Riverlilly

by William Young

  Chapter the Eighteenth,

  The Last Day,

  In which fire reigns.

  I. Out of the Light

  The pulsing red beam made the air buzz like a swarm of flies. As the searchlight flooded over the boat Jai’s breath seized in his throat and he collapsed. The ring of dark runes on his forehead blazed with a red-hot glow and a tendril of smoke coiled up from his skin where the cursed tattoo was branded.

  Ceder dropped to his side and held his hands. Through her closed eyes she saw an endless field of scarlet light, all-pervasive, all-encompassing, focusing to a pinpoint in the center of her forehead.

  In the back of the boat the Dangler soaked in the red beam like he was savoring his last sunset. The heat poured on. His glass face began to bubble. He sat and stared ahead as if he felt no pain.

  Ceder peeked an eye open to locate Astray. The cub was in the prow. He bellowed a seditious roar at the red light before seeking shelter under his bench. Ceder looked one last time at the fisherman, heartbroken that he should do nothing to save them.

  A shadow in the air passed through the red beam, lending the boat a breath of respite from the inferno. Ceder craned her neck back to see a gigantic bird of prey looping through the air to make another run past Sorid’s searchlight—it was the roc they had seen earlier before being pulled under the river.

  Ceder used the breath of refreshment to move Jai to a less exposed position in the bottom of the boat, but still the marks on his face seared red-hot. The skin around the arcane symbols cracked like volcanic crust and split open. He whipped his head from side to side in violent paroxysms while Ceder tried to hold him steady. “Do something!” she cried to the fisherman. “It’s killing him!”

  The Dangler did not show any sign he heard her. Liquefied beads of dark glass dripped down his cheeks. He stared at the water, muttering cravenly. “Is the ship named after the stars, or the stars named after the ship? Does sea mirror sky, or sky reflect sea? What came first, the dragon or the egg? Three wells… three frogs… three days…”

  With a piercing screech the roc executed a sharp turn and wheeled around behind the boat with its talons stretched wide. Ceder’s eye bulged in fear as she ducked down from the diving predator.

  Showing off the strength of wings wider than the boat was long, the great bird reared in its flight and pulled up fast as it reached the river. With one deft talon the roc grabbed at the fisherman’s head.

  Ceder shrieked as she saw the roc pull the Dangler’s head clean off his body and stick it on the end of his own fishing pole, but when she looked back she realized at once it was only his hat. Held high over the boat, the wide-brimmed cap acted like an umbrella on a sunny day, casting the boat in a crucial canopy of shade. The roc returned to greater heights.

  The unexpected act immediately galvanized the Dangler. He stepped forward and knelt over Jai, carefully keeping the shade from his hat balanced over both children. Jai’s tattoo stopped flaring, but the heat had been too severe for him to recover from as quickly as he had in the past. His skin was cooked black around the dark marks. Streaks of charred blood made a mess of his face like eggs let to burn on the bottom of a pan. He took a weak breath but did not open his eyes.

  “What do we do now?” Ceder asked the Dangler desperately.

  The fisherman studied Jai’s face. Like a man taking inventory of his weapons before a war, he assessed the steaming river, the orchard-plaited countryside, and the apocalyptic sky, where the sun and the moon were crossed like a chain link, dueling for the preeminence of the zenith. He turned back to Ceder. “It is only if you look to escape that you will find there is nowhere to run. You were told where all this would lead in the end. No turning back now.”

  Ceder stared at the fisherman with growing unease, but it was not his grave words that alarmed her: without his hat to conceal him, she saw his bare head for the first time. I shouldn’t be surprised, she told herself, it’s exactly the same as his face. His skull is like a crystal ball! She covered her mouth as the strange truth dawned on her. “You’re made of waveglass—some kind of dark waveglass! Someone in the castle told us Saerin Silvermoon was the only one who could make that.”

  He stared at her blankly. In the distance, Ceder heard the sound of the sea beating against the far side of the mountains. Astray leapt onto the bench between her and the Dangler and sat still, waiting. “We were told that Saerin was a friend of the fish,” Ceder finally said, “but you are a fisherman. That is at odds.”

  “Yes, very odd,” said the Dangler, denying nor confirming what she said.

  “We were also told not to follow ‘the fisherman,’ whatever your name may be,” she said bluntly. She knew her words were harsh but she had no fear that he would do any harm to Jai or herself. “Now, here you are, telling us the only thing we can do is sail back to Sorid’s keep.”

  The Dangler rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger, impressed by her acuity. “Indeed. Go on.”

  “The thing is… I believe you.” Ceder looked down at Jai. “But he’s going to die, isn’t he?”

