Birth of the Firebringer ft-1

by Meredith Ann Pierce

  Her central head champed its teeth, the little one muttering. “Such freaks would have been eaten at birth when I was young. But the king grows lax. A weak people are easier for him to manage in his age. Well.”

  Once more she shifted.

  “I would make my people great again. I would share fire among all the dens as when first we came here. The wyverns must breed in winter as we once did, and the weak be eaten, if our line is to regain its vigor. Now only the piddling summer eggs hatch, and no fruit comes of an autumn tryst….”

  “But only because of the cold,” the second head hissed. “With fire, I could….” She broke off. “Ah, but the king will not listen to me.”

  “I want you to return to your father, Aljan,” the white wyrm said suddenly. Her eyes had come back from their distance now. The central head spoke. “Explain your absence somehow. Tell them you have seen a marvel, our dens deserted, or all the wyverns dead of plague. Tell them anything, but make them follow.”

  Jan watched her, helpless now to move or speak. He wanted to run, turn away, shake his head in flat refusal, but his body would not obey. And he was outcast. Outcast. He could never go back. She laughed softly.

  “It is our king’s custom to be first out of the dens in spring, to go hunting and bring back the season’s first catch: red meat for his people upon their awakening. But how if I were to seize that right? The people love me, support me. They would proclaim me his heir. Then he must listen.”

  Again her eyes found him.

  “You must lead your people away from the poison pool, Aljan. My people still fear that place—superstitious fools! Lead your father and his band into the canyon below the cliff. It is a dead end, with sides too steep for your kind to scale.”

  She preened herself a moment, fretfully.

  “I, meanwhile, will rouse my people. They sleep lightly this year, with the spring come in so early and so mild.” She laughed, all three heads shaking, their sliding notes hollow and strange. “To kill the black prince of the unicorns and outstrip my own king in a single stroke. Will that not be, little trickster after my own heart, the finest game of all?”

  Jan stared at her across the well of sunlight. Firelight played over the minute scales of her delicately tinted skin. They flaked off along her underside as she slid along the floor. It must be these, he found himself thinking suddenly, irrelevantly, packed down and hardened for centuries, that formed the crystalline surface of the tunnel floors.

  His captor grew impatient for his reply. She spat, “Surely you can feel no loyalty to them, pompous unicorns, the very ones that cast you out?”

  The truth in her words mocked at him. No, he was not like other unicorns, could not keep to the old ways, to Halla’s Circle, though his father’s pride and the love of Alma depended on it. The white wyrm coiled about her bed of stones, looking at him, laughing at him with her three pairs of cut-jewel eyes.

  Jan could not recall ever seeing a creature more beautiful, though there nagged somewhere at the back of his mind the notion that she ought to have seemed hideous. Why? For she was pure, admirably pure, without a twinge of conscience or shame.

  “Serve me, Aljan,” her little head hissed. “Once we have destroyed the unicorns, I will let you go—off across the Plain to run wild Renegade if you will. Or even,” her voice grew sly, “back to your Vale. Who would know, with all the others dead, that anything you chose to tell them was not the truth? You would be prince, then, little darkling. You would rule the unicorns….”

  Something struck him then, dimly, through the fog. Why was she so importunate? And then that, too, came to him—because time is slipping away. It must be noon by now, or past, and the unicorns preparing to quit the pool. Because I am the last trick she has against my father. Without me she will never get him into that dead-end canyon. Her people are afraid to go near the poison pool.

  And without me to lead the unicorns into her trap, she will never have her bold stroke to outshine the king, to seize his place in her people’s hearts and come to power. I am the spark to all her kindling. Without me, her great scheme becomes only ashes and dust. I have only to refuse her, and she shall be undone. I have only to refuse.

  But he could not refuse. For she held his name, like a mouse struggling in her teeth. Aljan, Aljan—every time she said the word, he felt himself sink deeper in her power. He was tangled, frozen; he could not get free. Her spells had knotted round him like a snake. But she seemed oddly unaware how nearly he was hers—and then he realized he stood in shadow now. She could hardly see him.

