The Dragons of Noor

by Janet Lee Carey

  She read the rest of the passage describing the great quake that shook NoorOth in the second age, breaking the worlds, splitting the World Tree in two, Kwen tumbling into Noor, Arnun crashing in the otherworld of Oth.

  “ ‘Storms blew over Oth, where Kwen’s tree-wife, Arnun, was shattered on the ground. Her shining black trunk lay in pieces. Tempests swept through Noor, where Kwen fell, his branches twisted, his broken heart turning slowly to stone.’ ”

  She looked up from the page. “Do you see?”

  “Wait, look at this part.” Miles read aloud the passage on the next page, part of the tale he’d never seen before: “ ‘Some say that Kwen and Arnun died when they parted long ago, and Kwen’s remains are buried in the eastern lands of Noor. But the great Mishtar, who fought alongside the dragons to protect the Waytrees, held that one day the heart of the World Tree might still be awakened, and Kwen and Arnun be rejoined.’ ”

  Miles ran his hands along the script. In all the books he’d read at school, he didn’t remember anything about the World Tree rejoining again someday.

  Taunier said. “What does it have to do with the tree you saw in your dreamwalk?” Miles wasn’t sure, either.

  Hanna glared at them both. “Don’t you understand?” she asked. “Tymm was in an enormous tree. It grew from the earth like a towering fortress, larger than any tree you can imagine. It was black and shining, too, and it says right here”—she jabbed the page with her finger—“that Kwen’s tree-wife, Arnun, had black and shining branches.”

  Miles drew back. “But the female half of the World Tree is good, isn’t she? She wouldn’t take young children. Arnun wouldn’t call an evil wind to steal our Tymm!”

  “I’m not saying the World Tree is evil,” Hanna argued. “Only that the tree is like the one I saw in my dream. It’s the only mention of a black tree that size that I found in the book!”

  “There must be other massive black-barked trees like that!”

  “Nowhere in Noor that I know of.”

  “In Oth, then!”

  Taunier put out his hand. “Stop it, both of you. Arguing like this won’t help us at all.”

  Miles stood. “What do you say then, Taunier? Is there any sense in what she’s saying?” He was sure Taunier would side with him.

  Instead, Taunier looked from one to the other. “I say you’re both missing something. There’s a clue here that neither one of you seems to see.”

  “Aye? And what’s that?” Miles asked, not even trying to hide his irritation.

  Taunier read aloud: “ ‘As NoorOth loosened into the seen and unseen worlds of Noor and Oth, the rift tore a black hole in the heart of the Old Magic, and a Wild Wind awakened with the breaking of the worlds.’ ”

  “Wild Wind,” Miles whispered. The boat creaked, and the acrid scent of burning lamp oil filled his nostrils.

  “It’s clear this wind has come again,” said Taunier. “And this time it’s sweeping up children.”

  TEN

  CRACKED STONE

  The dragons have come to Othlore to hatch their young in our mountain caves. Our Waytrees are well guarded, and the meers have welcomed our winged guests.

  —THE MISHTAR, DRAGON’S WAY, VOL. 1

  Alone in the cabin, Hanna pulled on her nightdress. The small room had darkened when Miles and Taunier left with the oil lamp, but she did not want to light a candle when she had another light to read by. The stone she’d taken into Oth last year still glowed when she warmed it in her palm. Hanna pulled the lightstone from the trunk.

  It was cold to the touch. She turned the gray-blue stone over and traced the jagged white line that ran down its side like captured lightning. Closing her hand, she waited for the familiar pale blue light to shine out between her fingers. Sitting cross-legged on the bunk, she opened The Way Between Worlds again. There would surely be more here to help them with their trouble now.

  A golden ray rinsed the paper. Hanna raised the stone to eye level. The light used to shine blue. Had the color changed because she’d left the stone untouched for so long? Well, blue light or yellow, it was still bright enough to read by.

  “Teacher,” she whispered, “tell me what to do to help Tymm.”

