Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits

by Robin McKinley

  She didn’t move into the firelight this time, but I was beginning to learn to feel my way around the darkness that is dragon as opposed to the darkness that is just darkness. She was belly-flat to the ground although her head was up, the long neck carrying it some unguessable length above the reach of the firelight. Her eyes were closed when we stepped into the firelit circle, but then she opened them and we had shining dragon eyes beaming down on us like stars. Two stars.

  I leaned against the bottom of her shoulder. She’d moved the foreleg out a little from her body on the side with the stiff wing, which I’m sure was about the wing and not about expecting me or knowing where I’d want to lean, but it meant I could get in between it and her body. I never thought about how this might be dangerous, me being bug-sized and all, and maybe her not paying attention. She was paying attention. I don’t know where Dag went. Sippy came and leaned with me. We just stood there and leaned and nobody said anything or hummed anything either. But I felt better after and I was pretty sure Dag did too.

  But she still only had two eyes.

  I know Dag didn’t get any sleep to speak of that night because I didn’t either. I did offer him some quietleaf—I did have some left in my pack—but he refused so I didn’t have any either in some kind of stupid loyalty. I lay there trying to be quiet while he tossed and turned and muttered to himself and periodically sat up and stared out the window like he was thinking about running away. Maybe he was. But I bet he was thinking about running away with Hereyta. He wouldn’t have left her behind to face the shame of a First Flight without her partner, even if it maybe looked like the way to spare her shame, because if Dag wasn’t there she wouldn’t have to fly. She was only a dragon, what did she know? But why had she been waiting for us that evening? She knew. Whatever was going to happen he wouldn’t do that to her. But smuggling a dragon out of anywhere, even a place already full of dragons and built to have dragons moving through it, would be a little difficult. So that’s probably why he kept lying back down again with a long sigh.

  Mum and Dad had told us lots of stories when we were all little, and a lot of those stories had dragons in them. There was always lots of flying and lots of heroics in those stories. Dragons lost eyes in these stories occasionally but you never heard about what happened to them after. You always knew it was tragic though—worse than the old human veteran limping home leaning on his cane.

  Except there was one story I’d been half remembering, but more to the point half forgetting, ever since Dag had come home looking like a condemned man, and told us about Hereyta and First Flight. It was a story Ralas had told me, a long time ago, when I’d first brought Sippy home, and it was mostly about a foogit, which was why Ralas thought I’d like it. But I was sure there was a dragon in it. And I could almost remember that this particular dragon had only two eyes. And as I say, dragons don’t stay in stories when they lose an eye. But I couldn’t remember anything else about the story—the two-eyed dragon should have stuck better, but I was foogit-obsessed at that point. I kept trying to remember anybody’s name—the dragon’s, the foogit’s, even the human’s or humans’, since there had to be humans in it too—because if I could remember a name I’d ask Eled, casually, if he knew a story with someone named whatever in it. I just wasn’t going to say to him, hey, you don’t happen to remember some weird old story about a foogit and a two-eyed dragon, do you? With Sippy standing there. And Hereyta.

  Sippy was still subdued at breakfast, although being subdued didn’t stop him from eating everything that came his way. I’ve said that years tended to stay together but the third-years on First Flight morning had invisible ʺdon’t come nearʺ signs all around them. I would have hung back myself except Dag broke his twenty-four hours of silence to say, ʺWhat? Come on. Watching Sippy eat may give me some appetite.ʺ It didn’t seem to.

  I probably knew all the First Flighters by name but my eye lingered on the ones I’d had conversations with or slipped some quietleaf or gimpweed or something to. Setyep was looking as green around the edges as Dag was. Doara actually smiled at me, but it was a smile that said ʺYes, I know how bad I look, don’t even try and guess how I feel.ʺ I smiled back. Maybe it was the colour of the cadets’ formal uniforms, yellow and red, that makes fair people look grey and dark people look purple and anybody in between green. And the third-years seemed to walk ever so slightly funny because they had their tapping sticks in their boots. The sticks are really slender and your formal boots have a loop for one anyway, so it wasn’t that a tapping stick in your boot was crippling you. It’s just you knew what having it there meant.

