Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan; Marianne S. Jablon

  I liked the tree. It whispered stories into my dreams, the deeds of kings and queens and princes and princesses, sorcerers and witless virgin maidens, brave knights and cowardly jesters, talking animals and walking plants. Why did the tree know stories of men? Why did the tree choose to share them with me? I had no idea, but it made the solitude less onerous. I knew that something caught high in the tree’s branches smelled of Stepmother, too, but I didn’t know how to tell Masery that.

  “Maybe she just wanted you away from the house, but I suspect her of different motives. She could have ordered you to go far from our keep. Stepmother always has her reasons. Anyway, at least I know where to find you. And now, for your hair.”

  I was surprised to learn I even had hair. I had never gotten a good look at my new self, other than my tail and hindquarters, which I could see by curling my long, snaky neck, and my front claws. I could also see my snout, with its bristling, whiskery, scaly things, thicker than hair as I knew it. I could sense things through the whiskers—movement in the air, changes in the weather, a few things I didn’t yet understand.

  But hair? With these scales?

  Masery took a silver comb from her bundle. “Put your head down.”

  I laid my long, long chin on the backs of my hands and closed my eyes. Masery stroked my head. “Oh, Perry, you have tiny jewels all over you. You’re beautiful!”

  My ears twitched, and she stroked them. I couldn’t tell what they looked like, but they felt quite different from my human ears—longer, more mobile, directional. I could open my ears, angle them, swivel them; I could aim my hearing in a way I hadn’t been able to before, and hear noises I had never imagined. Skyward, the zooms and buzzes of even the tiniest bugs flying past; seaward, under the surface of water rushing, the hiss of sand sliding over itself; toward the forest, the slither of leaves touching other leaves. The languages I had started to learn in human form, fire, snow, the past, those I heard better than I had, but I couldn’t yet translate new words in fire and snow. My tree: its words were clear. Maybe all trees talked, and my hearing had just been inadequate before. Next time I went hunting, I would—

  Masery’s comb stroked something at the top of my head, and I fell into bliss, the perfect bliss of having an itch scratched just hard enough and long enough to satisfy its calling. The teeth of the comb stroked across the top of my head. I moaned in delight. Tiny puffs of smoke rose from my mouth.

  Masery combed my hair and whispered, “Never forget who we are, Brother. Never forget, no matter how deep you sink into your animal. Never forget who we are.”

  With each stroke, she woke another memory: our real mother, when we still lived at court, dressing us both for presentation to the king, giving me a peppermint drop to quiet me as she combed some nasty tangles from my hair, Masery standing by, six years old and already groomed, beautiful in dark blue velvet, with tiny pearls around her neck, her hair in curls. Father, taking us each up before him on his horse and riding us around the meadow at home in the south. How the horse bumped between my legs, until Father taught me to rise with its rhythm. He set my hands on the reins, though he still kept hold of them, and I stopped being afraid I would fall and began to learn how to talk to the horse with nudges and tugs. Cook giving us hot biscuits and butter on a cold winter morning.

  Masery let down a bucket into the ocean and pulled up water, and she washed my head. It hadn’t occurred to me to wash since I gained my new form. Masery’s gentle ablutions brought me strange comfort. Perhaps I was worth caring about and keeping clean, even though I had lost my human body. I remembered baths in front of the fire in winter, emptying ewers of steaming water into the copper tub to mix with the cold water already there, how I had to climb in and work my arms and legs to get a true mix of hot and cold so the water would be warm all through.

  I didn’t need the seawater to be warm; it warmed as it met my hot skin. Masery’s touch felt gentle and soothing.

  “Perry,” Masery said, when I was truly and happily trapped in memories of my human self, “I have to go now. I’ll return next week. Guard my things for me.” She undressed, closed the comb and my flute and her dress into the bundle, and climbed up the tree to lodge the bundle and the bucket in the lower branches. She kissed my cheek and dived over the cliff. I scuttled forward and watched as she silvered and sleekened and swam away, a fish once more.

