by Tammy Salyer
Bribery, he noted, seemed to be an effective tool not just among humans but universally. A handful of the creatures flew to the hatchling and seemed to confer with it. The dragør lowered its talons a fraction but gave him no other outward sign that he had permission to approach it. Yet a moment later the dragørflies flew toward his face, fast enough he blinked and stepped back. They spun back toward the dragør, then to him again, repeating this until he got the hint and followed.
When he was close enough, he reached out gently, slowly, and rested his fingertips lightly on the hatchling’s neck near the collar. The scales were as smooth as glass, and as cold. First, he quickly unknotted the ropes around the creature’s front and rear legs. The dragør stayed still, its almost glowing eyes fixed on Griggory with pupils as narrow as the crescent of a new moon.
“All right, all right. Good. Now I have to pick the collar’s lock to get it off, young one. Which means I need to use this.” He carefully removed his dirk from his belt with his free hand. The hatchling gave a grumble in its throat that was more terrifying than any threat Griggory had ever heard a human make, but it didn’t fight or flinch. “Won’t be a moment, I promise.”
He didn’t lie. Being acquainted with locks and how to override them was a necessary skill for a vagabond. More than a few occasions of needing to find shelter in downpours or food he couldn’t afford honestly in a pinch had provided him both necessity and opportunity to learn such questionable things.
The collar lock clicked and released. He tossed his dirk aside and bent the round band open at its central hinge. The dragør stood still as he eased the collar off, eyeing him.
“Yes, that’s right, you’re free, young—oh yes, that too.”
The hatchling was staring down its muzzle cross-eyed, then reached up with its claws and began to paw at the rope binding. Griggory bent to retrieve his dirk to help it.
He froze, still stooped over as if bowing. From deep in the Weald, a dragør bellowed. The hatchling’s parent? It hardly mattered. All the Weald’s dragørkind were hunting for it. And in moments, they’d be here.
Snatching the dirk, he turned back to the hatchling, who’d stopped clawing at the muzzle and was making an unusual chirring sound in its throat, looking out into the trees. It had turned toward the forest and appeared poised to run—before Griggory could make his last request. He needed to beg the dragør to speak to its kind and persuade them not to level Umborough. Not all people were bad, greedy, and misguided, he wanted to tell it, and not all deserved to pay for the mistakes in this case of just one.
He didn’t get the chance.
“Damn you, Griggory. I thought you’d be smarter than this.”
At the end of the path at the glade’s edge, Gwinifeve sat on horseback, a crossbow that looked like it could take down a bear pointed at him.
“I-I can’t let you—”
“You don’t have a say in it. Now, put the collar back on the hatchling and drop your…toy and move away. I’m not asking, and this is the last time I’m telling you.”
The options played in Griggory’s head rapidly. Tell Gwinifeve about the coming dragør wing. Then she would either flee and leave them all to their fate, or she would do the obvious thing and use the Fenestros once more to shield their scent and make the hatchling compliant, gather it on horseback, kill Griggory, and speed away stealthily. Or, he could help Gwinifeve, and all the items on the latter part of the list would be repeated, give or take the killing him part.
In both scenarios, Umborough would likely burn for her mistake.
He glanced at the hatchling. It had managed to pull the ropes around its snout askew, though they still held. Tight as the bind was, it must have been painful, and an unusual wave of enmity at the Knight washed through Griggory. The dragør was snarling and rearing on its haunches as if preparing to attack, but he knew the crossbow’s heavy draw would be enough to pierce its young and still not fully hardened scales. It could die or be seriously injured.
To save the creature, he had only one other choice.
Whispering over his shoulder to the hatchling, he said, “Run, little one! Fast as you can!” Then, Griggory ran too, at Gwinifeve, dirk waving, a loud primitive cry bursting from him.
Her eyes widened in surprise, but her aim was fluid. He saw as clear as Halla light when she depressed the trigger, and a moment later his forward momentum changed to reverse, and he was clubbed off his feet backward with the force of what felt like a battering ram striking his upper chest.
