Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The woman reappeared. “My bird,” she cried. “My pretty.” I was on my feet with my sword drawn before I could even close my mouth. I swung, but the old witch didn’t linger to do battle. A hawk caught the lark in its claws; the door swung open, and both birds disappeared into the night.

  We ran into the dark, stunned and horrified. The door slammed shut behind us like a mouth. The fire dwindled into two red flames that stared like eyes out of the darkened windows. They gave no light; we could see nothing.

  “That bloody web-haired old spider,” Danica said furiously. “That horrible, putrid witch.” I heard a thump as she hit a tree; she cursed painfully. Someone hammered with solid, methodical blows at the door and windows; I guessed Christabel was laying siege. But nothing gave. She groaned with frustration. I felt a touch and raised my sword; Justin said sharply, “It’s me.” She put her hand on my shoulder; I felt myself tremble.

  “Now what?” I said tersely. I could barely speak; I only wanted action, but we were blind and bumbling in the dark.

  “I think she doesn’t kill them,” Justin said. “She changes them. Listen to me. She’ll bring Fleur back into her house eventually. We’ll find someone to tell us how to free her from the spell. Someone in this wilderness of magic should know. And not everyone is cruel.”

  “We’ll stay here until the witch returns.”

  “I doubt she’ll return until we’re gone. And even if we find some way to kill her, we may be left with an embroidered Fleur.”

  “We’ll stay.”

  “Anne,” she said, and I slumped to the ground, wanting to curse, to weep, wanting at the very least to tear the clinging cobweb dark away from my eyes.

  “Poor Fleur,” I whispered. “She was only hungry… Harper or no, we rescue her when we learn how. She comes first.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, and added thoughtfully, “The harper eluded the witch, it seems, though not the dragon.”

  “How could he have known?” I asked bitterly. “By what magic?”

  “Maybe he had met the witch first in a song.”

  Morning found us littered across tree roots like the remains of some lost battle. At least we could see again. The house had flown itself away; only a couple of fiery feathers remained. We rose wordlessly, feeling the empty place where Fleur had been, listening for her morning chatter. We fed the horses, ate stone-hard bread with honey, and had a swallow of brandy apiece. Then we left Fleur behind and rode.

  The great forest finally thinned, turned to golden oak, which parted now and then around broad meadows where we saw the sky again, and the high dark peak. We passed through a village, a mushroom patch of a place, neither friendly nor surly, nor overly curious. We found an inn, and some supplies, and, beyond the village, a road to the dragon’s mountain that had been cleared, we were told, before the mountain had become the dragon’s lair. Yes, we were also told, a harper had passed through… He seemed to have left little impression on the villagers, but they were a hardheaded lot, living under the dragon’s shadow. He, too, had asked directions, as well as questions about Black Tremptor, and certain tales of gold and magic harps and other bits of country lore. But no one else had taken that road for decades, leading, as it did, into the dragon’s mouth.

  We took it. The mountain grew clearer, looming high above the trees. We watched for dragon wings, dragon fire, but if Black Tremptor flew, it was not by day. The rain had cleared; a scent like dying roses and aged sunlit wood seemed to blow across our path. We camped on one of the broad grass clearings where we watched the full moon rise, turn the meadow milky, and etch the dragon’s lair against the stars.

  But for Fleur, the night seemed magical. We talked of her and then of home; we talked of her and then of court gossip; we talked of her and of the harper, and what might have lured him away from Celandine into a dragon’s claw. And as we spoke of him, it seemed his music fell around us from the stars and that the moonlight in the oak wood had turned to gold.

  “Sh!” Christabel said sharply, and, drowsy, we quieted to listen. Danica yawned.

  “It’s just harping.” She had an indifferent ear; Fleur was more persuasive about the harper’s harping than his harping would have been. “Just a harping from the woods.”

  “Someone’s singing,” Christabel said. I raised my brows, feeling that in the untroubled, sweetly scented night, anything might happen.

  “Is it our missing Kestral?”

  “Singing in a tree?” Danica guessed. Christabel sat straight.

