Icefire

by Chris D'Lacey

  The truth became plain on the second run. With Gwendolen safely transported to land and Guinevere herself now riding on his back, Thoran was almost at the end of his rescue when he looked up and saw Gwilanna on the shoreline. She was drenched from head to toe, holding Gwendolen by the hair.

  “Urr!” growled Thoran, paddling harder.

  Guinevere, suddenly aware of the danger, looked up and screamed, “No, let her go!”

  “She is mine,” said the sibyl with an angry sneer. “If I cannot have the tear, then no one will.” And with a laugh that could itself have shattered rocks, she commanded the waves to turn and roll, driving Thoran and Guinevere out to sea, as far as any sunset could possibly reach.

  David felt numb with fear. “Then it’s true. She was drowned. She didn’t survive.”

  “Nnn,” the Teller rumbled. “Thoran strong.”

  “But the ocean. All that expanse of water? Even a bear …?”

  “Strong,” the Teller insisted. “Thoran swim, to center of stars.”

  David shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “North,” the bear grunted.

  “Where? To the Arctic? To the ice cap? Where?”

  Lorel gave one flick of his snout. “You dream it. Now. Center of stars.”

  So David closed his eyes and let the images come. Nightfall. Moonlight on a peaceful ocean. Guinevere, exhausted, on Thoran’s back. The great brown bear was paddling still, but fighting to keep his head above water. His chest and shoulders ached with cold. He could no longer feel his claws retracting. “Swim no more,” he managed to say, expelling more water than air from his lungs.

  Guinevere, delirious with hunger and thirst, laid her lips against Thoran’s ear and began to hum a sweet lullaby to him. It was the song she had used to calm Gawain in his last few days of torment on earth. As she sang, the wind rippled across the ocean, weaving a mist upon the surface of the water. From the center of the veil, a figure appeared.

  “Gaia,” said David, taking a breath.

  “Umm,” grunted Lorel. “She-mother. Earth.”

  A voice floated down from the woman’s mouth, gently wafting Guinevere’s hair. “Child, your work is done,” she said. “The dragon is forever in your heart. Now you must return the fire to me. Give it, child, back to the earth.”

  Guinevere moved her thoughts to the vessel. Her fingers, frozen by cold and time, could barely unlock themselves from its shape. Thoran dipped his shoulder and the ocean lapped. Its cold bite touched the girl awake. Water all around her. Stars above. She tugged at the vessel and its ties snapped easily away from her neck. She opened it up to the northern sky. Great arcs of color patterned the heavens, but Guinevere had eyes only for the tear. “Forgive me,” she whispered, “for taking this from you.” And stroking one hand over Thoran’s head, with the other hand she spilled the tear into the ocean.

  Water to water.

  Fire to …

  “Oh my God,” cried David, reeling back. His legs weakened and he dropped to his knees in shock. For as the fire tear joined the meniscus of the ocean, so its surface began to thicken and freeze, until a plate of blue-white glaucous ice had formed as far as the eye could see. And though he could never hope to understand how, David felt his mind become one with the ice, as though he shared every interlocking droplet of water and could glimpse, for the briefest moment of time, all that the water ever knew or ever was.

  And there was more.

  As Guinevere rolled off Thoran’s back, the bear put his claws into this miracle of nature, to satisfy himself it was real beyond dreams. And he, too, became part of the change. Every hair on his body paled from brown, until he was one shade darker than white. It suited him well, this new cream pelt. Indebted, he rose on his stiff hind legs and roared and roared at the northern sky. The ocean was his to walk; the reign of the great white bear had begun.

  David, shaking, threw off his gloves and scooped up two large hunks of snow. “The ice,” he said with a tremor, squeezing it into his aching fists. “The ice cap. All of it. The ice is the fire.”

  Bergstrom came to crouch beside him. “And the fire is the ice,” he said, igniting it.

  Tears emptied from David’s eyes. “Who are you? What do you want from me?”

