Rosa looked up and saw Guinevere running through the trees, clutching a handful of spongy green leaves. But as the girl broke fully into the clearing, the world seemed to tilt and motion slowed and all color became a blur of gray. The effect only lasted a moment. But when Rosa shook her head and her vision cleared, she saw not Guinevere coming toward her but a small pack of long-legged, thin-faced dogs.
“David!” she screamed. By then the first dog was flying through the air. Rosa fell back with her hands instinctively clamped to its throat, its gritty fur chafing the centers of her palms. It was lean and bony with little forward thrust, but the sight of blood on its needle-like fangs was a powerful aid to Rosa’s grip. How long she could hold it, she couldn’t be sure. The beast had a frenzied desire to kill, and the putrid stench from its open throat was rapidly making her insides fold. Grimacing, she turned her face aside and screamed for David again. Saliva dripped onto her exposed neck. Claws paddled and tore at her clothing. In a moment of panic it suddenly occurred to her she could not reach the mark on her arm and thereby save herself with magicks. Of greater concern was the feeling that the mark might not be there, for she couldn’t sense Zanna in her consciousness now, only Rosa, the orphan girl from Co:pern:ica, who had stepped through fire to enter this world and who could, at any moment, die in it.
Then David came to the rescue. With a mighty thump, the dog was sent flying into the treetops, batted away by the paw of the bear he called Ingavar. One more was bitten and another mauled. Any more with any sense faded into the woods.
David switched back to human form and knelt down quickly beside Rosa. “Did it scratch you? Are you hurt?” He scanned her body. Some clothing was torn but she appeared unscathed.
She sat up and threw her arms around him. She was breathing too fast, but still managing to speak. “Tell me this is all just a horrible dream and we can go home to Co:pern:ica and put some books in order.”
He placed his hand on the back of her head and let his mouth rest on the fabric of her top. Resisting the urge to kiss her, he said, “You’re safe now. That’s all that matters.”
But it wasn’t. And she had to tell him. “I can’t feel Zanna anymore.” She glanced along her arm. The mark was gone. With it, she sensed some hope had, too.
She felt him sway. Her grip tightened a little. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I feel … strange.”
Momentarily, she closed her eyes. Then she pulled away, stroking one hand down his arm as if she needed to convince herself he was still real. “What happened just now? One moment Guinevere was running toward me, then those horrible … things appeared.”
“Wolves,” he said. “At least, they used to be.”
She stared at the corpse that Ingavar had mauled. During the attack she had seen very little of the creature’s face, only its jaws and high pointed ears. Now she understood what David meant. Part of the memories she’d gathered from Zanna contained images of things Zanna called “grotesques,” ugly stone figures built onto churches. This wolf bore a mild resemblance to them. There were helical swellings at the side of its head and even small wings sprouting out of its back.
David crouched beside the wolf and lifted a wing. “Vestigial,” he said.
She shrugged. The word meant nothing to her.
“A leftover trace from a line of evolution. Except I don’t think this happened over millions of years. This wolf is an experiment. It’s been crossbred with a darkling.”
“A darkling?” Rosa felt a shiver of fear run through her. “But they don’t exist on this timepoint, do they?”
“Look around. What do you notice?”
“The trees,” she said eventually. “The trees look different. Have we moved?”
“No, but other things have. The timeline has altered.”
The blur, she thought. That peculiar tug.
David stood up and turned a full circle. “We’re fixed to this point because we’re visitors here, but everything indigenous to the Earth has changed.”
“So in this timeframe, Guinevere doesn’t exist?”
“She can exist, but she might not be found in this place. The same is true of Gretel and Thoran.” Who, like Guinevere, had both disappeared.
“And Gawain,” Rosa muttered, looking back the way they’d come — the way she thought they’d come. There was no sign of the last true dragon. Or David’s horse. Or, more worryingly, her unicorn, Terrafonne. “Do you think Gwilanna has him?”
“Well, he certainly isn’t dead. I can feel his auma. It’s radiating out from somewhere close — probably the island. Even though the legend is bound to have changed, it will gravitate to its original setting.”