  Three chickens kept me fed more than a day. I lay under the tree and digested, listening to the tree’s whispered tales and watching.

  A few days later, a knight rode along the cliff path toward me. He had a lance. I had never seen him before. Who was he, and where was he going? Was he a traveler? Why follow the cliff path? Was he heading for the next village along the coast? Why carry a lance all that way? How useful was it unless you were going to tourney?

  “Hail, loathsome worm,” he cried when he was still fifty feet away. He held his reins tight, for his horse pranced and sweated beneath him, its nostrils flaring wide. “I have come to slay you!”

  I had been dreaming of history lessons with our old tutor before we had to leave court. Masery, the tutor, and I sat before a fire in the nursery at the old house. Our tutor had drawn pictures to illustrate the lessons. His hand was deft, whether he drew griffins, kings, or cats. It took me a moment to shake myself free of memory and realize that this knight was speaking to me.

  “Don’t,” I cried. “Leave me alone. I have never harmed a human.”

  With those words, I made myself a liar, for instead of sound, flame shot from my mouth, and when the flame touched the horse, it bucked the knight off and fled.

  The knight lay on his back on the ground, the lance broken beneath him. Then he struggled to his feet. One of his arms dangled useless at his side. He groaned. I smelled his fear and pain, a sour, bitter scent mixed with blood. He unbuckled his sword so he could draw it with the wrong hand. “Wicked, vile creature,” he said. “I will rid the Earth of you.”

  Then I lost all the human I had ever been, and turned wholly into my dragon self, and I made a liar of the knight. Flame roared out of me, roasted him in his armor, dropped him smoking and screaming to the ground. I ran to him, my scales impervious to my own fire, and stamped on his head, crushing it.

  Later, I woke and saw what I had done. I loathed myself and lay, sickened, at the foot of my tree. I had just killed a hero. Every story the tree had told me ended with the hero triumphing over the dragon or the witch or the sorcerer, winning the fair maiden, riding into a happy future. I was the wicked dragon, and I had won. This was wrong.

  How could I kill someone and stay right with myself? I wanted to die.

  The stink of the cooked knight tainted the air until finally I went into the forest, dug a hole—my claws proved strangely suited to such a task—and dropped him in. I buried him deep and covered him over and scratched a cross into the earth above him. Then I slunk back to my tree.

  Sleep was a long time coming. My stomach was so soured with disgust that it kept speaking to me in grumbles and small gouts of flame. Finally I calmed enough to listen to my tree, and it told me a different sort of story, of a brave young dragon fighting for its life against a monstrous knight, emerging victorious.

  When I woke I was still heartsick, but I felt better. The tree told me more stories where the dragon was the hero, and gradually I let loose of fretting about my evil deed.

  Masery came again the next week. I wanted to tell her everything, but I still had no speech but a nod or flame. She dressed and snuck off to the castle and brought me back a slab of beef, which I cooked in my own flame and ate. Then she combed my hair and washed my head, and I remembered all the best things about our life before. She told me nothing of her own life under the water, though I longed to know. She left around sunset.

  So the tenor of my days was set. I guarded my tree, waited for Masery’s return, and hunted a little farther afield each day. Knights came, one after another, and I forgot I was human, and killed them. I always remembered I was h
uman afterward, and gave them as decent a burial as I could. I wished I could speak to them, though, ask them why they came to kill me, who had sent them here so far from normal routes, who they were.

  After I killed the sixth knight, I tried to frame speech with my mouth, tried to wake my throat into voice. The tree listened as I shaped hisses into whispers, searched and found words. The next knight I would challenge with speech before he attacked. The work of calling back words occupied my days.

  When Masery came that week, I whispered her name.

  “Perry! You can speak! How wonderful!” She hugged my head.

  “Masery. I’ve killed six knights.”

  She drew back and looked at me. She walked a little ways away. I thought: now I’ve lost her. She’ll never speak to me again. I wondered how I could kill myself. Bash my head into my oak? Leap from a higher cliff to crash to the rocks below? Starve myself?

