The Dragons of Noor (29 page)

Eason spoke. “Damusaun.” She did not look his way, but she was listening.

“There is a line from an old desert song I learned as a boy. It says,
‘The heart awakens from within.’
”

“We know this song,” said the Dragon Queen, “but we would only damage Kwen if we cut into his center ring to find his heart.”

Miles’s flesh prickled as he watched the red beetle disappear into a small crack. A strange idea was forming in his mind. “I’ll go in, Damusaun,” he said impulsively.

“How would you do that?”

“There was a student at the meers’ school on Oth thirty years ago, a girl named Yarta who could shape-shift into smaller and smaller things, birds, mice, and insects.” Miles turned to Eason for support and met a frown of concern. He pressed on.

“Once,” he continued, “she shifted smaller still into the song lines of eOwey, the vibrations all of us are made of.” Surely, the dragons and his teacher knew far more about eOwey’s life-song than he? Hadn’t the Damusaun spoken of the Old Magic that connected all things? “I could do that myself. Shape-shift very small. Form into vibration and go into the heart of the tree.”

The queen lowered her head. “This human girl, this Yarta. She saw with dragon’s eyes.”

“What do you mean, Damusaun?”

“We dragons see this vibration. I see you now that way, Miles, and though you stand very still, the millions upon millions of glittering motes that gather to be you are dancing.” Her eyes were bright as she looked about the cave. “We are all this, my brother and sister dragons, this cave, the great World Tree. All dance within vibration in the song and breath of eOwey.”

She tipped her head and peered down at Miles. “Do you see this?”

Miles frowned, thinking. He’d felt a kind of tingling when he played his ervay, as if every part of himself were coming awake, but he didn’t see it—he felt it. Once when his breathing stilled in meditation he thought he’d caught a glimpse of movement, specks of glitter swirling, but the vision had vanished in three breaths. It was only when he’d entered the lit lands of Oth that he’d seen everything around him sparkling, thrumming. The very air had seemed to dance with life.

The Dragon Queen was waiting for his answer, and, with her, Meer Eason and all the dragons by the white World Tree.

“I saw this dance once in Oth, but I cannot see it now, Damusaun,” he confessed.

“Your eyes are too small,” she said. “But this learned meer you called Yarta had vision. What became of her?”

Miles wiped his sweaty palms on his shirt. Yarta had been a student, not a meer, but he didn’t correct the Damusaun. There was more to Yarta’s story, parts he’d rather not tell. The second time Yarta had tried the experiment she’d vanished into thin air and never returned.
Meer Eason knew the truth, for Yarta’s disappearance was told as a cautionary tale to all the first-year students. Since that time the art of shape-shifting was considered much too dangerous to teach to apprentices.

Eason crossed his arms. “You should not do this, Miles.”

“You are my Music Master,” answered Miles. “But I’m a meer in my own right now.”

Meer Eason looked alarmed. He turned to the queen. “It is a difficult shift, and surely the most dangerous kind.”

“Damusaun,” Miles said hesitantly. “Yarta vanished the second time she tried the shift. She never came back.”

There was an uncomfortable rustling in the cave as Meer Eason spoke, casting more doubt. “Even Wielder Meers who have practiced Othic meditation years and years to understand what Yarta did have not dared to follow where she went.”

Miles hadn’t done his regular meditation practice since they’d left Othlore. If the Wielder Meers who were skilled shape-shifters couldn’t make the change …

“Are you sure you wish to try this?” asked the Damusaun.

“Yes, Damusaun.” Blood sang in his ears. “Hanna, Tymm, and Taunier are in Oth with the other Wind-taken.” He glanced at Meer Eason. “If this is the only way to rebuild the bridge that binds the worlds and bring them back to Noor, I have to try.”

His heart wanted it. His body did not. He was terrified at the thought of shrinking down smaller and smaller.

