Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

  “No. This will be my greatest harrowing.” He left her suddenly, and appeared flaming like a torch on the dragon’s skull, just between its eyes. His hair and his hands spattered silver. Word after word came out of him, smoldering, flashing, melting in the air. The drag-on’s voice thundered; its skin rippled and shook. Its claw ripped at ice, dug chasms out of it. The air clapped nearby, as if its invisible tail had lifted and slapped at the ground. Then it heaved its head, flung Ryd at the wall of mountain. Peka shut her eyes. But he fell lightly, caught up a crystal as he rose, and sent a shaft of piercing gold light at the upraised scales of its underside, burrowing towards its heart.

  Peka got unsteadily to her feet, her throat closing with a sudden whimper. But the dragon’s tail, flickering out of the mist behind Ryd, slapped him into a snowdrift twenty feet away. It gave a cold, terrible hiss; mist bubbled over everything, so that for a few minutes Peka could see nothing beyond the lip of the ledge. She drank to stop her shivering. Finally a green fire blazed within the white swirl. She sat down again slowly, waited.

  Night rolled in from the sea. But Ryd’s fires shot in raw, dazzling streaks across the darkness, illuminating the hoary, scarred bulk of dragon in front of him. Once, he shouted endless poetry at the dragon, lulling it until its mist-breath was faint and slow from its maw. It nearly put Peka to sleep, but Ryd’s imperceptible steps closer and closer to the dragon kept her watching. The tale was evidently an old one to the dragon; it didn’t wait for an ending. Its head lunged and snapped unexpectedly, but a moment too soon. Ryd leaped for shelter in the dark, while the dragon’s teeth ground painfully on nothingness. Later, Ryd sang to it, a whining, eerie song that show-ered icicles around Peka’s head. One of the dragon’s teeth cracked, and it made an odd, high-pitched noise. A vast webbed wing shifted free to fly, unfolding endlessly over the sea. But the dragon stayed, sending mist at Ryd to set him coughing. A foul ashy-grey miasma followed it, blurring over them. Peka hid her face in her arms. Sounds like the heaving of boulders and the spattering of fire came from beneath her. She heard the dragon’s dry roar, like stones dragged against one another. There was a smack, a musical shower of breaking icicles, and a sharp, anguished curse. Ryd appeared out of the turmoil of light and air, sprawled on the ledge beside Peka.

  His face was cut, with ice she supposed, and there was blood in his white hair. He looked at her with vague amazement.

  “You’re still here.”

  “Where else would I be? Are you winning or losing?”

  He scooped up snow, held it against his face. “I feel as if I’ve been fighting for a thousand years… Sometimes, I think I tangle in its memories, as it thinks of other harrowers, old dragon-battles, distant places. It doesn’t remember what I am, only that I will not let it sleep… Did you see its wingspan? I fought a red dragon once with such a span. Its wings turned to flame in the sunlight. You’ll see this one in flight by dawn.”

  She stared at him numbly, huddled against herself. “Are you so sure?”

  “It’s old and slow. And it can’t bear the gold fire.” He paused, then dropped the snow in his hand with a sigh, and leaned his face against the ice-wall. “I’m tired, too. I have one empty crystal, to capture the essence of its mist, its heart’s breath. After that’s done, the battle will be short.” He lifted his head at her silence, as if he could hear her thoughts. “What?”

  “You’ll go on to other dragons. But all I’ve ever had is this one.”

  “You never know—”

  “It doesn’t matter that I never knew it. I know now. It was coiled all around us in the winter, while we lived in warm darkness and firelight. It kept out the world. Is that such a terrible thing? Is there so much wisdom in the flatlands that we can’t live without?”

  He was silent again, frowning a little, either in pain or faint confu-sion. “It’s a dangerous thing, a destroyer.”

  “So is winter. So is the mountain, sometimes. But they’re also beautiful. You are full of so much knowledge and experience that you forgot how to see simple things. Ryd Yarrow, miner’s son. You must have loved Hoarsbreath once.”

  “I was a child, then.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry I brought you down here. I wish I were up there with the miners, in the last peaceful night.”

  “There will be peace again,” he said, but she shook her head wea-rily.

