The Last Dragon Chronicles #4: The Fire Eternal (3 page)

On a poster were the words:

“No strings,” he said. “Bring your partner.”

He noted her shudder. Then he turned and walked silently out of the shop.

H
e asked you
out
?” gasped Lucy, almost jumping from her seat.

Liz turned the car into a parking spot near the entrance to Benson’s Garden Center. “There’s no need to sound so horrified, Lucy. You don’t become an old maid at the age of twenty-five.”

“Six,” said Zanna. “I’m twenty-six.”

“And very attractive at that,” Liz added. She opened the door above a large gray puddle.
A shower of sleet drummed ripples in its surface. More “weather.” More false predictions from The Weather Channel.

The three of them stepped out of the car together. Lucy, on tiptoes, avoiding puddles, picked her way across to Zanna. “So what did you say?”

Zanna thought about using her umbrella, but kept it closed. “I said no, of course.”

Lucy chewed her lip and nodded. “What else did he ask?”

“Why? What’s it to you?”

“Just asking.” Lucy bristled. She folded up and shivered. “It’s not a crime, is it?”

“Don’t start, you two.” Liz was striding on already, getting out of the rain. “We’re here to buy plants, not start a small war.”

“He bought a dragon,” said Zanna.

“Good for him,” Liz said. “The man can’t be all that bad then, can he?”

“Was he handsome?”

“Lu-cy?” Zanna stared at her,
hard.

“What?
Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

“Because it’s meaningless.”

“Yeah, so why’d you bring it up in the
first
place, then?”

Liz stopped at the entrance and turned to face them, her feet rustling in the thick bristles of a welcome
mat. “You know, the way you two squabble, no one would ever believe that you weren’t actual sisters! I suppose I should be grateful that there’s only
a sliver of a family connection or we’d never see a day without bloodshed on the Crescent. I’m not going in here with the pair of you bickering like a couple of … gnomes!”

“Gnomes?” said Lucy. There was a group of them for sale on a pallet nearby.

“Liz, gnomes are gentle,” Zanna pointed out.

Liz thought about it quickly. “Not if you steal their fishing rods,” she said, causing Zanna to erupt
with laughter.

“This is dumb,” Lucy tutted. “You two are insane.”

“Hey!” Liz scowled at her hard for that.

“Okay, truce,” said Zanna, knuckling Lucy’s back. “I admit I found Tam interesting. He was witty and yes, quite handsome in a … hipster kind of way. But my commitment is to David and always will be.” She picked up her skirt and jumped for dry land.

“So why won’t you try harder to find
out where he is?”

“Lucy, not here,” her mother said quietly.

A ringtone sounded in Lucy’s pocket. She was standing in the rain like a little lost child and her eyes were tearing up when she spoke again. “Maybe he needs us to make the first move?”

Zanna looked sideways and saw, of all things, a caricature sculpture of a smiling gray squirrel. “Your phone’s ringing,” she said quietly, and pushed
the door of the garden center open.

Despite its war zone of a parking lot, Benson’s was a comfortable, easygoing store that sold a wide variety of plants and trees, plus every kind of accessory the home gardener could wish for. As well as tools and foliage, there was a well-stocked gift area selling everything from candles to spiced pears in syrup. It was here that Liz caught up with Zanna.

“You OK?” she whispered. She looped her arm and tugged.

Zanna sighed. “Why won’t she let go of it, Liz?”

“Because she’s sixteen. It’s her job to be awkward. Every year she sees you writing a valentine to David and she feels left out, so she has to compete for her own little part of him. She misses the man who wrote charming tales for the little girl that’s still inside her. He’s her hero and
she loves him. End of story.”

“But it’s not, though.” Zanna threw up a hand. “I love him dearly, you know I do. But I’m not forever trying to, you know …”

“Resurrect him?”

A bright tear rolled down Zanna’s cheek. “I want him back as much as anyone, she must know that. But he’s never going to come back, is he? Is he?” She sobbed and fell against Liz’s shoulder.

Liz turned her aside, guiding
her away from the eyes of an over-inquisitive cashier. “Shall I drive you home?”

