Dragonlove

by Marc Secchia

  This was the place of Reaving.

  The Princess felt as though she had plunged into a frozen lake. Her bones hurt. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably. All twelve of Azziala’s Councillors, even aged Feyzuria, had hiked up to the peak that afternoon, but none of them seemed to feel the cold. Perhaps their Dragon-golden skin was proof against freezing?

  With a wail, the unfortunate man cast himself into one of the nostrils. His despairing cry echoed for many seconds before fading into nothingness. Mercy. Azziala had no need of magical commands. The power of her will had been enough to drive that soldier to his death.

  How deep were those caves, Lia wondered? Her teardrops froze to her eyelashes. Instead of liquid, icicles tinkled against her cheeks.

  Azziala said, “I knew about the disturbance this morning, but they waited until evening to make their report?”

  “You did right, Highness,” said Feyzuria. “That lizard is unusually powerful. A great feast awaits us.”

  The mother’s eyes returned to her shivering daughter. “First, we must see what is needed to turn this one to our cause. Strategy, my dear aunt, is a game of years and the patience of a hunting snow leopard, as you taught me. But I sense the time is at hand. Prepare her for the Reaving!”

  The Princess of Fra’anior briefly considered if she should unleash her magic. One against thirteen was poor odds. One against an Island-nation? She would doom Grandion as surely as she doomed herself, and Razzior would help himself to the Scroll of Binding–stolen or not–with a few less of the opposition to worry about. Better then to turn into an ice-statue upon a mountaintop as she bided her time? Part of her, perversely, welcomed one more chance to thumb her nose at fate, coupled with a feeling she recognised as a reckless craving for oblivion. Neither of her true parents wanted her. Their betrayals cut deeper than she had ever imagined.

  A channel some three feet wide connected the ‘nostrils’. Either side a stone archway stood rooted as if carved from a monolithic block of stone, giving the appearance of a nose ring such as these Islanders used to tie or lead their orrican, a type of russet brown, thick-coated buffalo similar to the domesticated water buffalo of the Kingdom of Kaolili, Hualiama understood. She had a nasty suspicion she knew exactly where the ritual of Reaving was to take place.

  To the west, the suns touched the horizon. The wind had dropped. Surprised, Hualiama glanced about her. If anything, the tranquillity compounded the cold, an illusion grounded in her notion that the wind’s friction provided some element of warmth.

  Azziala said, “Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, you stand at the roof of the world. This is the westernmost Isle of our Cluster. To the west, all is an ocean of Cloudlands. To the East lie the lands Dramagon promised us.” Her hands upon Hualiama’s shoulders swivelled her about as she spoke. “Child of my flesh, you came to us from afar with claims of blood and kinship. Yet flesh is weak, and born to die.”

  “Flesh is weak,” intoned the twelve Enchantresses.

  The ritual had begun? Lia forced herself not to resist as Shazziya fitted solid manacles to her wrists, and clamped her ankles together with a heavier, single-piece manacle. Whatever they purposed, she would survive.

  “We turn our backs upon the night.”

  As one, the Enchantresses turned to face the eastern horizon. “We reject the night. We wait for the dawn.”

  Shazziya hefted Hualiama’s diminutive frame with casual ease, moving along the peninsula between the nostrils of the Dragon’s Pipe. For a bowel-twisting second, Lia presumed they meant to toss her in. The pipes were roughly circular and apparently depthless, as was the connecting part. Reaching up, Shazziya looped two short chains through metal rings embedded in the archway, and used a touch of unfamiliar magic to lock them in place. Without further ado, the Enchantress released her captive, causing Lia to drop slightly and dangle from the archway in the precise centre of the space between the two pipes. With the briefest of nods, Shazziya drew back four measured steps.

  Crossly, the royal ward bade her churning stomach cease its misbehaviour. There would be worse to come. Her full weight depended upon her wrists, chained shoulder-width apart. Lia glanced down at her body. Girlishly slender and scarred by her experiences, it seemed too frail a vessel to cup the life that tingled in her veins, and a poor choice for the fire-gifts of the finest of friends. Love and loyalty were Flicker’s gift to her. But what exquisite form of madness had possessed Amaryllion to grant a Human girl a whisper of an Ancient Dragon’s soul-fire? And how could the Empress, in all her pomp and power, fail to detect these secrets?

