Firebirds Soaring

by Sharyn November

  Smudu nodded. “Ask her for me, please.”

  “You took this man out of his family and left them in want,” Father said in dragonspeech. “Would you accept the gift of his ghost? Can you return his gold to them?”

  The dragon lowered her head, her eyes half-lidded. “I don’t know about the gift of his ghost. I understand others here share their lifebraids with human and animal ghosts, though this seems strange to me. I cannot return the man’s gold to his family until after my sister’s eggs are laid and I am sure she has enough to eat.”

  “The village will feed all three of you, and the babies,” said Father. “It’s been a good year for goats.”

  Elexa thought of the blue-violet stone she had found that morning, somewhere in Sanric’s hoard now. She could sense it through cloth and walls; she knew its radiance. She would be able to track it down. If she explained to Yan, would he help her reclaim it? It would pay for several goats, or she could take it to Smudu’s family.

  Leave Mountainknee. See the places her ghosts had told her about. Get away from Sanric and Yan, the death of her brother, the loss of her friendship with Tira.

  Leave Father alone?

  “Will you give my sister a child?” asked the dragon.

  “To eat?” Father said. “Certainly not.”

  “A slave child, like the ones the other dragons have.”

  “We aren’t slaves!” Father cried. “Both gain from the bond. You would have to give to the child who bonded to you. But we had Bond Night a month ago, and all the children who were ready bonded with dragons. We have no more unbonded thirteen-year-olds.”

  “What about this one?” asked the dragon. “The ghost catcher.”

  “She is too young, and unprepared,” said Father.

  Elexa said, “I won’t bond with a murderer!”

  The dragon said, “Jakar and I have killed humans, but my sister has done nothing but try to survive and keep her children alive. She has killed no one.” The pale head lowered, snaked toward her, its crest rising, the dim eyes glowing brighter. “How prepared do you have to be? We don’t know your ways.”

  “I don’t want to bond with your sister.” Elexa backed away from the dragon, her hand reaching behind her for Father’s. She wanted to bond to a dragon she had spent a year courting, someone she knew would be kind to her, someone she could respect. These strange dragons with ghost vision and no morals didn’t appeal to her.

  Father took her hand in his, placed his other hand on her shoulder to steady her. The world swayed, she was so tired. She leaned against her father’s steadiness.

  Smudu strode past Elexa to the dragon, who slid her head sideways so she could watch him with one eye. “Leave the child alone. Take me.”

  Father repeated what he had said in dragonspeech. Smudu’s murderer turned her head one way, then the other, studying the ghost with each of her eyes in turn.

  At last she laid her chin on the ground. Her waving whiskers stilled. “On my island that is no more, taking in another’s ghost is a large thing. It is a promise to carry forward a life, to nurture it and pass it on to another body when mine breaks, to weave it in with all the other lives I cherish and host. Man, I do not want you inside me, but I see now that I will have you. Come to me if you still will it.”

  Smudu turned back to Elexa. She took a deep breath and translated for him.

  The ghost walked to Elexa and kissed her forehead, a touch of chill. He turned and strode toward the dragon’s mouth, shrugging off Elexa’s net as he went. When he stood just in front of the dragon, she lifted her head a little and opened her mouth. Each of her wavy teeth was outlined in mother-of-pearl, and her tongue had three tips. Smudu stepped over the fence of her teeth and settled on her tongue. She closed her mouth, lifted her head, and swallowed.

  She froze, head pointed toward the stars. Father held Elexa’s shoulders as she leaned against him. An age of silence went by, and then the dragon’s head lowered. “I understand,” she said, in her own voice, in the language of humans.

  There were four human skulls among the bones at the mouth of the wild dragons’ cave. Father laid his cloak on the ground. He and Elexa worked the skulls free of the other bones and set them on the cloak. Each skull had a tooth-shaped hole in the back.

  “My sister liked the brains best,” said the dragon Smudu had joined. Her name was Nasra. “She said they tasted like stories.”

