Dragonlove (46 page)

“There’s a much better chance, which would make the Maroon Dragoness right, at least by Dragonish logic,” he said, waiting until with a gasp of horror, she made the fateful connection. He seemed quite sane, now. Lia wondered if his entire performance had been a sham. “A shame this isn’t the beautiful, prophetic truth you so desired, is it, little Lia? Child of the Dragon.
Ruzal-
spawn abomination!”

His lunatic laughter chased her out of the room.

* * * *

Stripped to her underwear, Hualiama shivered uncontrollably in the biting wind as Azziala took the report. Grandion had killed two Dragon Enchanters that morning. Hysterical laughter burbled in the back of her throat. Not so easy to chain a Tourmaline Dragon, was it?

“Fools! You waited until evening to make this report?” demanded the Empress.

“Highness! We had to check the Protocols … four times did not suffice to bind the lizard.” The man’s voice rose to a raw squeal in the face of her wrath. “We think they mentioned her name, this lizard-lover’s name, great–”

“FOOL!” Azziala’s sceptre crashed into his elbow. The man turned grey with pain. “Go cast yourself into the Dragon’s Pipe. I am surrounded by incompetents. Go!”

“Mercy,” whispered from Hualiama’s pinched lips. On the mountaintop, a flat area atop the tall volcanic cone she had first seen upon approaching the Lost Islands, the cold was a bitter beast borne on the wings of the ever-moaning wind, which rushed over the peak and down into twin holes which looked suspiciously like a Dragon’s nostrils set side-by-side in the rock. Each hole was thirty feet wide and rimed by ice. From this place, Azziala had told her during their march up the mountain, the frost emanated which gave the western, Human-inhabited Lost Islands a climate like the deadly cold of the Islands north of Immadia.

This was the place of Reaving.

The Princess felt as though she had plunged into a frozen lake. Her bones hurt. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably. All twelve of Azziala’s Councillors, even aged Feyzuria, had hiked up to the peak that afternoon, but none of them seemed to feel the cold. Perhaps their Dragon-golden skin was proof against freezing?

With a wail, the unfortunate man cast himself into one of the nostrils. His despairing cry echoed for many seconds before fading into nothingness. Mercy. Azziala had no need of magical commands. The power of her will had been enough to drive that soldier to his death.

How deep were those caves, Lia wondered? Her teardrops froze to her eyelashes. Instead of liquid, icicles tinkled against her cheeks.

Azziala said, “I knew about the disturbance this morning, but they waited until evening to make their report?”

“You did right, Highness,” said Feyzuria. “That lizard is unusually powerful. A great feast awaits us.”

The mother’s eyes returned to her shivering daughter. “First, we must see what is needed to turn this one to our cause. Strategy, my dear aunt, is a game of years and the patience of a hunting snow leopard, as you taught me. But I sense the time is at hand. Prepare her for the Reaving!”

The Princess of Fra’anior briefly considered if she should unleash her magic. One against thirteen was poor odds. One against an Island-nation? She would doom Grandion as surely as she doomed herself, and Razzior would help himself to the Scroll of Binding–stolen or not–with a few less of the opposition to worry about. Better then to turn into an ice-statue upon a mountaintop as she bided her time? Part of her, perversely, welcomed one more chance to thumb her nose at fate, coupled with a feeling she recognised as a reckless craving for oblivion. Neither of her true parents wanted her. Their betrayals cut deeper than she had ever imagined.

A channel some three feet wide connected the ‘nostrils’. Either side a stone archway stood rooted as if carved from a monolithic block of stone, giving the appearance of a nose ring such as these Islanders used to tie or lead their orrican, a type of russet brown, thick-coated buffalo similar to the domesticated water buffalo of the Kingdom of Kaolili, Hualiama understood. She had a nasty suspicion she knew exactly where the ritual of Reaving was to take place.

To the west, the suns touched the horizon. The wind had dropped. Surprised, Hualiama glanced about her. If anything, the tranquillity compounded the cold, an illusion grounded in her notion that the wind’s friction provided some element of warmth.