“No,” Zanna said, recovering quickly. She sniffed and cut the air firmly with her hand. “This has to be
faced. I have to deal with this and just think about Lexie. If David is anywhere he’s in her, right?”

“Absolutely,” said Liz, handing her a tissue, “and Lexie is a wonderful reminder of him … but you have to think
about yourself sometimes. David would expect nothing less, I’m sure.”

Zanna blew into the tissue and tucked it in her sleeve. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

Liz picked up a gift set of bath oils and soaps. “Maybe you should go to this poetry reading. What harm could it do? You’re not betraying David if you go to a public event now and then.”

“I don’t think Lucy will see it like
that. Anyway, I’m slightly wary. Call it that old sibyl sixth sense, but I got the feeling Tam was checking me out somehow. I don’t mean there was anything shady about him, but he knew who I was and what kind of stuff I did. I got the impression he knew a bit more than he was letting on.”

“Perhaps he knows someone you’ve treated in the past?”

“Maybe,” said Zanna, dropping her shoulders. “Whatever.
Come on, let’s buy plants.”

“No, let’s buy
this.”
From a nearby shelf, Liz picked up an ornament, an arch-shaped door about a foot tall, with a mint green frame and two working copper hinges. It was painted with autumnal leaves and flowers to give it a rustic, woodland look.

“What’s that for?” asked Zanna, opening and closing it.

“Fairies,” Liz said, grinning like a child. “You pop it in the
garden, up against a wall, and the fairies come and go as they please.”

Zanna rubbed her brow in despair. “Liz, you’ve got to stop buying Lexie presents. She’s spoiled to high heaven as it is.”

“It’s not for Lexie, it’s for the
garden,”
Liz said. “But she’ll be free to play with it, if she wishes.” She popped it into a wire basket. “There, done. Now we’ll buy plants.”

For the next forty minutes,
Zanna and Liz trawled around together, chatting about nothing in particular. They managed to purchase an outdoor wind chime and a pair of thermal gloves for Arthur, but not a single plant made it into the basket. Liz was commenting on this irony when they walked into the café in search of Lucy. “Thing is, when is the right time to plant anything now? You think you’ll get frost and you wake up
to butterflies. You think you’re in for rain, and you end up watering. On the news last night they were warning us to expect winds at up to ninety miles per hour. We might see tornados.
Tornados.
Here!”

“It’s Gaia,” said Zanna. “The planet’s kicking back.”

Liz shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s very worrying. Ah, there she is, on the phone as usual.”

Zanna dropped a shopping bag on the seat
beside Lucy, who almost knocked her milk shake over in surprise.

“Whoa, what’s with you?” Zanna said.

“Nothing,” said Lucy, hiding her phone. “Do you mind not creeping up on me?”

“If we’d known you were having a private conversation we’d have left you in peace,” Liz said.

“I was
texting,”
Lucy said.

“Of course you were.” Liz sighed and dropped her bag onto a seat as well, only for Zanna to
say, “I don’t think I want that cup of coffee after all.”

“Oh, great,” said Lucy. “So it’ll be my fault you didn’t get your caffeine hit?”

“What
is
it with you?” Zanna said, squaring up.

This time Liz did not intervene, and when Lucy realized no support was forthcoming, she stormed away saying, “I’m sick of you two. I want to go home!”

As she swept past the registers, she checked her cell
phone connection again. The link was still live. One message, from Tam:

And for the umpteenth time, or however many times one can change a text message in forty minutes, Lucy tried again, this time deleting everything she’d written in favor of one word.
She read it back, heart pounding, then posted it into the ether. She was doing this for David, she reminded herself. Someone, one of them, had to make a move. But even as
SENT
flashed up on the screen, she wished she could have clawed the message back. Just one word. Maybe Tam wouldn’t get it? Or maybe he would.

One small word.

One legend.