  The book was as mysterious as the old man who’d written it. She imagined the Falconer, quill in hand, filling in the pages, remembering his house inside the hill, the way the herbs smelled the night he’d sung Miles’s sacred name, his keth-kara, to heal him after the Shriker attacked.

  When Miles was lost last year, the Falconer had said to her, “You will seek your brother in the Otherworld. For the boy who is bound must be freed by your hand.” Back then he was talking of her older brother, not her younger one, yet the Falconer had shown more faith in her than anyone else ever had. Mother had feared her strange dreams and her sqyth-eyes; Da had thought of her only as a child, and worried she’d get lost on the mountainside while she looked for Miles. The villagers had called her a witch because of her strange eyes. And though Miles had been the Falconer’s apprentice and had studied with him long before Hanna ever had the nerve to visit the old man’s hermitage, the Falconer had valued her and had taken special time to prepare her for her journey into Oth.

  The meer was gone now, but he’d left Miles his prized ervay and bequeathed her his handwritten book.

  The Way Between Worlds was as much a journal as a book. It had its own kind of magic. Pages seemed to appear at one reading only to vanish later, as if freshly written text were brought forth to aid her each time she read it. Topics wandered from one to another, and she often found it hard to follow. At least the map pages stayed put and could always be found in the same place.

  Closing her eyes, she let the book fall open again and again: a page on herbal salves, a description of Garth Lake in winter when snow crowned the Waytrees. She skimmed the pages faster, until she found the words Wind Spirits, and read about Noorushh, who rode a white cloud stallion above the sea, and Isparel, the wind dancer of the east. Would Noorushh or any other wind spirits be strong enough to carry her to the place where the Wild Wind had gone? She knew how to call Wild Esper but hadn’t a clue about how to call the others. And nothing in these pages told her how.

  The lightstone was warmer than ever. Her palm began to sweat as she flipped to the maps near the back of the book, passing the familiar drawings of Enness Isle and Othlore. There were several Oth maps. The Falconer had used the magic of the Waytrees to travel from world to world more than once. But the only Oth map from the east was of a place called All Souls Wood.

  In tiny scrawled letters at the base of the map, she read, The greatest forest of Oth. Would the greatest forest in the Otherworld be the place where half of the World Tree, the black-barked Arnun, might have fallen?

  Excited by the thought, she traced the edge of the map from a place called Taproot Hollow to All Souls Wood. Hanna looked up. Taproot Hollow? That place was mentioned in the game Blind Seer. What did it mean? She whispered the familiar rhyme.

  “Children fly when worlds are shaken,

  Now the children are Wind-taken.

  Seek them there, seek them here,

  before the children disappear.

  Dreamer, travel through the night,

  Take Blind Seer robbed of sight.

  Seek them there, seek them here,

  before the children disappear.

  Bring the boy the torches follow

  To the heart of Taproot Hollow.

  Seek them there, seek them here,

  before the children disappear.”

  The verses had haunted her after the first children were Wind-taken, and she’d thought of them with foreboding again the day Tymm disappeared. But Blind Seer was only a kind of hide-and-seek game, wasn’t it?

  The clues went nowhere. How was she ever going to locate Tymm? She slammed the book shut, dropped the lightstone, and heard a crack.

  There was a knock at the door. She plucked the lightstone off the floor, shoved it under the covers, and slipped
on her cloak.

  “Come in.”

  Taunier closed the door behind him. “Meer Kanoae seems to think I should be dropped off at the next port to find my way home,” he said heatedly.

  “Why?”

  “Not enough room for me on the ship, she says, and I’ve no reason to go east with the rest of you.”

  “Why don’t you tell them?”

  “Tell them what?”

  “That you know magic. That you have a power that might help us.”

  He stood straight-backed as a soldier, his face hard and expressionless.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Hanna said. “I saw you herd fire. It’s a power few people have. I’m not even sure the meers themselves can do it.” He still hadn’t admitted his power to her, but she knew what she’d seen that day on the mountain. She peered at the burned corner of his green cloak. Evidence.

  “I think they’ll want you aboard if they know—” She faltered.