  Bergstrom waved a hand and the snow ceased to burn. “Since Thoran’s time, the world has changed a great deal, David. Some of those changes have not been good. The ice is melting. Climates are shifting. The earth is in a state of violent unrest. I need people who can help me to reverse those changes. You, Zanna, Elizabeth and Lucy, even Gwilanna in her way, have played a part. Returning the scale to the Tooth of Ragnar will mean Gawain’s body can go to the clay. This will bring stability — for a short time. But the ice, and the bears who dwell upon it, remain in the deepest peril. You can help me to save them.”

  David gave an incredulous laugh and let the snow tumble out of his hands. “How?”

  “By doing what you do best. I want you to write — about the Arctic.”

  “Write?”

  “Remember what I told you when we first met? About stories?”

  Well-chewed bones. David nodded, remembering.

  “Creativity is the auma of the universe, David. A good story, written with heart and feeling, can touch many people and raise their awareness of global issues. It was no accident that Gadzooks came into being. I owe a great debt to Elizabeth Pennykettle. She has used the icefire wisely. We should even thank our crone, Gwilanna. When she used her influence on the publishers, she helped us more than she really knew.”

  David thought back to Dilys Whutton’s offer. It seemed strangely ironic that Gwilanna should be paying to fund his research into a novel that might help to save the bears she so disliked. “I told them I’d write a saga,” he said. “I don’t even know where I’m going to start.”

  Bergstrom patted his shoulder and they stood. “Tonight, when you return to the crescent, go to the room of photographs. Let the tooth guide you toward a book. What you find there will help you begin. Good luck, David. When we meet again, it will be in Chamberlain. Now you must go. Suzanna needs you.”

  “Zanna? Why, what’s wrong?”

  On Bergstrom’s shoulder, a wraithlike shape appeared.

  “Grockle?” breathed David, and suddenly Zanna was screaming for him.

  “David! Where are you? David! David!”

  “Zanna?” he yelled back, swinging round.

  She came through the mist and thudded violently into his arms. Her face was awash and messed by tears. “Grockle,” she clamored.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  A mountain of grief poured out of her eyes. “He turned to stone.”

  David stood back, gathering his thoughts. A dragon without fire. Gawain. Stone.

  “Dr. Bergstrom!” he cried out and swung back again. “Dr. Bergstrom! Wait! Come back! Where are you?” And he chased across the common where Bergstrom had been. But all he found were tracks in the shifting snow. A single trail of five-clawed prints, dusted by the wind drifting in from the north.

  At home, Lucy and Zanna cried enough tears to fill up a fountain. David, his gaze never far from the floor, explained as much as he could to Liz. She bravely accepted all that had happened and tried to explain that Grockle wasn’t dead, merely in a place where he could fly in peace, free from the dark suspicions of a world so fearful and misunderstanding of dragons. This was of little comfort to Gretel, who had tried, from the very first hardening of scales, to use every flower available to her. She was close to shedding her fire tear that night. Only the warmth of G’reth saved her.

  As for David, he returned to Henry Bacon’s later, carrying such a pulsing mix of emotions that sleep seemed like an impossible venture. So he went to the study instead, to the room of photographs as Bergstrom had called it. In his pocket, in his hand, the enameled tooth of an ancient bear guided his eyes across the spines of books, until they settled on a single name that seemed to stand out above all others: Lono. H
e slid it off the shelf. A large book with full color plates. It fell open at the first of them. The picture was faded and cracked with age, its once-white borders yellowed to the shade of a polar bear’s pelt. There were polar bears in the picture. Two of them. One large, one small, sitting on the ice with their backs to the camera. David felt a tear prick the corner of his eye as his gaze traveled down and he read the caption.

  A mother and her female cub relax on pack ice in early spring. A second cub is just out of frame to their right. The island in the background, a favored nesting place for buntings and skuas, goes by the name of the Tooth of Ragnar.

  34

  CLEANING UP

  Over the next few days, the mood in the house was somber and still. Nobody said very much about Grockle and everyone wanted to drift away into their private space to reflect: Zanna returned to her college studies, Lucy went back to school, and Liz disappeared to the Dragons’ Den to make repairs to those dragons injured in the skirmish with Gwilanna.

