Buggery damn.
He threw himself under the stone a second before the acid drench of fire poured on top of him: smoke and suffocation, poison. Mind clouded, he fought and wriggled farther into the crack, tallying where he could go from here, how he could get away and wait for the poison to work. Would the flour he’d used to thicken it keep it from doing its job? Pain in his calf and thigh and dizzying weakness told him where he’d been slashed. He fumbled from his pocket one of Jenny’s silk scarves, twisted the tourniquet around his leg, and then fire, acid, poison streamed down again on the stone above him. Smoke. Heat.
It’ll tear the stone away from the top …
He had a belt-ax and pulled it free, cut at the claws that ripped down through the stone and roots above his head. A huge five-fingered hand, eighteen inches across, and he struck at it with all his strength, the blood that exploded out scorching his face. Above him, above the protecting stones, he heard Centhwevir scream, and the stones caved on top of him, struck by that monstrous tail.
Damn it, with all that poison in you, you should at least be feeling poorly by now!
The wall above him gave way. Darkness, pain, fire devouring his bleeding flesh.
Stillness.
His hold on consciousness slipped, as if he clung to rock above an abyss. He knew what lay in that abyss and didn’t want to look down.
Ian’s face, wreathed in woodsmoke and poison fumes, glistening with tears. He couldn’t imagine shedding tears for his own father, not at twelve, nor at sixteen when that brawling, angry, red-faced man had died, nor indeed at any other time. The dreams shifted and for a time the smoke that burned his eyes was that of parchment curling and blackening in the hearth of Alyn Hold. The pain was the pain of cracked ribs that kept him from breathing, as he watched that big bear-shape black against the hall fireplace where his books burned: an old copy of Polybius he’d begged a trader to sell him, two volumes of the plays of Darygambe he’d ridden a week out to Eldsbouch to buy …
His father’s brawling voice. “The people of the Hold don’t need a bloody schoolmaster! They don’t want some prig who can tell them about how steam can turn wheels or what kind of rocks you find at the bottom of the maggot-festerin’ sea! What the hell good is that when the Iceriders come down from the north or the black wolves raid in winter’s dead heart? This is the Winterlands, you fool! They need someone who’ll defend ’em, body and bones! Who’ll die defendin’ ’em!”
Beyond him in a wall of blurred fire—all things were blurred in that chiaroscuro of hearthlight and myopia—John’s books burned.
In the fire he saw still other things.
A distant vision of a tall thin woman, black-haired, frost-eyed, standing on the Hold’s battlement with a gray wolf at her side. Wind frayed at the fur of her collar, and she gazed over the moors and streams of that stony thankless desolation that had been the frontier of the King’s realm. His mother, though he could not remember her voice, nor her touch, nor anything about her save that for years he had dreamed of seeking her, never finding her again. One of the village girls had been her apprentice, skinny, tiny, with a thin brown face half-hid in an oceanic night of hair and a quirky triangular smile.
He seemed to hear her voice speaking his name.
“The poison won’t keep him down for long,” she seemed to be saying. “We have to finish him.”
It wasn’t the blue and gold dragon she was talking about. It was the first dragon, the golden dragon, the beautiful creature of sunlight and jewel-bright patterns of purple and red and black.
And she was right. He’d been hurt in that first fight, too, in the gully on the other side of Great Toby. She’d brought him to with those words. There was no way of knowing whether the poisons would kill a dragon or only numb it temporarily. He still didn’t know. Now as then, he had to finish the matter with an ax.
It took everything he had to drag himself back to consciousness. The mortar that had held together the wall above him had perished with time. Acrid slime leaked through, staining the granite; bits of scrub and weed smoldered fitfully. His body hurt as if every bone were broken, and he felt weak and giddy, but he knew he’d better get the matter done with if he didn’t want to go through all this again.
Body and bones, his father had said. Body and bones.
Maggot-festering old bastard.
He brought up his hand and fumbled at his spectacles. The slab of stone that had knocked him out had driven the steel frame into the side of his face, but the glass hadn’t broken. The spell Jenny had put on them worked so far. He drew breath and cold agony sliced from toes to crown by way of the belly and groin.
No sound from outside. Then a dragging rasp, a thick scratching, metal on stone.
The dragon was still moving. But it was down.
No time. No time.
It took all his strength to shift the stone. Acid burned his hands through the charred remains of his gloves. Broken boulders, knobs of earth rained in his eyes. He got an elbow over the granite foundation, inched himself clear, like pulling his bones out of his flesh in splinters.
The ax, he thought, fighting nausea, fighting the gray buzzing warmth that closed around his vision. The ax. Jenny, I can’t do this without you.
The sunlight was like having a burning brand rammed through his eyes into his brain. He waited for his head to clear.
Centhwevir lay before him, fallen among the ruins, a gorgeous tesselation of blue and gold. Striped wings spread, patterned like a butterfly’s: black blood leaked from beneath one of them. A wonderment of black and white fur pillowed the birdlike head: long scales like sheet-gold ribbons, horns striped lengthwise and crosswise, antennae tipped in glowing, jeweled bobs. Spikes and corkscrews and razor-edged ridges of scales rose through it along the spine, glistened on the joints of those thin deadly forepaws, on the enormous narrow hindquarters, down the length of the deadly tail. It was, John estimated, some sixty-five feet in length, with a wingspan close to twice that, the biggest star-drake he had ever seen.
Music returned to his mind through a haze of exhaustion and smoke. Delicate airs and snippets of tunes that Jenny played on her harp, fragments of the forgotten songs that were the true names of the dragons. With them the memory of Jenny’s ancient lists: Teltrevir heliotrope; Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold …
Ancient beings, more ancient than men could conceive, the foci of a thousand strange legends and broken glints of song.
Wings first. He forced his mind from his own sickened horror, his disgust at himself for butchering such beauty. A dragon could in a few short weeks destroy the fragile economy of the Winterlands, and there was no way of driving a dragon away as one could drive away bandits or wolves. Jenny was right. The dragons would seek to feed on the garrison herds. Bandits and Iceriders would be watching for any slackening in the garrison’s strength. To drive the King’s men, and the King’s law, out; to have the lands as their own to prey on once more.
Moving as in a dream he found his ax, worked it painfully from beneath the rocks that had protected him. The stench of burned earth and acid numbed him. He could feel his hands and feet grow cold, his body sinking into shock. Not now, he thought. Damn it, not now!
Centhwevir moved his head, regarded him with those molten aureate eyes.
John felt his consciousness waver and begin to break up, like a raft coming to pieces in high seas.
Rock scraped. A slither of falling fragments on the other side of the old curtain wall.
Muffle! John’s heart leaped. You disobeyed and came after me! I could kiss you, you great chowderheaded lout!
But