  “Who said anything about dying?” the fisherman asked mildly. “Not everyone dies in the end.”

  “Sorid will kill us if we return.”

  “How can you be sure? Has he ever killed you before?”

  “Of course not,” said Ceder.

  “Well, don’t you think you would remember if he had?”

  Ceder stopped short of what she was about to say as the fisherman’s idea wormed its way inside her head. She sat back, unsettled, and cocked her head to one side, staring at his impassive face.

  The purple roc dove in front of the searchlight again, pulling the distracted beam away from the boat for brief spurts, but always the red light returned to the river, where the beam gradually narrowed its focus solely onto the Dangler’s upheld hat—thick steam cascaded off the black felt. “I would be moderately astounded if it caught fire. It’s very wet,” said the fisherman, appraising the makeshift shield, which burst into flames just as he finished speaking.

  The roc swooped down over the river, covering the boat with its expansive shadow, bearing the brunt of the red beam on its back. It beat the flames off the fisherman’s hat with one powerful pump of its wings. Astray gave their selfless defender a thundering roar of encouragement. The bird of war screeched in agony as its majestic lavender feathers smoldered and turned black at the tips, but it flew as level as still water, protecting the pink boat from the deadly gaze of the magician.

  Ceder pressed her ear against Jai’s chest, listening to his heartbeat. The Dangler cleared his throat to get her attention. “Is there anything else you would ask of me before I take my leave?”

  Ceder looked up from Jai, almost fearing to ask, “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  “If only there were two of me,” said the fisherman. With that, he took the smoking hat off his pole and put it back on his head—the level shadow of the roc still blocked them from the red light. The Dangler reached into the folds of his soiled garments and retrieved a cupped handful of water—Silver’s last strand of hair. He poured the water into the iron reel on his pole, all but a drop, which he draped between his fingers like a thread of spider silk, ran along the length of the pole, and looped through a hole in the tip. Finally, he brought the end of the watery line to his lips and grazed it with a humble kiss; when he pulled the line away a brand new waveglass hook hung from his fingers. “I have an appointment to keep,” he told Ceder. He stood up, rocking the boat.

  “What if this big… bird… flies away?” cried Ceder. “Sorid will kill us!”

  “You will soon have other things to worry about than being caught in the light.”

  “What! Wait! Will we see you again?”

  The fisherman stared right through her. “Look up,” he said in farewell, “when the moon climbs in front of the sun.” Then he whipped his pole out blindly with one hand and cast his hook into the branches of a distant apple tree. As the boat sailed for
ward, the Dangler allowed himself to be whisked away by his line like a feather in the wind. He cranked the reel faster than ever, pulling himself to dry land before gravity could drop him into the boiling river.

  From the shoreline he gave the children a tip of his hat, then he turned and stalked off through the trees. Ceder could not believe he had abandoned them so abruptly. Astray summarized her feelings for her with a mourning roar that carried across the river like a kite with no string. She reached a hand into his fur for comfort and saw that the cub held a pink petal in his mouth.

  The Dangler returned through the trees—he had heard Astray’s call! Ceder squeezed Jai’s lifeless hand, certain the fisherman had experienced a change of heart and would escort them into the mountain, after all. On the riverbank, the Dangler watched the motion of the boat, waiting for the perfect moment to cast.

  He snapped his arm and Ceder saw, as if in slow motion, the shimmering line flash out and the waveglass hook pierce through the center of the cub’s pink petal. Reeling in the petal to his outstretched hand, the Dangler gave the Riverlilly a formal bow and then stepped backward, receding into the orchard with an air of finality.

  The searchlight swung off the back of the purple roc and set the riverbank awash in heat waves, but the fisherman was already gone. The apples that were bathed in the red beam swelled and burst apart like small bombs hanging from the branches. Ceder caught her breath, then she saw a dash of purple streaking up the mountainside, dodging from one tree to the next. As the Dangler made all speed for the crooked tower atop the summit, overexcited apples exploded one step behind him in the blazing heat of the scarlet searchlight.

  Ceder did not know if it was the distant sound of the sea or her own rushing pulse, but she was sure she could hear the beat of deep, low drums as the boat sailed out of the light into the mountain tunnel.

  II. Deep Breath

  The Riverlilly sailed through the dark without a sound. The three remaining petals on Astray’s necklace were still aglow, but their light was drowned out by the patterns of brilliant white fur which now interlaced across his body but for a ribbon of shadow on his tail and a dark, fuzzy area around his emerald eyes.

  With sweat and blood streaking down his face, Jai stirred and sat up shakily next to Ceder in the bottom of the boat. His tunnel-trained vision adjusted quickly to the darkness. He saw that the Dangler was gone.