  It was left to David and Mr. Bacon to get on with the business of cleaning up. Mr. Bacon, as usual, didn’t hang about. At eight-thirty sharp on the morning following Gwilanna’s departure — having first rearranged his day off from the library — he marched David around to number forty-two and told Liz what was going to happen. “Ordered a Dumpster last night,” he said. “Operation cleanup, under way promptly. Wheelbarrow shuttling from room to drive. Rubble cleared in a jiff.”

  “No,” she said.

  Mr. Bacon jumped.

  “No wheelbarrows in my hall.”

  Henry pursed his lips. “Understood, Mrs. P. Brush and bucket. Manual carting it is, then, boy.”

  Unimpressed by the thought of hours of hard labor, David made his own suggestion: “Can’t we just sweep it under the floor?” He nodded at the hole he’d smashed in the boards.

  Henry made a curt remark about carpets (and the sweeping of problems under them), then went home and found two buckets. He hooked the larger one over David’s arm and told him to start anywhere he liked.

  It took all day and more. They dumped the mattress, the curtains, and the broken boards, too. The latter were replaced with fresh-smelling timbers, which Mr. Bacon sawed to size and hammered neatly across the joists. There was a moment of panic when Bonnington decided to explore the hole and was nearly boarded up for all eternity. He was swiftly ejected and work continued. To no one’s surprise, Mr. Bacon was a hero of do-it-yourself jobs. Not only did he reglaze the broken window and fix Sheetrock onto the damaged walls, he also rewired the light cord and holder and warned David not to hang his clothes on it in the future — or whatever stupid prank he’d obviously been doing to tear the wiring apart in the first place.

  By the close of the weekend, the structural work was done. David was exhausted and slept like a lion. But at breakfast on Monday, Mr. Bacon shook him awake once more and told him that a steam stripper, a blowtorch, and two sharp scrapers were waiting in the hall and he expected good use to be made of them.

  The steam stripper proved a complete disaster. Within minutes, the room was filled with a muggy gray cloud that made the windows stream and had Gadzooks peeling sodden sheets of paper off his pad. The blowtorch was even worse. The first time David lit it, it virtually exploded. He called in Gwillan when Liz wasn’t looking. With the dragon’s help, the paintwork was all burned off by lunch.

  Later that afternoon, Zanna returned. On the surface, she seemed her usual self, chatting amiably to Liz (and Gretel) in the kitchen and admiring Mr. Bacon’s handiwork. But David sensed a quiet despondency about her, as if she wasn’t quite sure she belonged anymore — in the house, or even near him perhaps. When she rolled up her sleeves and grabbed a scraper, cheerily saying that she ought to do her part, David found himself strangely on edge, and their conversation soon began to mirror his disquiet.

  “Got some news from college this morning.”

  David, reacquainting himself with the mysteries of the steam stripper, waved away the mist and asked her what.

  “I won Bergstrom’s essay competition.”

  On the windowsill, Gadzooks stopped doodling. G’reth, who’d been meditating on the falling snow, shook himself awake and turned to listen.

  “Seems like Zanna’s theory that Loch Ness could support a whole family of mini-monsters won the great doctor’s approval. Hey.”

  “Hey,” repeated David, smiling, but sounding just a little bit shell-shocked. “You’ll be going to the Arctic, then?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t made my mind up yet.”

  “Well, what is there to think about? You just won the geographical trip of a lifetime.”

  “I’m not sure it would be appropriate,” she said, jabbing at an obstinate swatch of paper.

  David looked across at the dragons. Both of them shook their heads and shrugged.

  “I’m not very happy with Bergstrom, David.”

  “Oh,” he grunted, laying the steam stripper against the wall. “You’re still upset about Grockle, then?”

  “Of course I’m still upset about Grockle! Bergstrom should have warned me what was going to happen. He knew, and yet he let me …” She finished her sentence with another angry stab at the wall.