  Father stumbled down the mountain in the dark of morning, Elexa on his back and the cloak of skulls bunched in his hands. They went home and slept until the middle of the following afternoon, then took the skulls to the temple of the mountain god. Someone in the center ground rang the village bell in the pattern to share sorrow, and everyone who could set a job aside for an hour came to the temple to see the skulls, lined up atop the wooden bones of their funeral fire. From looking at them, Elexa hadn’t known which skull had belonged to Kindal and which to Smudu, or to whom the other two skulls had belonged.

  Nasra, Maia, and Birta landed in the center ground near the temple midway through the death songs. Yan, never anxious to take on god duties, had let Father take charge of this ceremony and farewell. When the dragons arrived, Yan glared at them, especially at Nasra. Some of the other villagers hid.

  Elexa felt as though she were in a strange country where all the colors were gray and all the edges soft. She had touched the skulls as she set them on their pyres. One was smoother than the others, with faint patterns across it in the shape of scales. She knew it had belonged to her brother. A dragon bond changed you from skin to bones.

  She prayed for all four of the dead, that they were happy in their next lives, and after she had set the fires to consume what they had left behind and watched the bones scorch, she turned and saw the dragons, next lives to Kindal and Pewet and Smudu.

  Nasra rested her forehand on a cloth-wrapped bundle. “Elexa,” she said.

  Elexa walked through the crowd, saw faces of people she had known all her life, locked in the quiet of sorrow. Tira, kneeling near the back, watched Elexa as she passed. Tira did not smile, but she didn’t frown, either. She looked pale.

  “I have collected what belonged to my man,” Nasra said when Elexa reached her. She shook the bundle and it clinked with coin. “We want to take it back to his family, but I cannot give it to them directly; the city will shoot me. Will you come with me, and walk it to them?”

  “Now you can leave your sister?” Elexa asked.

  Nasra dipped her head, glanced toward Birta and Maia. “I understand she won’t be alone or abandoned. I am coming to appreciate the advantages of this life.”

  “I’ll come,” Elexa whispered.

  Father headed for the house. Yan strode to Elexa. “You can’t leave. You’re the village deadspeaker. You have no right to risk yourself on a journey with a known killer of humans,” he said.

  Suddenly she had status, after all the years she had done the job alone? She didn’t want a job if it meant Yan could order her around. “My father can be the village deadspeaker,” Elexa said. “I need to take care of my ghosts.”

  Father returned with the leather saddle Kindal had used when he rode Maia; a hide coat, gloves, and helmet; and a pouch of food. He went to Nasra and strapped the saddle on her over a dragonhide pad to protect Elexa from the dragon’s heat. Elexa put on the leather clothes. They were all too big for her and smelled of Kindal. Her eyes swam. She looked at Maia.

  “Go,” said Maia in Kindal’s voice. “Go and come back, little sister.”

  There were stirrups for her toes, and straps on the saddle she could cling to. Nasra wasn’t as hot as other dragons—still not healthy yet. Elexa strapped the food pouch across her chest and took the treasure out from under Nasra’s forefoot. Her father helped her tie it to the back of the saddle with leather strings, then boosted her into the saddle just in back of Nasra’s first pair of arms and the bunched muscles that powered her wings.

  Elexa clutched the straps and glanced around at her villa
ge. She suspected it would never look the same to her again.

  Someone tugged on her boot. She looked down into Tira’s face. Tira stretched up a closed hand. When Elexa opened her gloved hand, Tira dropped the beer-colored gem into it. “Maybe you’ll find a good place to sell it in the city,” she said.

  “I’ll look.”

  “I’m still mad that you get to fly first.”

  Elexa laughed, wiped her eyes, watched the smoke rising from the farewell fires. Nasra gathered herself and leapt up into the air.

  Over the past twenty-some years, NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN has sold novels, juvenile and media tie-in books, short story collections, and more than two hundred short stories. Her works have been finalists for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel, The Thread That Binds the Bones, won a Bram Stoker Award.