  “He took a petal from Astray and then sprinted up the mountainside with Sorid’s spotlight hot on his tail,” Ceder told him. “He said he had an appointment to keep.”

  “Oh,” said Jai. “Well, that’s pretty weird, isn’t it? An appointment? For what? Some kind of… ritual?”

  “Jai!” Ceder gave him a dirty look. “It seemed like he was heading for the tower. That’s where the red beam was coming from. I think he might be going to pick a fight.”

  “Good,” said Jai, “let’s hope so. That way you and I can sneak out the other side of the tunnels before anyone notices we’re here.”

  The beat of drums tempered the air. Hoarse chanting, like flint striking stone, rang in harmony over the beat. It was a sound, the children realized in hand-held unison, that they had heard every moment of their lives. What had once seemed to be silence to them in the lair of the magician was never truly so; they had grown accustomed to the beating drums all their lives, tuned them out, turned them down, ignored them, but now the music—if it could be called such—was louder than ever, now the chant was as slow as the tide. Only at sea or sailing the river had they learned what it was to be free of its call, but now they were home.

  The children were fully conscious of the fact that they had returned roundabout, after three nights and three days, to the one place they had spent their lives trying to escape. Soon, they knew, they would come face to face with fire. But for now, in the dark, in the boat, they could drift along for a moment more and enjoy a breath of free air, hard-earned and humid though it was.

  “Jai, where does the river end?”

  “Ceder, if I had known there was a river down here, I would have sailed out on my wheelbarrow years ago.”

  “But didn’t you say there was a lake down here, somewhere?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s not the kind you can see your reflection in.”

  A flickering red light appeared far ahead of the boat. Jai sniffed the air delicately. Ceder noticed him do so and, in curiosity, took a deep breath. She heaved forward and choked on the sulfurous fumes in the air, invisible in the dark.

  Jai patted her on the back sympathetically. “I forgot to mention, you should hold your breath down here as much as possible.”

  Ceder spent the next several minutes fighting for air, finding the least painful method to inhale was to draw in a thin stream with pursed lips, as if she was whistling in reverse. Jai watched her flounder, bemused, while holding his own breath for minutes at a time in perfect, long-practiced stillness.

  By the time Ceder acclimated herself to the acrid netherworld that had been Jai’s lifelong prison, the tunnel and the river came alive with light as bright as smelted gold and they were at last able to see where the underground current came to an end.

  “Ohhh, now I know where we are,” said Jai. “I’ve never been up here, but now that I think about it, it does make sense there would be a river leading into the waterfall.” Ceder slapped her hand against her forehead. “Maybe we should have followed the Dangler, after all,” said Jai. “This is going to get bad.”

  A tail away the river shot out the end of the tunnel into a gaping cavern and fell into a subterranean lake of molten lava, forming a waterfall that burned into steam before it ever reached the bottom. In the center of the lake Jai pointed out the massive stone column that rose from the magma into the bedrock above the cavern. “That’s the pillar that holds up the mountain,” he told Ceder, but she was barely listening as she searched for an escape from their impending doom. Without oars or a long pole, they had no way to stop the boat, and there was nowhere in the tunnel to set foot if they disembarked.

  “Jai, we have to swim for it!” she cried as they approached the end of the tunnel.

  “The river is boiling hot, Ceder. And the current would carry us to the edge of the waterfall even faster than the boat is now.”

  She stared at him. He was right, of course, but staying in the boat would take them over the edge, as well, and the wooden hull would form a pyre around their bodies before they sailed half a tail through the lake of fire, if they even made it down the waterfall alive.

  “Jai, look!” She pointed behind the boat to the water.

  The severed black hand with two claws was in the river, chasing the boat, swimming with its pair of fingers like a tiny man practicing the butterfly stroke.

  “Why won’t that thing die?” Jai yelled.

  “Could it be here to help us?” asked Ceder.

  As if in answer to her question, the black hand swam beside them, climbed its way onto the boat, and crawled up the side, leaving fingerprints of dancing flames wherever it touched the wood. The hand crouched down then sprang through the air for Jai’s face, its claws flexed wide like an eagle’s talons.

  Jai froze, certain both his eyes were about to be gouged out by a pair of scalding hot pokers, but Ceder stepped in front of him and batted the dismembered claws back into the river with Jai’s scrap-iron sword.

  Jai looked at her in awe. “Ceder! Wow! How—”

  “It’s coming back,” she said grimly. The black hand was already swimming tirelessly for the boat, unfazed by Ceder’s blow. One side of the Riverlilly was up in flames where the hand had left its tracks.

