Dark Fire

by Chris D'Lacey

  The seriousness of this statement was not lost on David, who bowed his head again and said, “I ask the Wearle for more time. If the restoration fails, I will deliver the dark fire to you.”

  G’Oreal consulted left and right. “The awakening of the old Wearle is ready to begin. As each flies north they will draw the Ix with them toward the Fire Eternal. Nothing must endanger their sacrifice. Nothing.”

  “I understand,” said David, tasting the rain on his tongue.

  G’Oreal’s image faded a little. “When the twelfth dragon rises, your time among the humans is done. You have until then to complete your purpose.”

  The picture disappeared in a horizontal shimmer.

  Without looking at the watch again, David snapped it shut. For a moment, he raised his eyes to the Crescent, taking in the arrangement of houses and trees, as if the scene would be lost to him forever if he failed to commit it to his heart right then. With water dripping off the ends of his hair, he turned toward the house and looked at the number on the wall beside the door. Forty-two. Five years earlier he had stood right here, a shabbily dressed student, and done the same thing, unaware of what he was or what he would come to be. And it occurred to him then, in that exact instant, of how easy it was to miss the very obvious. For painted on the number plate of the house — tiny, but never forgotten, once noticed — was a squirrel. It was gray and it was sitting up, smiling. A tear pricked the corner of David’s eye. And it took every measure of his Fain awareness to draw it back within himself and master his destiny. He put the watch away and stepped back into the house, knowing that he might have crossed that threshold for the very last time.

  30 THE SECRET OF SCUFFENBURY

  I — AM — FREEZING!” Lucy complained, as she struggled to keep pace with Tam Farrell’s eager stride.

  “You can’t be cold. It’s May,” he said, picking the best route over the tourist-trodden pathway that would eventually take them to the tail end of the Scuffenbury horse. Even here, in the charcoal light before the dawn, he could see white patches of chalk between the grass.

  “It’s damp. I can’t feel my toes,” grumbled Lucy. “And it’s, like, four in the morning. I’ve never been awake this early in my life!”

  “Well, you daughters of Guinevere must be delicate,” he said, “‘cause I don’t feel the cold much.” He stopped and offered his hand in support. She was wearing her yellow raincoat like a straitjacket, hands (though gloved) tucked into her sleeves.

  “It’s all right for you; you’ve got polar bear blood!” Spurning his help, she scrambled past. A few knots of loose shale tumbled down the path as she sought to get a better foothold. “I thought we were going up the Tor again, not hiking across half the county?” Her thighs were aching. Her lungs were burning. White flags of surrender were probably fluttering from her ankles by now.

  “I want to see the sun rise over the Tor — from here, in relation to the horse,” he said. “Besides, if Glissington’s going to spew out a dragon it might be wise to be some distance away.” He grabbed her arm and drew her toward him. “Quick. Look at that.”

  A slim rail of amber light had risen up and stroked the far horizon, casting blood orange spokes across the downs. “Isn’t that fantastic?” He ripped the Velcro seal on his camera case.

  Lucy, annoyed that she’d lost her momentum, blew sighs of condensed air into the ground and tramped on. “How far do we have to go?”

  “To the horse’s head.”

  She looked up to assess their position. The horse was some three hundred yards away, cut at a relatively shallow angle out of the grassy escarpment facing Glissington. It didn’t look anything special from here, nothing like as impressive as it had done from the Tor. She sighed and sought out a course. Thanks to the oncoming daylight, she could see that the pathway offered her options. One fork would take her to the brow of the hill, where she’d be able to look down the slope and see the entire horse from above; the other would take her directly to it. She chose the direct route.

  Half a minute later, her energetic chaperone came bounding alongside. “I think we’ve chosen a really good day. The sun’s going to rise directly behind the Tor, which means if we get our skates on we’ll see how its rays fall across the horse when it crests the peak.”

  “Fab.”

  He sighed at her disregard. “You should take joy in this, Lucy. It’s a wonder of nature.”

  “It’s a wonder I don’t fall flat on my face.” She tutted as her shoes betrayed her again. What she wouldn’t give for a decent pair of boots. She found some slightly better ground and forged on ahead, only to hear him say, “That’s interesting.”

