Moth and Spark (42 page)

They watched the fire a while longer without speaking. The log crumbled at the center and the two ends tilted down. The light faded. Kelvan stood up. “Good night, my lady,” he said.

“Good night,” she said.

He went to the door of his own room, then turned. “This valley holds stories,” he said. “You have Sight. If you ask, it may give you one.” He entered his room and shut the door behind him without waiting for her answer.

In the morning, over breakfast, Corin said, “Have you decided?” and Tam said, “I want to try,” and that was all there was to it.

The dragon was still dozing midday when Tam walked with Corin up the hill to one of the huts. Her legs ached a bit, but the stiffness was improving.

It was a small, shabby-looking hut, with a pair of goats in a pen behind it and a thin grubby child playing in the dirt in front with a dog. The child, a girl Tam thought, gave them a glance as they entered and apparently decided they were not interesting enough to pay more attention to.

Inside was quite a different matter. She had been in the homes of very poor people many times with her father, and they were usually crowded and dark and in disrepair. The chimney smoked, if there even was a chimney, and the walls closed in. Sometimes two or three families would be living in the same two rooms. If there were windows, they looked onto filthy streets or a thin shaft of light that fell in the few inches between buildings. This place surprised her with its lightness and cleanliness.

Rois was very old, but she seemed spryer than Tam felt at the moment. When their eyes met Tam sensed the power, stronger than she had ever felt it from either Joce or Kelvan. She thought she should curtsy, but did not know how to do it without a skirt.

She gratefully accepted tea made of chamomile and a little valerian. It would help the stiffness. Corin stayed very close to her.

For a few minutes they engaged in polite idle chat. Then Corin said, with no lightness in his voice at all, “Rois, Tam needs to be tranced tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Tam asked, startled. She was ready to do it now.

“Yes. I think you need to go up on the dragon first, and it can’t fly today.” He turned back to Rois. “Can you do it?”

“Why?”

“To See the Dragon Valleys.”

Rois looked at Tam. “Do you want to do this?”

“Yes,” Tam said. “I’ve thought about it.”

“Are you afraid?”

She shook her head. “No. I did it before.”

“Tell me.”

“It was dark,” she said, remembering. “But I could see.” It had been so easy to slip into trance. When Liko asked her questions, it had been impossible to provide full answers. It had been like trying to recount a dream. What she saw was so clear before her, but she could not describe it. To say the cliffs were high did not do justice to the two thousand feet or more that they towered above her, leaving her feeling the size of an ant. She had no words for the smell of the place, a coldness that might have been ice and a sharp scent of metal and ashes or old fire. It smelled angular and hard. There had been a faint and constant whistling that she thought was the wind shrieking across the top of the canyon.

Then she heard the piano and felt the needle pain of dragonspeech and told Corin to go to the roof. She heard the sound of wing strokes in the air before she jerked back into consciousness. Her eyes met Liko’s, and he looked away. She terrified him.

“It took no effort to go into trance, and it took no effort to come back,” she said. “I can do this.”

Rois was silent. Tam could not read her face. The door was still open, and she looked out. A hen stood there, its golden feathers glistening in the sun, its feet scaled and reptilian. Dragon’s feet.

“Were you alone?”

“Yes.” Then, reluctantly, she said, “Until the end. The dragons spoke to me.”

“What do you hope to gain?” Rois asked.

“To See the ghosts of centuries,” she said.

“Why?”

Tam looked at Corin. His face was expressionless, but there was a tension in him that she recognized from the ball, when he had been so sure she was in danger. There was a way out for both of them, she
realized. She only had to say that it was his thought, his idea, and Rois would refuse to do it.

Very deliberately, publicly, she put her hand over his on the table and said, “I want to See the taking of the dragons. That is what Corin needs to know, and he can’t See it.”

“And for this you will risk the dark place?”

“Yes.”

“If you go deep enough, it might take you.”

“I know.” She did not want to explain it, to try to speak her loves and fears. They did not belong to anyone but her.

For a long time no one spoke. Tam heard the hen scratching at the dirt. Children’s voices called to one another farther up the hill. The light coming in the eastern window shortened.

“Give me your hand,” Rois said, as commanding as a king.

Tam did. She felt power at once, coursing hot through her, like wine, like passion. Steadily she lifted her head and met Rois’s silver eyes.

Rois looked at Corin. “Outside, now,” she said.

He went. Tam was a little amused.

Rois released Tam’s hand and leaned forward. “You are willing and ready and brave enough to do it, but is it the right thing?”

“Yes.”

“How far can you take yourself?”

Tam clasped her hands together in her lap and let her mind and body slip into the space Joce had shown her. She had to find the place of power within herself. She thought of Cade, the dryness of his skin as the life left him, the scent of stone that clung to him. When had she known she had power? Not when Cade died. But certainly she had known before Aram put it into words.

She remembered incense, candlelight, colored sand. The old woman must have had power of sorts. Perhaps she too had been a wizard. There was not a chance of remembering the words the woman had spoken, but she knew where to go. Back, not just into the stillness that she had felt before but into the stillness at the heart of time.

She began to sense presence, sparks of other moving creatures. Birds, dogs, quivering mice. The cold of a dragon’s mind.

Pain, memories of pain. Heat rising from a blistering desert and the hollow wizened faces of those who had died in thirst and starvation,
with the sun beating on them and the horrible consuming light everywhere. Then for a long time she felt only pain screaming at her from every cell in her body. She was blind but could not pass into unconsciousness. She could form no words or thoughts. Her head was heavy and hot and felt ready to burst into a thousand pieces.

