Bone, Fog, Ash & Star

by Catherine Egan

  Charlie had seen the same thing. “Islands!” he cried.

  These must be the mythical dragon isles, thought Nell excitedly, although she saw no dragons. The islands were bright gold and the setting sun gave them a fiery tinge. They bore no sign of vegetation but soared up out of the water, barren and gleaming with jagged rocks. Swarn’s dragon descended further, letting out a wrenching cry as it circled over the nearest island.

  The island beneath them stirred. The tip of the island lengthened, more and more of it appearing, lifting up out of the water. Nell saw eyes as green as the sea, a terrible head at the end of a seemingly endless neck, which lifted higher and higher, water streaming off it. The head opened into a mouth, a mouth large enough to swallow them all, including the dragon they rode upon. Swarn’s dragon was like an insect to this colossal creature. It let out a sound that rent the air, a sound that made Nell’s heart stutter and her mind go black. And then all the islands lifted their heads, all of them dragons as big as cities. Vast wings opened up over the green sea and the air was full of unearthly cries.

  Chapter

  ~21~

  The white tiger snarled, baring red gums and tongue, slinking along the shore. Nia was wearing a fox-fur coat like when Eliza had found her in the Mancer Library. Her face was very white and she was shivering a little from the cold.

  “Are you all right?” Eliza asked.

  Nia raised her eyebrows. “A funny question, coming from you,” she remarked. “I must say, it seems a cruel sort of irony that it should be winter here, as if I hadn’t had enough of snow. And it appears that one can’t work Illusion at the four lakes, so we’ll just have to bear the cold.”

  “I’m sorry.” Eliza wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for. It came out before she thought about it.

  A fallen tree lay along the shore, its upper branches disappearing into the ice of the lake. Nia brushed a patch of snow off the trunk and sat down. Eliza sat next to her.

  “You’ve had a rough time, I suppose, with the last three lakes,” said Nia. “And not enough sleep these past couple of weeks. Poor Smidgen. It’s all over your face. You never were any good at covering up your feelings. So tell me: What did you see?”

  Eliza hugged herself against the cold and fumbled for words that did not come at first. She felt strangely that in all the worlds, Nia was the only one to whom she could tell her secrets.

  “The lake of sweet lies…” Nia prompted her.

  “He doesnay love me,” said Eliza. “Nay…like that.”

  “No, of course not. Oh Smidgen, how blind are you? It’s touching but a bit pathetic. You’d better just get over him.”

  “How?”

  Her tears turned cold on her cheeks. The white tiger paced up and down in front of them, growling.

  “It seems impossible at first,” said Nia. “You think that this one person’s love is all you want, all you need to be whole. You think that without it you’ll hunger your whole life. But here is the truth, Smidgen: you’ll hunger your whole life anyway, no matter what. Someday it will be somebody else, but you’ll find that the heart breaks a little easier every time, and heals a little faster each time too. I remember how it is the first time. For better or for worse, you’ll never feel it again in quite the same way.”

  Eliza wept until she felt entirely empty, lighter than air. She slept a while, leaning against Nia. When she woke, she was lying on the ground wrapped in Nia’s fox fur coat. The tiger was sniffing at the frozen lake and Nia was still sitting thoughtfully on the fallen tree trunk.

  “What about the next lake?” Nia asked, almost as soon as Eliza’s eyes had opened. “The lake of hope?”

  “Everybody was safe and all right,” said Eliza sleepily. “I saw Holburg, aye.” She reached into her pocket for the final stone. Nia’s hand was on her wrist, quick as a snake.

  “Give it to me,” she murmured. Eliza handed it over without thinking.

  “Good girl. I must say, your hopes are modest. This is fascinating to me, you see. I’ve always longed to see the Hanging Gardens and the Sparkling Deluder. I went to visit the Blind Enchanter once, to see if he could help me, but he wouldn’t speak at all. I thought about Cursing him horribly as punishment but it seemed sort of overkill, considering he’s blind and can’t sing a note anymore. I could have given him stabbing gut pains for the rest of his life but in the end I just left him be, thinking I’d try again another time. I don’t see when I’ll have a chance now, thanks to you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing, it doesn’t help a bit. Well, go on. What about the lake of awful truths?”

