Seraph of Sorrow (30 page)

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dredge up memories of your mother.”

“It’s not Ma I’m worried about anymore, Charles. Not for a long time. It’s you!”

He sighed again, and the two of them examined each other. Winona found herself wondering what it would be like, after years of knowing this man, to fall in love with him. Why had they never fallen in love? Tasa didn’t seem to care much for this dasher, though in his whispering sessions to Winona, he never explained his discomfort. Certainly Charles, a widower with a charming young daughter named Ember, was available. He was a few years younger than Winona, but not so much that they couldn’t make it work. Maybe—

“You should come with me,” he finally said.

She felt her scales relax. “I’d like to.”

“You’ll need to hide, some distance away. I promised I would come alone.”

“Xavier thinks that’s dumb.”

“Xavier will learn better, in time.”

“Charles. If she tries to kill you . . .”

“I can handle Glory Seabright. But it won’t come to that. She’s not going to fight me.”

He’s right. Glory
isn’t here to fight him.
The grim, ironic thought saddened Winona as she watched a young beaststalker with golden hair set arrow to string.
This other woman is.

She watched the duel unfold, frozen between doing nothing because Charles had told her to stay hidden, and doing nothing because she was too scared to do anything else.

“What are you waiting for?”

She jumped at the voice, which was whispered loudly and closely enough by Tasa to have sounded like he was seething inside her skull.

“Dammit, Tasa, what are you doing here? Charles didn’t want anyone else to come!”

“Then he shouldn’t have invited
you
. But he did, and he needs help!” His gnarled, red wing claw pointed at the unfolding scene. “We’ve got to break cover and save him!”

She wanted to go, but her clawed feet would not move. “I can’t, Tasa. You go. You help him. I’ll go get help, in case there are more . . .”

“You’re such a chickenshit!” He rammed into her, pushing her on top of her wings and rattling the back of her skull against the base of a thick spruce tree. “I’m tired of watching you screw up every chance to be a real dragon! You want to stay hidden in the bushes—fine!”

He disappeared, and Winona squeezed her eyes shut to hold the tears. It didn’t work, and in any case she couldn’t close her ears against the clamor by the river. The sound of Charles Longtail’s death throes made her gasp and sob. She lay there, paralyzed by despair. After a while, she heard voices—one of them was the young woman, and one could only be . . .

Driven finally by the need to be sure, she lifted herself off the ground and emerged slowly from behind her spruce tree. Right away, she saw the body of Charles Longtail on the silent riverbank. His head lolled to one side, forked tongue stuck between two long teeth. A sword jutted from a smoking wound in his throat. About thirty yards distant, two beaststalkers were arguing—one with honey blonde hair, and another with graying black hair. The older one would be Glory Seabright. Though decades had passed, Winona could never forget the face.

She turned back to the corpse.
What could have been?
she thought.
Love for me. A father to little Jada. Peace for dragons.
It was all in ruins . . . because she hadn’t acted in time . . .

I wonder where Tasa is now.

She stepped forward carelessly, and snapped a branch under a wing claw.

That got Glory’s attention. “Elizabeth!”

But this “Elizabeth,” whoever she was, was already walking away. “I know there’s a second one,” she called out. “I saw it before I saw the first. I don’t care. Kill it yourself.”

Winona knew then she was not in danger—Glory would follow her disciple. Glory was nothing without her disciples. She returned her attention to Charles and thought of his younger brother, Xavier, and Charles’s own eight-year-old Ember, and what she had to tell them now.

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“You’ve told me enough, Xavier.” Winona settled on her haunches, beyond despair. It was too much like that moment long ago, when she had the unfortunate task of informing this very dragon that he had lost his brother, Charles. Now, years later, the tables were turned. Except this news was even worse.

“Even without any bodies or any other evidence, we have to assume they’re—”

“Dead, I know.” She looked into the fire she had made in her cave, and thought of her little Jada—a toddler giggling at her mother’s crazy faces with delight, a grade-schooler coming home from Northwater Elementary with perfect marks but teachers’ cautions against aggressive behavior, an impetuous teenager falling in love with a silly (vegetarian!) dragon, a married mother who chafed at sticking around the house . . . and, finally, another casualty of Glory Seabright’s army, dead before the age of forty. “As I said, Xavier—you’ve told me enough.”