  Taunier was pacing again. Suddenly, he turned and pulled up his sleeve. “Do you see this?” There was a brand on his upper arm—a circle with the letter B inside.

  “That’s … horrible. Who did that to you?”

  “That’s the wool merchant’s work. The B is for black magic. He accused me of using black magic at his shop, when all I did was save his little girl’s life in a fire and keep his filthy shop from burning to the ground!”

  Hanna felt a drumming in her ears. Most folk on Enness Isle feared magic of any kind. It was one of the reasons they shunned her family. Hadn’t the Sheens brought the monstrous Shriker to the isle long ago? Didn’t they have a daughter who might hex you with her strange witch-eyes? A son who’d gone to Othlore, where folk were known to study magic?

  It didn’t matter that Mother told the town gossips Miles had sailed to Othlore to study music and medicine, or that he would return with skills to heal the islanders of all their sores and sicknesses.

  She ran her hand along her own arm, sickened by Taunier’s brand. If the wool merchant were here, she’d kick him in the gut and pelt him with stones for harming Taunier.

  “Don’t look at it like that,” he snapped, quickly rolling down his sleeve.

  He’d misread her. “The wool merchant should have been punished,” she said.

  “Aye, well, none in Brim thought so at the time.”

  She folded her arms and looked out the porthole. High above the sea, the mist had cleared and the moon was disappearing. “The meers aren’t like the island folk. They wouldn’t punish you for using magic.”

  He answered her with an abrupt turn of the heel and slam of the door. She put her forehead against the thick glass of the porthole. If she told the meers about Taunier’s gift, she knew he’d hate her for it. She wanted to go after him, convince him to speak to Meer Eason and Meer Kanoae. A shadow crossed the water. Earlier this evening the moon had hung full over the sea. She shivered, trying to fight off the foreboding feeling as she watched the lunar eclipse. Should she take it as a sign, or was she reading too much into a natural event?

  The next full moon would be Breal’s Moon. Would she be home by then to make the round white candles and shape the fruited bread? Only if the two worlds held together. Only if she found Tymm and the other children and brought them safely back.

  She kept her cloak on and sought her bunk for warmth. Pulling the lightstone free from the covers, she placed it in her lap. Too upset to sleep, she was about to pull The Way Between Worlds closer to her when she noticed the familiar jagged white line along one side of the stone. There was a deeper crack now along the white line. Had it broken when she’d dropped it? A stone was a solid thing, and she’d dropped it only on the floor before Taunier came in.

  Hanna peered at the crack. Something was moving inside.

  She wanted to scream and push it away. The crack widened and a tiny black claw poked out. Another crack. A second claw appeared, gripping and tearing away at the edge of the lightstone.

  ELEVEN

  THE PIP

  And they saw in this one moment the promise of new life.

  —THE BOOK OF EOWEY

  The stone wobbled in Hanna’s lap as the life inside fought to get out. One last crack and the stone split open.

  A featherless bird lay in Hanna’s lap, its bulging eyes shut. The golden creature glowed like living embers. Its wings were folded fanlike across its back, each no more than two inches long. The thing had no beak, but a long snout. It was, she realized, not a bird.

  Hanna blinked. Gingerly, she put out her finger, touched the soft skin of the wing. “Terrow dragon,” she whispered.

  The egg had seemed a stone when it washed up on the beach the year before, ordinary enough when she’d first picked it up. She’d liked its smoothness, its quiet blue color, and the jagged white line down one side that reminded her of lightning. Later, when she found her way to Oth, she’d been surprised when the stone began to glow.

  Miles had called it a lightstone. But if it had been a terrow’s egg all along, how could it have come to her from the sea? Terrow dragons laid their eggs in caves, or so Granda had always said. The sea would have been a cold place for an egg, but then the terrow’s shell in her lap—the outside of what she’d thought had been a stone—was thicker than her finger, not at all flimsy like a bird’s egg, and now she could see there was also a soft pinkish padding inside the shell.