  Ceder perched in the stern where the fisherman had so often sat and waited with the sword for the bony hand to get closer. She raised the blade to stab it away but Jai pulled her into the bottom of the boat, shouting, “Get down! We’re going over the edge!”

  They both screamed in terror as the boat shot out the end of the tunnel and sailed over the side of the underground cl
iff, soaring straight down into the lake of liquid fire.

  Flexing every cord and tendon in his body, Astray roared loud enough to send waves into the crusted magma below. The pink wood under the children’s feet softened and melted, morphing into something as soft and fragile as a flower petal but as large as the boat, flattened out like a flying carpet. Buffeted up by pockets of hot air rising from the magma, the Riverlilly coasted over the lake of fire to a rocky ledge on the far side of the cavern. Behind them, Jai and Ceder saw the black hand fall over the edge of the waterfall, snapping its two fingers in disappointment before it stretched into a crooked swan dive and plunked into the lake.

  The Riverlilly shimmered like a new star and solidified back into a boat. The children were thrilled to see that the recent scorch marks on its side were fully healed. Even the hairline crack in the hull from the night of the twin whirlpools had fused together, good as new, during the transmutation. But their joy was fleeting—they had no need of a boat, now.

  Astray leapt into Ceder’s arms as she climbed ashore. Jai picked up the sword and looked for his satchel. The Dangler had it last! Cursing under his breath, he followed Ceder out of the boat. She hopped on her tip-toes, surprised at how sharp the rocky ground was, but Jai’s feet were born for it. He walked forward boldly to investigate the single, pitch-black crack in the cavern wall. It led into a lightless tunnel.

  “If you can lead us back outside the same way you escaped three nights ago,” Ceder said to Jai, “then maybe we can drag the boat behind us and set sail again for Coral Wing. We can stay there as long as we want to this time.”

  “Bad news,” said Jai, stepping back from the crevice. “I’ve never been here.” He pointed to a far corner of the cavern where a similar rocky outcropping sloped into the lava. “I lived on that side. This is the side Sorid appeared from when he came down to check on me. He stood where we are now, then walked across the fire to me like the lake was made of ice.”

  Ceder stared at the radiating heat waves rising over the glowing surface of the lake, the molten stone swirling together with the red-hot magma. “He walked across that?”

  Jai nodded dumbly in time to the haunting drums. Something under the waterfall had caught his eye. Unsinkable, the black hand emerged from a cloud of steam and lifted its severed stump like a wolf tasting the scent of its prey in the air.

  “I’m really starting to hate that thing,” said Jai.

  Rather than pursue the children, to their immense relief, the black hand crept across the surface of the magma to the pillar in the center of the cavern. It half-swam, half-scuttled around the column over and over, gaining speed as the magma was whipped into a small cyclone around the gray stones.

  “Hey,” said Ceder, “those stones are the same as—”

  A blob of oozing lava flew out of the churning tempest and landed right where Ceder was standing before Jai knocked her out of the way. They both rolled back to the wall before looking up. Bucketfuls of magma flew in every direction, thrown from the cyclone like spray from a whirlpool, but it was the bloating clouds of black smoke that scared Jai the most. He grabbed Ceder’s hand and pulled her into the crack in the cavern wall, leading her a dozen steps into the dark before she jerked back to a stop. “Jai, hold on! The boat!”

  “We don’t have time, Ceder! If that smoke gets in this tunnel, we’re dead! Now run!” He pulled her into motion. Astray fell from her arms as she sprinted to keep up with Jai. The cub ran ahead of them both, the fastest one of all.

  The smoke did not seem to catch up to them so much as to thicken out of the air all around, as if it already occupied every turn of every tunnel and was merely waiting to be woken like some long-slumbering ghost.

  “Smoke rises,” said Ceder, panting, waving the black ash away from her eyes, “it will lead to the Circle of the Sun!”

  “Ceder, when this place fills up, we won’t even be able to open our eyes, let alone hold our breath long enough to find the way out. Keep moving!”

  Astray took a sudden turn in front of Jai. His white fur left a streak in the black smoke—a torch shining through a thick fog. Jai followed the bright trail, pulling Ceder behind him. She barely kept up, covering her face with one hand, coughing with soot in her lungs, struggling not to collapse.

  The cub took one turn after another, back and forth. Jai ran after, following the glowing path through the darkness. After several minutes of running and stumbling he realized they had left the smoke far behind them. As he took a brief moment to catch his breath he felt the mountain tremble. Loose gravel slid down the tunnel walls like rain on a window. “That’s new,” said Jai, struggling to keep his balance as solid stone vibrated beneath his feet.

  “It’s that blasted hand again!” said Ceder. “It’s going to start some kind of a meltdown, I just know it!”