  “Kyreth told me I’m a bad person,” she said dully, sitting up and pulling Nia’s coat tighter around her.

  “Kyreth told you?” said Nia, her eyes flashing. “He should not be able to tell anybody anything. He should be living in the grip of a mindless, implacable terror.”

  “We got him out of that place,” said Eliza, not looking at Nia. “After…afterwards. We took him back to the Citadel to free the Mancers from your Curse, and then…they’ve been helping him, aye. He’s still Cursed, but nay like you meant him to be, I spose.”

  Nia’s nostrils flared but she controlled her voice. “You know what he did. To me and to my mother.”

  “Yes,” said Eliza.

  “And now he is the bearer of an unwelcome message. Your idea of evil, come to tell you that you are not so perfect yourself.”

  “I nary thought I was,” said Eliza. “At least I try to do the right thing. You nary tried.”

  “Perhaps that just makes me more self-aware, not more wicked,” said Nia. “But you’re welcome to think of yourself as the good Sorceress and me as the bad Sorceress, if you find that kind of thing comforting. So Kyreth was the messenger of Awful Truths. The Shade you’re so fond of told you the Sweet Lies, I assume? Oh Smidgen, do control yourself. There is nothing less appealing than a powerful Sorceress with a trembling lower lip. Who brought you the message of hope?”

  “Foss,” Eliza managed.

  “Poor thing, you’re really on the edge, aren’t you? I’m not even going to ask about it. But in any case, it makes sense, doesn’t it? He was your teacher and, unlike the other Mancers, he always accepted you for yourself. What he wanted most was your happiness, I imagine, and so of course he should bring hope. Now we are at the lake of the Deep Forgotten. So why are you seeing me?”

  “I dinnay know. Are you really here?”

  “As much as I can be anywhere,” said Nia with a shrug. “Come on, Smidgen, don’t be obtuse. Why would I be here?”

  The snowy trees were full of ravens looking down at them.

  “What have you forgotten, Smidgen?”

  “My ma,” said Eliza. “I dinnay remember my ma from when I was a baby. And what she was then…is mostly inside you, now.”

  “Clever girl.”

  It was not Nia’s voice. Eliza looked at her in astonishment. Nia was gone. A red fox sat alertly where the tiger had been and Rea stood in the snow, looking down at Eliza. Not Rea as she was now – this Rea looked more like the portrait of her in the Mancer Citadel. Her face was younger, pale and serious, but mostly it was the way she carried herself that was unfamiliar. Eliza was struck by the resolute way she put her shoulders back, her feet planted on the ground with a kind of righteous certainty, her hazel eyes intense and penetrating, like she was not merely looking at Eliza or the lake or the trees, but looking into them.

  Rea knelt swiftly and cupped a hand around Eliza’s face. Her hand was very cold and her breath puffed out in plumes of white mist.

  “So like your father,” she said. “And I don’t just mean the way you look. I mean the way you love. If it weren’t for the power, I’d hardly believe you were mine.”

  Eliza could not move. This was her mother before she was beaten and broken and unmade, but even seeing her here could not bring back the memories that were buried too far in the past to retrieve, hidden behind everything that had happe
ned since.

  “You were so young, just a baby,” said Rea. “I was your world and you were mine. That’s how it is between a mother and child at that time. But I knew about the rest of the world, too. I couldn’t stop living in it even if I wanted to. I didn’t have the right. It was my duty, my calling, to protect the world before even my own daughter.”

  “I know that,” whispered Eliza. “I’m nay angry.”

  She knew as she said it that it was a lie. Rea smiled wryly at her. She did not look as if she smiled much. She stood up and squinted out over the lake. Eliza staggered to her feet as well.

  “I was your world, and I left you and never returned. That was what you grew up with: that lack, that loss. You don’t remember the loss, not exactly, but you cling to those you love with such ferocity, you would die for them, because the memory of that first loss is buried within you, and it defines you.”

  It felt like cracking up the center. It felt like death. Some memory stirred, somewhere deep.

