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.”
He took the comb Masery had used on my hair and held it on both hands, lifted it to his nose and smelled it. Could he smell her on it? More likely me, smoke and the clean dirt I slept in and lay in, bitter oak for the one that spoke stories in my dreams and dropped acorns and leaves on me.
“Perry,” he said at last. “I believe you now. I’m going to speak to my wife.”
“Take care, Father. Don’t let her harm you.”
He nodded. “I’ve been a warrior a long time, my son,” he said, “and I am not without powers of my own.” He rose, left. I should go with him, I thought. I was stronger as my dragon self than I had been as a boy. Maybe I could protect him.
But then I remembered the further transformation Stepmother had made in me: she had made me obedient to her will. Ordered me to stay with the tree. Suppose I fought off that compulsion and went back with Father. Suppose she ordered me to attack him? Made me kill my own father?
I spent another night under my tree, listening to stories of homecoming heroes. In my drowsy state I did not notice whether they were knights or dragons.
The next morning, Father returned, with Stepmother in his grip. Her hair was disheveled, her gown smudged. “Now, woman,” Father said to her, bringing her face to face with me. “Undo what you’ve done to my boy.” He pushed her from him, and she stumbled forward, then caught her balance and stopped.
“Ah, Perry, how fine you’ve grown. Being a dragon suits you.” She smiled at me. Then she straightened and pulled her silver wand out of her sleeve. “But your father wants you back as a boy. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind.” She struck me three times across the forehead with the wand, muttering something under her breath. I shivered and shook, angry and frightened at the change I felt. I opened my mouth, ready to pour forth flame, but what came out of me was a muscle-armed man, his hair glossy and wet. I coughed and choked on him and then it happened again: I melted, all the dragon, jeweled length of me, into this shape that had emerged from me. There was a sense of being two shapes at once, jangling, jarring, wrong, and then an easing as I lost my dragon self. I stood up, clutched my head in my hands.
My father took off his cloak and wrapped me in it. After a moment, my stomach and my vision steadied. I tried to find myself again, but half the sounds and most of the smells had faded. I felt as though I floated in some strange bath of air that had washed away the real world.
“No harm done,” said Stepmother. “See how he’s grown into a fine young man!”
“Now get me back my daughter,” said Father.
“Of course, of course.” She went to stand at the cliff’s edge, and raised a tiny silver horn to her lips and blew.
I didn’t hear a sound, but I felt as though I would have with my dragon ears. My human ears didn’t swivel. I felt deprived. Father and I stood beside Stepmother and looked out to sea. Soon, the water turned silver with the arrival of fish, schooling so thickly one could have walked out to sea on their backs and not gotten one’s feet wet. “Masery? Where is Masery?” Stepmother asked the fish. We both stared at all the fish, looking for my sister.
“Here,” called a fish some distance out.
“Come closer,” said Stepmother, “or I won’t be able to change you back.”
“You shaped me once, Stepmother, but never again will I let you do that. Leave me be.”
“Masery, are you sure?” Father called.
“She has cast this grief upon me. Consider me dead to you, and blame her for it, Father,” she called, and swam away. All the other fish swam away too.
“I did my best, Kendrick,” said Stepmother. “You saw. She is wilfull and won’t come home. But you have your son again. Isn’t that enough?”
“No, Genevra, it is not enough. You need to suffer the way my children have.” He took the wand from her and bound her hands behind her and led her toward the woods.
“Kendrick,” she whimpered. “I am your son’s mother.”
“That’s not enough to excuse your crimes. I’ve raised motherless children before,” said Father, and then they had gone so far I didn’t hear them any longer.
But you haven’t, I thought. We were only motherless a year before you brought Stepmother home.
Everything had changed. I leaned against the oak and looked. My eyes were farther from the ground now, my ears and nose less sensitive. I tried to summon up my internal fire, and coughed. Only noise came out of my mouth. Could I be happy in this shape? Even the oak had gone dumb; the whisper of breeze in its leaves no longer made words for me.