  Astray gave them a thundering roar, a warning—the smoke was creeping back. “We should keep going,” said Jai. But it was only around one more turn that the cub led the children. At the end of the tunnel was a wooden door. A bright orange light seeped through the cracks around the doorframe. Jai and Ceder froze.

  Astray jumped into Ceder’s arms. The cub had not gazed at her so affectionately since the first time she said his name. He bit free a heart-shaped pink petal and laid it in her hand, licked her cheek once, then sprang out of her arms to Jai, who fell down in surprise—it was the first time in three days the cub had pounced to him instead of Ceder. Astray rubbed his head into Jai’s chin, then bit off his last pink petal and left it in Jai’s hand. The cub dropped to the ground. A lone petal remained around his neck, a familiar shade of violet.

  The orange haze sneaking through the doorframe intensified to an angry red. The source of the scarlet searchlight was in the adjacent room. It had to be, the light was so bright! The children backed against the tunnel wall. A voice behind the door said, “I see you, tunnel-minnow.”

  Jai dropped to one knee and put his hands to his forehead, clenching his eyes tight as the fresh scabs around his tattoo split open, revealing a ring of white-hot fire burning underneath his skin. He bit his tongue to keep from screaming and stared wild-eyed at Ceder, begging her to put him out of his misery, betraying a single, suggestive glance to his sword.

  Ceder lifted her hand instinctively and raised the glowing pink petal to Jai’s face. The black ink hissed and Jai recoiled, but the primary shock eased into a soothing coolness as Ceder wiped the soft flower around the dark tattoo in a circle, leaving a trail of pink foam behind as if the petal was a sliver of soap.

  Jai stared up at her as she tended him. Using a scrap of her tunic, Ceder rubbed the pink lather off his forehead. His skin was still scarred and inflamed, but the cursed mark of the magician was washed away at last. Behind the children the red light under the doorway abated, shifting its attention elsewhere, a rat led away by its nose.

  Jai closed his eyes, seeing only perfect darkness in his mind. He took a deep breath. While his eyes were closed, Ceder kissed him. He looked at her in surprise! She winked, once. Jai realized he was holding his breath like a blowfish.

  With an impatient growl, Astray reminded them they were not alone. Ready to go, the cub sat next to the door nearly touching the wood with his nose.

  Glaring at the cub, Jai pointed his sword at the door, wondering what was the best way to cut it down. I had better not get the blade stuck in the wood on my first try. He leaned his head to one side, picturing the damage he would do. Did she really just kiss me?

  Ceder stepped in front of him. “Jai, there’s no lock.” She put her hand on the door, waiting to push it open. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

  III. Run Dry

  Jai thought about the first night he met her, before their headlong sled-ride down the haggard mountainside. The scar on her forehead was all but invisible now. Jai grinned—he still had not told her the mark was even there. She probably doesn’t even realize that she always touches it when something twisted happens to us.

  “Ready
?” Ceder asked him again.

  He did not say the word this time, but nodded.

  Ceder pushed the door open.

  A tremendous draft of smoke gushed up from the tunnel behind them, drawn through the doorway into the Circle of the Sun, sucked up by the vacuity in the top of the mountain. Astray streaked into the room, a white blur. The children waited for the smoke to thin before stepping through.

  The room was bigger than Jai had envisioned from Ceder’s story—the hole at the top of the mountain was wider than the Dangler’s entire lagoon. High overhead, up through the chamber’s namesake opening, they saw Sorid’s crooked tower pointing to the sun like one big disjointed claw. And high atop the tower, nearly a speck to the children’s eyes, they saw the fisherman looking around with one hand shielding his eyes from the sun.

  The great stone stove in the center of the Circle of the Sun was a small tower in and of itself. Atop the stove was an iron grill. On the grill was a frying pan. Tottering around on the pan like a living spark in a shell, Jai and Ceder saw a ruby red egg with a zigzag crack down its middle.

  Cloaked in sable blacker than the night, the magician of the hollow mountain knelt with bowed head before the flames of the eternally-burning oven. He heard the children’s footsteps and rose slowly to full stature. A forked tail splayed out under his cloak like a pair of snakes looking for a small animal to swallow.

  Huddled together inside the doorframe, Jai and Ceder held their breath as Sorid the Synclaw slowly turned around. “Come to me, children,” said the magician. They did not move a scale. “Three days at sea and you are bold enough to disobey your master? Your hearts beat with fire, now, I feel it—a wave of heat. You will make a fine offering for Syn. Come,” Sorid said, “come and stand before the flames.”

  Ceder pulled Jai to one side, quietly edging along the wall toward the door that she knew led to the sea, the exit she had escaped by three days past.