  “How may you deny me?” her central head grated. Her tone had grown darker. She hissed with frustration. “Look what I have offered you: power, freedom, the death of your enemies. Unicorns! I know your kind to the marrow of the bone. When I was barely hatched, I fed upon the wit of one mightier than you, foal princeling. Do not tell me I do not know the things that tempt a unicorn.”

  Her words, like a thunderclap, brought Jan sharp awake. The cold coils that had trammeled his mind fell away. He stared. This one, this great three-headed thing, had been the little slip to gnaw away the mind of Jared the king half a hundred generations gone? She. She had done?

  A blazing anger rose in Jan, and the last of the white wyrm’s spell dissolved in its heat. His jaw tightened; his body tensed. He tossed his head, his nostrils flaring. He was Jan, the son of his people’s prince, and not some wyvern’s gamepiece. Eyeing her ice-white, reptilian form, he felt himself growing dangerous.

  Fire

  What will you give me?” said Jan suddenly. “What will you give me in exchange for the unicorns?” He picked up his hooves and set them down again, restlessly, for a sense of power had flowed into him. He could not keep still. The wyvern cocked her heads, clearly surprised.

  “What I have said…” she began.

  “No,” Jan told her. “My freedom? The leadership of the unicorns? Those things I will have anyway, if I do as you say.” He sidled, dancing. “You must give me another thing—to make this worth my game. Another thing, mistress of mysteries.”

  The white wyrm lay silent, eyeing him suspiciously. Jan knew it must be plain to her that he no longer lay beneath her spell; but it did not matter. He had her. She needed him. She must agree.

  And if he could stall her, dicker with her long enough to let the unicorns depart the Hallow Hills, if he could keep her from rousing her people for only so long—a weary sense of finality overcame him now—then it did not matter what happened to him after she found out he had been gaming her.

  The wyvern shrugged after a moment, her smallest head snapping its teeth. “Oh, very well, little unicorn,” she muttered. “What will you have? I will give it to you if I must—only because it pleases me.” Her central head added sharply, “But be brief. Our time is short.”

  Time, time, thought Jan, what thing might he ask her for that would take the most time? A mystery. One of her mysteries—but which? How to read the stars? Only there were no stars, for it was still broad day. How to raise wind and bring weather? But here below, out of sight of the sky….

  His gaze strayed to the firebowl, burning red flags in a golden shell. The air rippled and distorted above it, threads of black smoke rising and twining, then thinning out into a gray haze near the chamber’s ceiling. The wet pillar of stone gleamed behind the heat shimmer. Jan returned his gaze to the wyvern.

  “Tell me of fire.”

  “Ah.” The wyvern forced a smile. “You are ambitious, little darkling, and far more clever than I thought. Knowledge is a greater tool than mere glory. Very well. I will begin to show you. Then you will run my errand for me. But we can start the lesson now.”

  Her flanking heads hissed, as if to make some protest, but the great head warned them both to silence with a glare. She left her bed of sleeping-stones and slithered past Jan to the slab of rock where the firebowl rested. Jan realized with a start that his path to the doorway now lay clear. The wyvern’s back was turned to him.

  But he
dared not flee, for even if he were able to outrun her, much less find his way to the surface again, her clamor would doubtless rouse her people, and that he could not afford. The wyverns must continue to sleep until the unicorns were clear of the hills.

  He heard a sound in the passageway suddenly, just a small, soft sound: a scrape, a scuff, far down the corridor outside. He froze, listening, his skin gone cold, but no further noise came to his ears. The chill faded. It must have been nothing, a bit of earth shifting. He turned back toward the white wyrm and her fire.

  But then, just as he was turning, another thing caught his attention. His gaze fell on the wyvern’s sleeping ground, and for the first time he realized what it was. Not stones, not great round stones, but eggs, a double-dozen of them, melon-sized. They shone with the same milky translucence as the wyvern herself, as the chamber’s floors, as the passageways. Each globe was mottled like a moon, and within each Jan saw a tiny wyrmlet coiled.