  Nina’s two most recent books are Spirits That Walk in Shadow (Viking) and Fall of Light (Ace).

  Nina does production work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and teaches short story writing through her local community college. She also works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with several cats, a mannequin, and many strange toys.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have always loved books about dragons, starting with My Father’s Dragon, continuing on through Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, and many others, including Patricia Wrede’s wonderful books about dealing with dragons. In older dragon stories, though, dragons are not friendly. They are dangerous and menacing, and they’d rather eat you than make friends. My dragons ended up somewhere in between.

  I thought, what if there were a girl who lived in a village with regular relations with dragons, only the girl was scared of them? What if she could catch and talk to ghosts? What if she had a strange sense for stones? I had a great time answering these questions.

  Jo Walton

  THREE TWILIGHT TALES

  1

  Once upon a time, a courting couple were walking down the lane at twilight, squabbling. “Useless, that’s what you are,” the girl said. “Why, I could make a man every bit as good as you out of two rhymes and a handful of moonshine.”

  “I’d like to see you try,” said the man.

  So the girl reached up to where the bright silver moon had just risen above the hills and she drew together a handful of moonshine. Then she twisted together two rhymes to run right through it and let it go. There stood a man, in a jacket as violet as the twilight, with buttons as silver as the moon. He didn’t stand there long for them to marvel at him. Off he went down the lane ahead of them, walking and dancing and skipping as he went, off between the hedgerows, far ahead, until he came to the village.

  It had been a mild afternoon, for spring, and the sun had been kind, so a number of people were sitting outside the old inn. The door was open, and a stream of gold light and gentle noise was spilling out from inside. The man made of moonshine stopped and watched this awhile, and then an old widower man began to talk to him. He didn’t notice that the moonshine man didn’t reply, because he’d been lonely for talking since his wife died, and he thought the moonshine man’s smiles and nods and attention made him quite the best conversationalist in the village. After a little while sitting on the wooden bench outside the inn, the old widower noticed the wistful glances the moonshine man kept casting at the doorway. “Won’t you step inside with me? ” he asked, politely. So in they went together, the man made of moonshine smiling widely now, because a moonshine man can never go under a roof until he’s been invited.

  Inside, there was much merriment and laughter. A fire was burning in the grate and the lamps were lit. People were sitting drinking ale, and the light was glinting off their pewter tankards. They were sitting on the hearthside, and on big benches set around the tables, and on wooden stools along the bar. The inn was full of villagers, out celebrating because it was a pretty day and the end of their work week. The man made of moonshine didn’t stop to look around, he went straight over to the fireplace.

  Over the fireplace was a mantelpiece, and that mantelpiece was full of the most extraordinary things. There was a horn reputed to have belonged to a unicorn, and an old sword from the old wars, and a dragon carved out of oak wood, and a candle in the shape of a skull, which people said had once belonged to a wizard, though what a wizard would have wanted with such a thing I can’t tell you. There was a pot the landlord’s daughter had made, and a silver cup the landlord’s father had won for his brewing. There were eggs made of stone and a puzzle carved of wood that looked like an apple and came apart in pieces, a little pink slipper said to have belonged to a princess, and an iron-headed hammer the carpenter had set down there by mistake and had been looking for all week.

  From in between a lucky horseshoe and a chipped blue mug, souvenir of a distant port, brought back by a sailor years ago, the moonshine man drew out an old fiddle. This violin had been made long ago in a great city by a master crafts-man, but it had come down in the world until it belonged to a gypsy fiddler who had visited the inn every spring. At last he had grown old and died on his last visit. His violin had been kept carefully in case his kin ever claimed it, but nobody had ever asked for it, or his body either, which rested peacefully enough under the grass beside the river among the village dead.

  As soon as the man made of moonshine had the violin in his hands he began to play. The violin may have remembered being played like that long ago, in its glory days, but none of the villagers had ever heard music like it, so heart-lifting you couldn’t help but smile, and so toe-tapping you could hardly keep still. Some of the young people jumped up at once and began to dance, and plenty of the older ones joined them, and the rest clapped along in time. None of them thought anything strange about the man in the coat like a violet evening.