Azziala said, “Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, you stand at the roof of the world. This is the westernmost Isle of our Cluster. To the west, all is an ocean of Cloudlands. To the East lie the lands Dramagon promised us.” Her hands upon Hualiama’s shoulders swivelled her about as she spoke. “Child of my flesh, you came to us from afar with claims of blood and kinship. Yet flesh is weak, and born to die.”

“Flesh is weak,” intoned the twelve Enchantresses.

The ritual had begun? Lia forced herself not to resist as Shazziya fitted solid manacles to her wrists, and clamped her ankles together with a heavier, single-piece manacle. Whatever they purposed, she would survive.

“We turn our backs upon the night.”

As one, the Enchantresses turned to face the eastern horizon. “We reject the night. We wait for the dawn.”

Shazziya hefted Hualiama’s diminutive frame with casual ease, moving along the peninsula between the nostrils of the Dragon’s Pipe. For a bowel-twisting second, Lia presumed they meant to toss her in. The pipes were roughly circular and apparently depthless, as was the connecting part. Reaching up, Shazziya looped two short chains through metal rings embedded in the archway, and used a touch of unfamiliar magic to lock them in place. Without further ado, the Enchantress released her captive, causing Lia to drop slightly and dangle from the archway in the precise centre of the space between the two pipes. With the briefest of nods, Shazziya drew back four measured steps.

Crossly, the royal ward bade her churning stomach cease its misbehaviour. There would be worse to come. Her full weight depended upon her wrists, chained shoulder-width apart. Lia glanced down at her body. Girlishly slender and scarred by her experiences, it seemed too frail a vessel to cup the life that tingled in her veins, and a poor choice for the fire-gifts of the finest of friends. Love and loyalty were Flicker’s gift to her. But what exquisite form of madness had possessed Amaryllion to grant a Human girl a whisper of an Ancient Dragon’s soul-fire? And how could the Empress, in all her pomp and power, fail to detect these secrets?

As if echoing her thoughts, Azziala intoned, “Mighty Dramagon, we offer you one scarred by birth and life. Take her. Reave her. Let the breath of your mountain part flesh from bone, until nothing is left which has not been Reaved. May Hualiama become one of us, or may her flesh turn to ice with the coming of the dawn, and shatter upon the slopes of your mountain.”

“Reave her!” cried the twelve.

“It was Dramagon himself, blessed father of our nation, who gave these Isles to us to be our winnowing ground,” said Azziala, her expression growing yet grimmer. “Winter’s ice for the Human realm and summer’s warmth for the lizards to the East. A land of duality, suns-light and shadow, cold and warmth. Thus in duality your life is suspended between the heavens above and the Islands below, part of neither, part of both.”

“Heavens above and Islands below,” echoed the priestesses of her ghastly cabal.

Lia had always wondered where the common saying had originated. Could it be here, in the Lost Islands? Or had they twisted it to their own ends? Always, she had seen it as symbolic of beauty–the night’s velvet darkness above, and the Islands’ extraordinary beauty and variety below.

“A cupful of life’s blood to symbolise what is poured out this night.”

Shazziya unexpectedly flung a cupful of warm, sticky liquid full in her face. It splattered her hair and ran down her chest and abdomen. Hualiama gasped and then gagged. Blood, she realised from the tang. Mercy! Oh, double mercy, it was blood mixed with the foul magic of these Dragon-Haters …

“The lifeblood of the Watchman who failed in his duty,” said Azziala. Lia tried to spit. She wiped her face on her outstretched arms, spreading the crimson stain. “Very well, Hualiama. We will wait until the Reaving begins. Then we will abandon you to the night. Should you survive, you will be my daughter, heir to the Throne of the Lost Islands.”

Should she wish to survive, only to attain such a hateful title?

Silence as profound as a Cloudlands abyss enveloped the mountaintop.