  As if echoing her thoughts, Azziala intoned, “Mighty Dramagon, we offer you one scarred by birth and life. Take her. Reave her. Let the breath of your mountain part flesh from bone, until nothing is left which has not been Reaved. May Hualiama become one of us, or may her flesh turn to ice with the coming of the dawn, and shatter upon the slopes of your mountain.”

  “Reave her!” cried the twelve.

  “It was Dramagon himself, blessed father of our nation, who gave these Isles to us to be our winnowing ground,” said Azziala, her expression growing yet grimmer. “Winter’s ice for the Human realm and summer’s warmth for the lizards to the East. A land of duality, suns-light and shadow, cold and warmth. Thus in duality your life is suspended between the heavens above and the Islands below, part of neither, part of both.”

  “Heavens above and Islands below,” echoed the priestesses of her ghastly cabal.

  Lia had always wondered where the common saying had originated. Could it be here, in the Lost Islands? Or had they twisted it to their own ends? Always, she had seen it as symbolic of beauty–the night’s velvet darkness above, and the Islands’ extraordinary beauty and variety below.

  “A cupful of life’s blood to symbolise what is poured out this night.”

  Shazziya unexpectedly flung a cupful of warm, sticky liquid full in her face. It splattered her hair and ran down her chest and abdomen. Hualiama gasped and then gagged. Blood, she realised from the tang. Mercy! Oh, double mercy, it was blood mixed with the foul magic of these Dragon-Haters …

  “The lifeblood of the Watchman who failed in his duty,” said Azziala. Lia tried to spit. She wiped her face on her outstretched arms, spreading the crimson stain. “Very well, Hualiama. We will wait until the Reaving begins. Then we will abandon you to the night. Should you survive, you will be my daughter, heir to the Throne of the Lost Islands.”

  Should she wish to survive, only to attain such a hateful title?

  Silence as profound as a Cloudlands abyss enveloped the mountaintop.

  The Dragon-Haters stood motionless, waiting. The wind did not stir. Before her stretched the snow-capped peaks and icy Isles of their Cluster, seeming to groan beneath the burden of harsh, unforgiving cold. Dipping beneath the horizon, the suns threw a final halo across her thinly-clad body, and with that, it seemed to her that the mountain took a single, cavernous inhalation, and then began to exhale a stream of air so intensely cold, it turned to mist the instant it exited the Dragon’s Pipe. The odours of dankness and decay prickled her nostrils, along with a faint hint of sulphur, jasmine and metallic minerals, suggesting the draconic with a medley of scents at once unfamiliar to the Human girl but curiously evocative. Pain spread up her limbs as the cold rose.

  “The Reaving has begun!” cried Azziala.

  “It has begun!” echoed the twelve. They began to file down the mountain, one by one, until Lia was left alone with her mother. Already, the stretching of her arms grew uncomfortable, and the manacles bit into her wrists. The cold dug into her calf muscles like frigid Dragon’s talons slowly, unbearably, twisting their way beneath the muscles.

  The Empress said, “There’s a curious quality about this air from Dramagon’s mountain. It strips away extraneous magic, leaving bare the kernel of our being. Even your ruzal will not work here, child.”

  Her slip-up in Ra’aba’s cell had been duly noted.

  “Do you hate me, mother?”
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  “Hate? Of course not.” Her mother examined her as Hualiama imagined Dramagon might have examined one of his luckless specimens. “This is the Protocol of the Forbearing Mother, the Nineteenth. Twenty-one summers have I waited to usher you into your true place in this Island-World, Hualiama. This Reaving is an act of love, the best gift a mother can give her daughter.”

  “My true place is upon Grandion’s back,” Hualiama retorted, lifting her legs to try to evade the creeping chill.

  “Every false belief will be Reaved out of you,” Azziala asserted.

  “Do you honestly imagine I’ll ever become one of you?”

  “Survive the Reaving, and you will be.”

  “Survive being frozen to death, do you mean?” Lia asked, openly sarcastic.

  “If you’re worthy, you’ll find a way.”