  “Be quiet,” she said sharply. Justin, lying on her stomach, tossing twigs into the fire, glanced at her surprisedly. Danica and I only laughed at Christabel in a temper.

  “You have no hearts,” she said, blowing her nose fiercely. “It’s so beautiful, and all you can do is gabble.”

  “All right,” Justin said soothingly. “We’ll listen.” But, moonstruck, Danica and I could not keep still. We told raucous tales of old loves, while Christabel strained to hear, and Justin watched her curiously. She seemed oddly moved, did Christabel; feverish, I thought, from all the rain.

  A man rode out of the trees into the moonlight at the edge of the meadow. He had milky hair, broad shoulders; a gold mantle fanned across his horse’s back. The crown above his shadowed face was odd: a circle of uneven gold spikes, like antlers. He was unarmed; he played the harp.

  “Not our harper,” Danica commented. “Unless the dragon turned his hair white.”

  “He’s a king,” I said. “Not ours.” For a moment, just a moment, I heard his playing, and knew it could have parted water, made birds speak. I caught my breath; tears swelled behind my eyes. Then Danica said something and I laughed.

  Christabel stood up. Her face was unfamiliar in the moonlight. She took off her boots, unbraided her hair, let it fall loosely down her back; all this while we only watched and laughed and glanced now and then, indifferently, at the waiting woodland harper.

  “You’re hopeless boors,” Christabel said, sniffing. “I’m going to speak to him, ask him to come and sit with us.”

  “Go on then,” Danica said, chewing a grass blade. “Maybe we can take him home to Celandine instead.” I rolled over in helpless laughter. When I wiped my eyes, I saw Christabel walking barefoot across the meadow to the harper.

  Justin stood up. A little, nagging wind blew through my thoughts. I stood beside her, still laughing a little, yet poised to hold her if she stepped out of the circle of our firelight. She watched Christabel. Danica watched the fire dreamily, smiling. Christabel stood before the harper. He took his hand from his strings and held it out to her.

  In the sudden silence, Justin shouted, “Christabel!”

  All the golden light in the world frayed away. A dragon’s wing of cloud brushed the moon; night washed toward Christabel, as she took his hand and mounted; I saw all her lovely, red-gold hair flowing freely in the last of the light. And then freckled, stolid, courageous, snuffling Christabel caught the harper-king’s shoulders and they rode down the fading path of light into a world beyond the night.

  We searched for her until dawn.

  At sunrise, we stared at one another, haggard, mute. The great oak had swallowed Christabel; she had disappeared into a harper’s song.

  “We could go to the village for help,” Danica said wearily.

  “Their eyes are no better than ours,” I said.

  “The queen’s harper passed through here unharmed,” Justin mused. “Perhaps he knows something about the country of the woodland king.”

  “I hope he is worth all this,” Danica muttered savagely.

  “No man is,” Justin said simply. “But all this will be worth nothing if Black Tremptor kills him before we find him. He may be able to lead us safely out of the northlands, if nothing else.”

  “I will not leave Fleur and Christabel behind,” I said sharply. “I will not. You may take the harper back to Celandine. I stay here until I find them.”

  Justin looked at me; her eyes were reddened with sleeple
ssness, but they saw as clearly as ever into the mess we had made. “We will not leave you, Anne,” she said. “If he cannot help us, he must find his own way back. But if he can help us, we must abandon Christabel now to rescue him.”

  “Then let’s do it,” I said shortly and turned my face away from the oak. A little wind shivered like laughter through their golden leaves.

  We rode long and hard. The road plunged back into forest, up low foothills, brought us to the flank of the great dark mountain. We pulled up in its shadow. The dragon’s eyrie shifted under the eye; stone pillars opened into passages, their granite walls split and hollowed like honeycombs, like some palace of winds, open at every angle yet with every passage leading into shadow, into the hidden dragon’s heart.

  “In there?” Danica asked. There was no fear in her voice, just her usual impatience to get things done. “Do we knock, or just walk in?” A wind roared through the stones then, bending trees as it blasted at us. We turned our mounts, flattened ourselves against them, while the wild wind rode over us. Recovering, Danica asked more quietly, “Do we go in together?”

