Sisters of the Fire

by Kim Wilkins

  ‘She came with a companion, a small slight man with an eyepatch. He was dressed all in black, but his hand …’ Grimbald mimed a hand curled over on itself, useless, and Bluebell’s skin began to prickle. ‘She was small, pretty, but all her hair shorn off like a sheep in spring. I saw them coming down the hill. I see everyone. I saw you.’ He indicated the window over her head. ‘They disappeared into the inn and all was well. I saw them there that night when I went in to drink. He was hunched up around himself like a wounded cat, and she sat next to him as though she was protecting him. Alert as a fox. Watching us all as though she were hungry. As though she hadn’t seen people or heard laughter in a hundred years. There was something haunted about her face. For such a young lass, I’d say she’d seen more dark affairs than any of us can imagine. They say it’s the way with the undermagicians.’

  ‘How do you know they were undermagicians?’

  ‘It was what she did, my lord Princess. Though I wasn’t there to see with my own eyes. What we know is young Marigold who owned the inn told her friends that the undermagicians had upon them a large sum of money, and that she was going to … ask for a little extra. Marigold was a sly one, and we all knew it. Who knows? Perhaps she tried to steal it or extort it. But the sorceress, she was having none of it. They say that she set fire to the inn with the power of her mind. Marigold didn’t survive, though her dogs lived and now hang about the village relying on everyone’s kindness.’

  ‘But if she didn’t survive, how does anyone know that’s what happened? Why do you blame a sorceress? Undermagic? It might have simply been an accidental fire.’

  He was already shaking his head. ‘I was there when the villagers ran out to help. The first bucket of water on Marigold doused the flames, but they sprang back immediately. Six times we doused her, in the rain. Six times the flames returned, angrier than before. Determined to burn her to cinders. This wasn’t just a fire; it was fire of rage and vengeance.’

  Bluebell digested all of this. This powerful sorceress could only be Ash – the description of Unweder was unmistakable. Bluebell knew that Ash had turned to undermagic, but when had she become the kind of undermagician who would set a woman on fire and keep her burning for revenge? If this was Ash, then did Bluebell have cause to be afraid?

  Did Ash have the trollblade?

  ‘How is your stomach, my lord?’

  ‘It seems settled for now.’

  ‘You are very pale. If I cannot tempt you to eat, perhaps I can suggest you sleep.’

  Bluebell looked around. ‘You would give me your bed for the night?’

  ‘I would do all that I could to serve my king and his family.’

  ‘Then, thank you. I am … very tired.’ Achingly tired. So tired her bones weighed like granite.

  ‘Go on then. I shall keep watch.’

  Bluebell stripped down to her undershirt and lay down, was most comfortable on her front. For a long time she didn’t think she would get any rest. The pain in her guts, while no longer acute, throbbed and cramped. She felt hot, shut in.

  Late in the deepest part of the morning, she heard the hoofbeats again. She kicked off her covers and stood, opening the shutter. Listening hard into the dark. They drew closer. This time she knew she wasn’t mistaken and she was about to turn and pick up her sword when the beast burst from the trees and she saw what had been following her.

  A horse made of thin moonlight. A handsome mount, but a ghost nonetheless, saddled and alert, waiting at the top of the road. Waiting for her.

  Bluebell closed the shutter. The heat in her body had turned to chattering cold. She curled among the blankets and closed her eyes, fell in and out of half-dreams about ghosts. Finally, just before dawn, she drifted to darker, quieter realms.

  Seventeen

  Ash woke from a dream as sharp as it was sweet.

  She had been home at her father’s hall with her sisters Rose and Bluebell. She was twelve years old again, before any of the stirrings of the sight had begun to trouble her, and they were rolling apples to each other beside the hearth as a feast whirled around them. Her face grew hot and shiny from being so close to the fire as they rolled the apples back and forth. Bluebell rolled four at a time, laughing, knowing Ash couldn’t catch them all. Rose chided her for being mean but Ash was laughing too, the belly-aching laughter of childhood. She caught the apples and rolled them back, but when she looked up, Bluebell and Rose were moving further and further from her, and the apples were running under people’s feet. Then the music faded and the hearth went cold and her sisters were nowhere to be seen and she was alone and it was dark.