  The wyvern had half turned to look at him. This time her smile was real. “Yes, eggs.” She crooned now, all three heads at once. “Winter eggs—the first such our warren has seen in almost four hundred years. And ready to hatch now, soon. Soon. The king’s and mine.”

  Her smiles deepened. Her teeth glistened.

  “I am the king’s concubine—though always he has visited me only in autumn, thinking to avoid heirs that way.” Her whiskers twitched. “But I am the mistress of the wyverns’ fire, and I have not been cold this winter. Now my people will see for themselves how our breed may be improved.”

  She chuckled, hissed; but her smile spoiled after a moment, her tone growing impatient. Jan tore his gaze away from the translucent eggs to look at her.

  “But come now. Enough. I will show you the fire.”

  Jan turned and went to join the white wyrm at the bowl.

  “This, then, is flame,” she told him, tossing a dry branch onto the twigs. They no longer burned now, only glowed. Jan drew up beside her, watching close. The new wood smoked, then white flames licked at it, the branch curling and blackening as the fire caught. “You must feed it wood,” the wyvern said. “Dry wood is best.”

  Jan nodded. He had seen fire in the Pan Woods. He already knew it ate wood, and dry grass as well. The sorceress shifted impatiently. Her words were quick, half whispered. He watched the twigs she scattered crackle and burn.

  “It must be tended,” she told him, “like a hatchling, or it dies.”

  Hatchlings, thought Jan, and stole another glance back over one shoulder at the eggs. Another slight sound from the hall again—very faint, just on the edge of his hearing. Earth, earth shifting, and no more, he told himself. He knew in his bones it could not be wyverns. The wyverns slept. He turned back to the wyrm.

  She arranged the dry, burning twigs over the coals with a moldery wet one; he noticed that it did not catch, only smoked a little, thickly. Jan stood fascinated. Her third head took a sprig of leaves and brushed the scattered ash back into the heart of the flame.

  “A thick bed of ash will keep fire hot,” she continued. “Sweep ash over the coals to keep them warm overnight —but not too much, too long, or you will smother them. Fire must have air. It breathes. It is alive.”

  Alive? thought Jan. And a little thought sprang into his mind, bright, burning like the flame. If fire is alive, then it can be killed. He glanced sidelong at the white wyrm, but she was studying the fire, its dancing flickers and rising tendrils of smoke.

  “What else kills it?” he asked, keeping his voice low and steady.

  The wyvern shrugged. “Earth kills it. A sudden gust of wind can snuff it. Or rain.” Yes. Rain. He remembered the rain in the Lay of the Unicorns. She glanced at him. “We keep it below, protected from wind and rain.”

  Jan glanced at the crescent cistern above the bowl. “But near water.”

  The wyvern laughed. “Ah, clever, Aljan. And how if a spark overleapt the bowl? The crystal floor of our dens is flammable, the oil of our skins volatile. Flame would run along our caverns faster than we could slither to escape.” A low laugh. “It happened once.”

  She smiled slyly.

  “In the beginning, when first we lived here, the king shared fire among us all. Every chamber had its hearth. Eggs hatched in all seasons, and no one slept. But all the while, the trails were building up—within a few years all our passages were crystal-coated.

  “Then one day a torch fell—some servant in the king’s room—no one knows. That whole quarter of the warren went up. The king escaped, but many did not. We tore down the ceilings of connecting passageways to seal the wing. It smoldered for days.

  “Afterward, Lynex ordered all fire either killed or confiscated, and put it into my keeping as a sacred charge….”

  Jan stared unseeing into the dancing flames, and it seemed he could almost see what the wyvern described to him, behold it happening that moment, vivid as a dream.

  “But what is fire?” he found himself demanding, interrupting the white wyrm. “Where does it come from?”

  The mistress of mysteries bent her head to his ear.

  “Sunstuff,” she whispered. “The stuff of lightning flash in storms. Starstuff—our god. It can kill or quicken eggs to life: a weapon or a friend. It is Magic. It is Power, the source of all our sorcery. We worship it.”

  She was looking at him from the corners of her eyes.