  Masery returned. “What happened?” she asked.

  I told her about the first knight, how I spooked his horse, how he came at me with a sword and I roasted him. I told her of the others, who had also refused to run away, though I showed the later ones I could flame things before I actually aimed my flame at them. I tried to frighten them off. I tried to gesture at them to run away. They only drew their swords and came at me, screaming, and then—then I killed them. And was sick afterward.

  Masery combed my hair and washed my head, and I remembered being human. The images were smaller, now, dimmer, veiled in a shimmer of flame. She whispered to me: “You only did what you had to, Brother. They came to fight you. You gave them what they desired.”

  That day, she did not kiss me before she left.

  The seventh knight stopped to listen to my challenge. “I don’t wish to harm you,” I said. “Please go back.”

  “You speak with the devil’s tongue, tempting me to abandon my quest! Have at you!” he cried, and charged me. His horse was better disciplined than the others’ had been, and did not bolt at the first touch of flame. I didn’t want to hurt a blameless creature. I flamed the horse’s feet. When the hair burned on his hide—I smelled the peculiar pungency of singeing hair—he rose up, cast his knight to the ground, and ran away. This knight landed on his feet somehow, perhaps because his armor was lighter than the others’, and drew his sword.

  “Won’t you save me from having to kill you?” I said.

  “They call me coward, back home. I’m going to prove them wrong. Don’t speak to me again.”

  “At least tell me your name so I will know what to scratch on your grave.”

  “Silence, Worm!”

  He came at me then, and, as I had learned from past knights, I released my human self and let myself become wholly dragon. The dragon raged with flame, toasted the knight. The knight broke through the first wall of flame and hacked at the dragon’s neck, scoring a long, shallow wound, and that threw the dragon into a frenzy. He flamed and flamed.

  “Wait,” cried the knight at last, reduced to a burned heap on the ground, his sword long fallen from his hand, his shield flaming on the ground a distance away from him, his armor burning him from the heat it had absorbed. “Wait,” he said, though he was so badly injured he could not have survived even if given mercy.

  The dragon did not listen, though somewhere inside it, I heard and tried to stop us. The dragon breathed out a long stream of flame that burned the features off the knight’s face. A last scream, cut off when his throat was no longer whole. The dragon stomped the dead knight, the only one who had actually cut us. There was not much left for me to bury.

  The eighth knight was my father.

  He dismounted and tied his horse to a tree in the forest’s fringe. Perhaps he had learned from all the other horses I had sent running. He approached me, wary of the char marks on the ground. He steeled himself and walked forward to come face to face with me.

  “Now I find you here, on my lands, you stinking worm,” he cried, “and hear about the devastation you’ve wreaked in my absence! You pestilence! You blight on a fair country! You killer of the king’s champions! Now it’s time for you to die.” He drew his sword.

  “Father,” I said.

  He staggered back, then righted himself.

  I laid my head on my claws. “Father,” I whispered. “I never meant to kill the others. They would not stop. They would not listen. At the last I couldn’t help myself. Wouldn’t you fight back, too, if someone stabbed you?” My voice was full of hisses and smoke, and yet, the words were clear enough to halt my father.

  “Who are you, Worm, who claim my paternity?” he cried.

  “I’m Perry. Peregrine of Hopelost. Your son. Stepmother enchanted me and Masery while you were gone. She wanted us out of the way once she got with child. Father.”

  He did not speak for a moment, and then he swayed. He pushed up his helm and rubbed his face with the back of his gloved hand. “Is it the devil who speaks to me?” he asked.

  “Father. Please, Father.”

  “Perry?” He fell to his knees in a clatter of armor before me. “I knew I stayed away from home too long, but after all, there were reivers at Hidden Cove, and we had to fight off the first wave, and guard against the next two, and Genevra sent no word of trouble; we had no reason to hasten our return. I came home yesterday to find you gone. She said she’d sent you to foster at court. And all the village was full of the news of this dragon haunting the coast, and how knights had been sent for, and how all had been vanquished, or so it was thought; only their horses returned. Genevra warned me not to come here. She said you were a puissant dragon and would only kill me. She begged me to send my men instead, and to fight you with spears and arrows tipped with diamonds. But how could I honorably do that? Perry.”