  She opened her eyes. Cool dawn. The sky palest pink beyond the treetops. Ash sat up, hugged her knees to her chest, and refused to cry. In the distance, the sea sat mute under sunlight, lonely and grey-green. She had set up a camp in a wooded valley that plunged dramatically down to the sea, scored into the land by a swift stream that had its source many miles away on the south-west moors of Ælmesse, the remotest and least populated part of her father’s kingdom. She knew of only one town there, Stanstowe, a mining town that she would find if she followed the river towards its source. Knowing her camp lay in a direct line to some kind of civilisation had given her a little comfort yesterday, but after the dream that comfort was dwindling to scraps.

  Ash knew why she’d dreamed of home, and especially of her sisters: Bluebell had tried to contact her. Ash, feeling her sister’s spirit on the air around her skin, had tuned in hungrily, but only for a half-moment before she remembered that allowing that connection did nobody any good, least of all Bluebell. So Ash had shut herself down. Bluebell would never find her that way. Nobody would ever find her if she didn’t want to be found. She knew Unweder was looking for her; she could feel his insistent attention pressing around her, like ghostly fingers against a membrane, sending her scalp prickling. There was always the chance that one of them would happen across her in person, but the chance was so remote it made her feel hopeless. Thyrsland was big and she was small.

  Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since she found mushrooms yesterday morning. She was tired of boiled seaweed. She had nothing to catch a rabbit or a pheasant with. She held her hands up in front of her. Her bones and tendons were visible, the scar across her wrist still angry red.

  The morning was dewy and soft, and she rose and drank from the stream and wandered a little way into the woods in the hopes of finding more mushrooms. After she had eaten and the sun had risen enough to warm her skin, she followed the rocky path down the valley to the beach. The trees – walnuts and sycamore – led all the way down to the stones and sand, where they stopped abruptly on either side of the gully the stream had carved on its path into the sea. It ran not in a mighty waterfall, but in a series of falls and trickles all across the rock face. Ash climbed down over boulders, her shoes crunching on shells, then jumped the last two feet onto the damp sand. The sea was morning gentle, a high tide that seemed too full for waves to gather themselves into the crested rolls she ordinarily saw. As she cast her eyes and mind out over the ocean, she saw and felt instead colder currents moving at profound depths, swift and dangerous, belying the pretty, sun-starred surface. She closed her eyes, reached beneath the ocean, felt the current flow through her fingers, pushing them until they bent backwards. Snapped her eyes open. Her hands, of course, were not in the water, not being broken by the weight of the ocean, but she had felt its power.

  Ash walked out as far as the rocks would take her until she was surrounded by water. She no longer feared the rise of the tide, the crush of the waves. With her mind she felt for fish. Slippery, silvery, fast. She had no net, but perhaps she could trap one with her mind.

  The thought formed, the sea closed its strangling grasp around a squirming flounder, then spat it up so it landed on the rocks at her feet, flapping and flipping.

  She pulled out her knife and killed it quickly, filleting it clumsily and throwing its non-edible remains into the sea. A shado
w caught the corner of her vision, and her heart knew what it was before her eyes saw. Cruising high on the thermal currents around a rock half a mile off shore, its gold-shot crimson wings dazzling in the morning sun.

  Her first thought: I know where it lives.

  Her second: Why is it coming this way?

  Ash’s heart swelled against her ribs. It was coming. For her. It remembered her and it was coming for her. For revenge. Her caught fish forgotten, she ran. She scrambled to her feet, nearly tripping and falling in the water. Climbed over rocks, banging elbows and shins on rough edges in her haste, the taste of her thundering pulse bitter and dry in her mouth. Mortal dread. She could hear its wings, tough leathery billows behind her, heard the sharp intake of breath.