  “One can even see visions in the fire, if one is a dreamer or a sorcerer. Look, look into the fire, little unicorn. Look closer. Closer.”

  Her voice had grown sly, but Jan hardly noticed. He leaned forward. The heat shimmer above the flames was like water rippling, like the stirring beneath the surface of the Mirror of the Moon. The wyvern’s mocking laughter haunted softly through the room. She lifted a clump of herbs from beside the firebowl. They were small, withered pods with wispy spires on the underside.

  “What are those?” he asked.

  “Rosehips,” the wyvern said, “the fruit of the milkwood tree. We gather them in autumn.” She tossed them onto the fire. “They give a sweet smoke to bring one dreams.”

  Jan watched the round seed cases fall among the burning twigs. Soon they began to smolder, to send up thick, twining tendrils of smoke, pearly white mixed with bluish gray. The pale smoke had the heavier, milder fragrance, smooth and soothing; the darker, thinner threads had the keener scent. It stung his eyes.

  Jan realized he had leaned far forward over the rosehips even as the wyvern had moved back out of their vapor. His face, his throat and nostrils tingled. A trembling began in the center of his limbs, made him feel at once weak and utterly unbendable, rooted to the stone. The sensation spread to his chest and ribs.

  His senses were growing very acute suddenly. Before, he had not noticed the sound of fire. Now it fascinated him—a thick hissing, almost a thrum, like sea surf, a slow, arresting roar. He began to distinguish licks of color in the flames, greens and reds, pale violets. They flickered and danced.

  Behind him he heard the three heads of the wyverns arguing.

  “Why have you told him our secrets, of fire?” That was the second head, impatient but controlled.

  “No matter.” The central head, softly. “He’s no more than a prit, a child. And he’ll have no time to make use of what we’ve given him, even if he understood….”

  “And why the rosehips?” the little head cut in. “Their influence is always uncertain. They may put him in such a stupor he’ll be no use to us at all.”

  “What choice had we?” the great head snapped. “We are out of time. And how was I to know he would be strong enough to throw off a wordspell? Only the fire seems to have any power over him.”

  “I say pounce on him now and be done,” the third head muttered.

  “Patience. We’ve other plans for him.”

  Jan did not mind their words. He knew he ought to, somehow, but he could not manage it. The wyvern’s voices remained a faintly distracting background noise.

  “Hist, be still.” That wa
s the second head again. “He’s not quite under yet.”

  Under what? Jan wondered briefly, and could not care. He had the feeling that he must watch, watch very carefully now, as if this were the most important lesson of his life and he must memorize it all the first time, for it would not come again.

  Yet at the same time he was vaguely aware that presently he must act. Watching the fire was important, surpassingly important, but it would end soon. He mulled over what he might be expected to do then, and had not a clue. No matter. A plan would come to him, or not, just as it chose. Things were moving so slowly now. There was time enough.

  “I say slay him,” the third head hissed. The thin, sharp sound of its voice fizzed on the air. “Our eggs are but a day or two from hatching; perhaps only hours. Red meat to nourish our little prits—and meat improves with age.”

  Jan admired the glow of the charring rosehips. They did not seem to burn. Winter eggs, he thought. Little poison-prits. Heirs to the king that would have no heirs. What had Lynex done, all these hundreds of years? Pashed all the eggs of his mates to bits before their hatching.

  “Fah.” The wyvern’s second head scoffed at the third. “If we killed this unicorn now, I can well guess where the greater part of the flesh would go—down your greedy gullet.”

  “Only a little,” the little head sniffed. “What could be spared. The winter has been long. I’m ravenous.”

  The second head did not reply. Jan listened without interest. The fire was absorbing his whole attention. But he had begun to feel that time was starting to slip away. He sought to rouse himself from the torpor now creeping over his limbs, tried to lift his head away from the heat, but the vapors were making him slow. His limbs refused to move. He made to speak—how slowly the words formed in his mind.

  “Is this….” He had to pause, draw a breath heavy with smoke. His throat burned. “Is this the only fire the wyverns have?” He could not seem to turn his head. The words did nothing to lift the spell.