“So what are we waiting for? Let’s go. Let’s track him down. If we find Gawain, you can bet we find Gwilanna.”
“Yes, but do we want to?” he muttered. He crouched and stared at the woodland floor. “Gwilanna might not be the whole cause of this.”
“She must be. She has the tornaq.”
“This is not Groyne’s work. Groyne is just an agent of time. She will have used him to hunt for one of Gawain’s claws, maybe even the isoscele. Nothing else would have the power to stir the Earth. But why would she go this far …?” He put a hand flat to the ground.
“David, what are you doing? What are you feeling for?”
“Gaia,” he said. “The fire is ascending. The whole core of the Earth is realigning….”
Rosa pushed her hands back through her hair. “David, you’re not making any sense. What are you babbling about?”
“I can answer that for you,” said a voice.
Rosa whipped around. David jumped up, ready to protect her. But he did not assume his ice bear form and Rosa knew he was just too stunned to attack. Sitting on the unicorn that had carried them across the nexus was none other than Lucy Pennykettle. On the horse that David had ridden was Tam Farrell. On foot, and quickly surrounding David and Rosa, was a party of unknown beings. They had the physique of ordinary men, but …
David stared at the girl he had known as Lucy. “In the name of Godith, what have they done to you?”
She had gone the same way as the wolf. A human girl with a darkling imprint. Tam was the same, but slightly less recognizable. “Don’t try to resist,” he said. “We’ve coded the auma from the bear known as Thoran. His threat is nullified. You cannot escape the Shadow.”
Two of the darkling men stepped forward. They grasped David’s arms and sniffed him as if he was just fresh meat. “Coded,” he said. “Interesting choice of word. I would have used ‘corrupted.’” He looked at Lucy again.
She gave the unicorn’s mane a short, sharp tug, making the animal whinny and rear. “The Pri:magon is expecting you.” She barked an order at the men as she rode. “Bring them.”
I materialized in the kitchen, the room my mother usually referred to as the “center of operations” in the Pennykettle household. On the fridge top was the listening dragon, Elizabeth’s “radar” for anything and everything that happened in the house. For the listener, like everyone else, the suspension of time had been no more than a blink. It wasn’t surprised to see me in the kitchen and must have assumed that I’d run in from the garden. I spoke a word of greeting and dashed upstairs, almost tripping over Bonnington on the landing. I poked my head around the door of the Den and saw G’reth, the wishing dragon, shaking his head as if trying to remove some fluff from his ear. Then I heard a voice from Elizabeth’s bedroom. Arthur whispering, “Please, no …”
I ran in. Elizabeth was lying on the bed. Arthur was kneeling on the floor, reaching over her, pressing a nightdress to her tummy. I wasn’t sure if Gwilanna had cut her or not. There were clothes and coat hangers on the floor, as if someone had fought their way out of the wardrobe. The dressing-table mirror was shattered so badly that only one piece of glass was hanging in the frame. Pieces of clay were scattered about the floor. I noticed the clock on the bedside table. 3:15:22. And at the foot of the bed, curled up dead, h
er face contorted by fear, was Gwilanna.
“Arthur,” I said.
He turned. His eyes were as sad as a kitten’s. “She’s gone,” he said. “She’s gone. She’s …”
And then the timeline changed, just as it had for David and Rosa in their where and their when in the woodlands of Iunavik. Everything blurred and the room readjusted. The furniture disappeared, the curtains with it. The pastel wallpapers faded away, replaced by violet painted walls. A rack of lights shone down from the ceiling, illuminating a large, unfinished sculpture on a turntable in the center of the room. The room was cold, on the point of freezing. The sculpture seemed to be made from ice.
A woman walked in. She was clearly Elizabeth, though her hair was considerably shorter. One eye was violet, the other green. “Hey,” she said kindly, “you shouldn’t be in here without a sweater on, at least.”
I held the hem of my T-shirt out in front of me and stared at the fabric for several seconds.