  As she spoke, Azziala had been moving closer. Now, she reached up to tear away Lia’s undergarments, and with them, came the White Dragoness’ scale. Somehow, in all that had transpired, the cord had snapped and the scale had slipped beneath her right breast. Her mother did not appear to notice. She dropped the garments together with the scale into the black void beneath her daughter’s feet. Another loss. Silently, Hualiama vowed she would find that scale again. The White Dragoness deserved to be remembered for her sacrifice.

  “Now, all is stripped away,” she said. “Thus will your inner self be stripped away. Child, even in your benighted life, you have risen–from Ianthine’s paw to the Halls of the Dragons; from Gi’ishior to the royal house of Fra’anior; from Ra’aba’s Dragonship to the shores of Ha’athior; from Ha’athior, home. Fate is your plaything. That’s your true power. You rise where others fall.”

  Angrily, Lia said, “May I conclude, then, that your brand of love amounts solely to ambition?”

  Azziala raised her chin in an imperious gesture that Hualiama recognised only too well–from herself. “How sorely you misjudge me. You’re blind–”

  “Not blind to the true face of love.”

  “What girl of two decades is an expert in love?” But the Empress wiped her brow in a tired gesture, as if all the burdens of a lifetime had become manifest at once. “I must feed. I leave you with this, Hualiama. I received your name in a dream, while you yet lived in my womb. It’s an ancient name which means ‘song of the Eastern star.’ It comes with a story. In Dragon lore, there’s a legendary star called Hualiama. It’s the last star to glimmer when the suns rise in the East. The lizards say it can only be seen for the briefest of instants as the twin suns crest the horizon, just a flash of blue, on the night of a five-moon conjunction–as it will be, tonight.”

  “A blue star?”

  Hualiama realised that she spoke to an empty mountaintop. Had she dreamed, or had Azziala defied her nature to speak a kind word to her daughter?

  Her tears fell, but they turned into hailstones long before they reached the bottom of the Dragon’s Pipe.

  Chapter 30: The Reaving

  Kindness from her mother trembled her Island in ways Hualiama had never anticipated. The dreadful Empress had a Human soul. She was redeemable. And here was prekki-mush-hearted Lia picturing a tearful reconciliation with her baby-abandoning, murderous mother who thought freezing her offspring was a gift of love.

  Madness! Anger summoned her fires as the mist billowed up toward her hips, making her appear as though she waded hip-deep through billowing clouds of white smoke. So glacial was the cold, she could see it undulating down the mountain in great streamers, like the straggling beard of an old man. Fire and ice fought for dominance in her and around her. At times the Princess of Fra’anior thought the fire should recover its ground, making the nerves of her lower body scream with pain every time they thawed out, only for the cold to return, deeper and more insidious. Even an hour was too much. She sweated with the supreme effort. The moisture froze and refroze to her body until her struggles cracked it open like a chrysalis. As promised, her ruzal lay dormant. She was trapped.

  As the stars wheeled overhead and the moons waxed, brightening the cloudless night, the white fog spread over the nearest Islands with the air of an animate creature which purposed to smother any life, sucking the heat away until any final, sluggish movement froze into immobility. Hualiama wondered what might exist within the mountain that generated such an unnatural cold. An Ancient Dragon? The fabled ice-Dragons of the farthest north? She realised that someone was raving, wailing, pleading for the pain to cease. It was her.

  Lia clamped her jaw shut.

  Chaotic visions beset her. Lia cried out for help and the white mist grew black and stormy, heralding the advent of Fra’anior, whose laughter belled over the emptiness between the Islands.

  Ah, the thief is brought low. Suffering, little one? Screaming? Sweet music to the ears of one you purposed to defy!

  I never … meant …

  Meant or not, the deed is done. The Black Dragon’s scorn poured over her, torrential.

  Help me, she sobbed. Help me, don’t scorn–

  Don’t what? Blow you away?

  Storm winds broke over the mountaintop, making her chained body flutter like a flag in a stiff breeze and her long hair ripple behind her until she feared it should crack clean off her frozen scalp. Blood ran down her arms from where the manacles cut into her pale, icy skin. She could not breathe. He stole the breath from her lungs, but the monstrous power of his Dragon fire warmed her.

