by Lou Hoffmann
The rolling plain where Lucky stood was huge, extending far beyond the end of his sight. Feeling sick at the brutality he witnessed, he wanted to run away. He struggled, hopelessly unable to pick a direction—things were equally horrible everywhere he looked. Then he heard a horse approaching fast, and he looked over his shoulder. It was his mother, still some distance away but riding fast and hard, so the direction he chose was, simply, away from her.
Amazed that he could run so far without getting tired, he eventually left the battle behind, but the lifeless plains rolled on toward every horizon. Finally, his strength began to flag. He started to slow and to stumble, and he could hear his mother’s terrible mount coming closer, ready to ride him down.
The change that brought him hope came suddenly. In a blink, light washed the plain in gold and red. A wind rushed by that smelled like struck matches, cedar, and sweetgrass—a memory of Hank George’s cabin on Black Creek Ravine. Overhead, he heard a rush of wings, and he looked up to see the most wondrous thing.
A dragon. The dragon. The beautiful, powerful creature that, in this world of unbeing, was Han Rha-Behl Ah’Shieth. Where before he’d seemed small, now his huge form dominated the plain, as if he’d decided to be all the dragon he could be. The sky above was red like the earliest moments of a summer dawn over a California desert, but gold glinted off Han’s scales as he dove to harry Liliana with a blast of brilliant flame. Her horse whinnied and reared and Liliana barely retained her seat. As she fought to control her mount, Han swooped down to land next to where Lucky stood awestruck.
“Get on,” Han said. “And hang on tight.”
After some fumbling, Lucky found a foothold in the wing joint, sort of vaulted onto Han-the-dragon’s back, and took hold of his two long, spiral-curved horns. “I’m ready,” he said, just as he heard the horse’s hooves thundering close.
Apparently the dragon needed to get a running start before he could get airborne, so the first, overland, part of the ride was pretty bumpy. Once they were up, though, it was smoother, the rhythm of Han’s great, scaled wings creating a rocking motion almost like a ship riding over waves. At least Lucky supposed a ship might be like that, because he felt seasick.
But seasick on the back of a dragon that also happened to be the uncle he loved was better than any feeling he’d had while stuck in his mother’s macabre world. They flew upward toward the red sky, and the higher they went, the more the sky brightened to gold, as if they flew through a swift sunrise. The sound of Liliana’s pursuit faded until suddenly it stopped. Her shout came to Lucky borne on a black wind that nearly tore him from Han’s back.
“One way or another, Luccan, I will have you with me!”
A cold blue fire rose up and licked at his legs where they dangled at the dragon’s sides. Han turned a great arc and breathed back toward where Liliana held her wand aloft, the source of that icy flame. His breath blazed ruby and gold, struck against the chill wind, and where the opposing guest met, they flared up and out into a great sheet of battling flames. The towers and pillars of mist they touched turned to gray ash and fell back to the plains below, and Han turned and once again began winging skyward.
There was daylight up there, not far now, but Lucky realized that, as before, a membrane separated the world of the living from this awful place. His hope stuttered until Han reassured him.
“Use your Key again, Luccan, and Ciarrah. She’s in your other hand.”
“Ciarrah?”
She answered. “I’m here with you, Blade-keeper. I will help if you ask it.”
“Yes, please.”
Instantly, her light streaked toward the barrier overhead and began cutting like a torch.
“Use the Key too,” Han said, “and wish. We’ll go through together this time. We have a lot of help on the other side, and Maizie’s waiting.”
“Maizie?”
“She came home with Thurlock.”
It was such a wonderful thought that Lucky laughed, and with joy in his heart for the first time in what seemed like forever, he grasped the Key of Behliseth in one hand, held Ciarrah’s light toward the sky with the other, and fervently Wished for a world full of sunshine, and people who truly loved him, and dog kisses, and—especially—Han with him safe and sound.
They burst into a splash of sunlight. In his heart, Lucky knew his nightmare was, at last, truly over.