The Dragon-Haters stood motionless, waiting. The wind did not stir. Before her stretched the snow-capped peaks and icy Isles of their Cluster, seeming to groan beneath the burden of harsh, unforgiving cold. Dipping beneath the horizon, the suns threw a final halo across her thinly-clad body, and with that, it seemed to her that the mountain took a single, cavernous inhalation, and then began to exhale a stream of air so intensely cold, it turned to mist the instant it exited the Dragon’s Pipe. The odours of dankness and decay prickled her nostrils, along with a faint hint of sulphur, jasmine and metallic minerals, suggesting the draconic with a medley of scents at once unfamiliar to the Human girl but curiously evocative. Pain spread up her limbs as the cold rose.

“The Reaving has begun!” cried Azziala.

“It has begun!” echoed the twelve. They began to file down the mountain, one by one, until Lia was left alone with her mother. Already, the stretching of her arms grew uncomfortable, and the manacles bit into her wrists. The cold dug into her calf muscles like frigid Dragon’s talons slowly, unbearably, twisting their way beneath the muscles.

The Empress said, “There’s a curious quality about this air from Dramagon’s mountain. It strips away extraneous magic, leaving bare the kernel of our being. Even your
ruzal
will not work here, child.”

Her slip-up in Ra’aba’s cell had been duly noted.

“Do you hate me, mother?”

“Hate? Of course not.” Her mother examined her as Hualiama imagined Dramagon might have examined one of his luckless specimens. “This is the Protocol of the Forbearing Mother, the Nineteenth. Twenty-one summers have I waited to usher you into your true place in this Island-World, Hualiama. This Reaving is an act of love, the best gift a mother can give her daughter.”

“My true place is upon Grandion’s back,” Hualiama retorted, lifting her legs to try to evade the creeping chill.

“Every false belief will be Reaved out of you,” Azziala asserted.

“Do you honestly imagine I’ll ever become one of you?”

“Survive the Reaving, and you will be.”

“Survive being frozen to death, do you mean?” Lia asked, openly sarcastic.

“If you’re worthy, you’ll find a way.”

As she spoke, Azziala had been moving closer. Now, she reached up to tear away Lia’s undergarments, and with them, came the White Dragoness’ scale. Somehow, in all that had transpired, the cord had snapped and the scale had slipped beneath her right breast. Her mother did not appear to notice. She dropped the garments together with the scale into the black void beneath her daughter’s feet. Another loss. Silently, Hualiama vowed she would find that scale again. The White Dragoness deserved to be remembered for her sacrifice.

“Now, all is stripped away,” she said. “Thus will your inner self be stripped away. Child, even in your benighted life, you have risen–from Ianthine’s paw to the Halls of the Dragons; from Gi’ishior to the royal house of Fra’anior; from Ra’aba’s Dragonship to the shores of Ha’athior; from Ha’athior, home. Fate is your plaything. That’s your true power. You rise where others fall.”

Angrily, Lia said, “May I conclude, then, that your brand of love amounts solely to ambition?”

Azziala raised her chin in an imperious gesture that Hualiama recognised only too well–from herself. “How sorely you misjudge me. You’re blind–”

“Not blind to the true face of love.”

“What girl of two decades is an expert in love?” But the Empress wiped her brow in a tired gesture, as if all the burdens of a lifetime had become manifest at once. “I must feed. I leave you with this, Hualiama. I received your name in a dream, while you yet lived in my womb. It’s an ancient name which means ‘song of the Eastern star.’ It comes with a story. In Dragon lore, there’s a legendary star called Hualiama. It’s the last star to glimmer when the suns rise in the East. The lizards say it can only be seen for the briefest of instants as the twin suns crest the horizon, just a flash of blue, on the night of a five-moon conjunction–as it will be, tonight.”

“A blue star?”

Hualiama realised that she spoke to an empty mountaintop. Had she dreamed, or had Azziala defied her nature to speak a kind word to her daughter?

Her tears fell, but they turned into hailstones long before they reached the bottom of the Dragon’s Pipe.

K
indness from her
mother trembled her Island in ways Hualiama had never anticipated. The dreadful Empress had a Human soul. She was redeemable. And here was prekki-mush-hearted Lia picturing a tearful reconciliation with her baby-abandoning, murderous mother who thought freezing her offspring was a gift of love.