“Agawin, are you okay?” she said.
Agawin. I looked up, feeling my face. “Am I … a boy again?”
She laughed and said, “Sweetheart, you’ve always been a boy.”
“My wings?” I whirled around, trying to see them.
“You are funny,” she said, laughing. And from nowhere she had a sweater in her hands, compressed and ready to slip over my head.
“Where’s Arthur?” I was almost panting.
“In the kitchen, at his food bowl, where he usually is.”
“His food bowl?”
She shrugged. “A cat has to eat.”
She stepped forward and drowned me in wool for a second.
“Arthur’s a cat?!”
She pushed my hair from my eyes as I stretched my arms straight. “Four legs, a lot of whiskers, and a curly tail. Still blind in one eye. You’ve been having those timeline dreams again, haven’t you?”
I didn’t know what to say. My memories of Alexa and Yolen, and the seer’s apprentice I had been so long ago, were fading away like lights in fog. This … altered reality … seemed to be all that mattered now. But one name was still very prominent in my head.
“Muh —” I began, then changed my mind. This was Elizabeth, not Zanna (and where was she now?). “Grand … ma …?”
“Hmm?”
At least I’d got that right. “Tell me about Gwilanna.”
“Great-aunt Gwilanna,” she tutted. “She’ll think you impolite if you refer to her so bluntly. What about her?”
“Is she alive?”
“I beg your pardon?”
There was a fluttering sound and a firebird flew in. It landed on the table beside the sculpture. It was not as big as Gideon or any I’d seen before, more the size and color of a Pennykettle dragon. A stunning shade of green with turquoise ear tufts. Rrrh? it went, through its elongated beak.
Elizabeth said, “It’s all right, Gryffen. Agawin seems to have stepped out of the wrong side of his sleep chamber this morning. You can go back to your tree.”
Rrrh, went Gryffen. And he zipped out again.
Elizabeth took my hand and swung it. “Would you like to see a counselor? You seem to be on another planet this morning.”
“Co:pern:ica?” I said, a little uncertainly.
She blinked at me, uncertain whether she should smile or not. “Is Co:pern:ica the world in your comix?”
This wasn’t going well. So I laughed out loud (as convincingly as I could). “Only joking. Got you, Grandma.”
“Phew,” she sighed falsely, flapping a hand. “You nearly had me worried there for a moment. You and that big imagination of yours.”
“Sorry.” I tightened my hand around hers. “So … you were saying — about Aunty Gwilanna?”
“Well, she’s on her way. That’s all I can tell you. I had a :com yesterday to say she’s … close. I hope I get this finished in time.”
“In time for what?”
“Her birth day, silly.”
“Sorry,” I said again. “Brain’s gone to sleep. I’m a bit … cold now.” Colder than she knew. Almost freezing in terror. Something to do with the way she’d said “birth day.”
She slipped her arms around me. “Come here,” she whispered, giving me a hug. She turned me to face the sculpture. “What do you think? Coming along, isn’t it?”
“Mmm,” I said. About a quarter of the ice block now had form, but I didn’t have any idea what it was. At the risk of being sent to a “counselor,” I said, “So …?”
“It’s a gathering of angels,” she said. “I’ve got a name for it, too. A really good name. Do you want to hear it?”
More than she knew.
She squeezed herself together, in the way people do when they’re pleased with themselves. She was so very pretty when she spread her mouth and smiled. “In the old tongue it would translate as ‘the fire that melts no ice.’”
“And in the new tongue?” I tentatively asked.
She walked forward and unveiled a temporary plaque.
On it was written ISENFIER.
It wasn’t just men and wolves. On the long trek down to the shores of the sea, David saw birds, rodents, and even a wild deer displaying signs of the darkling template. Some of them had wings (the deer did not), but those that did — like a mouse he spotted turning worried circles — appeared to have no use for them or no idea what the wings were for. Many animals lay dead or rotting in the foliage, all of which was losing its shades of green. Like the animals, the plants were physically changing. He saw leaves without symmetry. Roots knotted aboveground. Flowers that stank of something unholy. As the party reached the edge of the wood, a long gray vine with helical nodules snaked down from the trees and fixed itself around Rosa’s neck. She screamed and was heard by Tam, who galloped forward and chopped the vine through with a knife.