Chapter Thirteen: Like Old Times
LUCKY EXPECTED to find bliss on the other side of that membrane between worlds. Instead, immediately upon emerging into daylight, his nausea grew so intense he barely managed to spew over the side of his bed instead of on it. Unfortunately, Thurlock’s sandaled feet were in the splash zone.
If Lucky hadn’t been still sick, if he hadn’t been dizzy even though he was lying down, if his head hadn’t been pounding and every inch of skin hadn’t felt like it had been asleep and was now tingling to life with pins and needles, he would have been mortified about the barf. As it was, however, he lay back, far too occupied with his own misery to care that the wizard rolled his eyes and drawled, “We-e-ell, of co-o-ourse,” before flicking a hand to clean it up.
A rapid, rhythmic pounding on his bed near his feet alerted him to Maizie and her happy tail. She was licking his ear like crazy—some of those dog kisses he remembered foolishly wishing for. He couldn’t help but laugh as he scratched behind her much-missed floppy ears. He started to feel better—the pins and needles faded to tiny blunt pokes and the whirling ceiling overhead stuttered to a stop.
His head was still pounding, but when he propped himself up on an elbow, it eased a little. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to remember things he’d seen, places he’d been. He knew they were important, and Thurlock should know about them. Try as he might, though, he recalled only two images—his mother’s apparition sitting astride her grim horse, and Han—the red dragon. He smiled when he recalled Han coming gloriously to his rescue, the epitome of both strength and love. Lucky looked up to find Han sitting next to him, felt him gently cradling his hands. He hadn’t noticed it before, but—although he still felt weak and faintly sick—his hands hurt worse than anything else. And when he looked at them, cut and bloody, each holding tightly to one of his magical tools, he understood why.
Taking a deep breath, he made himself loosen his hands, which momentarily intensified the pain. “It hurts,” he said.
“I know,” Han whispered. He gently took the Key of Behliseth from Lucky’s hand and held it out to Thurlock, showing him the break in the chain. Lucky’s eyes followed the Key as Thurlock took it, made a gesture with his chin, and whispered some unintelligible word to mend the chain with magic. Thurlock dipped it into the washbowl, muttered again, and brought it out clean, dry, and shining like new. He passed the Key on its chain back to Han, who dropped it over Luccan’s head so that the Key rested over his heart as it should. Han took Ciarrah from him then, passed the Blade to the waiting Wizard, who cleansed it and returned it as with the Key.
Han put the blade down on the side table very near the head of Lucky’s bed, took up the damp cloth from next to the washbowl, and after removing the shreds of earlier bandages, gently cleaned Lucky’s hands. “I’ll make you a sheath for the knife,” he said. “Keep it close.”
It was the quality of his voice—low, rough, and oddly strained—that made Lucky meet his uncle’s gaze. To his utter shock, tears were streaming down Han’s face, a mask of abject misery.
“Han,” Lucky said, but he didn’t know what to add.
Han responded with a single choked sob, and an embrace so strong it redefined the concept bear hug. “I love you, Luccan,” he said. But then he immediately released Lucky, and he was already on his way out the door when he said, “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
Bewildered, Lucky sat staring.
Thurlock took Han’s place sitting on the bed, and said, “Let me look at you.”
Lucky looked up and was drawn, as had happened before, straight into the calm seas tha
t were the wizard’s deep gray eyes.
After a moment, Thurlock said, “You’re going to be all right, I think, Luccan. But you’ve had quite an ordeal. You’ll need to rest, and I don’t think this room is the best place for you to do it. For now, until I must leave the Sisterhold again, I’ll want you near me. You can stay in my tower—have the same room you had in Earth if you like. It will be like old times. Sound okay?”
“Yes,” Lucky said. “But, sir—”
“Just Thurlock.”
“Thurlock, sir…. Sorry. What about Han? Something’s wrong….”