Madness! Anger summoned her fires as the mist billowed up toward her hips, making her appear as though she waded hip-deep through billowing clouds of white smoke. So glacial was the cold, she could see it undulating down the mountain in great streamers, like the straggling beard of an old man. Fire and ice fought for dominance in her and around her. At times the Princess of Fra’anior thought the fire should recover its ground, making the nerves of her lower body scream with pain every time they thawed out, only for the cold to return, deeper and more insidious. Even an hour was too much. She sweated with the supreme effort. The moisture froze and refroze to her body until her struggles cracked it open like a chrysalis. As promised, her
ruzal
lay dormant. She was trapped.

As the stars wheeled overhead and the moons waxed, brightening the cloudless night, the white fog spread over the nearest Islands with the air of an animate creature which purposed to smother any life, sucking the heat away until any final, sluggish movement froze into immobility. Hualiama wondered what might exist within the mountain that generated such an unnatural cold. An Ancient Dragon? The fabled ice-Dragons of the farthest north? She realised that someone was raving, wailing, pleading for the pain to cease. It was her.

Lia clamped her jaw shut.

Chaotic visions beset her. Lia cried out for help and the white mist grew black and stormy, heralding the advent of Fra’anior, whose laughter belled over the emptiness between the Islands.

Ah, the thief is brought low. Suffering, little one? Screaming? Sweet music to the ears of one you purposed to defy!

I never … meant …

Meant or not, the deed is done.
The Black Dragon’s scorn poured over her, torrential.

Help me,
she sobbed.
Help me, don’t scorn–

Don’t what? Blow you away?

Storm winds broke over the mountaintop, making her chained body flutter like a flag in a stiff breeze and her long hair ripple behind her until she feared it should crack clean off her frozen scalp. Blood ran down her arms from where the manacles cut into her pale, icy skin. She could not breathe. He stole the breath from her lungs, but the monstrous power of his Dragon fire warmed her.

When the little one who bowed beneath his mighty Ancient-Dragon blast felt liquid fire sear her numbed senses, Fra’anior drew back with a new, vicious laugh.
Feel my minions rise!

Dragonets materialised within the white cloud. Perfect little Dragons three feet in wingspan, they had ice-white scales and black eyes and talons. Their tiny claws began to cut the ice off her body but quickly, the scrabbling turned vicious as they quarried through skin and muscle. It seemed the dragonets became Razzior, savaging her body, burning and mauling her again and again, and each time Fra’anior resurrected her, laughing,
Dragon fires never die.
He gave her over to the Orange Dragon once more …

Hualiama woke screaming from a nightmare–or was she awake? Her mind existed in a plane of warped reality, visions layered upon dreams, meandering without understanding. Was it just the cold, or was the insidious magic of this place prising her sanity loose of its moorings? The clouds billowed up to her chest. Every inhalation brought fresh agony to her lungs. Her blood moved like gelid sap, and in that yawning space between each impossibly slow heartbeat, pain encompassed all. Fra’anior’s thunder rent the skies. Chalcion struck her repeatedly, a percussive drumbeat of humiliation. The White Dragoness bellowed at her for losing the scale, yet it seemed that the place on her breast where it had rested, grew warm. Only her heart retained a hint of warmth, and even that was being Reaved from her. Was she dying?

The breath of her lungs frosted before her face, falling as minute particles down her body. Her pleas fell upon skies deaf to her cries, and echoed across barren Isles.

Dimly, Hualiama became aware of a great rumbling beneath her feet. The white exploded. Suddenly she was the centre of an upwelling storm, as though the air had erupted skyward, the moisture speedily adhering to her body, encasing the girl who would have danced with Dragons in an icy coffin. She was bound, body and magic, her mind and emotions ravaged by the fierce Reaving, yet Hualiama intuitively realised that she still had freedom of choice. Her spirit was free. She must choose to cling to that knowledge, no matter what this Dragon-Haters’ ritual portended for her. Even in extremity, her spirit could dance.