  I turned to look at him. He stared into my eyes, his brow furrowed. “Are you in truth my son, or is this just another of evil’s tricks?”

  “Father.” I laid my head down again and closed my eyes. “Kill me if you must; I will strive not to fight you. If you can, ask the villagers not to fish in the harbor. Masery was transformed into the mackerel of the sea, save for one afternoon a week, when she visits me as herself. If that will prove anything to you, come back on Saturday and see. But whatever you do, beware of Stepmother. Don’t let her know you’ve spoken with me. She has her own son now, and perhaps she needs you no longer.” Masery, during one of her weekly forays to the keep, had heard the news about our little half-brother. A fine boy, they all said.

  Father leaned on his sword as he climbed to his feet. “I will think on all these things.” He scrubbed his gloved hand over his face once more. “I am so weary of battle.” He turned and marched back to his horse, led it to a fallen tree and mounted. He rode away.

  The next day a lad from the keep castle rode out on a sturdy pony and tossed a burlap sack in my direction, then rode off in a hurry before I could respond. I crept to the sack, and clawed it open. I knew before I opened it that inside lay something delicious. The smoked haunch of a pig, as fine as anything Masery had brought me. I ate and was content.

  The following day the same lad threw me another sack with roasted chickens in it, and the day after that, a beef roast.

  The day after that was Saturday. Masery came up out of the water and dressed herself, as she always did, then pulled out her comb and the bucket and set to grooming me. “Perry, Perry,” she said. “What was your week like?”

  “Father has returned,” I said.

  She sat up straight, comb in hand. “Has he?”

  “He came to kill me, but I spoke and he left. I told him about your visits. Sister, what was your week like?” I had asked her every week since I found words again, and she had always shrugged and said she was as happy as she could be, considering everything.

  “Well,” she said, “I got married.”

  I lifted my head and turned so I could see her with both eyes. “Who—whom did you marry, Sister mine?”

  “His name is Silverthin, and he is a prince under the
waters. I had to tell you, Perry, because I don’t know how long I’ll be able to visit you anymore. Silverthin has a witch in his court who can make my transformation permanent. Silverthin worries about me because I worry so much about you.” She leaned against my side.

  “Father has been feeding me,” I said. “Perhaps you no longer need to worry about me.”

  “I worry about you forgetting who you are.”

  “Maybe it would be better if I did. Maybe it would be better if I lost my human side. Then when some knight comes to kill me and succeeds, I won’t even care.”

  “Don’t say that.” She combed my hair, combed memories back into my mind, the taste of sap sugar candy at the harvest fair, the day I was allowed to tip wine on the roots of the apple trees in the orchard so they would share our joy at the season and bring us a good harvest next year, the smell of wax as we lit the first candles of the evening, ready to sit at Mother’s feet while she read to us after supper. “Never forgot who you are,” Masery sang softly to me. “Never forget.”

  But she was going to forget. She was going to let a witch turn her into her new self and leave her that way. Why should I remember any longer?

  I heard clanking, and smell-tasted the scent of smoke and marsh and sweat that was my father. Masery leapt up. I closed a claw around her ankle. “It may be your last chance to speak with him,” I said. “Please wait.”

  Father came into the clearing, bareheaded but otherwise locked into armor. “Masery,” he said, and ran to us. “Masery!”

  My sister kicked free of my grasp, dropped her comb and bucket, and dived over the cliff into the sea. Father rushed to the cliff and looked for her, and I followed. Her dress floated, empty, on the surge of the tide. Of her, there was only a silver flicker under the surface, beyond where the waves broke. She was gone.

  Father dropped beside me, groaning. “Why did she run?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. She’s found a love under the sea. She came to tell me today that she probably won’t be back.”