  The magician continued to face the doorway they had been standing under. “I see you!” he shouted, raising his arms. His cloak fell back from where his hands ought to have been, revealing bones that were cut off at the wrist on both limbs. The light from the sun condensed around him and flashed red, then a beam of blazing light blasted out of the magician’s severed arms directed at the wooden door. Sorid stopped the assault just as suddenly, sensing he had missed his target. The door was engulfed in flames.

  “He’s lying!” Jai whispered to Ceder. “He can’t see us without my curse!”

  Sorid heard him. The magician turned in an instant and fired the red beam at the children. At close proximity, the intensity was greater than anything they had experienced before. Jai swung at the beam futilely with his sword. The iron blade began to glow and he dropped it, hissing in pain, his hand branded. Then he let go of Ceder as they both broke to different sides to get away from the scorching searchlight.

  Pressed against the wall they ran in circles like frightened mice, each in opposite directions. Sorid swung his beam after Jai, following the patter of his frantic footsteps. When Jai and Ceder met on the far side of the room, Jai grabbed her hand and turned her around before she ran headlong into the sweeping light.

  “You cannot run away inside a circle!” Sorid bellowed. “You were never free! You never will be! You will give your hearts to Syn! I will cut them out and hold them beating in the flames while your bones roast over the coals!”

  The pounding of drums seemed to come from all around, echoing every footfall. Skeletal chanting filled the chamber, groans and grunts coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, never saying a true word in a mindless hymn that wound the beat inside the mountain to a frenzy.

  Jai eyed his sword as they ran. Ceder looked to the two remaining doors, trying to tell them apart in the billowing smoke and rapid change of directions. Jai let go of her hand to make a dash for his cooled-off weapon.

  Sorid swung his arms wide of one another, suddenly splitting his deadly beam in two, pointing at Jai and Ceder both. Jai missed his sword as he dodged the second beam, stumbling into a bushel full of apples. Sorid heard the crash and converged both rays on the epicenter of the sound. Jai rolled away under the crossing lights by the nick of his nose. The spilled apples swelled in the scarlet blaze to twice their size and blew apart with staggering force, splattering the walls of the room with burnt applesauce and black seeds.

  Jai ran to Ceder and pulled her down to the ground as Sorid intersected his beams over their heads, not realizing they had ducked directly in front of him. The magician stopped and listened, holding his arms level, spread like wings, then slowly he moved the red lights inward, converging inevitably on the children.

  “Ceder, get behind me,” Jai mouthed soundlessly. “When both beams hit me, run to the door and get out of here.”

  “Jai!” she hissed silently, then understanding hit her with a blunt thud: she was going to lose him, right now.

  Sorid closed the twin beams into one all-consuming ray just as Astray crept up from behind and sunk his teeth into the magician’s tail. Sorid lurched to one knee, forfeiting the concentrated red light back to the sun. The magician thrashed his tail back and forth in fury, throwing the cub the length of the room hard against the wall. Astray dropped to the floor unmoving.

  Jai stood up slowly, his sword in hand, silent as a shadow. Ceder was now on the far side of the room, motionless, undetected. Sorid had not refocused from the cub’s surprise attack.

  Jai heard a piercing screech and looked up. The purple roc was circling the mountain in a wide loop, held at bay by the thick smoke that continued to emerge from the top. Jai saw the Dangler, too. With his shining line hooked over the ramparts of Sorid’s tower, the fisherman was repelling down the crooked wall, but was still far from the Circle of the Sun.

  Sorid turned toward Ceder as if he could hear her heart beating. “I know you stole my eggs, you nasty little thief. I could feel when you broke them, three moons past. There is only one left, but I have a riddle: How many sparks does it take to start a fire?”

  Jai raised his finger to his lips, signaling to Ceder across the room to remain quiet. She rolled her eyes. Jai pointed to Sorid and drew his finger across his neck. Ceder waved her hands to say No! Terrible idea! Don’t go near him! but Jai waved her off and took his first silent step toward the middle of the room.

  Ceder put her hands together in a silent prayer, begging Jai to back away. He nodded confidently, solemnly, and took a second step forward.

  “I only need one,” said the magician, “one beating heart for the fire to give life to all-powerful Syn. Speak, one of you, and I will let the other swim away. Now is your last chance, else you will burn together forever in a grave of red ashes.”

  As the magician uttered his final, drawling ultimatum, the room went dark. The moon had centered at last in front of the sun, swallowing the light. Red tongues of fire circled the dark disc like fluttering petals on a black flower. Sorid spun around, utterly surprised by the disappearance of the light.