  “I don’t feel it.” She expected him to smile, but his frown deep-ened. He touched her face suddenly with his burned hand.

  “Sometimes I almost hear what you’re trying to tell me. And then it fades against all my knowledge and experience. I’m glad you stayed. If I die, I’ll leave you facing one maddened dragon. But still, I’m glad.”

  A black moon rose high over his shoulder and she jumped. Ryd rolled off the ledge, into the mists. Peka hid her face from the peer-ing black glare. Blue lights smouldered through the mist, the moon rolled suddenly out of the sky and she could breathe again.

  Streaks of dispersing gold lit the dawn-sky like the sunrises she saw one month out of the year. Peka, in a cold daze on the ledge, saw Ryd for the first time in an hour. He was facing the dragon, his silver hand outstretched. In his palm lay a crystal so cold and deathly white that Peka, blinking at it, felt its icy stare into her heart.

  She shuddered. Her bones turned to ice; mist seemed to flow through her veins. She breathed bitter, frozen air as heavy as water. She reached for the wormspoor; her arm moved sluggishly, and her fingers unfolded with brittle movements. The dragon was breathing in short, harsh spurts. The silvery hoods were over its eyes. Its un-folded wing lay across the ice like a limp sail. Its jaws were open, hissing faintly, but its head was reared back, away from Ryd’s hand. Its heartbeat, in the silence, was slow, slow.

  Peka dragged herself up, icicle by icicle. In the clear wintry dawn, she saw the beginning and the end of the enormous ring around Hoarsbreath. The dragon’s tail lifted wearily behind Ryd, then fell again, barely making a sound. Ryd stood still; his eyes, relentless,spring-blue, were his only color. As Peka watched, swaying on the edge, the world fragmented into simple things: the edges of silver on the dragon’s scales, Ryd’s silver fingers, his old-man’s hair, the pure white of the dragon’s hide. They face one another, two powerful creatures born out of the same winter, harrowing one another. The dragon rippled along its bulk; its head reared farther back, giving Peka a dizzying glimpse of its open jaws. She saw the cracked tooth, crumbled like a jewel she might have battered inadvertently with her pick, and winced. Seeing her, it hissed, a tired, angry sigh.

  She stared down at it; her eyes seemed numb, incapable of sorrow. The wing on the ice was beginning to stir. Ryd’s head lifted. He looked bone-pale, his face expressionless with exhaustion. But the faint, icy smile of triumph in his eyes struck her as deeply as the stare from the death-eye in his palm.

  She drew in mist like the dragon, knowing that Ryd was not har-rowing an old, tired ice-dragon, but one out of his memories who never seemed to yield. “You bone-brained dragon,” she shouted, “how can you give up Hoarsbreath so easily? And to a Dragon-Harrower whose winter is colder and more terrible than yours.” Her heart seemed trapped in the weary, sluggish pace of its heart. She knelt down, wondering if it could understand her words, or only feel them. “Think of Hoarsbreath,” she pleaded, and searched for words to warm them both. “Fire. Gold. Night. Warm dreams, winter tales, silence—” Mist billowed at her and she coughed until tears froze on her cheeks. She heard Ryd call her name on a curious, inflexible note that panicked her. She uncorked the wormspoor with trembling fin-gers, took a great gulp, and coughed again as the blood shocked through her. “Don’t you have any fire at all in you? Any winter flame?” Then a vision of gold shook her: the gold within the dragon’s heart, the warm gold of wormspoor, the bitter gold of dragon’s blood. Ryd said her name again, his voice clear as breaking ice. She shut her eyes against him, her hands rising through a chill, dark dream. As he called the third time, she dropped the wormspoor down th
e dragon’s throat.

  The hoods over its eyes rose; they grew wide, white-rimmed. She heard a convulsive swallow. Its head snapped down; it made a sound between a bellow and a whimper. Then its jaws opened again and it raked the air with gold flame.