Well, there was one thing I had wanted to do as a dragon that I couldn’t manage. I could no longer smell the cinnamon scent that had told me night and day something of Stepmother’s was up in the tree, but now I could climb. So I did: I shed Father’s cloak and climbed up the tree, higher and higher, until the branches were slender and wouldn’t support my weight. I wished again I could smell with the sensitive tip of my tongue, that wash of information from the air into my mouth and then my brain, but I couldn’t. I searched through the tree’s crown with just my hands, which were soon scratched and bleeding. How could anything be hidden up here? Maybe I had dreamed it.
But then I found it, tucked into a crotch of the tree, the branches almost grown over it: a small wooden box with ivory inlay in the shape of lilies on its top. I tugged at it. At first I thought the tree had grown too tightly around it to release, but then something shivered in the tree; I felt it in the bark against the soles of my feet, in my arms where I leaned against branches, in the air. The tree moved just enough to loose the box into my hand.
Somewhere in the distance the sound of crackling, burning. A shriek, and then a scream. Then another.
I climbed carefully down, the box in one hand. When I reached the ground, I sat on my father’s cloak and opened the box. Inside was something black, repellent, and shriveled. I clapped the lid closed again. I couldn’t look at the contents of the box without feeling sick to my stomach.
Screams from the forest, the scent of smoke, meat cooking. The same meat I had cooked in its own armor when I defeated the knights. “No, Kendrick, no,” screamed Stepmother, and then a howl of anguish.
I flinched, though I had known without knowing what my father must be doing.
He doesn’t even know what her real crime is, I thought. I wished I could warm myself with my own fire again, and listen to tree tales through the long winter night. She had given me that and taken it away.
I opened the box that held my stepmother’s heart. As long as her heart was safe, she couldn’t perish. She must be screaming just for show.
I closed my fist around my stepmother’s heart and squeezed.
The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath
Patricia A. McKillip
Patricia A. McKillip was born in Salem, Oregon in 1948. Educated at San Jose State University in California, she received a B.A. in 1971 and an M.A. in English in 1973. She published two short children’s books, The Throme of the Erril of Sherill and The House on Parchment Street in 1973. Her first longer novel, the sophisticated young-adult fantasy The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, won the 1975 World Fantasy Award. She switched to children’s mainstream for The Night Gift, but returned to young-adult fantasy in the Riddle of Stars trilogy.
McKillip followed that with Stepping from the Shadows, an adult contemporary novel with some magi
c realist elements, and then YA science fantasy duology Moon-Flash, and The Moon and the Face. Her adult SF novel Fool’s Run was followed by YA fantasy The Changeling Sea, fantasy duology The Sorceress and the Cygnet and The Cygnet and the Firebird. In 1995 she published The Book of Atrix Wolf, the first in a sequence of remarkable stand-alone fantasies marked by great sophistication and elegance, which include Winter Rose, Song for the Basilisk, The Tower at Stony Wood, World Fantasy Award winner Ombria in Shadow, In the Forests of Serre, Alphabet of Thorn, Od Magic, Solstice Wood and The Bell at Sealey Head. Her short fiction was collected in Harrowing the Dragon. Coming up is a new novel The Bards of Bone Plain. McKillip was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.