  “What? Me falling over? Thanks.”

  “No, this.”

  She stopped to catch her breath. He was bending down to pick up a stone.

  “It’s a stone,” she said.

  He flicked a bit of dirt off its surface. “Cairn stone. Like the one in your room. Look, they’re everywhere.” He pointed to them, dotted about in the grass.

  “So?”

  “So it’s a chalk-based hill. How did these get here?”

  “If I answer correctly do I get a drink of water?”

  He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a plastic bottle, and tossed it to her. “Keep it. I don’t need it.”

  She split the seal on the cap with a crack that seemed to carry right across the vale. She watched him lob the stone back onto the hill, as if he were returning a pebble to the sea. “Maybe the dragon was building a rockery and he dropped them here?”

  Tam’s silence suggested that was just plain silly. He stared at the mound that was Glissington Tor, backlit by the emerging sun. “Come on, we’ve got ten minutes, if that.”

  He walked on, shaking his head in dismay. Somewhere inside, that hurt Lucy deeply. OK, she told herself, just for today be Guinevere, not Barbie. She tilted the water bottle with purpose to her mouth and let her gaze slant toward the Tor. To her surprise, she thought she could see a figure on the peak. “Tam?”

  “Come on, you’re going to miss it.” He was already twenty yards ahead.

  “I think there’s someone on the Tor.”

  His footsteps halted. She saw him squint in that scary polar bear fashion, just the way David sometimes did. “Probably a tourist. People come here all the time.” He started along the path again, almost bounding where it hollowed out into a dip.

  Lucy scrabbled after him, glancing at the figure every now and then. Comparatively speaking it was nothing but a matchstick, but Lucy, blessed with the eyesight of youth, could still work out its basic movements. She saw the arms come parallel with the shoulders. Half-stretched, not full, as if the person might be cupping their hands above their eyes. Or holding a pair of binoculars.

  “Tam, I think they’re watching us.”

  “Amazing,” he muttered, not hearing her. He was at the white horse’s head by now, placing his palm on the hard, dry chalk.

  Lucy quickened her step and practically jogged the last thirty yards. She glanced at the horse as she walked its length. Impressive. A whole creature, branded in the grass.

  “What do you make of that?” Tam said. He was on his haunches, pointing to a region just beyond the head where there was an unusual density of the cairn-type stones. They were tightly packed together and barely grassed over. Many were scratched and badly chipped where tourists had tried to excavate them, apparently with little success.

  “Let me borrow your camera,” Lucy said. She dragged it off his arm. “How do you zoom it?”

  “Hey, give me that!” He snatched the camera back. Suddenly he was towering over her, angry.

  In her defense she snapped, “Just look at the Tor!”

  In his own time he put the camera to his eye. Lucy followed the whirr of the lens. The figure on the Tor had made a Y with its arms and was catching an arc of sunlight between them.

  Tam lowered the camera. “I think that’s Ms. Gee.”

  An inexplicable shred of fear r
ippled across Lucy Pennykettle’s chest. “Can you see what she’s doing?”

  He shook his head. “Praying? Celebrating the return of the sun?”

  The wind tugged at Lucy’s raincoat and something rustled in the grass around her feet. “Erm, Tam …?”

  “What?”

  “The stones are moving.”

  “What?”

  “The stones. They’re rolling down the hill.”

  More than that, Tam noticed: They were leaving the ground. Whatever force was moving the stones was strong enough to pluck them out of the earth and leave a small pile of exploded dirt. As each one gathered momentum, it lifted off Scuffenbury Hill and started spinning toward the Tor. Tam glanced at Ms. Gee again. Her arms were still raised as though she was calling all the rocks to her. “Get down!” he shouted, pulling Lucy flat. A small boulder came hurtling toward them. It deflected off his shoulder with a bruising thump. The impact knocked him back a few feet. Lucy squealed as shale began to swirl around her head, catching and pulling at her wild red hair.

  “Help! Something’s digging into me!” she cried.