  Eled still just looked like Eled, but I thought it was costing him. And Fistagh was looking rather too well, as if he was under a small glamour, which I think he was. He had a funny half smell about him that I recognised from Ralas. I did wonder if it was legal, which I doubted, but even if I’d ratted him out it wouldn’t have given Hereyta a third eye.

  Fistagh had a girl with him. She was extremely pretty, and they both knew it. One other First Flighter, Vorl, had someone who had to be his brother with him, they looked so much alike, but Vorl’s brother wasn’t small and scrawny except for his ears and feet, nor was he accompanied by a demented foogit.

  When Dag stood up with the others I grabbed Sippy’s topknot and looked uncertainly at Dag.

  ʺYou don’t have to come if you don’t want to,ʺ Dag said in this awful flat voice that didn’t sound anything like him. ʺIt’s okay.ʺ

  I shook my head violently. ʺIt’s not that—you must know it’s not that. It’s okay with me if you want Sippy and me to stay out of the way and not, you know, not embarrass you. I can go back up to the room and sit—sit on Sippy—till—till—ʺ

  ʺTill it’s all over?ʺ said Dag. ʺYes. Well, if it’s really all the same to you, I’d actually rather you came.ʺ He turned away, not checking to see if we were following. Of course we were. I let go of Sippy’s topknot but he stayed right beside me, nearly as glued to my leg as Fistagh’s girl was to his side.

  The First Flighters drew lots for the order they filed out of the hsa. We were near the last. It gave us plenty of extra time to adjust, readjust, de-adjust, and super-adjust every scrap of Hereyta’s harness six times. Maybe sixteen. I say ʺusʺ but it was mostly Dag. He knew where the bits went and I still only sort of knew. The tip of Hereyta’s nose followed Dag’s every tiny motion, back and forth, up and down, round and round. She did this a lot anyway but this morning the nose-tip was about a hand’s-breadth away from the back of his neck.

  I was watching Dag and didn’t really think about what I was doing so I started petting one of Hereyta’s ankles. I was reassuring me, not her, but when I stopped Hereyta’s nose left the nape of Dag’s neck just long enough to point at me. I started petting again. The nose went back to Dag. Sippy, like we were a pair of bad comedians, was licking the side of her other foot. He couldn’t reach her ankle.

  It was our turn—Hereyta and Dag’s turn—finally. I wondered how many times Hereyta had made a First Flight. Maybe never, because I think she hadn’t been an Academy training dragon till after she lost her eye. Why had she been waiting for us last night after curfew? I trotted behind Dag and Sippy trotted behind me.

  I’d never counted the First Flighters. There were probably about twenty; Academy classes are small. But twenty dragons look like they go on forever. I couldn’t even recognise the dragons at the far end of the queue. Unfortunately Fistagh was about halfway along and I could recognise him and his yellow-gold dragon. She was beautiful too; I might as well get used to it that all dragons are beautiful. I couldn’t see Eled or Doara. Setyep and Arac were two behind Fistagh, so like only the distance between one end of my village and the other from us. There were only three more dragons and riders after us.

  I was just noticing that Fistagh’s girl was in the saddle with him when Dag said, ʺUp you go.ʺ He’d unrolled the double belt that the dragonrider uses to tie himself in place in case of unexpected acrobatics or vertigo (a
lso the Firespace is just so strange, Eled had told me, that you can get numb or breathless as well as dizzy: lots of ways to lose it and fall off), which doubles as a mounting ladder, since it has rungs between the two long bands. It’s an awkward climb because the rungs are made of the same soft tough cloth that the belts are and you worry about grinding your toes into your dragon’s side, but on formal occasions you use the ladder.

  I gaped at Dag.

  ʺTuck Sippy under your arm; I’ll be right behind you and I’ll give him or you a shove if he looks like he’s slipping.ʺ I’d only been up and down the mounting ladder once—and unhindered by a foogit passenger—most of the time you either climb the dragon as you can, or ask for the head to come down and lift you up somewhere. Dimly I was thinking, Dag let me climb the ladder that once just because he knew I was interested in anything to do with dragons.

  ʺCome on,ʺ Dag said impatiently. ʺStad is halfway up already.ʺ Stad was next behind us in the queue. I climbed.