F
or the first six or seven years of his life, the ice bear, Avrel, had led a fairly commonplace polar existence. The smaller cub of a two-litter family, he had never stood out or troubled his mother, and had easily survived his yearling stages largely by virtue of learning through obedience. Born into the seal-rich waters of Svalbard, he had rarely had to
cope with lasting hunger. Even in the summer months, when only the most careless of seals could be stalked, he had always grubbed for rodents in the shoreline vegetation or settled for grinding his teeth on kelp. And because the hunting had always been plentiful and serious hostilities with other bears few, he had never strayed far from those sketches of land.

All this changed on the day he met
Ingavar.

It had been one morning, during the very late spring, when the sea birds were squawking and the space between the ocean and the clear blue sky was growing ever more hazy with heat. Avrel was wandering the drifting pack ice on a pessimistic lookout for any blubber-rich seal that would care to ease his stomach through the oncoming summer, when he’d picked up the scent of an unfamiliar
animal. It was weak in strength, which meant the animal was small, but as pungent in its way as the foul-smelling walrus. He tested the wind with a bob of his snout. The creature was behind him, lost in the slight miasma of haze that sometimes settled between the ice and the sky. It might even be following him.

Curious, he turned and rose up slowly. The ice field was relatively flat and sea-washed,
but away to his right a small cluster of undissolved ridges offered visual protection for anything less than the size of a bear. In this direction, the scent was at its strongest. So he set down and slid himself into the water, swimming
between floes until he neared the ridges. There he saw it. A small creature with grayish-blue fur and a tail half the length of its skinny body. Thinking at first
it was a free-running dog, he grew wary and looked around for signs of men. But the animal did not move like a dog, it trotted along in playful steps, keeping its snout very low to the ice, obviously hunting for scraps of food.

Calculating no threat whatsoever, Avrel hauled himself onto the floe. The creature paused. Avrel must have seemed like a monster to it, dripping wet, thickset, heavy of
claw. Yet the thing merely looked up as though it had been expecting him. It had an elegant face and remarkably small ears. There were barely five mouthfuls of flesh on its bones, but in the absence of seals, it would have to do.

Avrel swaggered forward in a cloud of breath, pools of water running off his flip-flopping paws.

The animal’s dark eyes screwed into his. “Aren’t you at least going
to ask?” it said.

Avrel came to a snorting halt. Most prey, if it spoke, limited its output to squeals of alarm. To be asked a question was …

“Exactly,” the animal said, as though it could read his puzzled mind.

And puzzled he was. The instinct to hunt had overtaken his natural inquisitiveness, but now, stopped in his tracks by this dialogue, the questions were there: What was this creature?
Why was it here? Why hadn’t he seen its kind before? “Are you a … fox?” he grunted, though he did not understand where the reference had come from.

“Sometimes,” it said, which puzzled him even more. Annoyed, he cut short all other questions in favor of:
What do you taste like, I wonder?

He padded forward again. Unalarmed, the “fox” trotted off behind a crest of snow. Avrel mooched on, in no
particular hurry. The floe was detached from the rest of the field. Unless this creature could fly like a bird or outswim a seal it was only a matter of wearing
it down. It was quick, no doubt. Silent, too, on its furry little feet. But how long could it hold out against a bear? It might as well offer itself up and be done with.

“Only a bear with a head full of stories would know what I was,”
its voice said suddenly.

Avrel swung to his left. The “fox” was sitting on a plinth of snow, staring down at him as if it owned the whole white world.

“What
are
you?” Avrel grunted.

“What are
you?”
it said with a tilt of its head. “How did you know to call me fox when fox are never found in these waters, bear?”

Avrel blinked and thought about this. His mother must have taught him, but he couldn’t
recall it. A guess, perhaps? But how could he guess at what he didn’t know existed? And yet when he nuzzled down deep into his thoughts, he could picture these creatures in strange locations, stealing food, running with young, their bluish fur turning white in winter. They were
there,
in his memories. Arctic fox. As clear as this one in front of him now.

“Tell me a story, Avrel,” it said.

What?
He looked up. The plinth was empty. Nothing to the left or right of it either. Avrel moved forward, purpose in his step, his chest heaving in time to his heart. Was he dreaming? How did this thing know his name? He lunged forward at the crest, certain that the fox would be cowering behind it. It wasn’t. It was ahead again, riding another floe.