  Tam could feel it, too. Stones, underneath them, rising out of the ground. If they didn’t move quickly, they’d be thrown into the air or turned into sieves.

  “Slide!” he shouted. “Get onto the horse! We’ll be safe on the open chalk.” And summoning up the strength of the ice bear, Kailar, he slid down the hillside hauling Lucy with him until she was flat against the horse’s shoulder.

  For several minutes he held her in place, until the rush of air had stopped and he judged there was no more danger. She was dirty and shaken, but mostly unharmed: one minor graze on the side of her chin. Tam rolled onto his back and sat up quickly, training his camera on the Tor again. But this time he didn’t really need a lens. In the place where Ms. Gee had stood was a monument, easily visible to the naked eye. She had rebuilt the Glissington cairn: a tall, tapering pillar of stone with a diamond-shaped extension at its zenith. Cut out of the diamond was a hole roughly the shape of a teardrop, waiting to catch the rising sun.

  But that wasn’t all. Lucy was the first to notice what had been uncovered on Scuffenbury Hill. Not the scars in the earth — the hundreds, probably thousands of pockmarks in the soil, as if a plague of moles or rabbits had escaped — but the region by the horse’s head where all the sunken stones had been. They were gone, torn away to their places in the cairn, leaving behind a long, twisting spiral of chalk. Lucy’s hand began to shake as she pointed to it. “Tam, this is not a horse.”

  He looked over and saw what she could see.

  “It’s a unicorn,” she said.

  31 THE LEGEND OF THE VALE

  Impressive,” said a voice.

  Ms. Gee whipped around. A little way below her, dressed in green rain boots and an unflattering weatherproof top, was Hannah.

  The old woman cursed and stretched a long finger, as though about to turn the intruder to dust. Hannah was quick to raise her hands in submission.

  “Please. I’m no threat to you. I have no powers. Please.”

  Ms. Gee kept her finger aimed at Hannah’s heart. “Why are you here?”

  “To see the dawn.” Hannah approached the cairn. She closed her eyes and pressed her face against the stones, caressing them as if they were alive. “I come up here to worship the sun, to be part of this landscape and all that it is. I’ve had a passion for dragons ever since I was a child. And now you’ve shown me this — and the unicorn as well. With one flick of your fingers you’ve vindicated all my beliefs. If you look back far enough into the history of this area it’s written that people like you have always existed. Women able to control the elemental forces. I never dreamed I’d be lucky enough to witness the restoration of the cairn — or meet a genuine sibyl.”

  Ms. Gee lowered her hand. She was wearing a woolen tweed suit all the colors of vegetable soup and a pair of dull brown shoes. “I don’t have time for this prattle. Your insignificant presence is of little interest to me. In a matter of moments the sun will be aligned with the eye of the cairn and what is hidden beneath these hills will be mine to command. Worship all you like. You will be consumed in the dragon’s first breath.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “You dare to defy me?”

  Hannah shook her head. “I’m simply questioning what you think you know.”

  A stream of air flew into the sibyl’s nostrils.

  “Wait! I didn’t mean to insult you. All my life I’ve wanted to see the dragon and the unicorn risen, but this isn’t how it happens. Look across the vale. Where’s the shadow of the cairn?”

  Ms. Gee turned sharply on her sensible heels. “I can’t see it,” she snapped.

  “And you won’t,” said Hannah. “It’s written in the legends that the ‘horse’ will wake and call the dragon when a teardrop of flame is framed beneath its eye. But that can never be. The angle of the sun is always wrong. That version of the legend is a cover for the real one.”

  “Then pray tell me what is right?” the sibyl demanded.

  Hannah let her gaze roam over the stones and plucked something barely visible from them. “It’s all to do with this,” she said, holding up a single red hair.

  “The girl,” said Ms. Gee, curling her fingers. Her gaze flashed across the valley, but there was no sign of movement on Scuffenbury Hill.

  Hannah nodded. “A red-haired innocent, to tame the unicorn. But she must be touched by the spirit of dragons — and she must be prepared.”

  The sibyl’s mouth snapped like a hunting trap. “How?”

  Hannah chewed her lip. “I can arrange it, but I want something from you in return.”

