Dragonwitch (27 page)

The next moment, it was gone.

Mouse found herself standing on the edge of a small, sparse copse. Dead leaves of autumn littered the ground, and a sudden biting wind blew through the branches. She was no longer in the vast Wood. She stood on the borders of low fields, gazing out across a winter-tinted landscape to a river, a rise, and a high stone castle, above which gleamed a shining blue star.

F
IRE
!
F
IRE
!
F
LAME
AT
N
IGHT
!

Hri Sora, they called me, and they spoke rightly! My delicate feathers burned away, replaced by the mighty sweep of leathery dragon's wings, and the boiling of jealousy and rage inside me was replaced by a furnace that demolished my heart and pumped lava through my veins.

A woman's body cannot support such heat, so mine gave way into the scale-armored form of a vast dragon. I became that which had lurked deep inside me since I first drew breath.

“Sister. Child,” the Dragon called me. “My beautiful firstborn.”

The cat sat with his eyes half closed, his tail curled about his paws as it twitched slightly at the tip. Surrounding him was the Haven, a place of comfort, of familiarity, yet it was made strange now. Without Imraldera, it felt as foreign to him as the court of the Mherking.

He watched Mouse as she told her tale. He was not naturally intuitive, for cats tend to live in the moment, and the moment is focused on self. But he was more than a cat these days. He was a Knight of Farthest Shore, and as such he had begun to learn what it meant to put himself in another's shoes. Not like Imraldera. No one, he believed with something close to religious conviction, could possibly be as empathetic as she, able to weep at the death of monsters, able to look in the face of hell's hounds and see something to love!

But he was learning.

It wasn't love he felt for Mouse as he watched her, however, only deep suspicion. He flicked one ear when she told of the unicorn. In all the long ages of his immortal life, he had never seen one of Hymlumé's children come down from the heavens. Yet the girl's face was full of earnest honesty that he could not help believing. Who could invent a lie so fantastic?

The cat's tail lashed once, then wrapped tightly against his body. If only Imraldera were here! She would know what to believe and what not. Or would she?

After all, she'd believed the Murderer.

Mouse came to the end of her story. Other than when speaking of the unicorn, she'd kept her eyes downcast to her folded hands, as though afraid of seeing the Haven around her, of glimpsing too much of this strange half-light world.

Or she might be feeling the pressure of Alistair's gaze, which never once left her face.

“I think you know the rest,” she said quietly. “Even after returning to the mortal world, I followed the star as the Silent Lady had told me, all the way to Gaheris. And there you, sir”—she flashed Alistair the briefest of looks, though she did not meet his gaze and hastily lowered her chin—“you let me through your gates and established me in the castle keep. So I began my search for Etanun.”

Alistair nodded. “Did you find him?” he asked. It was a straightforward question, but Eanrin had to chuckle a little. Up until scarcely more than a few hours ago, Alistair had not believed Etanun existed outside fiction. But he was a straightforward individual, ready to believe much sooner than he was ready to doubt.

Especially if the girl is sweet,
Eanrin thought, perhaps unfairly.

Aloud he said, “Of course she found him. Have you paid no attention to recent events? She found him, and in a dramatic twist of fate he told her the heir to the sword was your diminutive cousin. Not someone reasonable, no. Etanun couldn't be bothered to pick an heir one might actually
expect
to . . .”

He trailed off and looked about the hall, as did Alistair and Mouse. For the Chronicler was nowhere to be seen.

“Dragon's teeth and tail,” Eanrin muttered. “Where has the imp got off to?”

The corridors of the Haven were wondrous indeed, more wondrous by far than any description the Chronicler had ever read or copied. And they were far away from the strange tale being told, a tale that felt to him like chains as solid as Corgar's clamping on his neck and weighing him down until he could scarcely move.

Smallman.

Flame at Night.

It was all too much, so he sought the soothing quiet of the halls, stately forests of shimmering green. Here sunlight touched the leaves and turned them golden, and sometimes they looked like colored-glass windowpanes. Not a single bird's song disturbed the silence.

He came at last to the library of Dame Imraldera. There he stood, his breath quite taken from his body, and stared.

For many years, by the Near World's count, the lady Knight of the Farthest Shore had been at work on this room. When she and Sir Eanrin, newly knighted, had made their way to the Haven of the Brothers Ashiun and rebuilt what had been left in ruin, they found the Wood encroached deeply on the once-solid structure. But the Haven was still there, beneath the growth, beneath the shadows.

So, Imraldera and Eanrin had set to work, binding back the trees gently, so as not to hurt them, but firmly, making clear that this was not their domain; it belonged to the Lumil Eliasul. The Wood had obeyed. Though Imraldera was no more than a slip of a mortal girl, the trees had backed away, drawing their shadows with them. Not even Eanrin, an immortal
who had lived since before these trees put down their first tentative roots, could command their obedience as thoroughly as she did.

And so they reclaimed the Haven, and Imraldera built her library.

When she first entered the service of the Lumil Eliasul, she could neither read nor write in any known language. But she had quickly learned. “Records must be kept,” she had told Eanrin. “We cannot have the worlds forgetting as they are so inclined to do. And since
you
can't be bothered to take time from your songster ways, I shall have to do it.”