  She thought of the terrow she’d seen the day Tymm had been taken. She still didn’t know if the dragon had come to help her and the Waytrees, or if she’d burned the thorns to keep Hanna away from the deyas.

  A memory came. When they were in Oth, she’d offered her lightstone to the Sylth Queen to save Breal, but the queen had refused the gift. There’d been strange whispering sounds from the sylth folk and the sprites as Hanna held the lightstone in the air. “Lightstone,” they’d said one to another. “Dragon’s tear.”

  Dragon’s tear. Could the terrow who came to Garth Lake that day have been the pip’s mother, looking for her lost egg? She might have been, but by then Hanna had had the lightstone for a full year. That would be a long time to search for an egg.

  The hatchling stirred and opened one eye, revealing a slit black pupil. Around that was an iris, blue as a mountain lake. This surprised Hanna. She’d thought dragons’ eyes were yellow.

  “Have you come to help us, little pip?” she asked. It seemed a lot to hope for, but she was in need of hope. Dragons lived in Noor now, but they were once creatures of Oth, and they still carried the magic of that world.

  The pip began to stretch itself on her lap, pressing its four legs outward, arching its back like a cat, then slowly unfurling the tail that had been tucked up beside its belly and wrapped daintily about its neck. As the tail came away Hanna saw the purple ring around the terrow’s throat. She’d read descriptions of dragons before—the purple-throated ones were female.

  “So you’re a girl,” she whispered. It made her glad somehow, on a ship full of men, with the exception of Captain Kanoae. “You’re a lovely birthday present, though you’re a little early. I won’t be fifteen for another two weeks.”

  The terrow opened her jaws in a yawn, emitting a tuneful squeak. A row of tooth buds made tiny mountain ridges along her orange gums. Would she need milk? Birds and lizards didn’t suckle, but dragons might.

  The ship rocked softly. Hanna felt happy with the wonder of this unexpected, shiny new life. “Are you hungry, little one?” Baby birds ate the spill of their mother’s bellies. Hanna would be willing to chew a bit of bread or meat for the pip, but she would not go so far as to swallow it and vomit it back up. The very thought turned her stomach. Then again, the terrow was a small kind of dragon. Aside from the little wings, it looked more like a lizard than a bird, and lizards ate beetles and spiders and such.

  “Wait here.” She placed the pip and the broken shell on her bunk.

  Hanna crept to the ship’s galley and was soon back with a bit of meat. She hadn’t run into Taunier
and was glad of that. She didn’t want to speak of the pip to him or anyone, not yet. Hanna chewed the beef until it was soft, then put the brown lump in her open palm.

  The hatchling blinked, flicked out her long orange tongue, and took the meat. In a moment it was gone, and she licked Hanna’s hand with her gritty orange tongue.

  “Well,” said Hanna, “that settles dinner.”

  She felt suddenly foolish talking to a pip who, no doubt, heard her words as so much babbling.

  Captain Kanoae might come into the cabin any minute. Would she approve of a baby dragon on board?

  “What am I to do with you?”

  The pip stretched again, then stood up on trembling legs. Hanna held very still as the dragon made her way across her lap and began to crawl up her arm, much like a cat would climb a tree. Tiny sharp talons dug into her sleeve as she worked her way up to Hanna’s shoulder.

  “Ouch,” complained Hanna, but it came out in a laugh. The terrow lifted her golden head and sniffed her cheek. “If you’re looking for my cheek pouch, I haven’t got one.” Female dragons carried their young about in their dangling cheek pouches the first few months of life. The terrow gave up her search and hid under Hanna’s nightdress instead, curling her slender tail loosely around Hanna’s throat.

  The glimmering tail looked like a golden necklace in the dark porthole window.

  “You can’t sleep there,” scolded Hanna.

  “Thrissss,” hissed the pip.

  “Thriss, is it?” said Hanna. Thriss—courage. Not a bad name for a dragon.

  Hanna’s neck grew warm. It felt like the touch of her granda’s hand when she was very small and needed comforting on a dark night. She tucked The Way Between Worlds back in the trunk and closed the lid.