The Damusaun stepped closer. He caught the mixture of fennel, wet stones, and azure needles that was her familiar dragon scent. She had not stopped him when he wanted to shift into a dragon’s form and fight. He knew she would not stop him now. She would let him choose the part he was to play.

Miles slipped the leather strap of his ervay pouch over his neck and handed it to Meer Eason.

Meer Eason touched his brow and dipped his head, acknowledging a fellow meer. He, too, would let him go.

The Music Master held the ervay over his head. “For Miles to shift into pure sound, we will have to play and sing from the time that he departs until his return. That was the way Yarta found her way from formlessness to form again the first time she shifted. The song cannot stop, not even for a moment, or he will be lost.”

Miles was wracked with wave upon wave of fear. Every shift he’d made thus far was to a larger, stronger animal, and he’d relished the feeling of growing power. It went against everything in him to consider becoming a weak creature or, worse, to slip into nothingness. Yet here he was volunteering to do just that, and the lives of those he loved, maybe even the binding of the worlds, depended on it.

I have to make this work
, he thought, but he feared this shift more than he’d ever feared anything. What if he vanished? Was lost forever? Miles stiffened his jaw, hoping Meer Eason and the dragons wouldn’t detect the naked terror coursing through his body.

The Music Master put a comforting arm about his shoulder. Miles had one more thing to say before the shift, something for Eason’s ears alone. “Sir,” he whispered, “I’ve not kept up my meditation practice,” he confessed.

“I know this,” said Eason. “But you have played your music. It’s that you can rely on.”

Miles nodded, unconvinced. He whispered, “I’ve never shifted into anything smaller than myself before.” He couldn’t hide that from his teacher. “I need to … try
that first,” he admitted, motioning toward the tiny red beetle scuttling along the trunk.

“All right,” whispered Eason. “Go on. I’ll protect you.”

The insect looked ugly. Repugnant. Miles swallowed. He used to think the stories about Yarta’s shifts were stupid, the pointless games of a naïve girl, whose senseless death had left a legacy of fear and ignorance behind. Now he had to rely on Yarta’s experiments, and on the one time she’d managed to return. He had to stake his life on it.

His heart drummed and, strangely, the one person he wanted to see now was Hanna. She’d seen him shift last year from boy to beast to boy again. She knew him better than anyone and still thought him brave. They all needed him to awaken the tree, to hold the worlds together, but the reason he must go, even if it meant his life, was because of her. Not because she was the Kanameer, but because she was his sister.

“Are you ready?” asked Meer Eason.

“Wait.” Miles looked up at the Damusaun. “If I do find the World Tree’s heart, what am I supposed to do to awaken him?”

“No one can tell you that, pilgrim.”

The dragons’ blue flames had died down, and the cave
was cold and quiet. Miles could see the breath misting from his mouth. He ran his hand along Breal’s soft fur, letting his fingers say good-bye, before he addressed the Damusaun again.

“I’ll go now.”

Meer Eason began to play a simple childlike tune called “Merry-Go-Round” that made Miles smile. He’d need an easy melody to shift to something small, and Eason knew that. Eyes on the red beetle, Miles imagined himself shrinking down, envisioning a small, rounded back, hard and shell-like, tiny legs crawling up a great white tree. He let the tune take him even as he felt himself shrinking.

He closed his eyes. Panic swept through him as he grew smaller and smaller. Eyes open. He saw Meer Eason’s feet. They were mountainous. He spread his tiny insect wings, flitted to the tree, and landed near his fellow beetle. The ridges in the white bark were hill-like. The beetle was traversing along a sharp-edged crevice just ahead of him. Folding his wings, he listened again to the song Meer Eason was playing and let his thoughts flow.

Quava-arii. Ever changing. You shifted smaller to make sure you could do it without losing yourself. You’ve done that, and you’re all here, even in this tiny shape. Nothing’s missing
.