Once, on the top of a world, there existed the ring of an island named Hoarsbreath, made out of gold and snow. It was all mountain, a grim, briny, yellowing ice-world covered with winter twelve months out of thirteen. For one month, when the twin suns crossed each other at the world’s cap, the snow melted from the peak of Hoarsbreath. The hardy trees shrugged the snow off their boughs, and sucked in light and mellow air, pulling themselves toward the suns. Snow and icicles melted off the roofs of the miners’ village; the snow-tunnels they had dug from house to tavern to storage barn to mineshaft sagged to the ground; the dead-white river flowing down from the mountain to the sea turned blue and began to move again. Then the miners gathered the gold they had dug by firelight out of the chill, harsh darkness of the deep mountain, and took it downriver, across the sea to the main-land, to trade for food and furs, tools and a liquid fire called worm-spoor, because it was gold and bitter, like the leavings of dragons. After three swallows of it, in a busy city with a harbor frozen only part of the year, with people who wore rich furs, kept horses and sleds to ride in during winter, and who knew the patterns of the winter stars since they weren’t buried alive by the snow, the miners swore they would never return to Hoarsbreath. But the gold waiting in the dark, secret places of the mountain-island drew at them in their dreaming, lured them back.
For two hundred years after the naming of Hoarsbreath, winter followed winter, and the miners lived rich isolated, precarious lives on the pinnacle of ice and granite, cursing the cold and loving it, for it kept lesser folk away. They mined, drank, spun tales, raised chil-dren who were sent to the mainland when they were half-grown, to receive their education, and find easier, respectable lives. But always a few children found their way back, born with a gnawing in their hearts for fire, ice, stone, and the solitary pursuit of gold in the dark.
Then, two miners’ children came back from the great world and destroyed the island.
They had no intention of doing that. The younger of them was Peka Krao. After spending five years on the mainland, boring herself with schooling, she came back to Hoarsbreath to mine. At seventeen, she was good-natured and sturdy, with dark eyes, and dark, braided hair. She loved every part of Hoarsbreath, even its chill, damp shafts at midwinter and the bone-jarring work of hewing through darkness and stone to unbury its gold. Her instincts for gold were uncanny: she seemed to sense it through her fingertips touching bare rock. The miners called her their good luck. She could make wormspoor, too, one of the few useful things she had learned on the mainland. It lost its bitterness, somehow, when she made it: it aged into a rich, smokey gold that made the miners forget their sore muscles, and inspired marvellous tales out of them that whittled away at the endless winter.
She met the Dragon-Harrower one evening at a cross-section of tunnel between her mother’s house and the tavern. She knew all the things to fear in her world: a rumble in the mountain, a guttering torch in the mines, a crevice in the snow, a crack of ice underfoot. There was little else she couldn’t handle with a soft word or her own right arm. Even when he loomed out of the darkness unexpectedly into her taper-light, she wasn’t afraid. But he made her stop instinctively, like an animal might stop, faced with something that puzzled its senses.
His hair was dead-white, with strands bright as wormspoor running through it; his eyes were the light, hard blue of dawn during suns-crossing. Rich colors flashed out of him everywhere in her light: from a gold knife-hilt and a brass pack buckle; from the red ties of his cloak that were weighted with ivory, and the blue and silver threads in his gloves. His heavy fur cloak was closed, but she felt that if he shifted, other colors would escape from it into the cold, dark air. At first she thought he must be ancient: the taper-fire showed her a face that was shadowed and scarred, remote with strange experience, but no more than a dozen years older than hers.
“Who are you?” she breathed. Nothing on Hoarsbreath glittered like that in midwinter; its colors were few and simple: snow, damp fur and leather, fire, gold.
“I can’t find my father,” he said. “Lule Yarrow.”
She stared at him, amazed that his colors had their beginnings on Hoarsbreath. “He’s dead.” His eyes widened slightly, losing some of their hardness. “He fell in a crevice. They chipped him out of the ice at suns-crossing, and buried him six years ago.”
He looked away from her a moment, down at the icy ridges of tramped snow. “Winter.” He broke the word in two, like an icicle. Then he shifted his pack, sighing. “Do they still have wormspoor on this ice-tooth?”
“Of course. Who are you?”
“Ryd Yarrow. Who are you?”
“Peka Krao.”
“Peka. I remember. You were squalling in somebody’s arms when I left.”
