices spilled into that silent space. Will stared yearningly over his shoulder after his dwindling friends.

  The dragon opened an eye to discover the cause of so much noise. He reared up his head in alarm. In a voice of power he commanded, “Drop that!”

  Startled, the Scissors-Grinder obeyed.

  The device exploded.

  Magic in the imagination is a wondrous thing, but magic in practice is terrible beyond imagining. An unending instant’s dazzlement and confusion left Will lying on his back in the street. His ears rang horribly, and he felt strangely numb. There were legs everywhere—people running. And somebody was hitting him with a stick. No, with two sticks.

  He sat up, and the end of a stick almost got him in the eye. He grabbed hold of it with both hands and yanked at it angrily. “Auntie!” he yelled. Blind Enna went on waving the other stick around, and tugging at the one he had captured, trying to get it back. “Auntie, stop that!” But of course she couldn’t hear him; he could barely hear himself through the ringing in his ears.

  He got to his feet and put both arms around his aunt. She struggled against him, and Will was astonished to find that she was no taller than he. When had that happened? She had been twice his height when first he came to her. “Auntie Enna!” he shouted into her ear. “It’s me, Will, I’m right here.”

  “Will.” Her eyes filled with tears. “You shiftless, worthless thing. Where are you when there are chores to be done?”

  Over her shoulder, he saw how the square was streaked with black and streaked with red. There were things that looked like they might be bodies. He blinked. The square was filled with villagers, leaning over them. Doing things. Some had their heads thrown back, as if they were wailing. But of course he couldn’t hear them, not over the ringing noise.

  “I caught two rabbits, Enna,” he told his aunt, shouting so he could be heard. He still had them, slung over his shoulder. He couldn’t imagine why. “We can have them for supper.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll cut them up for stew, while you wash the stoops.”

  Blind Enna found her refuge in work. She mopped the ceiling and scoured the floor. She had Will polish every piece of silver in the house. Then all the furniture had to be taken apart, and cleaned, and put back together again. The rugs had to be boiled. The little filigreed case containing her heart had to be taken out of the cupboard where she normally kept it and hidden in the very back of the closet.

  The list of chores that had to be done was endless. She worked herself, and Will as well, all the way to dusk. Sometimes he cried at the thought of his friends who had died, and Blind Enna hobbled over and hit him to make him stop. Then, when he did stop, he felt nothing. He felt nothing, and he felt like a monster for feeling nothing. Thinking of it made him begin to cry again, so he wrapped his arms tight around his face to muffle the sounds, so his aunt would not hear and hit him again.

  It was hard to say which—the feeling or the not—made him more miserable.

  The very next day, the summoning bell was rung in the town square and, willing or no, all the villagers once again assembled before their king dragon. “Oh, ye foolish creatures!” the dragon said. “Six children have died and old Tanarahumra—he whom you called the Scissors-Grinder—as well, because you have no self-discipline.”

  Hag Applemere bowed her head sadly. “It is the truth.”

  “You try my patience,” the dragon said. “Worse, you drain my batteries. My reserves grow low, and I can only partially recharge them each day. Yet I see now that I dare not be King Log. You must be governed. Therefore, I re
quire a speaker. Somebody slight of body, to live within me and carry my commands to the outside.”

  Auld Black Agnes shuffled forward. “That would be me,” she said wearily. “I know my duty.”

  “No!” the dragon said scornfully. “You aged crones are too cunning by half. I’ll choose somebody else from this crowd. Someone simple… a child.”

  Not me, Will thought wildly. Anybody else but me.

  “Him,” the dragon said.

  So it was that Will came to live within the dragon king. All that day and late into the night he worked drawing up plans on sheets of parchment, at his lord’s careful instructions, for devices very much like stationary bicycles that could be used to recharge the dragon’s batteries. In the morning, he went to the blacksmith’s forge at the edge of town to command that six of the things be immediately built. Then he went to Auld Black Agnes to tell her that all day and every day six villagers, elected by lot or rotation or however else she chose, were to sit upon the devices pedaling, pedaling, all the way without cease from dawn to sundown, when Will would drag the batteries back inside.

  Hurrying through the village with his messages—there were easily a dozen packets of orders, warnings, and advices that first day—Will experienced a strange sense of unreality. Lack of sleep made everything seem impossibly vivid. The green moss on the skulls stuck in the crotches of forked sticks lining the first half-mile of the River Road, the salamanders languidly copulating in the coals of the smithy forge, even the stillness of the carnivorous plants in his auntie’s garden as they waited for an unwary frog to hop within striking distance… such homely sights were transformed. Everything was new and strange to him.

  By noon, all the dragon’s errands were run, so Will went out in search of friends. The square was empty, of course, and silent. But when he wandered out into the lesser streets, his shadow short beneath him, they were empty as well. It was eerie. Then he heard the high sound of a girlish voice and followed it around a corner.