  His climb down the tower complete, the Dangler peeked over the hole in the top of the mountain, a hundred fins above the children. “Look out!” he called down to them, waving like he was trying to stop a ship on a foggy night, “I see the Magician!”

  Sorid swung his arms up at the fisherman, but his power had run dry under the eclipsing of the sun.

  Sensing the magician’s disadvantage in the half-dark, Jai sprang to close the distance between himself and his old master. A forked tail leapt for Jai’s heart; he rolled under the attack, stood up strong, and swung his sword at Sorid’s head. The serrated iron instantly heated up and glowed orange. With no handle to protect his hands, the skin on Jai’s palms sizzled and popped, but he could not yet let go, not with the blade buried only a third of the way into the magician’s neck. The hood of Sorid’s cloak fell back and he stuck his face out at Jai, grinning like some hideous jack-o-lantern, deep fires ablaze behind a shell of bone.

  Jai pulled the sword free with a tor
tuous effort and swung it again even as the skin on his hands turned brown with searing burns. He screamed in pain as the blade cut halfway again into the spine of the magician. The iron was red-hot and Jai sensed in another moment it would soften so much that he might as well wield a strand of seaweed.

  Sorid leaned forward, a fin away from Jai’s face, and exhaled a gust of hot fire that engulfed Jai’s upper body even as Jai ripped his weapon free, pulling so hard he spun in a circle and sent the blade whirring all the way around and back through the last fraction of the magician’s neck.

  The fire spewing from Sorid’s mouth burped and sputtered out.

  Jai dropped his white-hot weapon and stepped back in disbelief that he himself was not dead and burnt to a crisp—the threads of his tunic were smoldering, the tips of his hair were singed, but the accidental pirouette before his final swing of the sword had saved his face from the brunt of Sorid’s dying gasp of foul flames. But his hands were burned so badly he could not feel his fingers. A dull pain traveled up his arms and throbbed through every vein in his body.

  The magician teetered backwards and bumped into the stove, knocking his disconnected head free to the floor. The head rolled out of the hewn-off, sable hood that had shrouded the demon for centuries. Seeing his master’s entire face for the first time, Jai stepped back in fright. There was no flesh or skin or blood. The tar-black skull was a freakish hybrid of man and reptile without eyes or nostrils. The mouth was a jagged crack in the charred bone, nothing more.

  Sorid’s body shuddered once, finally, and then a fountain of white-hot lava exploded from his severed neck, forcing Jai and Ceder back to the wall.

  The decapitated head on the floor grinned sadistically and began to chant in time with the drums.

  IV. Into the Open

  The body of Sorid rose up to its full height, inflated by the droning incantations of its own severed skull on the floor. The rest of the sable cloak fell away in rags, revealing a twisted, crooked black skeleton with smoke rising from its limbs and glowing magma oozing from its joints. The headless skeleton stumbled one way then another, gushing white lava like a geyser out of its cut-open spine. The liquid fire burned through wood and stone alike wherever it splattered.

  The Dangler cast his line down through the top of the mountain and tried to hook the frying pan atop the stove, but his waveglass hook turned to steam in an instant, then the thick smoke leaving the chamber pushed the fisherman back from the cusp of the hollow and the children could no longer see him. The mountain quaked again, more violently than it had earlier, jarring everyone off their feet.

  Jai and Ceder crawled to one another, worming away from the black skeleton, but the severed head heard them scraping across the floor. Its chant dropped in pitch and the obedient body whirled around like a dancer cued to a single, sustained note. It took an unsteady step toward them, compensating its balance for the shaking of the mountain, wobbly as a sailor without his sea-legs.

  “Jai, look,” said Ceder, pointing to one of the doors on the far side of the room. It was open just a crack. “Astray is gone!”

  “We can get over there!” mouthed Jai. He crawled toward the door.

  She grabbed his ankle, stopping him. He jerked away until he saw it was only her. “We can’t go yet,” she told him.

  He stared at her in disbelief. She nodded to the center of the room. Jai followed with his eyes. The crack on the third egg of Syn split open and a premature puff of fire whiffed out, taking the form of a fledgling dragon whelp before floating apart like smoke.

  “It’s really going to happen,” said Ceder.

  The reptilian skull of the magician chanted the same guttural tone over and over, driving its weak-kneed body step by step across the floor, lunging blindly after the children, spewing its fiery lifeblood in all directions.

  “We have to destroy that egg,” Ceder told him, and her tone made it clear this was a strict vow.

  “Easy,” said Jai. “Don’t dive into the oven. No ritual, no beating heart for the big fire monster, no problem.”

  “It’s already hatching, Jai.”

  “It might not crack all the way open without a live heart getting fricasseed on the stove. Sorid said he needed a heart for the ritual!”