  Ryd, his hair and eyebrows scored suddenly with gold, dove into the snow. The dragon hissed at him again. The stream beyond him turned fiery, ran towards the sea. The great tail pounded furiously; dark cracks tore through the ice. The frozen cliffs began to sweat under the fire; pillars of ice sagged down, broke against the ground. The ledge Peka stood on crumbled at a wave of gold. She fell with it in a small avalanche of ice-rubble. The enormous white ring of dragon began to move, blurring endlessly past her eyes as the dragon gathered itself. A wing arched up toward the sky, then another. The dragon hissed at the mountain, then roared desperately, but only flame came out of its bowels, where once it had secreted winter. The chasms and walls of ice began breaking apart. Peka, struggling out of the snow, felt a lurch under her feet. A wind sucked at her her hair, pulled at her heavy coat. Then it drove down at her, thundering, and she sat in the snow. The dragon, aloft, its wingspan the span of half the island, breathed fire at the ocean, and its husk of ice began to melt.

  Ryd pulled her out of the snow. The ground was breaking up under their feet. He said nothing; she thought he was scowling, though he looked strange with singed eyebrows. He pushed at her, flung her toward the sea. Fire sputtered around them. Ice slid under her; she slipped and clutched at the jagged rim of it. Brine splashed in her face. The ice whirled, as chunks of the mountain fell into the sea around them. The dragon was circling the mountain, melting huge peaks and cliffs. They struck the water hard, heaving the ice-floes farther from the island. The mountain itself began to break up, as ice tore away from it, leaving only a bare peak riddled with mine-shafts.

  Peka began to cry. “Look what I’ve done. Look at it.” Ryd only grunted. She thought she could see figures high on the top of the peak, staring down at the vanishing island. The ocean, churning, spun the ice-floe toward the mainland. The river was flowing again, a blue-white streak spiralling down from the peak. The dragon was over the mainland now, billowing fire at the harbor, and ships without crews or cargo were floating free.

  “Wormspoor,” Ryd muttered. A wave ten feet high caught up with them, spilled, and shoved them into the middle of the channel. Peka saw the first of the boats taking the swift, swollen current down from the top of the island. Ryd spat out seawater, and took a firmer grip of the ice. “I lost every crystal, every dragon’s fire I possessed. They’re at the bottom of the sea. Thanks to you. Do you realize how much work, how many years—”

  “Look at the sky.” It spun above her, a pale, impossible mass of nothing. “How can I live under that? Where will I ever find dark, quiet places full of gold?”

  “I held that dragon. It was just about to leave quietly, without taking half of Hoarsbreath with it.”

  “How will we live on the island again? All its secrets are gone.”

  “For fourteen years I studied dragons, their lore, their flights, their fires, the patterns of their lives and their destructions. I had all the knowledge I thought possible for me to acquire. No one—”

  “Look at all that dreary flatland—”

  “No one,” he said, his voice rising, “ever told me you could har-row a dragon by pouring wormspoor down its throat!”

  “Well, no one told me, either!” She slumped beside him, too de-spondent for anger. She watched more boats carrying miners, young children, her mother, down to the mainland. Then the dragon caught her eye, pale against the winter sky, somehow fragile, beautifully crafted, flying into the wake of its own flame.

  It touched her mourning heart with the fire she had given it. Be-side her, she felt Ryd grow quiet. His face, tired and battered, held a young, forgotten wonder, as he watched the dragon blaze across the world’s cap like a star, searching for its winter. He drew a soft, in-credulous breath.

  “What did you put into that wormspoor?”

  “Everything.”

  He looked at her, then turned his face toward Hoarsbreath. The sight made him wince. “I don’t think we left even my father’s bones at peace,” he said hollowly, looking for a moment less Dragon-Har-rower than a harrowed miner’s son.

  “I know,” she whispered.

  “No, you don’t,” he sighed. “You feel. The dragon’s heart. My heart. It’s not a lack of knowledge or experiences that destroyed Hoarsbreath, but something else I lost sight of: you told me that. The dark necessity of wisdom.”

  She gazed at him, suddenly uneasy for he was seeing her. “I’m not wise. Just lucky—or unlucky.”

  “Wisdom is a flatlander’s word for your kind of feeling. You put your heart into everything—wormspoor, dragons, gold—and they become a kind of magic.”

  “I do not. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Ryd Yar-row. I’m a miner; I’m going to find another mine—”

  “You have a gold-mine in your heart. There are other things you can do with yourself. Not harrow dragons, but become a Watcher. You love the same things they love.”