“I fear you’re right, which is why I’m going immediately to see if I can’t sort him out for at least the hundredth time in his life. He’ll be all right too. You’ll see. Meanwhile, look.” He pointed toward the end of the bed. “I believe this is a friend of yours?”
“Henry!”
“Hey, Lucky!” Henry smiled.
“What…. How…?”
Thurlock said, “That will be a story for another time. Right now, Henry, and our new friend here, Olana—” This time he indicated a woman standing at the head of the bed. “—will stay and help you gather anything you need to bring with you to my house.”
Lucky twisted his head to see the tiny woman Thurlock had called Olana. Bewildered, he greeted her with a simple “Ma’am.”
“I’ll meet you at my place,” Thurlock said, rising. “Don’t tarry. There is a great deal of mischief and perhaps a measure of evil afoot even here at the Sisterhold. I don’t want you to try to meddle with any of it. What you’ve already done is quite enough.”
Shocked, Lucky started to protest that he hadn’t done anything wrong, but Thurlock winked and smiled before turning around, taking two long strides to the door, and exiting with his robes swishing behind him. Lucky laughed instead.
Odd how everything seems brighter when you smile, he thought. But then he needed to throw up again.
Chapter Fourteen: Song for the Preservation of the World
HAN KNEW Thurlock was looking for him, and he supposed he was grateful the old man cared enough about him to want to help him think things through. The truth was, though, he didn’t want help. He didn’t want to sort things or figure them out. He didn’t want to come to terms with the dragon; he wanted to forget it.
Yes, he was glad he’d been able to help Luccan, and he had the dragon to thank for that. Still, it wasn’t a welcome development in his life. It was exactly the development he’d been hoping to dodge for most of his previous years. In every generation of the direct Drakhonic line, one person had manifested the dragon. He’d known this fact since he was a small boy, since it was regularly the topic of family stories told around the hearth on winter nights. When he was very young, he used to play at being the dragon, spreading his imaginary wings and cleansing the earth of rot and meanness with his imaginary fire. His flights had been so vivid that now, looking back, he found himself confused as to whether they had all been only in is mind.
More honestly, he was afraid they hadn’t. He could, if he tried, believe those times were absolutely real. The thought had ramifications that made him sick.
Trying to put distance between him and Thurlock, Han entered through the front door of his small, tidy home, stripped off all finery and evidence of his Drakhonic heritage and donned the plainest of his military garb, all of that almost without ever having come to a stop inside. Then he strode out the back door and into the trees that crept up to within ten yards of his home.
He tried to think of where he could go that Thurlock wouldn’t think to look. He knew dodging the wizard was acting like a child, but truthfully his misery had its roots in the child he once was. If his brother, Lohen Chiell, were still alive, maybe he would have been able to take some comfort from him. But Lohen was well and truly gone, and Han didn’t think he could face anyone else. Especially not the ever-helpful-and-caring, all-wise Thurlock.
A thought about where to hide came to him—a small clearing on a stream bank, almost hidden by a thick copse of willow, rushes, and yellow flag. He sometimes went there of an evening just to put the day’s worries behind him. He’d pretend to fish, but really he was only keeping company with the small spotted trout that jumped for flies as the sun went down. Unlike birds the fish kept chatter to a minimum, and Han usually found it a relaxing meditation to follow their simple comments, which could be interpreted something like this:
“Cool.”
“Big.”
“Good.”
“Hungry.”
“Sleepy.”
“Moon.”
Now, he wasn’t in the mood for such communion, but the place might be a little harder for the wizard to find, and Han could be alone with his dreadful thoughts at least for a while.
He sat down at the edge of the water with his back against a trio of mossy stones that had always seemed to him to have been placed there by some great hand for just that purpose. The water cooled the heat in the little glade somewhat, and judging from the position of the sun, more time had gone by while he rescued Luccan than he’d thought. The Midsummer Day remained hot, though, so Han stripped off his sandals and plunked his feet down in the water, which was just deep enough here to top his anklebones. After the slight stir of mud settled, the water cleared to crystal, and he could see the bed of colorful, waterworn pebbles on the bottom. A small otter—one of Tiro’s very distant relatives—splashed into the stream from a dozen feet away, and when she emerged, Han realized she had a lame foot.