“Tell me a story,” it said across the water. “Tell
me of Ragnar, Lorel, and Aluna.”

Avrel shook his head wildly. Suddenly, pictures were pouring through his mind. It was as if he’d been buried for years in a den and now someone had punched a bright hole in the roof. He saw bears. Great bears, in battle with men. In conflict with one another. On nine great pillars. Memories, running the aurora of time. All the way back to the dawn of the ice.
Generations. History. Adventure.

Stories.

He looked up again. The fox was trotting across the ice, north. This was impossible, he told himself. How
had it crossed the gap so fast when there was ten bears’ length of water between them? “Wait!” he cried.

“This way,” the fox replied. Its voice was lower now. Deeper. Rounded.

Avrel took to the water again. He swam for the floe, but it seemed such
a long, long time in coming. When he eventually saw the white edge, the sky had darkened and he knew in his heart he was a long way from home. It occurred to him then he might have been dying, on a dream journey heading for the far side of the ice.

In truth, he was about to come alive, to awaken.

Just ahead, he could see the feet of his quarry. But they were no longer stick feet, nimble and
clean. They were rugged, fur-straggled, heavy of claw. He looked up then, into the eyes of eternal wonder. The bear he would come to call Nanukapik, Ingavar, was gazing down at him. “Tell me a story, Avrel,” he said, and he carried all the souls of the North in his voice.

Avrel knew without knowing that the real story began here. He dragged himself tiredly out of the water, shook himself down,
and gathered his thoughts.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“Everywhere and nowhere,” Ingavar said.

Avrel tested the ice. It was sound. “My head …?” he began. “These memories … are they mine?”

“For now,” said Ingavar, looking at the sky.

“Are you a spirit bear? What do want with me?” Avrel could feel himself trembling now.

“Walk with me,” said Ingavar, and the fur on his head seemed to separate into
three until a mark was burning in white fire there. “You are Avrel, son of Lorel. My chosen Teller. Walk with me, nanuk. Watch, learn, remember …”

… And now here they were, many, many months later, under a gray sky that seemed to walk with them. “Lord, look at the clouds,” said Avrel.

“They are not clouds,” said Ingavar, continuing.

Avrel peered at them again. Where he usually saw twisting
vapor, he could now see a flock of spirit people, walking. They were dressed in the furs of the Inuit natives. Some carried harpoons, others drums. Some
drove long sleds, pulled by dogs. Avrel rose up, reaching out a paw. “Who are they?” he asked. Everything his claws raked turned to fog.

“The dead,” said Ingavar, “mourning their home.”

“Why are they with us?”

“They are always with us,” Ingavar
said. “You will see them when we need them, and we need them now.”

He came to a halt. A drumbeat sounded, echoed by another and another and another, till the sky shook with a thunderous hum. The cloud people formed a gigantic circle. From their throats, they chanted
ai-ee-yah! ai-ee-yah!
stirring the wind into flurries and moans. They clapped and danced and sang to the ice, beckoning a great
spirit into their ring.

Avrel felt a rumbling vibration in his feet. The ocean was angry. Something was surging up from below. “Lord!” he cried urgently. “Lord, we must run!”

But Ingavar threw back his head and howled, a sound no bear should be capable of making. In the sky, every sled dog joined his call. Avrel, nearly deafened,
flattened his ears and saw the ice break with a rolling crack.
A great spout of water gushed into the sky and came crashing back in clinging waves, over his paws. Then from the crack came the body of a woman with the tail of a fish. She crawled out, looking around, hissing threats. Her upper half was dressed in the furs of the natives. Her hair was long and matted with algae, her face crusted and twisted by shells, her eyes yellow with the rot of death. On one
hand, all her fingers were missing. On the other, all that remained was a thumb.

The spirit people sighed. The drumbeats softened. The dogs ceased to howl. Ingavar also. “Do you recognize this creature?” he asked his Teller.

Avrel nodded in fear. He had seen what he had seen, and here it was to Tell: the story of the day he had walked with the souls of countless men, and seen the blue-eyed Nanukapik,
Ingavar, call the sea goddess, Sedna, up from the deep.