  “Yes. Peace and quiet and private places—”

  “I could show you dragons in their beautiful, private places all over the world. You could speak their language.”

  “I can’t even speak my own. And I hate the flatland.” She gripped the ice, watching it come.

  “The world is only another tiny island, ringed with a great dragon of stars and night.”

  She shook her head, not daring to meet his eyes. “No. I’m not listening to you anymore. Look what happened the last time I listened to your tales.”

  “It’s always yourself you are listening to,” he said. The grey ocean swirled the ice under them, casting her back to the bewildering shores of the world. She was still trying to argue when the ice moored itself against the scorched pilings of the harbor.

  The Bully and the Beast

  Orson Scott Card

  Orson Scott Card was born in Richland, Washington in 1951, and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. In addition to writing he teaches classes and workshops, directs plays and is a professor of English at Southern Virginia University. Winner of four Hugos, two Nebulas, one World Fantasy Award and eight Locus Awards, Card has written more than forty novels and over sixty-five short stories. He is best known for his science fiction novels Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow and Speaker for the Dead and for his American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker, beginning with Seventh Son. He also writes contemporary fantasy, biblical novels, non-fiction, poetry, plays and scripts. His short fiction has appeared in a number of collections, among them career retrospectives Maps in a Mirror and Keeper of Dreams. In the early ’80s he edited two dragon anthologies—Dragons of Light and Dragons of Darkness. His most recent novel is Hidden Empire. Forthcoming is young adult novel Bully and the Beast, based on the short story below.

  The page entered the Count’s chamber at a dead run. He had long ago given up sauntering—when the Count called, he expected a page to appear immediately, and any delay at all made the Count irritable and likely to assign a page to stable duty.

  “My lord,” said the page.

  “My lord indeed,” said the Count. “What kept you?” The Count stood at the window, his back to the boy. In his arms he held a velvet gown, incredibly embroidered with gold and silver thread. “I think I need to call a council,” said the Count. “On the other hand, I haven’t the slightest desire to submit myself to a gaggle of jabbering knights. They’ll be quite angry. What do you think?”

  No one had ever asked the page for advice before, and he wasn’t quite sure what was expected of him. “Why should they be angry, my lord?”

  “Do you see this gown?” the Count asked, turning around and holding it up.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “Depends, doesn’t it, my lord, on who wears it.”

&n
bsp; “It cost eleven pounds of silver.”

  The page smiled sickly. Eleven pounds of silver would keep the average knight in arms, food, women, clothing, and shelter for a year with six pounds left over for spending money.

  “There are more,” said the Count. “Many more.”

  “But who are they for? Are you going to marry?”

  “None of your business!” roared the Count. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s a meddler!” The Count turned again to the window and looked out. He was shaded by a huge oak tree that grew forty feet the castle walls. “What’s today?” asked the Count.

  “Thursday, my lord.”

  “The day, the day!”

  “Eleventh past Easter Feast.”

  “The tribute’s due today,” said the Count. “Due on Easter, in fact, but today the Duke will be certain I’m not paying.”

  “Not paying the tribute, my lord?”

  “How? Turn me upside down and shake me, but I haven’t a farthing. The tribute money’s gone. The money for new arms is gone. The travel money is gone. The money for new horses is gone. Haven’t got any money at all. But gad, boy, what a wardrobe.” The Count sat on the sill of the window. “The Duke will be here very quickly, I’m afraid. And he has the latest in debt collection equipment.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An army.” The Count sighed. “Call a council, boy. My knights may jabber and scream, but they’ll fight. I know they will.”

  The page wasn’t sure. “They’ll be very angry, my lord. Are you sure they’ll fight?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the Count. “If they don’t, the Duke will kill them.”

  “Why?”

  “For not honoring their oath to me. Do go now, boy, and call a council.”

  The page nodded. Kind of felt sorry for the old boy. Not much of a Count, as things went, but he could have been worse, and it was pretty plain the castle would be sacked and the Count imprisoned and the women raped and the page sent off home to his parents. “A council!” he cried as he left the Count’s chamber. “A council!”