  “What are we going to believe—what Sorid told us or what’s right in front of our eyes? We have to stop it while we still can.”

  Jai clutched his charred fingers in a tight fist around the pink petal Astray had given him. “You’re right,” he said bleakly, “wait here,” and before she could react he popped to his feet and sprinted to the stove, leaping over a gushing torrent of white-hot lava that cut Ceder off from following him.

  Jai reached up to grab the frying pan but the fire in the stove responded to the presence of his racing heart and the flames in the iron grill flared out and knocked him back to the floor. He tried again but was unable to near the frying pan without the unholy fire roaring to life and throwing him down.

  Jai turned around, looking for Ceder, not knowing what to do. The black skeleton stood between them. It sensed it was in some sort of final standoff. Sorid’s decapitated head was intoning one long, rumbling low pitch; the ethereal drums beat like hummingbird wings; the walls of the Circle of the Sun shivered as if there was a hand vice-gripped around the very heart of the mountain.

  “Ceder, get out while you can!” Jai shouted.

  The headless body lurched at Ceder and she bolted to one side, dashing along the wall in the direction of the open door. The skeleton spun around on one heel and took a step toward the stove, toward Jai.

  Jai felt the pink petal grow hot in his hand as he recalled every form of torture Sorid had put him through, every lie, every scar, every hour of hunger and thirst and witless fear. As he watched the deformed body of black bones advance, a burning itch for revenge filled Jai’s blood. He opened his hand—the petal was as bright as a red coal, the color of his anger, blood-red.

  Jai stared into the open flames. She left. She left! He held the petal up. And I will die! Smoke spilled out of the oven, a salivating beast starving for the red-hot flower.

  Ceder popped up beside Jai and held his free hand. “Not without me,” she said, gazing up at his expression of total astonishment. Before their eyes the petal in Jai’s hand turned from ruby red to pink and pink to sapphire blue as Jai’s anger flowed out of him in a single breath.

  From the corner of his eye Jai saw the apple bushel that he had knocked over was now upturned and curiously squirming like an impatient child hiding under a box. At the same time, he realized Sorid’s chanting had become extremely muffled. “I just wanted to shut him up, for once,” said Ceder with a twinkle in her icy blue eyes.

  An instant later the wooden bushel exploded in a fiery conflagration of bone shards, splinters, and black seeds. Jai looked at Ceder, baffled. “I stuffed a few apples in his mouth, too,” she admitted. “It seemed fitting. I guess they popped.”

  The body of the black skeleton collapsed like a puppet with no strings.

  A resounding crack filled the room as the third egg of Syn split wide open down the middle.

  The children turned back to the great stone stove. Ceder bit her lip and squeezed Jai’s hand. His dark eyes were full of wonder as he beheld for the last time his hand in her own, held tightly together, white and black.

  “No!” the Dangler called from above, fighting through the smoke at the cusp of the hollow. “Get away from the well! It must be me! For the Sight of Silver, it must be me!”

  Before the fisherman’s words could reach the children Jai leaned close to Ceder and kissed her on the cheek, then thrust the heart-shaped blue petal into the fire.

  The Year Nine Hundred & Ninety-Nine,

  The King dove among the charred shipwrecks in search of a fish. Anyone with a gnawing hunger for an apple would suffice and there were always plenty of mermen around the coast with such an appetite. He quickly found someone who would suit his needs. The King did not bother asking the name
of the fish he found—names were irrelevant this close to a new beginning. Using the fine point of his horn to underscore the magnitude of his orders, the King commanded the cowering creature to collect the smallest, most rot-infested boat at the bottom of the sea and tow it to the surface; there, he was to wait for two children on the shore.

  Countless tails from the coast the Queen waited for the sound of a small splash. Hers was a rescue mission. The one she was charged to save would be as difficult to spot as a shadow in the night, she knew, but the Queen had faith that there would be lights to show her the way when the time came. It had been a long time since she had seen the one she must save. Her heart raced. She longed to see him again, but she knew it would be bittersweet and all too short.

  In the deep of the sea a wyrm began to stir. Its thousand-year stasis in endless night had come to an end.

  In the hollow mountain the man of black bones told two children—the last descendents of the slaves who dug his tunnels and built his tower—that they had three more days to live before they found their end in flames. The children listened in mortal fear and vowed to escape that very night.

  To the stars above the coast a comet without her colors rose and began her three day flight around the Land of Lin, carried as ever by the wings of the West Wind. The cub at her side felt her go missing before he awoke. Shedding a single teardrop as he slept, the little lion fell off his bed of moss on the turtle’s back and crashed into a hard world of dark water, headfirst.