The Dragon's Legacy

by Deborah A. Wolf

  Before long, Ehuani was pinning her ears and twisting her tail. By the time they arrived at the oasis, she was tucking her chin and threatening to throw him. She was not used to being ridden so far, and it was past her dinnertime. Akari Sun Dragon spread his wings over a wide and glorious day, but Ismai found that his vision was dark about the edges, as if he were peering out at the world from the bottom of a dim and stinking sack, and someone was drawing the top closed.

  I will set my tent here, he sent to Ruh’ayya, and let Ehuani graze. Would you please check to see whether there are any greater predators about? Bonelord, he thought but did not say.

  There are no predators here besides us. Stupid human, she thought but did not say. I am going to go kill something. With a flick of her tail, she was gone.

  Ehuani pretended to be spooked by the cat’s sudden movement and shied violently sideways, nearly unseating him. Ismai gritted his teeth and relaxed his hands, willing himself not to yank on the reins. He dismounted, careful not to kick his horse or to land in a patch of old dried thorns. Then he removed the saddlebags and his mare’s tack, and let her go with a little pat on the rump. She snorted and tossed her head, but waited until he was out of range before kicking both hind legs out to show what she really thought.

  He might have chased after her, as it was never a good idea to let a horse get away with such behavior. He might have shrugged it off and laughed. A spirited mare was treasure beyond rubies. Ismai did neither. He simply stood in the sand, a few strides from the oasis, saddlebags slung over one arm, tack in the other, and a shamsi he did not deserve hanging heavy at his side.

  It seemed too much to ask, suddenly, that he should take those last strides, and pitch a tent. Drink some water. Eat some food. Check Ehuani’s legs and hooves, brush her hide, scout for predators, try once more to talk to his stubborn hurting vash’ai… it was too much.

  He dropped his burdens and stood swaying in the heat, blue robes whipping about him in the wind. He heard Ehuani nicker, and he felt Ruh’ayya’s soft exclamation at the back of his mind, but he could not seem to care enough even to turn his head and see whose feet were whispering through the sand behind him. As if he could not guess. Still, he jumped a little when she laid her skinny little hand on his shoulder.

  “Ismai.” Her words were smoke and honey. Smoke from the funeral pyre, honey among the burnt offerings. “Ismai, I am so sorry.”

  Then he was able to let go. At the touch of her hand, the touch of her voice, and not a moment before, Ismai dropped to his knees like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She caught him as he fell, strong and tough as old roots, deep and sweet as the night sky. He clutched at her tattered robes, his arms went about her middle and he pressed his face into her belly and he clung to her and he cried like a little boy. The sound of his own voice was so lost, so lost, so wracked with pain and longing that it dragged him over the edge of the well of sorrow and into an endless abyss.

  Char stroked his hair, she held him like his mother had held him when he was young and hurt, she rocked back and forth crooning a lullaby, and it was the most beautiful thing in all the world.

  Ismai wept until he was empty, until he was hollow, until his body was leaden and his mind as empty as the night sky. When his tears had run dry and been soaked up by the Zeera, he clung to his friend for a short while longer before staggering to his feet. He wiped his face on his sleeve as a child might, and pushed his touar back into place. He felt fragile and strangely light, as if he might float away with the moons’ breeze.

  “I am sorry,” he told her.

  “Sorry?” Char reached a thin brown hand toward his arm, but her fingertips did not quite brush his robes. “Why sorry?”

  “I am sorry to bring my weakness here to your home.” He looked up at the pale sky. Ismai had missed the first star of evening, and now they shone by the handful. “I only wanted to spend a few days alone. Do you mind if I camp here? I will not disturb you.”

  “Weakness?” From the corner of his eye, Ismai could see that she smiled. A child’s smile, secret, fleeting. “So strange that you should name yourself weak, Ismai son of Nurati. The desert grieves your loss. The world grieves your loss. The stars grieve your loss.” More softly, she added, “I grieve your loss. You are welcome to stay as long as you like, but I wonder…” She hesitated.