  When the little one who bowed beneath his mighty Ancient-Dragon blast felt liquid fire sear her numbed senses, Fra’anior drew back with a new, vicious laugh. Feel my minions rise!

  Dragonets materialised within the white cloud. Perfect little Dragons three feet in wingspan, they had ice-white scales and black eyes and talons. Their tiny claws began to cut the ice off her body but quickly, the scrabbling turned vicious as they quarried through skin and muscle. It seemed the dragonets became Razzior, savaging her body, burning and mauling her again and again, and each time Fra’anior resurrected her, laughing, Dragon fires never die. He gave her over to the Orange Dragon once more …

  Hualiama woke screaming from a nightmare–or was she awake? Her mind existed in a plane of warped reality, visions layered upon dreams, meandering without understanding. Was it just the cold, or was the insidious magic of this place prising her sanity loose of its moorings? The clouds billowed up to her chest. Every inhalation brought fresh agony to her lungs. Her blood moved like gelid sap, and in that yawning space between each impossibly slow heartbeat, pain encompassed all. Fra’anior’s thunder rent the skies. Chalcion struck her repeatedly, a percussive drumbeat of humiliation. The White Dragoness bellowed at her for losing the scale, yet it seemed that the place on her breast where it had rested, grew warm. Only her heart retained a hint of warmth, and even that was being Reaved from her. Was she dying?

  The breath of her lungs frosted before her face, falling as minute particles down her body. Her pleas fell upon skies deaf to her cries, and echoed across barren Isles.

  Dimly, Hualiama became aware of a great rumbling beneath her feet. The white exploded. Suddenly she was the centre of an upwelling storm, as though the air had erupted skyward, the moisture speedily adhering to her body, encasing the girl who would have danced with Dragons in an icy coffin. She was bound, body and magic, her mind and emotions ravaged by the fierce Reaving, yet Hualiama intuitively realised that she still had freedom of choice. Her spirit was free. She must choose to cling to that knowledge, no matter what this Dragon-Haters’ ritual portended for her. Even in extremity, her spirit could dance.

  And dance it did, uninhibited by the strictures of chains or cold, magic most hateful and even Fra’anior’s wrath. Lia thought about Amaryllion, and danced upon his paw. She remembered Flicker, and laughter shook her ethereal being. Puny and hopeless her actions might be, yet they symbolised her defiance.

  Troubling dreams assaulted her, centred on Azziala and her Enchantresses. The girl who hung beneath the heavens wondered if they sent forth their powers to
mould her as they wished. Overwhelming waves of shame and horror battered her spirit. All the ghosts of her past paraded past, screaming the hatred of parents who had despised her since conception, the mockery of her abusive father and punishment for the forbidden love of a Tourmaline Dragon. ‘Abomination! Abomination!’ Their cries echoed through her soul. Why not simply die? Why not yield to hatred? A creature like Hualiama deserved only death. Death itself quailed in disgust at the prospect of receiving her.

  A vision of Numistar loomed out of the mists, an Ancient White Dragoness so vast that her tail was yet lost in the Cloudlands as she loomed over the archway holding Hualiama enchained. Dazzling, beautiful and deadly, her eyes blazed with a different type of white-fire–not the fire Lia knew, but the vicious breath of the uttermost North, the Dragonsong of cold-blasted fields of ice, hail and deathly frost. Numistar’s mouth engulfed the mountaintop. From her throat waves of wintriness gusted over her, and then Fra’anior lunged from his own darkness and the Ancient Dragons battled, toppling Islands and lashing the Cloudlands into froth with their league-long tails …

  There, in the darkest nadir of her suffering, Hualiama reached across time and space to touch the mother-presence of the White Dragoness who inhabited her egg-dreams, and yet it seemed that she saw another Dragoness beyond her, a midnight-blue female brooding over a clutch of five eggs.

  Five? How could this be?

  The White Dragoness said, None can interfere, little one. You alone must find the strength to separate soul from flesh. Be the duality your mother spoke of. Afterward, seek the Maroon Dragoness. She’s closer than you think.

  Be the duality? Hualiama wished the beneficent forces in her life would speak less in mystical riddles. She laughed wryly. Should she find her future written upon scrolleaf?