  It happened that in the village, the lord of the manor’s daughter had been going about with the blacksmith’s apprentice. The lord of the manor had heard about it and tried to put a stop to it, and knowing his daughter only too well, he had spoken first to the young man. Then the young man had wondered aloud if he was good enough for the girl, and as soon as he doubted, she doubted too, and the end of the matter was that the match was broken off.

  Plenty of people in the village were sorry to see it end, but sorriest was a sentimental old woman who had never married. In her youth, she had fallen in love with a sailor. He had promised to come back, but he never did. She didn’t know if he’d been drowned, or if he’d met some prettier girl in some faraway land, and in the end the not knowing was sadder than the fact of never seeing him again. She kept busy, and while she was waiting, she had fallen into the habit of weaving a rose wreath for every bride in the village. She had the best roses for miles around in the garden in front of her cottage, and she had a way with weaving wreaths too, twining in daisies and forget-me-nots so that each one was different. They were much valued, and often dried and cherished by the couples afterward. People said they brought luck, and everyone agreed they were very pretty. Making them was her great delight. She’d been looking forward to making a wreath for such a love match as the lord of the manor’s daughter and the blacksmith’s apprentice; it tickled her sentimental soul.

  The little man made of moonshine played the violin, and the lord of the manor’s daughter felt her toe tap, and with her toe tapping, she couldn’t help looking across the room at the blacksmith’s apprentice, who was standing by the bar, a mug in his hand, looking back at her. When he saw her looking he couldn’t help smiling, and once he smiled, she smiled, and before you knew it, they were dancing. The old woman who had never married smiled wistfully to see them, and the lonely widower who had invited the little man in looked at her smiling and wondered. He knew he would never forget his wife, but that didn’t mean he could never take another. He saw that smile and remembered when he and the old woman were young. He had never taken much notice of her before, but now he thought that maybe they could be friends.

  All this time n
obody had been taking much notice of the moonshine man, though they noticed his music well enough. But now a girl came in through the back door, dressed all in grey. She had lived alone for five years, since her parents died of the fever. She was twenty-two years old and kept three white cows. Nobody took much notice of her. She made cheese from her cows, and people said yes, the girl who makes cheese, as if that was all there was to her. She was plain and lonely in her solitary life, but she couldn’t see how to change it, for she didn’t have the trick of making friends. She always saw too much, and said what she saw. She came in, bringing cheese to the inn for their ploughman’s lunches, and she stopped at the bar, holding the cheese in her bag, looking across the room at the violinist. Her eyes met his, and as she saw him, he saw her. She began to walk across the room through the dancers, coming toward him.

  Just as she had reached him and was opening her mouth to speak, the door slammed back and in walked the couple who had been quarrelling in the lane, their quarrel all made up and their arms around each other’s waists. The moonshine man stopped playing as soon as he saw them, and his face, which had been so merry, became grave. The inn fell quiet, and those who had been dancing were still.

  “Oh,” said the girl, “here’s the man I made out of two rhymes and a handful of moonshine! It was so irresponsible of me to let him go wandering off into the world! Who knows what might have come of it? But never mind, no harm done.” Before anyone could say a word, she reached toward him, whipped out the two rhymes, then rubbed her hands to dust off the moonshine, which vanished immediately in the firelight and lamplight of the bright inn parlour.

  2

  It was at just that time of twilight when the last of the rose has faded into the west, and the amethyst of the sky, which was so luminous, begins to ravel away into night and let the first stars rub through. The hares were running along the bank of the stream, and the great owl, the one they call the white shadow, swept silently by above them. In the latticework of branches at the edge of the forest, buds were beginning to show. It was the end of an early spring day, and the pedlar pulled his coat close around him as he walked over the low arch of the bridge where the road crossed the stream, swollen and rapid with the weight of melted snow.