  He waited. Delpha was half full, Didi her little sister shone gibbous. They hung in the air with a sense of expectation.

  “Would you like to come down to the Valley?” she whispered. “It is very… peaceful. It is a good place to grieve. A healing place. I think you would be welcome.”

  Ismai hardly dared to breathe. He had come to the blackthorn oasis several times since their first meeting, but never had Char invited him to her valley. And he had heard the stories. The Valley of Death…

  Why not? he thought. “I would like that very much.” He picked up his horse’s tack, and his saddlebags, and shook them free of sand.

  It was a short walk, and the harsh winds of day made way for the softer breeze of the evening. Ismai still felt hollowed-out, spent, and so tired he could hardly keep his feet straight. Char reached for Ehuani’s saddle, and after a slight hesitation Ismai handed it to her. His boots and her bare feet whispered shushhhh-shushhhh through the sand, and off to the south and west the dunes began to sing.

  Their song filled some of the darker empty corners of his heart, as they had since he was very small, though his heart had never before had such vast empty spaces to fill.

  What a beautiful night, he thought. It seemed wrong that there should be a beautiful night after the death of Umm Nurati. But the indigo sky was beautiful, and the torches that lit the path down into Eid Kalmut were merry and welcoming, and the best part was that he did not have to explain any of this to his companion. She walked next to him, and she walked with him, and he was less alone than he had ever been in his whole life.

  Then the smell of burning flesh reached him, and Ismai remembered some of the worse stories of Eid Kalmut. He stopped dead in his tracks until Char tugged at his sleeve, urging him forward. “What,” he asked, “is that?”

  He thought she might have smiled. “Roast hare and potatoes.”

  “Oh.” His heart started up again. “I smelled something burning and I thought…” A nasty suspicion came to him. “Wait… you did that on purpose?”

  She laughed and skipped ahead, down the smooth stone path between the torches. The valley to either side of the path, he saw, was thick with grasses and fur-willow and low flowering shrubs. He followed, almost smiling himself.

  Since he was a small child, the Mothers had been frightening him with tales of Eid Kalmut, the Valley of Death. Dead kings were buried in this place, it was said, kings and queens and sorcerers and criminals of the worst sort. Wraiths haunted the passages and pathways of Eid Kalmut, bloodmyst and Horned Hunters and worse, lusting for the taste of a young child’s flesh.

  The reality was an entirely different story.

  The walls of Eid Kalmut were steep and verdant, striated rock in rainbow hues of pink and orange and red, even some greens and blues in the torchlight, festooned like a feast-tent with ribbons and streamers and garlands of living things. A cloud of tiny bats whirred from a crack in the rocks as he passed, circling his head twice as if unsure what to make of him before flittering off into the night in search of bloodsucking insects. Ismai wished them much luck.

  As for kings and queens… the walls were riddled with hundreds of hundreds of arched doorways. As Ismai drew near, he could see that there was a person seated in each one, a person long since gone to dry bones and old leather, but dressed in cloaks and robes and furs finer and more elaborate than anything he could remember, even finer than those worn by the Atualonian prince.

  Each alcove was sealed with a delicate filigree wall of some shining metal, and the dead people on their carven wood chairs did not look as if they had any intention of rising up and eating his brains, as in the old stories. Rather,
they looked… serene. As if they had lived well and died well and were perfectly content with the way things had turned out.

  “It is beautiful here,” he whispered. “Who are these people? Are they really kings and queens?” They certainly seemed so, with their fine clothes and haughty bones, and the antlered crowns upon their heads.

  “They are my charges,” she answered. “It is my duty to watch over them, just as it is your duty to watch over your pride.”

  Ismai said nothing.

  “Not your fault,” she told him, stepping more briskly. “Your mother faced a terrible enemy, and she fell. There is nothing you could have done to save her.”

  “My mother died in childbirth,” he corrected. “How did you know she had died?”

  “You can sleep here, by the fire. Are you hungry?”