  Sippy, who was really not himself this morning, hung like a package over my arm, and while my shoulder was coming out of its socket—and my other arm and side were fiery from strain—by the time I got to Hereyta’s saddle, we did both get there. ʺPush up forward,ʺ Dag said, ʺI’m coming in behind you.ʺ Hereyta’s saddle was bigger than usual because she was bigger than usual, so there was plenty of space, and I now noticed that Dag must have been doing some secret alterations because the bumps and bulges for both padding and helping keep the rider in place had been rearranged for two. Or three. I had thought Dag had been spending a lot of time ripping out bits of the saddle and sewing them back together, but I’d thought it was general reflex obsessiveness. But Dag had been planning for us to come with him. Why? When had he decided? Why? Ralas had only said take us back to the Academy with him.

  I settled Sippy in front of me so he could look out over the pommel. Dag dropped a loop of the ladder-belt over me. I stuck my arms through a couple of the rungs and snugged Sippy down with another.

  ʺComfy?ʺ said Dag.

  I would have liked to say no but I wasn’t sure if truth disguised as humour was a good idea right now so I said thanks instead. I was feeling so stunned and flabbergasted and appalled I wasn’t feeling anything really. Dag grunted. Maybe he thought that truth disguised as humour wouldn’t be a good idea either.

  The three dragons after us were all mounted and their riders tied in too. I couldn’t see Vorl so I couldn’t see if his brother was riding with him. Fistagh’s girl was behind him.

  My heart was beating so hard I thought I was going to throw up. The Academy officers were making a long queue in front of the dragon queue. Dag had told me they read out a lot of historical stuff that probably nobody ever heard except maybe some of the onlookers. Onlookers. I’d forgotten. Some First Flighters’ families, the ones who either lived nearby or were wealthy enough to make journeys that weren’t about buying or selling anything, came to watch. I looked around. There was a rope fence that wasn’t usually there at the edge of the field. There were probably a hundred people behind it, but they were scattered in little clumps behind the dragon they were interested in. The officers were now bellowing something at us. There was one almost right in front of us and one more near the end of the queue and then five or six stretched out along in the other direction, and they were reading just not in unison enough that it made it impossible to hear what they were saying. I could hear words like honour and heroic and stalwart flying over my head.

  I couldn’t think of anywhere I belonged less. Sippy was actually shivering. I put my arms around him. We’d heat up in the Firespace, I thought.

  Except we weren’t going to the Firespace. How could I have forgotten? Hereyta had only two eyes. I still didn’t know why Dag wanted us to come with him, but he must have thought it would make it easier somehow, in spite of our extra weight for Hereyta’s weak wing. I had a really ignoble moment when I thought that Dag might have brought us because we were foolish and ridiculous and maybe that would make it our fault somehow when Hereyta couldn’t Fly with the other dragons. But I realised immediately what a really rotten thing that was to think, and I knew it wasn’t true. Maybe it was because Hereyta liked us. She played with Sippy and when I’d stopped petting her ankle she’d noticed. Maybe Dag thought it would be better for her to have three friends with her rather than only one. I wasn’t sure he was right. Dragons are very proud.

  The officer-heralds had stopped shouting and were leaving the field. It was a blue clear day, cold for the time of year; Sippy’s and my excuse for shivering. We seemed to be in the sky already, sitting so high up, in the saddle at the base of Hereyta’s neck, with her standing at full attention. And I don’t like heights. The heat of her beat through the heavy leather of the saddle and flowed off her neck in front of us like a mane, but it barely touched me; it was like it broke and swept past, like water around a rock. I wished I felt more rocklike, steady and solid and untroubled. I wished I’d never come. I wished Ralas hadn’t sent us.

  Poor Hereyta.

  The neck in front of us quivered. I don’t know how I knew that. It wasn’t anything I saw. But Hereyta knew what was coming. I leant forward, squashing Sippy into the pommel, but after years of illicit lying between my feet and the wooden foot of my bed he knew how to squash. I let go of him and put both hands on Hereyta’s neck.

  I was so busy feeling Hereyta through the palms in my hands I didn’t notice when the first dragon launched itself into the air.