And dance it did, uninhibited by the strictures of chains or cold, magic most hateful and even Fra’anior’s wrath. Lia thought about Amaryllion, and danced upon his paw. She remembered Flicker, and laughter shook her ethereal being. Puny and hopeless her actions might be, yet they symbolised her defiance.

Troubling dreams assaulted her, centred on Azziala and her Enchantresses. The girl who hung beneath the heavens wondered if they sent forth their powers to mould her as they wished. Overwhelming waves of shame and horror battered her spirit. All the ghosts of her past paraded past, screaming the hatred of parents who had despised her since conception, the mockery of her abusive father and punishment for the forbidden love of a Tourmaline Dragon. ‘Abomination! Abomination!’ Their cries echoed through her soul. Why not simply die? Why not yield to hatred? A creature like Hualiama deserved only death. Death itself quailed in disgust at the prospect of receiving her.

A vision of Numistar loomed out of the mists, an Ancient White Dragoness so vast that her tail was yet lost in the Cloudlands as she loomed over the archway holding Hualiama enchained. Dazzling, beautiful and deadly, her eyes blazed with a different type of white-fire–not the fire Lia knew, but the vicious breath of the uttermost North, the Dragonsong of cold-blasted fields of ice, hail and deathly frost. Numistar’s mouth engulfed the mountaintop. From her throat waves of wintriness gusted over her, and then Fra’anior lunged from his own darkness and the Ancient Dragons battled, toppling Islands and lashing the Cloudlands into froth with their league-long tails …

There, in the darkest nadir of her suffering, Hualiama reached across time and space to touch the mother-presence of the White Dragoness who inhabited her egg-dreams, and yet it seemed that she saw another Dragoness beyond her, a midnight-blue female brooding over a clutch of five eggs.

Five? How could this be?

The White Dragoness said,
None can interfere, little one. You alone must find the strength to separate soul from flesh. Be the duality your mother spoke of. Afterward, seek the Maroon Dragoness. She’s closer than you think.

Be the duality? Hualiama wished the beneficent forces in her life would speak less in mystical riddles. She laughed wryly. Should she find her future written upon scrolleaf?

Seek Ianthine?
she echoed.
White Dragoness, how is it that we can speak of such things? Who are you? Where … why …

She questioned the night.

Lia looked upon the Reaving of her flesh as if from a distance, knowing the damage they sought to do, knowing that once more Azziala had betrayed her out of misguided and blind adherence to her Protocols. The Enchantresses were present in the wailing of the wind, their power clawed into her body, bringing on the visions that tormented her. Hualiama touched her body only enough to keep the heart beating, nothing more. All had been surrendered.

Only survival mattered.

* * * *

When first light touched her face, Hualiama did not feel it. She watched thirteen women approach the mountaintop, but it was not with eyes frozen into their sockets that she observed their climb. She watched in the knowledge of a five-moon conjunction, alive to the twin suns’ radiance, and yearned for the dawn.

The Empress touched the pulse of Hualiama’s neck, her face set like bronzed stone.

Feyzuria shook her head. “She didn’t make it.”

Azziala said, “Take her down.”

Right between the twin suns, in a place which could never be seen by eyes of flesh, a tiny flash of blue glinted once, and speared across the intervening space to touch her spirit, at once fleeting and profound, with a peal like the distilled laughter of starlight. It sang,
Hualiama!

Shazziya also shook her head, wondering, “How could she perish? We felt her strength. She has your heritage, o Empress.”

“The father’s the weakness,” spat Feyzuria.

“No, he was a great Enchanter,” Azziala said tonelessly, gathering Hualiama’s stiff body into her arms. “This is wrong. WRONG!”

Her grieving cry shook the mountain.

Riding the turbulence of that magic-infused shout, Hualiama’s spirit rejoined her body. Breath ghosted across her rimed lips.

Azziala gasped; placed her cheek close to Lia’s mouth. “Breathe, little one. You must … she’s alive!” For the first time, her voice was raw with emotion. She breathed, “Together at last, my beautiful daughter.”