  He was famished, and three fat rabbits sizzled and crackled over the flames. He set his bags and saddle down, and put his hands on his hips.

  “How did you know? What do you mean, enemy? My mother had no enemies. She was beloved of all the prides.”

  “The prides are not the whole world, though, are they? Perhaps I spoke of Time, the enemy who defeats us all.” She looked away. “Eat, if you like. I am not hungry, but they were an offering and I do not like to see life wasted.”

  “An offering? Whose offering?”

  “Eat.”

  Ismai made a frustrated sound in his throat, but he sat down and ate. The rabbits were very fat, crisp and dripping with hot juices, and he ate them down to the bones. She pushed the roast potatoes toward him and he ate those too, wondering where she might have gotten such things, but tired of asking questions into the wind. He supposed it was better to simply savor her company, and swallow the mystery.

  It occurred to him that his mother might have said such a thing, and another pang took his heart. No less was his grief than it had been, no cooler to touch, but somehow the food and the fire and the company made it more bearable.

  And I have found a fat young tarbok, purred Ruh’ayya. I have eaten my fill of his entrails, and tomorrow I will roll in what is left.

  You are so gross, he thought, and felt her soft laughter.

  Char sat on her heels before the fire, and cocked her head to one side. “You are talking to the young queen?”

  He nodded and dug around in his bag for a waterskin. “She has made a kill and is quite pleased with herself.”

  “She is very strong, to have survived her first challenge. If she lives, she will be most powerful.”

  “Her first challenge?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “You know,” he mused, leaning back against his saddlebags. So comfortable. “Sometimes talking to you is like playing riddle games with a rock.”

  The shadows did not quite hide her smile. “You play the riddle game with rocks?”

  “My mother said it was good practice, if I ever wanted to understand women.”

  “You will win the riddle game against a rock before you ever understand women.”

  “Sometimes you do not sound much like a child,” he told her.

  “Sometimes I do not feel much like a child,” she agreed. “Ismai—how is it you can look at my face?” She turned and faced him fully for the first time.

  He shifted uncomfortably. “What do you mean? Your face is your face. I could look away, if you like.”

  “No, that is not what I mean. No one has ever looked…” Her voice grew uncertain. “Not without staring, or turning away. Or…” She shook her head slowly. “When you see my face, you see me.”

  “Why do you not laugh when I trip over my own feet, or fall off my horse?” He shrugged. “I am sorry you were hurt, and I am very sorry if people hurt you now. But your face is your face.”

  “You are a very strange boy.”

  “So I have been told.”

  “Ismai… wait, no.” She twisted her hands together in her lap. “Wait, yes, yes. Stay right here. You will not follow me?”

  “Never,” he told her gently.

  She stood and ran off into the dark, a scared little rabbit with a burned-off face.

  Ismai bundled up the rabbit bones and threw them into the fire. The greasy black smoke twisted up toward the sky. He thought a small prayer for the rabbits, that their bright little souls might find their way to a pleasant world. The bones crackled and spat at him in their pyre, angry that their lives had been cut short so that he could fill his belly. But such was the life of a rabbit.

  The dead kings stared at him across the fire, their eyes empty and solemn.

  Somewhere far away a bintshi wailed, and Ismai felt his blood stir in response. He wondered what had drawn it so far from the Seared Lands, and shivered again.

  A cloud of the little bats flapped and fluttered overhead, blotting out the pale moons.

  Ruh’ayya’s presence was a warm comfort in the back of his mind. She had gorged and rolled in offal, and was well pleased with life.

  It must be nice to be a cat, he thought, living only for the present. What matters today, or days past, when one has bathed in the blood of a good kill?

  You know nothing, she thought at him, but the thought had no claws in it. He sent a wash of gratitude and affection toward her, to which she responded with quiet amusement.

  He was so near sleep that when Char’s face emerged from the gloom, he jumped half out of his skin and kicked a stone into the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. She had pulled a tattered hood up over her head, and in her arms she held a bundle.

  “Shssss,” she chided. “He is sleeping.”