  Ash hit the cover of the trees just as the dragon unleashed its first gout of fire. Two tall walnuts behind her instantly combusted. She ran further into the forest, higher up among the stones, then jumped in the stream and crouched so only her head was above the water. The dragon circled, blocking the sun from the east, but too large to fit between trees. Instead, it ignited the canopy above her, so that burning leaves and twigs rained down, sizzled to damp black in the water. Then Ash remembered: she had controlled fire back in the little village where the inn burned down. She grasped the fire with her mind, expected to be able to extinguish it with the fist of her will, but a searing pressure in her head startled her and she had to let go, hands to her temples, in agony.

  Unnatural fire. Her command of the elements was no use to her against this beast.

  The dragon circled a little longer, setting fire to treetops and roaring belly-deep in its frustration. Then, as if realising it was fruitless, it flew two last circles above her, making the light come and go, before taking off back towards the sea.

  Ash submerged herself under the cool, dark water, releasing her held breath. It bubbled around her and she emerged again, and walked back towards her camp, stamping out burning debris. As she trod on a blue-gold ember, a flash of colour caught her eye. She bent to pick up another dragon scale. This one was not the same pearlescent white, but crimson, from a different part of its body. She tried to bend it, couldn’t. At her camp, she placed it carefully by her pack, then stripped naked and hung her clothes over low branches to dry. She rarely saw herself naked, but today her jutting ribs and hips, her hollowed stomach, alarmed her. Nothing could convince her to return to the seaside to retrieve her fish, or collect seaweed. Today she would stay under cover of the wood, find more mushrooms, some berries perhaps, even if they were green. Unweder had always hunted their food. He was clever with traps and nets so she had always left it to him.

  And the thought of town came to her again. An inn – she still had gold left from the dragon’s barrow – a meal. Ale. Other people’s voices. Human hearts beating around her. Of course, the closer she drew to civilisation, the closer she drew to discovery, especially now she knew Bluebell was looking for her.

  She fetched her cloak from her pack and shook it out, heard the charms rubbing against each other, and pulled it around her naked body. Then she sat down, and her thoughts turned sad and dark, and she realised she was missing Unweder. Not that awful, aggressive, brain-addled man who had pinned her down to forcibly take her blood, but the old, familiar Unweder with his blind eye and crooked arm, who was at the very least made of the same substance as her: undermagic and exile.

  He was gone now. She wondered if he was still exploring the northern caves, hoping to find his dragon. Ash knew precisely where his quarry was, and the old tired desperation washed over her. She had to kill it before he found it, but she didn’t know how to. She couldn’t drown it, she couldn’t put out its fire. There were other things to try, she supposed: rain down stones and trees upon it. It seemed to Ash, though, that all of those things would simply make it angrier. She had felt its scales. They were tougher than steel.

  She needed to know more about dragons. Unweder had been custodian of that information, and had deflected any of her questions. She hadn’t pushed, afraid he would discover her purpose was counter to his.

  To defeat this enemy, she had to know it better.

  Her eyes turned towards the rock out at sea where the dragon lived. She couldn’t see it through the trees, but she knew it was there, encircled by sea mist. And she told herself there were more ways to travel than in person.

  It took a long part of the day and many miles of wandering between trees and rocks in the woods, but Ash eventually gathered everything she needed. Green wood, angelica, and one god-eye toadstool, the last being dangerous poison so she only handled it by rolling it up in a thick chestnut leaf and shaking a few spores onto the fire.

  The weather had turned wild, and that troubled her. The smoke would dissipate too quickly. Travelling on undermagic to the dragon’s bower required her to be immersed in the smoke, so she put her cloak carefully around her shoulders, extending her arms as close as she dared to the sides of the fire pit she had dug, and leaned over the smouldering twigs. The smoke scratched the back of her throat and the strong, organic smell of the ingredients burning on the fire made all the cavities in her face throb and sting. The wind whipped overhead, spitting rain iced her back then was gone. The light was leaving the sky.

  Ash focussed, then dropped the dragon scale on the fire. It flared, fizzed. She closed her eyes.