  “Here, try this,” David said, moving across with his plate of steam. “It’s much easier if you soften it first.”

  “I’m all right,” she grumbled, jutting out an elbow. She switched the tool to her opposite hand, revealing the graze where Gwilanna had scratched her.

  David gave it a protracted look. “That’s taking its time to heal. It’s still weeping. Don’t you think you should bandage it?”

  “I did. It doesn’t help. It’ll scab when it’s ready. Besides, it doesn’t hurt.”

  David tilted his head and stared at it again.

  “What?” she said, irritated by his puzzled expression.

  “Don’t know. It reminds me of something, that’s all. Remember before the fight with Gwilanna I went upstairs into Henry’s study?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I saw a mark appear in the polar bear print. In the middle of its forehead, here.” He traced a mark with his fingertips. “Three cuts, very similar to those, made when Ragnar’s cub was hit by a bone.”

  Zanna turned full on to him now. Dressed in leggings and a plain black T-shirt, with minimal makeup and her hair knotted back, she looked far less daunting than she normally did, but David still felt his mouth going dry as she cocked her head to her shoulder and said, “Rain, the hag just dug in and gouged. She wasn’t being particularly artistic at the time. Besides, you said an Inuit hunter killed the cub.”

  “Yeah. Gwilanna was behind it, though.”

  “Oh, so now I’m cursed by the mark of the sibyl?”

  “No, I never said that. It’s just … Oh, forget it. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

  But Zanna wasn’t going to let it drop. “This is about me and Gretel, isn’t it?”

  “What? What’s Gretel got to do with it?”

  “I didn’t ask to be able to see her, David. When Lucy used the icefire, it changed us all. You were filled with the auma of Ragnar, Gwilanna got her evil fingers scorched, and I got a free pass through to dragon world. In some people’s eyes, that makes me a witch.”

  “Zan-na …”

  “Shut up. I’m making a point. You’ve never been able to get your stuffy, blinkered brain around my ‘fashion sense’ as you condescendingly like to refer to it. And now it turns out that I am, in fact, sibyl girl, you’re just fondly congratulating yourself on how smart you think you were.” She jerked her arm upward and nearly scraped the stubble off David’s chin. “I don’t care what you think I am. Gretel is my special dragon now, and we are going to work in Grockle’s memory. And we don’t have to go to the Arctic to prove it!” “Zanna, listen …”

  “No, David. I don’t want to know!” And her scraper hit the boards with a painful clatter and she ran out, leaving the room door shuddering.

  The hand that came
to steady it belonged to Lucy. “What’s the matter with Zanna?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “She was crying. What have you done to her?”

  “Nothing. Go away.”

  “She was talking about Grockle.”

  “Lucy, if you know what’s good for you, beat it.”

  Lucy, as always, stood her ground. “Sometimes I wish you’d stayed under the floorboards.”

  “Yeah, well. Right now, I wish I had.”

  Hrr-oo, went G’reth and covered his ears. So many unhappy wishes. He was glad that no one was using their thumbs.

  “You’re still mad at me,” Lucy went on, “because I was right all the time about Spikey and because you didn’t trust Gadzooks enough.”

  On the windowsill, Gadzooks gave his scales a rattle and kept his head decidedly low. He was staying well out of this.

  David sighed and let his forehead rest against the wall. “What do you want, Lucy?”

  “Mom’s in the kitchen. She wants to see you.”

  “What about?”

  “What you did to Grace.”

  David closed his eyes and wished the world would go away. “Tell her I’ll be there in a minute,” he muttered. But when he turned around, Lucy had already gone.

  “Tea’s brewed,” said Liz, without looking up. She was at the table when he walked in, carefully painting a dragon’s ears. A hollow feeling rebounded in his chest when he saw that the dragon in care was Grace. Liz jiggled her brush in a jar of spirits, then wiped it quickly against her smock. “What was all that with Zanna just now?”

  “Oh, nothing. She’s still upset about him.” David nodded at the fruit bowl where the small stone figure of Grockle was curled up in perfect, petrified sleep.