The next thing he knew, he was staring into the afternoon sky. Not a cloud up there. He felt nothing, no pain, not even the ground beneath him, almost as if he were floating. He blinked, tried to cough—and then there was pain. Worlds of it, bursting from his chest like a volcano. Without moving his head, he turned his eyes down and saw the bolt shaft rising out of his chest from somewhere just right of center. He also saw Gwinifeve dismount and walk toward him.
Standing over him, she gazed down with pity. “I’ll find it you know.”
He couldn’t speak, but if he could have, his last words would have been filled with admonishment, berating her for the destruction and ruin she was bringing down on the people of Umborough. But then, it occurred to him that she probably knew and probably didn’t care. As she’d put it, her duty was to Vaka Aster. And as she’d shown, she would fulfill her duty no matter who it hurt.
“May as well put you out of your misery.” She reached to her belt for a dagger.
And then, the most extraordinary thing happened.
The swarm of dragørflies…attacked her? One moment, she was drawing her knife, the next she was surrounded by a hundred fluttering, buzzing, brightly colored sets of wings, diving around her, flapping in her face, trying to crawl into her nose and clothes, even, from the sound of her grunts of pain, biting her.
Waving her arms madly to brush the creatures off, Gwinifeve stumbled backward and out of his sight, the edges of which were growing tattered and dull, darkening to a wash of gray.
A kind of weight settled on him, and he felt like he was drowning. He tried to reach up to his chest but his hand was heavy, and he realized he still held the collar bearing the Fenestros. He laughed at the irony of what it would look like if his body was found this way. They’d think he’d stolen the celestial stone. The only thing he’d ever stolen were the odds bits of food and, once, a handcart to rescue an injured bruhawk. But never something like this. He wouldn’t—
He realized his thoughts were becoming as langorous and unfocused as his vision. Blinking, he looked back up toward the sky, blue as the lakes around Kolga in Ivoryss Province, where one time he’d found an ancient book that described the firebreathers’ ability to see beyond the stars and into other worlds. What a sight that would be.
Then a shadow clouded the sky, as dark as night, and as long and wide as—a full-grown dragør.
Chapter Twelve
“This one looks weak and skinny, barely worth cracking my jaws to bite into.”
“Look deeper, he has sacrificed himself to save your hatchling from someone he reveres. What does that tell you?”
The two voices seemed to come from inside his own mind, and Griggory hoped for a moment that having this unusual experience meant he wasn’t dead. His eyes shot open, and whatever hope he’d had evaporated.
Around him in every direction, he saw—nothing. No forms, no contours, no colors. Even the light couldn’t have been called yellow or white or bright or dim. It was all empty. His gaze turned to what he thought was under him, but there wasn’t an under him. It seemed he really was floating now.
“Hello?” he tried, speaking without a mouth somehow. One other thing he’d noticed in the void; he wasn’t there either. Not physically, anyway. If this was death, it wasn’t anything like he’d ever imagined.
“Vinnr is already rid of one more immortal speck of a creature, or will be soon, why would you want to create another? They will always be the same. Weak. Puny. Greedy.”
“Does the Howling Weald’s wing need no more allies?”
And the second again, a voice that sounded like the song of crystal. So clear and piercing that it was almost beyond a tone the ear could hear. He supposed that might be why he wasn’t hearing it, exactly, but more like feeling it in his mind.
And he suspected he knew who the speakers were, despite their insistence on ignorning him. He tried to clear his ephemeral throat to get their attention, found this wasn’t a thing a non-being could do, and instead said, “Ahem. Hello? I can hear you.”
There was silence in response, and more, a sense of expectation, almost of judgment. He wondered what they were judging but decided guessing was a short road to nowhere (for if these two presences belonged to whom he thought they did, he was the first to admit he had no idea what tilt their values took, if they had values he would even understand). So instead he voiced his deepest concern: “If it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition, could you please tell me if the hatchling I was trying to help was able to get away?”