  “It’s nay really you,” said Eliza desperately.

  “Of course not,” said Rea. “I’m gone forever.”

  A wave of fury washed over Eliza, washed away everything else. Her voice burst out of her like a wild thing from a cage: “How could you leave me? Why did you go?”

  “I believed I would come back,” said Rea. “I believed I would win. I’d never had cause to doubt my strength. But even if I’d known what would happen, I would have gone. What choice did I have? I could not turn my back on my task.”

  “You left me! You just left me behind!”

  It came back like a great wind, like a tempest that tears up the earth and leaves behind a ruin: the memory of her mother, the memory of her mother’s disappearance, the bottomless terror and grief and confusion of it. Tears blinded Eliza, blurring the image of Rea watching her with pity but also an unmoving calm, an unshakeable certainty in herself. She howled like a baby. Her heart smashed against her ribs, again and again. She returned to herself cradled in Nia’s arms. Nia was rocking her back and forth gently, whispering, “sh, sh, sh.”

  Eliza pulled free of Nia’s embrace, wiped the tears from her face.

  “Where is she?”

  “You know where,” said Nia. “Parts of her are in me. Parts of her remain in the body left to her. And parts of her are simply gone. She can’t be whole again.”

  “Unless I can find a way to take back what you stole from her,” said Eliza.

  Nia laughed sympathetically. “One thing at a time, Smidgen.” She held out the fourth enchanted stone. “I’m going to tell you a secret: You can survive the loss of all you love, of all you think you are, and yet still be Eliza. You knew it when I tried to rob you of yourself. You knew it then, but you have forgotten it again.”

  “But what would I have to live for?” Her sorrow was too big for her. It filled the ravens in the trees, so all their hearts overflowed with it.

  “That is the mystery,” said Nia. “That is what you live to find out. If you strip everything away, what is left at the core? What are we? I wish I could go with you, Smidgen, I’m dying of curiosity. But if anyone can go to meet the Sparkling Deluder and come back to tell the tale, I’ll bet it’s you. Here, eat this.”

  She grabbed Eliza by the back of the neck and shoved the rock into her mouth. Eliza struggled and gagged. Without wanting to, she bit down. A heavy darkness filled her throat. Nia was gone. She saw the shadows of the trees as if she was looking through fogged glass or her own tears. Some shadow whose form she could barely make out moved towards her and touched her, and the touch was ice and fire at once. It turned and moved, changing shape as it did so and yet no shape fixed enough that she could name it, limbs more than she could count and then perhaps none at all, it moved and she followed, and the trees folded and fell and the ground softened and swallowed her.

  She was deep in the earth. She felt the beating hearts and the clamour of consciousness all around her. She felt great bodies folding against each other, and she was the sorrow of the Ancients, because they loved life, they loved the world. She slid like a tear from an eye into the earth, and the earth was made of slumbering bodies. She crawled, two hearts beating, four legs and four arms. She pulled herself up out of the earth and as she took in her first gasp of air she tore apart from her other self. She lay gasping in the dark and the cold. The earth stirred once more beneath her, and was still. She was bound in flesh and time and space. Blazing-eyed they came to her, tall and gold and white. They formed a ring around her, begged her to come with them. They gave her shackles and they gave her love, and she took both with a grateful heart, for she was too unmoored, too much alone.

  Eliza opened her eyes and saw only darkness. The ground was hard and cool beneath her. She sensed immediately that she was in a cave. It was a very long cave, deep in the earth, and narrow too. She could not stand up, and so she slithered and crawled towards the glimmer of light in the distance. She crawled out of the opening and found herself high in the Yellow Mountains. Bright flowers blanketed the slopes. Far below she saw the four lakes, one in spring, one in summer, one in fall, one in winter, unchanging. At that moment the world seemed impossibly beautiful and she felt grateful just to be alive and witness to it.

  Beyond the lakes lay the Dreaming Wasteland. It was a white moonscape, a barren expanse cut through with rivers that gleamed like quicksilver. Long black dragons with tattered wings swung over the terrain, letting out high, mournful snatches of song. A faint haze, like steam, rose up from the ground, forming swirls of cloud.