“Have I, Elder Brandfire? I wonder.”

“Xavier, I’d like to mourn my daughter, and her husband. This is hardly the time—”

“Regretfully, I beg to differ,” he interrupted with no regret in his tone at all. “I would suggest that this is the
perfect
time to ask you: Do you still cling to your ridiculous notions of peace? Do you still think we should stride into Winoka, wings outstretched, smiling and waving white flags from our tails? You’ve talked a good game since Charles died almost a decade ago.”

“Charles was not just your brother. He was my friend.”

“Such a good friend, that in all this time you’ve never discovered and caught his killer.”

“Whoever it is, is long gone.” She believed this. Sure, at times she would pass by a tall, lithe blonde in some random town and wonder if she was brushing shoulders with Charles’s killer. This was Minnesota—and there were thousands of tall blondes. Plenty of them, she was sure, were named Elizabeth. She couldn’t mount a hunt based on such skimpy information.

Not so for some in the Blaze, like Xavier. Not so for her own daughter, who became obsessed with the tale of her mother’s friend, and who convinced her husband to join her on a quest for revenge. No matter how much Winona protested, no matter what she told them of dead Grammie Patricia and their dead uncle Forrester, they
wouldn’t listen . . .

“Long gone,” he repeated her words with distaste. “I doubt it. In fact, whoever killed Charles probably killed your daughter and your son-in-law. Yet in your heart, the quest for peace goes on. No doubt you see yourself as some sort of successor to his—”

“Xavier,
not now
!” She stomped her foot twice, and two six-feet long Gila monsters scrambled out of the crumbling rock beneath her. Without looking at her servants, she pointed them in the right direction. “Elder Longtail is leaving. Please see him out of this cave.”

A quick flick of his three-pronged tail kept the lizards at bay. “I’m curious to know, Elder Brandfire, since so many on the Blaze speak of you so well. They see your ineptitude, your fawning hopes for peace, and your spinelessness as strengths that qualify you to be our next Eldest. Assuming your hermit of an ex-husband doesn’t want the job.”

“Actually,” she snarled over the crackling flames, “I think they want me to be the next Eldest because they see my greatest strength of all—my ability to see through your hate and bile. You act like you deserve the job yourself, but we both know you don’t have what it takes to lead the Blaze. The last Longtail who was up to the job died years ago.” It was a harsh barb, and it felt good to say.
Fight fire with fire,
she told herself.
Hurt with hurt.

His lips curled enough for her to spot spittle on his yellowed teeth. “It would not have to be me, Elder Brandfire. Just someone who knows who the hell he or she is. Someone who doesn’t pretend to be a dragon, all the while hating dragons. Someone who doesn’t walk among us, a coward in dragon’s clothing. Someone whose own daughter didn’t respect her enough—”

“GET OUT!” She let loose with a jet of flame, making him close his eyes and turn his head, but no more. When he faced her again, he was actually smiling.

“Someday,” he promised her, “you will understand. I don’t know what it will take to get you there, but I hope I am there that day.
Eldest
.”

He left before she could spit in his face again.

Later in the day, long after she had calmed down from Xavier’s visit and was simply wracked with sadness, she got another visitor. She figured he would come, and she knew why he was here. Spotting the light shift at the entrance to her cave, she smiled ruefully.

“Come to say good-bye, Smokey?”

Smokey Coils dropped his camouflage and hung his head. The deep scar through his left eye had not grown fainter with time. In fact, there were growths beginning to form around it. His right eye, a single black orb, glistened with a tear. His wing claw worked around two coins—
zeep, zeep. Plick.

“You’ve got two coins now, instead of just the one,” Winona noticed.

He ignored the observation and answered her initial question. “You need someone now, Winona. Someone helpful. I’m not that someone.”

“I suppose not. I still wish you’d stay, for Catherine’s sake. She needs a grandfather.”