Now the great pillared room in which the Chronicler stood was filled with scroll after scroll of her hard labor. Prophecies both fulfilled and unfulfilled, legends of heroes and monsters, true stories, false stories, stories that were both. All could be found in this library, where Dame Imraldera could always be found at her work.

Except today. As the Chronicler entered into that solemn glory of written words, he felt the lack of the dame though he had never met her. The lady knight who lay curled up in a dungeon crawl space, lost in the darkness of mortality, lured away, perhaps, by the cunning petitions of the Murderer.

For how could anything this so-called Etanun said be true? If all else proved real, and there was a sword and a lost House of Lights and a twice-dead dragon alive for a third time . . . if all that was true, how could it be that he, the rejected son of a mortal earl, was the heir to Halisa?

It must be a lie. And the Murderer, Etanun, must be no more than a wicked trickster playing games with mortal lives.

The Chronicler approached Imraldera's desk with something close to reverence and fear. It was made of cherrywood, but the wood looked alive, a tree twined into the shape of a desk. The dame's work lay across it.

Written in Faerie letters was the same rhyme he had found copied in Lady Pero's hand.

The heir to truth, blest blade of fire

He finds in shielded shadow light.

“An impressive sight, eh, Chronicler?”

The Chronicler turned around, startled, and saw Eanrin sitting in cat form at the far end of the tall chamber. “Rivals your own library, doesn't it?”

Paling, the Chronicler stepped away from the desk. He glanced at the trove surrounding him. “I never thought to see so much captured in writing,” he said. “How many scribes did it take to document all that I see here?”

“One,” said the cat. “But she's an industrious little bee.”

“It must have taken . . .” The Chronicler shook his head, staggered at the enormity of work surrounding him. “It must have taken decades!”

The cat shrugged, twitching both his tail and ears. “I couldn't say. We don't keep track of Time as such here in the Between. It might have been decades. It might have been minutes. Really, does it matter?”

“Perhaps not,” the Chronicler said, glancing again at the wonders around him: the tall trees, the piled scrolls. He looked at the parchment on the desk, the rhyme with which he had become so familiar over the years, as though it haunted him. “Smallman,” he whispered. A shudder passed through his frame. “So that is supposed to be . . . me.”

“How should I know?” said the cat. “I didn't write that one. I've written much fine poetry in my day, I'll have you know, mostly romantic verse, all excellent quality, bound to make my name even in the Near World one day. But I don't write nursery rhymes.”

“I don't believe in any of this,” the Chronicler said, staring at the words on the page. As the speech of Faerie made itself understood, so did this fey writing. The characters seemed to rise off the page as he looked at them, rearranging themselves and playing through his mind like images, like tastes, like smells. It was the way music speaks without language but communicates more than words.

Yet the end result was the same. The end result was the nursery rhyme of his childhood.

The Chronicler drew a long breath. “I don't believe in chosen ones. In prophecies. In destinies.”

Eanrin padded into the room. “Neither do I,” he said mildly. “On principle, I'm against them. Inconvenient, nonsensical things, and a cat does like to be master of his own fate, you know?” Then he put his ears back and gave the Chronicler a pointed look. “But what I believe or don't believe has little to do with the truth of the matter.”

The Chronicler ground his teeth. “I've fought against believing things I could not understand, and I laughed at those who clung to Faerie stories.”
His voice was bitter as black tea. “Faerie stories are the last thing the likes of me needs to believe.”

“Likes of you?” said the cat. “You mean, mortal?”

“I mean like
me
,” the Chronicler snarled, fixing a glare upon the cat. “Malformed. Disfigured. An accident.” His face was like the old earl's in that moment, the face of a warrior, but a defeated warrior who had fought a long, losing battle. A face all the more terrible for its youth.

The cat sat silent, his eyes slits, his ears quirked back as though he was offended. When at last he spoke, his voice was silky soft. “What is it with you mortals and your fixation on
size
? Do you think your stature has anything to do with anything?” Then he spoke like a knife. “Look at me!”

Suddenly he stood up, and his cat form dropped away into that of a man. The Chronicler, though he had seen the transformation once before, fell back against the desk, clutching at its legs for support.

“Take a good look at me!” the cat-man said, indicating his tall, straight, golden self, clad in brilliant red. But when he turned his head, he was a cat, small and furry. Just as the Haven was both a structure built of stone and mortar and a woodland glade of trees and moss, the cat was all cat, the man was all man, and both were simultaneously Eanrin.

“Look closer still,” said the cat-man. “Do you know what I am? I am Eanrin of Rudiobus, Bard of Iubdan, one of the little people, one of the Merry Folk. Do you see?”

And the Chronicler saw what he had not seen before. Even as a man, Eanrin was unbound by size. He could be small enough to stand in the palm of a mortal's hand; he could be tall enough to speak eye to eye with the great centaurs. But he was still, no matter his size, Eanrin.

“Do you understand, mortal?” Eanrin said. “We Faerie know it's the spirit that counts, and all else is malleable. Beauty or ugliness; brawn or frailty; height or lack thereof—these appearances can be exchanged with scarcely a thought! But the truth . . . now, that's another issue. The truth of the thing, the person behind what you perceive with any of your paltry five senses . . . Creature of dust, it's the truth that counts! And you'll rarely find more truth than in Faerie tales.”