More silence followed, and Griggory could do little but wait for someone else to break it. He studied the void surrounding him, noting the emptiness he could see matched the way he felt: empty, bodiless, not there, not anywhere. How long would this last? Eternally? He tried to come up with a way he might pass the time during eterntity and found his imagination wasn’t up to the task.
Finally, there seemed to be a…shimmer in the emptiness. There was no increase or decrease in light. Nevertheless, a sort of thickening appeared before him, a place where the void seemed to act differently, and he sensed more than saw a figure. Two of them, actually.
One most definitely was a dragør, massive and towering in his senses as big as a house, confirming his suspicions. The other was diminutive but boundless. Both small and big. He couldn’t describe it at all and soon stopped trying.
“You see—” the shapeless figure with the crystalline voice said something then that must have been a name, but Griggory didn’t know it as a sound. He tasted fried apples and smoked fish, and thought, oddly, That’s the flavor of green. He examined his thought and senses and realized it was a gibberish idea. Green was not a flavor. But the clear voice was still speaking, so he paid attention. “He is not driven by his own desires, other than the desire to help others. They are not all greedy and simple. Is he not the kind of creature you’re always telling me the world needs more of?”
“But he’s human, Vaka Aster. The weakest of your creations. And they smell repellent.”
“Weak or strong, they are a part of Vinnr, too. And one at least was clever enough to catch one of you.”
Of all the emotions Griggory might have expected to feel at being ignored and spoken of by a dragør and the celestial creator of Vinnr as if he were an item on display at a shop, annoyance would never have made the list. He was, however, becoming so. Being imbued with a modicum of wisdom kept him from letting it show in his voice as he asked, “I hate to interrupt again, but am I dead?”
The response was startling in its immediacy. “Would you like to be?” the dragør asked, its deep voice rumbling through the void.
“Er, no. Thank you. That is, if it’s not too late not to be.”
That sensation of expectation and judgment returned, but this time, from what he could tell, it wasn’t directed at him but at the dragør.
“Your hatchling is safe because of this one—,” that green taste again that he thought was a name, “and now I leave the choice of how to repay him to you,” Vaka Aster said. “If you choose to heal him with the Fenestros, I will make him a Knight, and the Weald will once again have an ally, if not an equal, among the fledgling peoples of Vinnr.”
The dragør asked, “And what shall I do with the city of the specks?”
“Leave it be. Do not extract vengeance for Knight Gwinifeve’s foolishness from the people of Yor. They are hapless and not part of her mistake.”
The presence of the Verity evaporated. Though relieved to hear Umborough wouldn’t be levelled by the dragørs, Griggory did still wonder if he was about to learn whether he could be as easily eaten as an ephemeral form as he could as a physical one.
His fear was allayed when the dragør said, “And would you like to become a Knight Corporealis, speck? To live a life of many ages in perpetual service to our shared creator Vaka Aster?”
He thought about that a moment, and of all the wisdom and knowledge and places to see that such a long life would afford him. Of the ability to wield a Fenestros and perhaps, just perhaps, ask the dragørs what other worlds looked like to them. Then he remembered Gwinifeve. “Ehm, was that thing you said earlier, about Vinnr being rid of one immortal speck—is Gwinifeve dead?”
“Aren’t all your kind, eventually?”
“Well, yes, but I mean, is she currently dead?”
“Vaka Aster has rescinded her ordination. Now the dishonorable speck will live her much-diminished time in shame and disgrace as a much-diminshed mortal, like you all are.”
Griggory took that to mean Gwinifeve had been allowed to escape. He didn’t know how he felt about that exactly, but he supposed he shouldn’t care too much. At least the hatchling was safe.
“If I was made a Knight, Great One, would you and the other dragørs speak with me? Teach me more of your ancient lore and the lore of Vinnr?”