  With a barely audible pop, Ash separated from her physical body in the wood and rose above it, looking down on herself, a thin hunched figure in a stained cloak. She felt pity seeing herself there, a depleted, shrunken thing and a pang of sorrow zigzagged through her subtle body, almost returning her to the physical.

  But then she remembered her purpose and shot up and up, above the high tree tops, until she could discern in the distance – not with her eyes, but with an ineffable sense between sight and feeling that she recognised from a lifetime of dreams – the narrow crooked hump of the rock out at sea where the dragon lived. She arrowed towards it through glittering rain and mist like spun silver, buffeted by the sea winds but true to her path.

  Over waves silently slamming rocks.

  Over sea spray and gleaming whorls of seaweed.

  Above the gulls’ nests.

  Down and around to the jagged mouth of a cave hidden under an overhang.

  I would never have found this, she said in her head, the words too articulate, making her teeter on the brink of falling back into her body. She balanced herself again and, slower now, moved inside.

  A labyrinth of black rock and barnacle led her to a softly gleaming chamber with a high vault of ceiling above it. Gold coins and brooches and cups tangled among thick ribbons of seaweed, old fishing nets that had washed away, and bones. So many bones. A collection of skulls that looked almost to have been arranged in an arrow, pointing to the centre of the cave.

  Curled at the point of the arrow was the dragon. She (for somehow in her subtle body, Ash could tell it was female) had her eyes closed; her ribs rose and fell softly. Ash reached out to touch her, feeling only tough scales like the ones she had found. All the way down her back, on her ribs and flanks, no ingress for spears, no soft gaps for clubs. Ash even felt around to the side of her tummy, but the scales were doubly thick here, to protect from attack as she flew overhead.

  The dragon stirred, let out a long breath. A faint curl of smoke rose from her nostrils. Ash moved herself around to the dragon’s head, feeling the rough procession of leathery horns that ran from crown to snout. Even her nostrils were lined with the impenetrable scales. Gingerly, Ash reached with her mind’s hands for the creature’s eyes.

  One snapped open. Ash rebalanced; she didn’t want to startle and end up back in the wood just yet. The other eye opened. Had the dragon become aware that something was in here with her?

  It lifted its head, nostrils twitching, sniffed the air, then dropped its head again and half-rolled on its back, putting Ash in mind of a dog. She waited until she was sure the dragon was sleeping again, then continued her explorati
on. Each eyelid was crusted with steely scales, but here … just here … Ash stopped and slowed herself, wishing she had her physical fingers to prod with, because she was almost sure she could feel …

  Yes, in the exact midpoint between the dragon’s eyes, where the leathery horns ended but before the double scaling of the snout and nostrils began, in a place where too much armour would impede the creature’s vision, there was a soft spot that was simply leathery skin. A heart-shaped gap in the skull and the shell, about two inches across.

  So small, she said, and again the words tipped her back towards herself but this time she let it happen, retracting towards the woods swiftly and lightly, then down and down, feeling the density and pressure of her body closing around her once more.

  Ash gasped and sat up, coughing and coughing, nausea thundering through her. She climbed to unsteady legs and stumbled to the stream, falling to her knees and vomiting and vomiting until she was sure she would turn herself inside out.

  Throat burning, eyes stinging, she sat back. Rain started to fall in earnest. She crawled to her campsite. The seeing fire had been extinguished by the rain, was just a mess of black with one shining red dragon scale in it, perfectly intact. Ash curled on her side, pulling her cloak over herself. Usually, in heavy rain, she might send up a command for the drops to run either side of her, but she was weak and tired. She closed her eyes and let the misery roll over her.

  Tomorrow, raining or not, at the first glimmer of grey light she would head upstream towards Stanstowe. She needed a weapon, a sharp one.

  Bluebell woke. Had trouble clearing her vision. Her head throbbed.

  I am very ill.

  She sat up, found her clothes and began to pull them on.

  ‘My lord, you cannot be thinking of leaving.’ This was Grimbald, slipping back into the house on his return from some errand. She hoped it was tending to her horse. ‘You are pale, shaking.’