That’s when he remembered that, when he’d gone to Luccan’s room this afternoon, he’d been lame too. He turned his leg and lifted his khalta to examine his wound, and found it red and tender but healed. The wonder of that occupied his mind for a moment, but then he looked out over the water, and the particular angle of the light brought to mind one of the reasons he’d always loved this spot. It reminded him so much of another stream by the house he’d lived in as a child. A memory—the very worst of all the memories he had—rose up full in his mind.
After the fire. Lohen, standing in the stream with him, bathing him clean of dirt and ash and his own filth. Over and over whispering shushes and soothings that meant nothing and everything all at once. Han crying into his brother’s shoulder as evening slowly fell to dark over the stream bank where Lohen held him and sang to him their mother’s songs.
L’ARIA STOOD on an island of sand, screened from Han’s sight by vegetation—the kind that grows very tall very fast, its roots reaching down into a temporary land that might not last the season. She was planning to travel and already had her feet sunk into the water that still coursed through the lower layers of the sand that made up the island. She’d meant to be gone by now, but across the gold-splashed water, Han Shieth’s heart seemed to be breaking. She’d almost gone to him to see if she could help, but now Thurlock approached with his big, noisy wizard feet.
He’ll take care of Han. He always does.
Still, she stayed a moment, sang a song of silence, of camouflage, words that spoke of no sound set quietly to a melody that wove itself into the sounds of the trees, the grasses, the water in the creek, and all the living things hidden nearby. As long as she sang this particular magical song, no one would know she was there. Not even the great wizard Thurlock would see her unless he specifically set his mind to the particular task. At present, though, he had no reason to do that, she was sure. She doubted anybody had even discovered she’d slipped away from the Sisterhold.
She hadn’t known that Thurlock had returned, and she was happy to see him. It was never a good thing when he was absent from the country for too long, and this time even Han hadn’t known where he’d gone or when he’d be back. Or maybe—judging from the way Han had dodged the subject when she’d heard others talking with him—the question in Han’s mind had been if Thurlock would be back. For a moment, L’Aria considered coming out of hiding to greet the old man. Maybe, she should even tell them she planned to leave.
L’Aria kept t
o herself a lot, and she’d been making most of her own decisions since not long after her mother died—she’d been only nine years old then. She kept herself independent, and because of that people assumed she only cared about herself.
It wasn’t true.
She’d known even before her father put it into words that the magic she inherited from him, River Song, was all about the preservation of the world. And though her father said things had been different in past millennia, in this age, preservation of Ethra meant preservation of the Sunlands, because that’s where the light had arisen brightest after the last great upheaval thousands of years past. Tiro, didn’t—couldn’t—explain the politics to her. He wasn’t quite human enough to do that. What he knew, he knew by instinct and by his unseverable connection to the waters, lands, and spirit of the world. And L’Aria knew too, from her connection with him. But she understood some things differently because of her mother’s humanity.
River Song was needed now because so much had gone wrong. She had power to help.
She carried an enchanted sea-green teardrop gem, an heirloom called Tiro’s Stone, which her father had given to her last summer when she’d helped defeat Mahl’s Earthborn thralls outside the Witch-Mortaine Isa’s tower in Earth. It boosted her magic and the energy behind it, and she’d done incredible things in the flooding waters of Black Creek, helping the entire military expedition get back home to Ethra when it had seemed impossible. So much had gone wrong in the world; clearly the time was coming soon when River Song would need to join with the power of the stone again. It seemed likely she would need to use the full force of her magic to help save Ethra from whatever dark thing was crawling all over it, tracking its stink and corruption everywhere. The thing that had taken Luccan under. The thing that had made Tiro L’Rieve sick.