A long pause followed, then: “Dragørs do not ordinarily bother with mortal specks.” Another pause, while Griggory’s hope teetered on that one word, “ordinarily.” “But—”
He tasted another color, violet, the flavor like moss and eggplant cooked over a spit of roast venison. Is that the hatchling’s name?
“—seems to have an unnatural fondness for you. My hatchling at least will welcome you in the Weald. Therefore, so shall the rest of us.”
This was an opportunity Griggory knew he’d never get again, and though he’d never relished the thought of service to anyone, even as a Knight, instead of his usual lengthy process of consideration, he simply said, “Then yes. I will swear an oath to serve Vaka Aster as a Knight Corporealis for as long as our Verity pleases, if it means a chance to become an ally and a companion of dragørkind.”
The dragør rumbled, the sound’s meaning hard to determine. Then it said, “Why did you allow yourself to be nearly killed for Violet, speck?”
It was his turn to pause, but he wasn’t sure how to put his reasons into words. After a moment, he merely said, “The dragør bairn needed a friend, and I was there.”
He could think of no other way to explain it. The hatchling and all dragørs were creatures of immeasurable exellence of every kind, Vaka Aster’s first creations, with power that grew greater and greater as they aged. He recognized the world Vinnr would be without them—a world of less. And what was one human worth compared to a dragør? He’d decided at the moment he’d lunged at Gwinifeve that his greater contribution to the world wouldn’t be his life but the hatchling’s.
In the void, the dragør’s next words echoed as loudly as the sound of the world’s moment of creation: “Vaka Aster, this one is worthy.”
Chapter Thirteen
Griggory gasped and sat up. Something fell from his chest, and he looked down to see the Fenestros rolling away. His chest felt as if it had been filled with fire, especially where the crossbow bolt had penetrated, but the sensation was quickly diminishing. Looking down, he noticed something curious. The swarm of dragørflies were perched along his outstretched legs, their wings pulsing slightly, as they did when the creatures were at rest, and each of them was turned to him with their big eyes fixed to his face. They’d been watching a vigil over him.
Far off, frantic cries and shouts came from the direction of Umborough. No doubt, they’d seen the dragør arrive. The dragør!
He leaped to his feet and turned, scattering the dragørflies. Filling the rear of the glade, the beast towered over h
im, sitting on its haunches with its tree-length tail snaking around the glade’s edge. At its feet, rising just to the level of its elbow, sat the hatchling, gnawing on something blackened and long, perhaps the leg of a hart.
“It’s strange to me, speck, how the little ones seem to like you too,” the dragør said.
It took Griggory a moment to speak. Seeing the ephemeral form of one of the creatures up close in a celestial void was one thing. Having one sitting barely five paces from you, staring at you with eyes that burned with a wystic flame and baring teeth that would crush you with their weight alone, not to mention the power of the beast’s bite, was quite another. “Yes,” he finally managed. “They seem inordinately fond of honey, which I have become the supplier of.”
“Honey…” the dragør said in a tone of dismissive disbelief.
There was something odd about the way the dragør spoke, but it took him a moment to realize what. Then: “You-you’re not…that is, you’re still in my head. Do dragørs not speak through their mouths like huma—specks?”
He received a smug chuckle at that. “Do you think you’d be able to understand us if we did? Your kind’s minds are simple and clear as creek water. You think yourselves clever, with your duplicitous pronuncements and pretty language, but we know, we always know what you really think. It is hardly a feat worth mentioning to share with you what we wish.”
Griggory had felt exposed before, like once when brigands had stripped him of everything but his underclothes on the Great Province Byway, but now he felt not just exposed but naked—and exuberantly happy the thoughts he’d had while in the void had been deemed acceptable to the creature.
“So…mind-sight. Incredible.” He already felt such a depth of eagerness to learn more about this trait, and possibly how to do it, that he could hardly wait to begin. Today, however, he wasn’t going to push his luck, not with this dragør, who he hoped was grumpy because of the danger to its hatchling and wasn’t an example of all dragørs’ attitudes toward people all the time.