  A crimson bird as big as a myrkestra swooped out of the sky and landed next to Eliza. It looked at her, expectant. She thought of the great Panther waiting for her to return what she had taken and the terrible prophecies the past Oracle had spoken of her. She thought of all the powerful beings in pursuit of her. She thought of Charlie fleeing the Thanatosi and Foss slowly dying in the Enchanter’s cabin. She felt little hope that it might all come out right, but she had set her course and she would follow it through. She climbed on the bird’s back and left the beautiful world behind her.

  Chapter

  ~22~

  Watching the immense Dragons surge up out of the water, Nell was, for a few moments at least, entirely free of fear, so great was her amazement at their size and beauty. Many of them had been entirely submerged but surfaced now, like islands springing up out of the sea, and the water churned and rocked with the movement of the great beasts. They formed a circle and Swarn’s dragon descended and landed at the centre of it, floating on the water quite comfortably, unafraid.

  Nell saw that Charlie had his hands over his ears and then realized that she was doing the same thing. The sound of the Dragons was like the sky being torn open. Her head was ringing with it. Swarn, however, was standing up on the head of her dragon. She held her double-sided spear up in the air and was emitting an awful wail of her own. One of the Dragons leaned its head down towards them, casting a huge shadow, and let out a whistling reply that nearly knocked Swarn off the head of her dragon. She seemed to understand whatever the dragon said, for she looked sharply to the west. Charlie and Nell looked also. They saw a whitish line moving just over the darkening horizon.

  “What is that?” shouted Nell.

  “Ten thousand or more myrkestras,” replied Swarn.

  “What? How?”

  “The Faeries are coming,” said Swarn. “The Dragon tells me that there was an attempt at theft just days ago – an attempt that failed. Now the Faeries are out in full force. They are waging war on the Dragons.”

  “What for?”

  Swarn smiled grimly. “The Gehemmis. It seems everybody has decided it would be a good idea to collect all four.”

  Charlie looked around at the sea full of colossal dragons and laughed a little. “What could the Faeries possibly do against these?” he asked.

  Swarn’s dragon lurched up out of the water and flew over the expanse of foreleg and shoulder of the Dragon that had spoken to them. It settle
d on the hard, bright scales between the wings.

  “Come.” Swarn’s face was bright with joy. “They will take us to see the Dragon Lord.”

  “Oh. Do we want to…see the Dragon Lord?” asked Charlie nervously, but Swarn did not reply. With a great roaring of water, the Dragons emerged from the sea like islands being uprooted, and wings many kilometers long beat the air. The Dragon’s back was so huge there was little fear of falling as it flew eastward, towards the dimming horizon.

  As they flew through the night, many more islands that proved to be Dragons rose into the air to fly with them. They could no longer see the approaching Faeries in the dark.

  When dawn came, the sun inching up over the horizon, they saw what appeared to be the end of the world. The sea poured over the edge, and nothing lay beyond it, nothing at all but the sky. The horde of Dragons flew out into the nothingness, shut their wings, and began to drop.

  They plunged, dropping with the sea, for miles. There was a faint, echoing roar, perhaps the sea landing somewhere far below, but they could not see. The roar grew louder and the air was hazy with spray. Another world came suddenly into view. The Dragons stretched their wings out again and coasted over bottomless, twisting towers of rock, cliffs and arches, all gleaming like the inside of a seashell, smoothed and shaped by wind and water. Vast caverns hung with glistening moss. Dragons sat poised upon clifftops or curled in canyons and caves. The shining stone was everywhere cracked and riven with black lines. Here and there, empty black calderas smoked. A mist of sea-spray hung over it all.

  The Dragon landed high on a cliff and stretched out its foreleg, enabling them to scramble and slide to the ground without injury. Swarn remained standing on the creature’s great claw and said to Nell and Charlie:

  “Wait for me here. If I do not return, my dragon will know the time for you to go.”

  Her face was changed. She seemed younger, almost. Not less weathered and lined – but rejuvenated.

  “What do you mean, if you dinnay return?” cried Nell. “Swarn –”