The agony shifted into rage that she shrank from. It clawed at her. She crossed her arms before her. She had to hide. It pushed viciously against her. It forced its way through every protection that she had. She cowered against it.

It relented. Her mouth and throat were paper dry. There was a deep ache in her bones. They were there, the dead, their voices clamoring in her mind. They wanted her body, wanted to walk again on earth and under sky. It would be simple to yield to them. She was so very tired. Rest, a voice cajoled, rest. Her skin was numb. The spirits rocked her gently and sang a lullaby.

There was someone with her. It did not matter. There was no pain anymore, only weight and stillness. Light and silence. She could not lift her arm. All that remained of her was her mind. If she released it she would be done.

Sharp pain cut across her hand. She shouted. She was bleeding, damn it. What was Rois doing?

Then she realized she was herself again. Her whole body jerked violently. Her breath was ragged. Blood was running down her palm and fingers onto the floor.

Rois put down the knife and wiped Tam’s hand with a warm damp cloth. It stung a little. The cut was very shallow.

“You’d better wrap it,” Tam said tiredly. Her voice was hoarse and scratchy.

Without speaking, Rois spread a bitter-smelling paste across the wound. It numbed the skin. She wrapped it neatly with a strip of cloth.

“If you can go that deep on your own,” Rois said, “trance is extremely dangerous. I may not be able to bring you back.”

“You’ll have to,” Tam said. Her mind felt very clear. Whatever she had heard, whatever had spoken to her, that was what remained of the dragons’ age. She drank some tea. “How many other worlds are there?”

“More than we can ever know,” said Rois. “Or perhaps all worlds are one with ours but we can only see this if we step back.”

There was a very long silence. Tam let it fill her, the valley silence, the voice of stone. It was far older than Caithenor. That was what Kelvan had meant about it giving her stories. The magma at the roots of the mountains, the wearing away by the rain, uncountable years of wind. It made the dragons look young, and yet they were like it too, snatched out of time to dwell in fire and rock.

She picked up the knife and wiped it clean with the damp cloth. One of the goats behind the hut bleated. She said, “How much do you remember, Rois? How old are you?”

Rois laughed. “I was not alive at the taking of the dragons, if that is what you want to know. Wizards live and die as other humans. But I am old enough to remember when Aram’s grandfather found us and offered us this place. I was a girl then.”

“Do you remember any stories about the taking of the dragons?”

“There is a legend, but I doubt its truth.”

“Tell me anyway. Please.”

After a hesitation, Rois said, “As the stories go, the Myceneans came and found a group of wizards to aid them. They were wizards who tried to increase their power with other magics, sorceries and spells from without, not wizards of ordinary sort. They took the Mycenean soldiers to the Dragon Valleys. They thought they would gain more power by becoming riders for the Empire. Somehow they made the dragons cold, froze them. Different versions say different things. They called the North Wind, shot arrows of ice, transformed the flames into rubies. Then the Myceneans killed all but one of them and took him and the eggs back to Mycene, and after the eggs hatched they killed him too. In one version of the story the wizards stole power from the rest of us and used it up, and that’s why we weakened.”

Made them cold, Tam thought. Something about it seemed familiar. She remembered the cold air when her hand plunged through the silver tray, the ice Corin had described when he tried to bring Tai back. It mattered. She could not quite see her way through to the answer.

“Why did your people come here?” she asked.

“It seemed a fair bargain,” she said. “The service of a few to the king, whose subjects we were anyway, in exchange for safety and solitude instead of hiding and poverty. After the Fires things were very hard for us. There were some who objected to the bargain but they agreed in the
end.” She hesitated. The wrinkles around her eyes creased a little more. “But I remember, when we came here, it was the only time I ever saw my father weep. He felt free.”

Tam imagined how he must have felt and shivered with the intensity of it. “What was that king like?” she asked. “Do you remember?”

“Big, black-bearded, impatient. Kind in an absentminded sort of way. He was said to be clever but not deceitful. I didn’t know him, of course. I could not tell you if Corin is anything like him.”

Tam had a hundred other questions, about Rois, about wizardry, about the people of the village. All of them seemed too much like prying. “Thank you,” she said.

Rois rose. “He has waited long enough.” She opened the door.

Corin came rapidly in and sat down beside Tam. “Well?” he asked. Then he saw her hand. “What the hell happened?”

“She wanted to be sure I could do it,” she said. “It’s all right. I’ll tell you the whole story later.”

He scowled. Tam did not try to appease him. She watched him exert control of himself. He said, quite calmly, “Will you do it, Rois?”

“Yes,” she said. “Send for me tomorrow when you are ready.”

“Thank you,” he said. He started to rise, then dropped back down abruptly. He said, “How much power does she have?”

Rois included Tam in her answering look. “Sight, strongly. I think stronger in some places than others, places where there is power. But no wizard power.”

Tam said, “Joce thought I might be able sometime to do more than See. Years from now. That was all he would say. The king seemed to think there was more.”

“It depends upon how you use your Sight now,” Rois said. “Upon what you will let in.”

It sent coldness down her back and arms, and recall of wings fluttering against her skin. Was she ready to admit the dead? She swallowed and said, deflecting the question, “There’s power in Caithenor.”

“Yes. It did not become the seat of rulers by accident. That is what woke you.”

“I didn’t feel anything when I went back. There was no point in going.” She remembered walking those ashy streets, sitting on the cobbles baking from the sun. It had been hot and frightening, and all that had happened was that her legs got more tired.

“You went back,” Rois said, “because it is now the place you consider home.”

Tam wanted to deny it, but the protest died on her lips. Even if Corin died, she would not be able to settle comfortably back into her parents’ home. Rois was right.