  “Yes,” I said and then, “No. I’ll go first.”

  “Don’t be daft, Anne,” Danica said crossly. “If we all go together, at least we’ll know where we all are.”

  “And fools we will look, too,” I said grimly, “caught along with the harper, waiting for Celandine’s knights to rescue us as well.” I turned to Justin. “Is there some secret, some riddle for surviving dragons?”

  She shook her head helplessly. “It depends on the dragon. I know nothing about Black Tremptor, except that he most likely has not kept the harper for his harping.”

  “Two will go,” I said. “And one wait.”

  They did not argue; there seemed no foolproof way, except for none of us to go. We tossed coins: two peacocks and one Celandine. Justin, who got the queen, did not look happy, but the coins were adamant. Danica and I left her standing with our horses, shielded within green boughs, watching us. We climbed the bald slope quietly, trying not to scatter stones. We had to watch our feet, pick a careful path to keep from sliding. Danica, staring groundward, stopped suddenly ahead of me to pick up something.

  “Look,” she breathed. I did, expecting a broken harp string, or an ivory button with Celandine’s profile on it.

  It was an emerald as big as my thumbnail, shaped and faceted. I stared at it a moment. Then I said, “Dragon-treasure. We came to find a harper.”

  “But Anne—there’s another—” She scrabbled across loose stone to retrieve it. “Topaz. And over there a sapphire—”

  “Danica,” I pleaded. “You can carry home the entire mountain after you’ve dispatched the dragon.”

  “I’m coming,” she said breathlessly, but she had scuttled crabwise across the slope toward yet another gleam. “Just one more. They’re so beautiful, and just lying here free as rain for anyone to take.”

  “Danica! They’ll be as free when we climb back down.”

  “I’m coming.”

  I turned, in resignation to her sudden magpie urge. “I’m going up.”

  “Just a moment, don’t go alone. Oh, Anne, look there, it’s a diamond. I’ve never seen such fire.”

  I held my breath, gave her that one moment. It had been such a long, hard journey I found it impossible to deny her an unexpected pleasure. She knelt, groping along the side of a boulder for a shining as pure as water in the sunlight. “I’m coming,” she assured me, her back to me. “I’m coming.”

  And then the boulder lifted itself up off the ground. Something forked and nubbled like a tree root, whispering harshly to itself, caught her by her hand and by her honey hair and pulled her down into its hole. The boulder dropped ponderously, earth shifted close around its sides as if it had never moved.

  I stared, stunned. I don’t remember crossing the slope, only beating on the boulder with my hands and then my sword hilt, crying furiously at it, until all the broken shards underfoot undulated and swept me in a dry, rattling, bruising wave back down the slope into the trees.

  Justin ran to help me. I was torn, bleeding, cursing, crying; I took a while to become coherent. “Of all the stupid, feeble tricks to fall for! A trail of jewels! They’re probably not even real, and Danica got herself trapped under a mountain for a pocketful of coal or dragon fewmets—”

  “She won’t be trapped quietly,” Justin said. Her face was waxen. “What took her?”

  “A little crooked something—an imp, a mountain troll—Justin, she’s down there without us in a darkness full of whispering things—I can’t believe we were so stupid!”

  “Anne, calm down, we’ll find her.”

  “I can’t calm down!” I seized her shoulders, shook her. “Don’t you disappear and leave me searching for you, too—”

  “I won’t, I promise. Anne, listen.” She smoothed my hair with both her hands back from my face. “Listen to me We’ll find her. We’ll find Christabel and Fleur, we will not leave this land until—”

  “How?” I shouted. “How? Justin, she’s under solid rock!”

  “There are ways. There are always ways. This land riddles constantly, but all the riddles have answers. Fleur will turn from a bird into a woman, we will find a path for Christabel out of the wood-king’s country, we will rescue Danica from the mountain imps. There are ways to do these things, we only have to find them.”