“You look a hundred years older than that,” she commented, still puzzling, holding him in her light, though she was beginning to feel the cold. “Seventeen years you’ve been gone. How could you stand it, being away from Hoarsbreath so long? I couldn’t stand five years of it. There are so many people whose names you don’t know, trying to tell you about things that don’t matter, and the flat earth and the blank sky are everywhere. Did you come back to mine?”
He glanced up at the grey-white ceiling of the snow-tunnel, barely an inch above his head. “The sky is full of stars, and the gold wake of dragon-flights,” he said softly. “I am a Dragon-Harrower. I am trained and hired to trouble dragons out of their lairs. That’s why I came back here.”
“Here. There are no dragons on Hoarsbreath.”
His smile touched his eyes like a reflection of fire across ice. “Hoarsbreath is a dragon’s heart.”
She shifted, her own heart suddenly chilled. She said tolerantly. “That sounds like a marvellous tale to me.”
“It’s no tale. I know. I followed this dragon through centuries, through ancient writings, through legends, through rumors of terror and deaths. It is here, sleeping, coiled around the treasures of Hoars-breath. If you on Hoarsbreath rouse it, you are dead. If I rouse it, I will end your endless winter.”
“I like winter.” Her protest sounded very small, muted within the thick snow-walls, but he heard it. He lifted his hand, held it lightly against the low ceiling above his head.
“You might like the sky beyond this. At night it is a mine of lights and hidden knowledge.”
She shook her head. “I like close places, full of fire and darkness. And faces I know. And tales spun out of wormspoor. If you come with me to the tavern, they’ll tell you where your father is buried, and give you lodgings, and then you can leave.”
“I’ll come to the tavern. With a tale.”
Her taper was nearly burned down, and she was beginning to shiver. “A dragon.” She turned away from him. “No one will believe you anyway.”
“You do.”
She listened to him silently, warming herself with wormspoor, as he spoke to the circle of rough, fire-washed faces in the tavern. Even in the light, he bore little resemblance to his father, except for his broad cheekbones and the threads of gold in his hair. Under his bulky cloak, he was dressed as plainly as any miner, but stray bits of color still glinted from him, suggesting wealth and distant places.
“A dragon,” he told them, “is creating your winter. Have you ever asked yourselve
s why winter on this island is nearly twice as long as winter on the mainland twenty miles away? You live in dragon’s breath, in the icy mist of its bowels, hoar-frost cold, that grips your land in winter the way another dragon’s breath might burn it to flinders. One month out of the year, in the warmth of suns-crossing, it looses its ring-grip on your island, slides into the sea, and goes to mate. Its ice-kingdom begins to melt. It returns, loops its length around its mountain of ice and gold. Its breath freezes the air once more, locks the river into its bed, you into your houses, the gold into its mountain, and you curse the cold and drink until the next dragon-mating.” He paused. There was not a sound around him. “I’ve been to strange places in this world, places even colder than this, where the suns never cross, and I have seen such monsters. They are ancient as rock, white as old ice, and their skin is like iron. They breed winter and they cannot be killed. But they can be driven away, into far corners of the world where they are dangerous to no one. I’m trained for this. I can rid you of your winter. Harrowing is dangerous work, and usually I am highly paid. But I’ve been looking for this ice-dragon for many years, through its spoor of legend and destruction. I tracked it here, one of the oldest of its kind, to the place where I was born. All I ask from you is a guide.”
He stopped, waiting. Peka, her hands frozen around her glass, heard someone swallow. A voice rose and faded from the tavern-kitchen; sap hissed in the fire. A couple of the miners were smiling; the others looked satisfied and vaguely expectant, wanting the tale to continue. When it didn’t, Kor Flynt, who had mined Hoarsbreath for fifty years, spat wormspoor into the fire. The flame turned a baleful gold, and then subsided. “Suns-crossing,” he said politely, reminding a scholar of a scrap of knowledge children acquired with their first set of teeth, “causes the seasons.”
“Not here,” Ryd said. “Not on Hoarsbreath. I’ve seen. I know.”
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