  Ismai scrambled to his feet, and met her halfway. “What…? What?” He hushed his voice at her sharp look. “You have a child? No—you are too young.”

  “I am not as young as I seem.” Her voice was scarce a whisper, and amused. “He is not mine… not really. I had thought to keep him, but…” She looked down at the swaddled child. “This is a resting-place for the dead, not a growing-place for the living. Here, take him.” She held out her burdened arms, though her eyes belied the gesture. “He is broken, but he is not worthless.”

  “Broken?” Ismai took the sleeping child. He was heavier than he looked, and warm. Only one fat cheek and a hint of long-lashed sleeping eyes peeked from beneath the coverlet.

  Char lifted the blankets aside. This close, Ismai could see the raw flesh above her eyes, and the exposed bone at one temple where an ear should be. He wondered if it hurt—it must—and his heart ached for her pain. Then he looked down at the child.

  The little boy was four or five moons old, he guessed, perhaps old enough to fuss over cut teeth and roll about, maybe old enough to scoot around a bit. Rudya had begun crawling when she was just a bit older than this. This child would not be crawling on all fours. The boy was missing an arm just below the elbow. It looked to be a defect of birth, and not the result of some injury.

  “Where did you get him?” he whispered, pulling the blankets tight against the chill. The child slept on, blissfully unaware.

  “He is not worthless.” Char’s eyes flashed in her ruined face. “He is healthy, and strong. He is one of yours. You should take him home to your people, and never let them hurt him.”

  “Hurt him?” Ismai frowned. “We do not hurt children. Only a monster would harm a child.”

  Char was silent for a long, long time. Finally she whispered, “Where I come from…”

  She did not finish the thought.

  Ismai shifted the boy’s weight in his arms. “I will take him, if that is what you truly wish. He will be well looked after—the Mothers are always delighted to have another child to fuss and coo over—and so few boy babies are born to us. He will be welcome.

  “So would you, Char. You should come with me, too. As you said, this is a resting-place for the dead, and no place for a child.” He held his breath, fearing a harsh reply, but she only shook her head.

  “You are sweet, Ismai. But this is my home now. These are my people. I look after th
em, and they look after me.” She held up a hand when he would protest. “Please, Ismai. Take the child and go.”

  “May I at least spend the night?”

  “Best not.” She sighed. “I am glad that you will be taking the boy, really I am, but I am sad, too, and when I am unhappy—” her eyes glittered “—Eid Kalmut is not a safe place to be.”

  “The bonelord—”

  “Arushdemma will not bother you. He has a belly full of slavers.”

  That startled him. “Slavers?”

  “Bad men from the river. They were taking the boy to Eid Kalish, to sell him.” Her eyes were as dark as the realm of Eth, those dark places in the sky untouched by any star. “I do not like slavers, Ismai.”

  “As you wish,” he agreed slowly. “Ehuani is going to have a fit, you know. And Ruh’ayya may never forgive me.”

  I am coming, brother. We need to leave this place. Ruh’ayya’s voice sounded tense. Now.

  Char’s eyes glittered. “Please go, Ismai.”

  Ismai nodded, and then he did a thing that surprised himself— he stepped as close to Char as he dared, and put an arm about her shoulders, gently, so as not to startle or hurt her. “I hope you know I would never hurt you,” he said in the softest voice. “I hope you know I am your friend.”

  “My friend.” A single tear spilled from her eye and trembled down her ruined cheek. “Yes. Please, you should go now.” She ducked from beneath his arm. “I will carry your bags… come on.”

  He followed her up the steep path, choosing his way carefully, wondering how under the moons he was going to make the ride back to camp with an infant in his arms. Ehuani was waiting for them at the mouth of the Valley, as was Ruh’ayya. Char saddled his horse, and fastened his bags in place, and held the child as he mounted. He was pleased to see that Ehuani seemed fresh and eager to go, not at all put out by the unexpected journey.

  Ismai reached for the infant, and settled him into the crook of one arm. “He is a good sleeper.”