  “How?” I cried again, for it seemed the farther we traveled in that land, the more trouble we got into. “Every time we turn around one of us disappears! You’ll go next—”

  “I will not, I promise—”

  “Or I will.”

  “I know a few riddles,” someone said. “Perhaps I can help.”

  We broke apart, as startled as if a tree had spoken: perhaps one had, in this exasperating land. But it was a woman. She wore a black cloak with silver edging; her ivory hair and iris eyes and her grave, calm face within the hood were very beautiful. She carried an odd staff of gnarled black wood inset with a jewel the same pale violet as her eyes. She spoke gently, unsurprised by us; perhaps nothing in this place surprised her anymore. She added, at our silence, “My name is Yrecros. You are in great danger from the dragon; you must know that.”

  “We have come to rescue a harper,” I said bitterly. “We were five, when we crossed into this land.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you know this dragon?”

  She did not answer immediately; beside me, Justin was oddly still. The staff shifted; the jewel glanced here and there, like an eye. The woman whose name was Yrecros said finally, “You may ask me anything.”

  “I just did,” I said bewilderedly. Justin’s hand closed on my arm; I looked at her. Her face was very pale; her eyes held a strange, intense light I recognized; she had scented something intangible and was in pursuit. At such times she was impossible.

  “Yrecros,” she said softly. “My name is Nitsuj.”

  The woman smiled.

  “What are you doing?” I said between my teeth.

  “It’s a game,” Justin breathed. “Question for answer. She’ll tell us all we need to know.”

  “Why must it be a game?” I protested. She and the woman were gazing at one another, improbable fighters about to engage in a delicate battle of wits. They seemed absorbed in one another, curious, stone-deaf. I raised my voice. “Justin!”

  “You’ll want the harper, I suppose,” the woman said. I worked out her name then and closed my eyes.

  Justin nodded. “It’s what we came for. And if I lose?”

  “I want you,” the woman said simply, “for my apprentice.” She smiled again, without malice or menace. “For seven years.”

  My breath caught. “No.” I could barely speak. I seized Justin’s arm, shook her. “Justin. Justin, please!” For just a moment I had, if not her eyes, her attention.

  “It’s all right, Anne,” she said softly. “We’ll get the harper without a battle, and rescue Fleur and Christabel and Danica as w
ell.”

  “Justin!” I shouted. Above us all the pillars and cornices of stone echoed her name; great, barbed-winged birds wheeled out of the trees. But unlike bird and stone, Justin did not hear.

  “You are a guest in this land,” the woman said graciously. “You may ask first.”

  “Where is the road to the country of the woodland king?”

  “The white stag in the oak forest follows the road to the land of the harper king,” Yrecros answered, “if you follow from morning to night, without weapons and without rest. What is the Song of Ducirc, and on what instrument was it first played?”

  “The Song of Ducirc was the last song of a murdered poet to his love, and it was played to his lady in her high tower on an instrument of feathers, as all the birds in the forest who heard it sang her his lament,” Justin said promptly. I breathed. a little then; she had been telling us such things all her life. “What traps the witch in the border woods in her true shape, and how can her power be taken?”

  “The border witch may be trapped by a cage of iron; her staff of power is the spoon with which she stirs her magic. What begins with fire and ends with fire and is black and white between?”

  “Night,” Justin said. Even I knew that one. The woman’s face held, for a moment, the waning moon’s smile. “Where is the path to the roots of this mountain, and what do those who dwell there fear most?”

  “The path is fire, which will open their stones, and what they fear most is light. What is always coming yet never here, has a name but does not exist, is longer than day but shorter than day?”

  Justin paused a blink. “Tomorrow,” she said, and added, “in autumn.” The woman smiled her lovely smile. I loosed breath noiselessly. “What will protect us from the dragon?”

  The woman studied Justin, as if she were answering some private riddle of her own. “Courtesy,” she said simply. “Where is Black Tremptor’s true name hidden?”

  Justin was silent; I felt her thoughts flutter like a bird seeing a perch. The silence lengthened; an icy finger slid along my bones.