Lia’s body could not shudder, but her spirit did.

* * * *

Abed, days slipped by in a delirium of recovery, characterised by fires kept blazing in a firepit until the temperature became sweltering, regular meals of mashed, spiced orrican kidney and liver–unspeakably foul–and Yinzi’s massage of her frostbitten extremities. Despite the warmth and liberal application of herbal medicines and magic, each massage was a fresh agony, to say nothing of the state of her brain. Had Grandion enthusiastically stirred up her skull’s contents with a talon and then chargrilled the mash to perfection, she would have felt no less abused. When lucidity returned, Hualiama tried to question the old midwife, but her probing met with fearful non-answers.

Lia learned they had housed her in Azziala’s own chamber. She supposed she should be honoured, but quickly became aware she was still being strictly monitored, in particular by Feyzuria, who seemed to find something distasteful about the new heir-apparent to the throne. Most likely, the political plotting had reached a fever-pitch in the corridors of Azziala’s underground lair. Hualiama would have been unsurprised to find a viper in her bed, or poison slipped into her drink, but she realised that the powers of these Enchantresses must keep at least some of the dagger sinister, to borrow the Fra’aniorian saying, at bay.

Late the fourth evening after her Reaving, the Princess learned what had kept Azziala from her bedside.

Without warning, the oval wooden door of the Empress’ austere chambers banged open. Her retinue of watchers–they all seemed identical, always a pair of blue-robed women with the unnervingly intense eyes and unsmiling golden faces–did not startle, but left the room at once.

“Two days ago, the lizards razed one of our villages,” Azziala announced. No preamble for her. No greetings or happiness that her daughter appeared well. “What do you know of this?”

“Er–as much as you just told me,” said Lia.

“Look into my eyes when you speak, child! The eyes!” Taken aback, Lia raised her gaze. Azziala eyed her narrowly. “Repeat that.”

“Islands’ sakes, what–”

The Empress’ voice shook with wrath. “What do you know of this attack?”

Just then, the door banged a second time. Shazziya charged in, closely followed by Feyzuria.

“Lizard-lover!” spat Shazziya. The royal ward stared. The tall Enchantress’ face glowed with an unholy radiance, as though her skin were lit from within. “Let me wring her scrawny little neck–with respect, Highness. I’ll stake you out for a lizard’s lunch! I’ll rip the truth out of you–”

Feyzuria, in a voice crackling with power, snarled, “We all want to know, Shazziya. Now hold your tongue before the Empress and her heir, before we still its wagging with a blade. Answer the question, child!”

Lia queried, “You’ve outdoor villages? In this climate?”

“THE QUESTION!” Azziala’s roar knocked her bed over and snuffed out the fire instantly.

“Nothing!” Hualiama wriggled out from beneath the tumbled bedclothes, stood toe to toe with her mother, and roared in her best impression of the Tourmaline Dragon, “Nothing! As in, not-one-thing! Now, can someone kindly–”

Azziala gripped her cheeks with the Dragon-pincer grip she seemed all too fond of. She glared into Hualiama’s eyes, before shoving her aside with a growl, “Guiltless. Shazziya!” The Empress whirled. “Confirm this truth.”

Having subjected Lia to the same treatment, Shazziya was forced to admit, “Guiltless. I could have sworn, Highness–”

The Empress cut her off effortlessly. “Councillors. Come inside. We might as well move our meeting into my private chambers.” Her heavy sarcasm did not raise a single eyebrow among her dour-faced twelve, but Hualiama realised that at a stroke, battle lines had been drawn. “Feyzuria, the chalices. We must feed.”

Lia watched pensively as the old woman moved over to a wooden sideboard which held a cloth-covered metal tray. She removed the blue velvet cloth and folded it reverently, revealing a pitcher and thirteen chalices of the finest etched crystal. Golden liquid. Dragon’s blood, poured out thick and beautiful, its exotic spiciness igniting her nostrils with a delicious scent. Unconsciously, Hualiama licked her lips.