“Take the rest of it off her,” Lucy said. “The Pri:magon won’t be happy if she thinks the girl’s lost any auma to the Shadow.” The nodules were oozing a gooey black fluid.
“So the Shadow got clear,” David said. “And infected everyone at Scuffenbury Hill. But why has it drawn you here? Why has it pulled you back through time …?”
Lucy angled the unicorn toward him. “Scuffenbury,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
He let his mouth form into a smile. “Of course, you won’t remember the battle. Or the ‘Pri:magon’ won’t allow you to. That’s what playing with dragon claws does for you. Think back, Lucy. Somewhere in that strangely inverted mind you’ll find a better place.” He let his gaze drop, inviting her to follow. With the toe of one boot he had scratched the number 42 in the soil around his feet. He saw a flicker of movement in her eyes. The first hint of confusion. The first sign that he might have a chance of saving her. “Wayward Crescent,” he whispered.
She looked up fiercely. “My name is not Lucy. I have no name. I only exist to serve the Pri:magon.”
“No, you don’t,” he said, which earned him a thwack across the head from Tam.
“No talking,” Tam said. “Move.”
By now the sea had come into view: a widespread, unsettled slate of gray, fixed between a characterless sky and land. It was raining as they made the descent. Rosa, whose footwear was barely adequate for the slippery terrain, lost her footing because of the enforced pace and had to suffer the ignominy of being slung across a shoulder and carried the rest of the way down. On the flat, they entered what had once been a village, though, rather like the mammals with wings, the darkling people seemed to have no awareness of what to do with their dilapidated shacks. They were moving in clusters, scavenging for food. A whole crew of them were using their bare, clawed hands to tear at what had once been a whale. David and Rosa were ushered through quickly, into fishing boats oared by the men under Lucy’s command. Rosa was planted back-to-back against David. As the rain lashed down and the boat struck open water, she whispered over her shoulder to him, “Where are we going?”
“The island,” David said. “I’m guessing it’
s around that headland.” He nodded across the water, even though she couldn’t see from where she was sitting.
“Can’t you do anything?”
“There are too many of them. And Tam and Lucy are still there under that … façade. The only way to free them is to get to Gwilanna and reverse all this.”
“Hmph. Easy as that. Remind me to brush my hair before the showdown.”
That brought an irritated sigh from his chest. “You know, you really are more like Suzanna than you realize.”
Rosa shivered and shook the wet hair off her face. “Suzanna? Why did you call her that?”
“It’s her name, Rosa.”
“But you never call her that. Why here? Why now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was … thinking about Alexa. And Suzanna sounds more …”
“Feminine?”
“Motherly.”
“Oh.” Rosa looked away, over the ocean. The boat hit a wave and bumped them apart for a second. “Do you think Alexa will be at the island?”
“I hope not. I hope she got away.”
“What about us?”
“Us?” he said as a rower struck an elbow against his knee and growled in fury at losing his rhythm.
“You! Seven! Keep rowing,” barked Tam.
The darkling growled and heaved at the oar.
Rosa waited for the fuss to settle, then whispered again, “We, or rather ‘they,’ were at Scuffenbury Hill. David and Zanna. I know you have this ability to flit between timepoints, but what about her? Am I going to see her? Won’t that create a massive paradox?”
“Only if you touch.”
“What happens if we do?”
“You two!” This time it was Lucy shouting. She turned, stern-faced, to Tam. “I said they weren’t to talk. Separate them.”
“What happens if I touch her?” Rosa hissed again as Tam came forward from the back of the boat. He yanked her upright and told her to be silent. Spray from a loose wave slapped her face but her eyes met David’s and she mouthed again, What happens if I touch her?
“You’ll fade from time.”
Last Dragon 7: The Fire Ascending Page 22