The thought soothed him. If he could shift so small and still be Miles, then he could go smaller, down to a flea or even … sound waves.

eOwey, help me. I don’t want to lose myself
.

He had no picture in his mind to shift to. No animal or insect. He had to let the song itself take him. The tune began to change as Eason slid into the dragon song they’d offered Kwen in the hollow cave. And now the voices that rose with the ervay were rumbling dragon voices.
Abb nayn kwii onan. Zuss. Tesha yoven
.

Awaken. Bind the Broken. Miles let the chant flow all around him in a river that carried him along in a warm current. It was like the time he’d played as a seal in the Morrow Sea, only more so. He left the body of the beetle and slowly let go. He was sound and wave, and still he was Miles. The surprise thrilled him.

Voices carried him, rising, falling. Miles willed himself to move faster within the song and found he could do that. From high notes to low, he did one flip and two and three. He was completely free. The happiness he’d felt swimming in his seal form and later flying on a dragon’s back was nothing next to this.

The song mellowed, and he fell into its easy rhythm.
It was a new tune he’d not heard before, but that didn’t matter; he could play and move within the sound as he circled his way around the rings, deeper and deeper into the heart of the tree.

The journey was near and far, and he knew straightaway when he’d reached the center ring.

This was the song the dragons sang and the sound Miles rode as he searched. With the surrounding song, he lost himself inside the music, lost his worry, his loneliness, his need to prove himself, lost everything, yet he was not lost.

Miles didn’t know how this was so, but it was so. The tune carried him and was him, and he belonged.

I in you and you in me
, the dragons were singing in tune with the ervay. They were all inside the song of eOwey. He knew it now as he rode the sound waves. He would find the heart of the tree and awaken him for Hanna, for Tymm, for Taunier, for the dragons, the deyas, and the sylth folk of Oth, for all of them and everyone who lived and longed for both worlds to be gathered in.

T
he starless black was dead silent. The air felt so thick it was hard to move hand or foot, hard at times even to breathe. Hanna clung to Arnun’s roots; all that held her up in the vast, unending void. The only way she could keep herself from retreating back to the safety of the cliff was to fill her eyes with Taunier. He balanced on a thick root just ahead, his hands waving as he fought the Outer Darkness with small, bright bursts of fire. The flames shed light on the kneeling children as they pieced together Arnun’s roots.

On the cliff behind them, Thriss breathed a slender blue jet as she circled Arnun’s trunk. The Fire Herd and the little pip were their only source of light and warmth in
the frigid gloom. Hanna drew another fragment from her pocket and watched Tymm’s soiled fingers with wonder as he pressed the piece snugly into place. Broken things were just a puzzle to him—things he could rejoin with grace and ease and glue, only here no glue was needed, for Arnun melded the pieces and filled them with vibrant life, once they were properly joined.

The root bridge lengthened, and still the void extended on and on.
You have far and far to go to find the light beyond the dark
. Had Evver known they would walk out over the abyss on nothing but roots? Had he seen ahead and glimpsed her doing this, the way she’d glimpsed the Wind-taken building Arnun?

A song began as they built the root bridge, and the one leading the song was Arnun, her voice deep as the night:

It was a love song, but the love was more than that of a husband and wife. It was the love between those who’d been torn apart, those who longed beyond all things to see each other again. Ahead of the group, Taunier herded his blazing light. If the roots should fail to reach the World Tree in Noor, could she let him disappear without ever reaching out to him? Would the last thing she saw be simply his back?

Hanna stood and walked carefully along a thick root. Fall to the left or right and she would plummet to her death, but she had to walk this far. The song had circled round again, the words repeating the refrain:

It was a thousand miles and a hand’s reach to touch him on the shoulder. Taunier turned slowly and looked down at her.

“Hanna?”

“If this is hello, then hello. If this is good-bye …”

She framed his face with her hands, brought it closer to hers, kissed him on the mouth. He did not draw back as she had feared but leaned into her, his lips barely parting.