  “Oh, really? Then have this.” Ms. Gee twisted her hand. A streak of energy flew from her fingers, striking Hannah in the center of her chest. The younger woman fell to her knees in pain. Her glasses shattered.

  Ms. Gee’s soft and callous footsteps stopped a few yards in front of her victim. “Tell me what you know, or your eyeballs will be next.”

  Hannah leaned forward, spreading her hands on the warming earth. “Gaia, Earth goddess, guide me,” she breathed. She spat a trail of thick saliva from her mouth. “My family are no strangers to persecution, Ms. Gee. My grandmother, six times removed, was left dangling like a bauble from the tree in my garden, all for the truth she refused to give up, a secret entrusted through the generations to her. The tree died with her and her spirit still haunts it. You would do well to remember that. Those who took Mary Cauldwell’s life tore down the cairn in frustration and vengeance and covered the unicorn’s horn with its stones. That was over four hundred years ago. Do you really want to wait that long again, sibyl? Do you want to see your clever spell wasted?”

  “Very well,” said Ms. Gee. “What are your terms?”

  “I want a gift,” said Hannah. She removed the frames of her useless glasses and threw them aside. “In ancient times, a scale or a claw, given by a dragon to those in its service, would endow the receiver with creative integrity and purity of heart.”

  “How wearisome.” Ms. Gee stifled a yawn.

  “What you do when she wakes is your concern,” snapped Hannah. “All I ask for my part in her rising is to be blessed with a token of her glorious body so I might do great things in her name.”

  “She?” Ms. Gee seemed to freeze to the spot. “Did you say … she?”

  “My, you really don’t know, do you?” For a moment, Hannah’s laughter filled the vale. She struggled to her feet and looked at Ms. Gee with bitter contempt. “I always knew that a sibyl would be drawn to this place, but I had hoped it might be one that could cope. Are you sure you want to learn the truth, Ms. Gee? Are you sure you want to wake the beast in this hill? The dragon underneath our feet is a queen. One of the fiercest matriarchs ever known. She came here when the vale was a natural forest, tired, wounded, and about to give birth. She was seeking a creature of her own legends, a white horned horse that might heal her injuries and grant her time to re
ar her unborn young. The storytellers say she was far beyond help, but the unicorn still did its best to save her. It failed. In its distress, it lay down on Scuffenbury Hill to die. If the queen hadn’t shared the last of her fire and let them both go into stasis, it would have. They are locked together, Ms. Gee. Wake one, you wake them both — the last of the healing horses, Teramelle, and the greatest dragon of her age, Gawaine.”

  32 ABOUT UNICORNS

  Morning. What do you know about unicorns?”

  Zanna swept into the Pennykettles’ kitchen, picked up the kettle, and filled it at the sink. The whole movement was flawlessly smooth, as if she’d had it programmed into her at birth. “Well, that’s a good one as early morning greetings go. I suppose it beats ‘Did you sleep well, Zanna?’ or ‘Did you manage to get our daughter to nod off, eventually?’ knowing she was upset that Daddy might flit away to the boys in the colony at any moment.” She clamped the lid on the kettle and plugged it in. “You’re still here, then — Daddy?” She opened a cupboard and took out some mugs.

  “Wayward Crescent is my home,” he said, hoping she would turn and see the sincerity in his eyes. She was wearing a hair band and very little makeup. He liked her like this. Stark, pale-faced, achingly beautiful. Yet still untouchable — for now. “That communication yesterday: I’ve been given more time to take the dark fire to the Arctic.”

  “How great for you.” She swung a teaspoon idly. “Not terrific as bedtime stories go, but Alexa would have appreciated hearing it all the same.”

  “I needed time alone to think. I’ll do my best to make it up to her, I promise, but the situation remains unchanged. When the dragons are ready, Alexa will come into play. There is nothing you or I can do to stop it. It’s what she chose. It doesn’t mean we can’t be with her.”

  Zanna closed the cupboard door and stared at it. “Then answer me this: If her destiny is written, why is she so upset when her father ignores her?”

  He lowered his head and sighed. “Where is she this morning?”