  The backdraft, even from the far front of the queue, was amazing. Not that it disturbed the other dragons one whisker, except that the tension level arced up like a firework on a solstice, but it nearly pulled all my hair out. Sippy rearranged his squashedness a little but he stopped shivering. I was feeling something else, not just heat, beaming up from Hereyta, through my hands, into the rest of me, into Sippy.

  Another dragon hurled itself into the air. The ground shook and the trees bent back, their leaves streaming in the wind like a girl’s long hair. And another. And another. It was like being in a series of small, violent, curiously self-contained storms, each one closer than the last. . . .

  I wasn’t anything like ready, and I can’t begin to describe it. I wished that it wasn’t just my body tied to the saddle but that I had a neck brace as well. I thought my head might just about part from my shoulders. I couldn’t breathe. My stomach seemed to have been left behind, which was just as well, because if it had come too I might have been sick. My arms felt like they were being dragged out of my shoulders, my legs from my pelvis, my eyebrows and nose just shoved off my face from the pressure, my eyelids peeled down with them. My eyes were trying to weep from the blast, but the wind snatched the tears away and my eyes felt dry and sore. I couldn’t see anything. And it seemed to go on and on and on.

  Hereyta went on spiralling up and up and up with great thunderous heaves of her wings. I finally managed to drag my head from crushed backward against my spine to crushed forward against my chest. This way I could kind of see some of what was going on around me, when the vast, country-wide wings on either side of me allowed it. The other dragons were disappearing, and I realised that some of the noise that I thought was Hereyta’s wings was actually the rumbly, echoey, huge whomping noises the disappearing dragons created as they slid into the Firespace.

  Whomp and whomp again. There weren’t many dragons left. And Hereyta carried on, climbing and climbing and climbing. The last dragon I saw was Arac, Setyep an unrecognisable speck. And then they disappeared too.

  There was only us left.

  And then the worst thing happened. The thing that was even worse than Hereyta not being able to make the jump. And I don’t know how it happened. I’d tied him in myself, and I knew how to tie him, because I knew what a wriggler he was.

  Sippy snaked out from between me and the pommel. Out of the harness that kept him safe.

  And jumped off Hereyta’s back. Into the air. Into nothing.

  He might have lan
ded on a wing—he should have landed on a wing; Hereyta’s wings are big enough to hug the world—but he didn’t. I swear he aimed. He aimed for the little triangular gap where the wing met the shoulder. And fell through it. I could see him, a little hairy lump—the wind fanned his hair out till he looked like a greeny-brown dandelion clock—getting smaller and smaller and smaller and farther and farther and farther away. . . .

  I heard Dag cry out behind me. I only know because of how sore my throat was later that I must have been screaming. I was busy trying to get out of my own harness—like that was going to do any good—and Dag was busy trying to stop me.

  And Hereyta turned in the air like a swallow, neatly, gracefully, impossibly, and plunged after Sippy.

  My memory gets pretty confused after that. We’d climbed much higher than where a dragon usually finds its navigation points and goes into the Firespace, I think, so I guess we had some room to manoeuvre. Maybe it makes some kind of sense that Sippy, Hereyta and I—because despite Dag’s efforts I had got out of my harness—arrived at the same little piece of air at the same time. I don’t actually remember falling. I remember seeing Sippy rolling in the air as if he was perfectly at ease, like he rolled on the ground sometimes when he was so excited he couldn’t think what to do with himself.

  And I seem to remember Hereyta turning her head toward us, keeping her deadly wings at almost the full distance of her long neck—although even so, with every stroke, Sippy and I bobbed up and down on the air-waves like little boats pitch in the wake of a ship—but we were falling, falling, falling. . . .

  And then I do remember the roaring and the squashing, which could just be the air, but then the heat, and the sharpness of it, almost like being cut with a hot knife. And I have a vague, crazy flash of memory of being still in the middle of the roaring and the squashing but having got my arms around Sippy somehow; and then an even crazier flash of glancing off the rough tip of Hereyta’s outthrust nose which was suddenly right there under us to be fallen on, and into the concavity farther back, behind the nostrils, just in front of the steep higher-than-a-man-is-tall crag where the dragon’s array of eyes is. We hit and rolled and juddered . . . and thumped against the bottom of the empty left eye socket.