“Let the Blaze help you. She’ll have plenty of family, in Crescent Valley.”

Winona shook her head. “I’ll raise her in Northwater. Like I raised Jada. I’ll find some help to watch her on crescent moons. She doesn’t need to know she’s a dragon until much later.”

He raised the coins to his eye and sighed. “Earlier today, I went up to Northwater . . .”

“Northwater? You never go there. And as a dragon?”

“I went camouflaged. I watched the people. Outside the supermarket. Mothers with children. Every now and then, a mom would stop out in front—her kid would stop her. You’ve seen them, I’ll bet, those gumball and toy machines? They’d put in a coin, out comes candy for the kid, kid gets quieter. I watched them and thought . . .”

After a while, she prompted him. “Were you thinking of Jada?”

“And of Catherine. I never gave Jada much, not even gum-balls . . .”

“Not even much of anything, Smokey. So you got Catherine a gumball? She’s less than a year old—she’ll choke on it!”

He scraped the ground with a claw and cleared his throat. “That’s not the point, Win. Once I heard about Jada, I needed . . . I needed . . .”

Winona deflated, losing her anger for this man. He had been entirely too absent from Jada’s life, but he could still feel loss. She stepped up to him and put a gentle wing on his.

“I wanted something,” he finally blurted. “To get Catherine, I mean. I found a quarter. It was on the ground, where some mother had dropped it. So I picked it up. It went in okay, but then nothing would happen. No gumball, no toy. I tried it again. The quarter just shot straight through. Again, and again . . .”

He began to rub the quarters together again, gulping with the effort to keep control.
Zeep. Zeep. Plick.
“I kept the quarter.”

“To go with the one you already had,” Winona said. She knew the story behind the first one, and saw no need to go over it here. He had suffered enough.

He patted her wing. “Maybe I’ll come back when she’s nearer her first change.” He motioned inside to the crib where the human baby wriggled. “She’ll need family then.”

“She will. And you’re always welcome to drop by before then, Smokey.”

“I know I am. Thanks.” He smiled at her. “It’s not that I don’t love you. I’ve just . . . seen too much.”

“I know how you feel.”

“I’d like to show you,” he added, walking out of the cave, “one last thing.”

She followed him. “What’s that?”

“Some illusions. And some reality.”

He began to shine, setting the entrance of the cave aglow with a golden light. Winona vaguely recalled something only elder creepers could do.
What is it exactly that they do?
she asked herself. Somehow, her memory was unclear. But her answer came soon enough.

The twilit fields around them burst with dark colors, as the moon elms sprouted impossible flowers and the stars began to streak through the sky. The ends of the crescent moon grew until a bright “O” rolled over the horizon. The distant buzzing of fire hornets gave way to the hooting of wooden flutes, and the scents around her recalled something prehistoric.

These are dreams of mine,
she realized. From childhood, from adulthood, even from last night. They were all happening at once.
These aren’t real.

Nothing here is,
she heard his voice say. His outline, glowing brighter than the moon, was the only thing that stayed constant as the scene around them shifted. Elms disintegrated into grass, grass grew into animals, animals rotted into pools of tar. Massive flocks of birds drew a darker curtain over the world, spiders danced around a roaring fire that smelled of roast chicken, and shimmering streams trickled uphill by their feet. Winona looked around for a dragon, but beyond the still form of Smokey Coils, she saw no one. Given a moment, she understood why.

I never dream about them. About us. We are all too real.

But then he showed her one dragon after all, and her limbs froze as she realized what this last gift was that her estranged husband was giving her. He let her take it in for some time, and then the real Crescent Valley rushed in to replace the illusions she had seen.

Without another word, he kissed her scaled cheek, and left. Winona watched him leave. She could not make out the exact moment when his image faded into the twilight, or when the sound of his two quarters—
zeep, zeep, plick
—gave way to the strumming of insects.

All she could do was trust her third visitor would come, before she forgot all of this.

“Tasa.” The word came out like a gasp. “You’re here.”

“Winona.” He stepped forward and put a wing claw on her back. “It’s been too long.”