by A. J. Lake
‘I’ll help you,’ she said. Her mouth was dry, and the words came out more softly than she had intended. But Eolande heard her.
‘The entrance is here,’ she said, walking only a few steps further and gesturing to the rock wall. The outcrop of stone against which Elspeth had been leaning masked a narrow opening, so well hidden that she had to peer behind the stone slab to see the gap between it and the mountain wall.
‘The cleft in the mountain, where the dragon flew, leads straight to Loki’s prison,’ Eolande told her. ‘This tunnel is a longer way, but will take us there more safely – at least the dragon cannot follow us here. And you go in of your own free will; not as a captive.’
She stood by the narrow entrance. It was pitch-dark inside, and for a moment Elspeth had the feeling that the darkness was seeping out around her.
‘We cannot take Loki by surprise,’ Eolande said. ‘He will know we are coming, and he’ll throw up defences against us. Don’t be afraid, Elspeth: it will all be illusion, however real it feels. He has no power against the sword, not unless you let him touch you. So keep back until you can strike cleanly. Are you ready?’
No, Elspeth thought. ‘I think so,’ she said.
She called the sword to her hand, feeling a thrill of fear as it blazed out. Ioneth, she said, this is what you wanted. Don’t fail me.
I will not fail again! cried the voice in her head, fierce as fire.
Elspeth reached her sword arm through the crack in the rock, and forced her body after it, into the darkness.
Chapter Seventeen
It took the skill of all the peoples together – the Stone and Ice people, the Fay – to return the dragons to the ice. One by one, they hovered over the peak, their breath foaming around them; then their wings folded back and they plummeted into the mountain. As each one crashed, a glittering cloud of shards shot up, hiding them from view – and when it cleared, there was only the glacier.
– But Loki is still unbound, the Fay said.
And, as if in reply, the mountain groaned, and a livid light shone from every crack and cave, as if its whole stony heart were aflame.
The sun had risen to nearly overhead, and for the first time since setting out on the journey Edmund found he was sweating inside his heavy fur cloak. Fritha had led them to a track that climbed upwards in a wide curve, with a stony ridge running alongside it to their left; Fritha often ran a hand along it as they walked, as if for reassurance. The snow fields were far below them now: when Edmund looked down he saw only a jagged confusion of ice and grey rock, rising to the next peak in the range. Behind that peak, rising sharp and clear in the hard light, the sky was a deeper blue than he had ever seen – but ahead of them there was no sky, just the grey-white surface of the ice and the ridge that loomed over them.
The surface was becoming smoother as they climbed, and Edmund’s feet, which had grown accustomed to the rough ice further down the mountain, were starting to slip again. A couple of times Cathbar had had to give him a steadying hand – he looked over at the captain, trudging stolidly beside him, with a mixture of gratitude and shame. Neither Cathbar nor Fritha seemed to tire at all. Edmund’s legs were beginning to shake with weariness, but he told himself sternly to ignore it: there was no time for tiredness. Elspeth was still in danger – maybe already in Torment’s cave – and they were still on the mountainside far above her. They had to be able to fly down!
And what if you can’t raise this dragon? a hard little voice asked inside his head. He pushed that aside, too. I’ll find it and raise it, he told himself fiercely. It will work. It must.
‘We’re here,’ Fritha announced.
She and Cathbar had drawn a little ahead of him. The ridge which had guided them this far had flattened out, and the two of them stood on an outcrop large enough to form a plateau on the mountainside. As Edmund hurried to join them he noticed that a dozen paces off to each side, the ice fell away sharply, the drop marked by two knife-edged creases of blue shadow. The plateau was like a lonely island in a sea of air.
Fritha and Cathbar were looking expectantly at him. My turn now, he thought, trying to ignore the sudden knotting in his stomach. ‘Where is the dragon’s cave?’ he asked Fritha – and instantly saw dismay in her face.
‘No one knows!’ she faltered. ‘I told you, no one has seen them; not in the memory of the oldest teller. All the tales and songs say they returned to the ice here, but no one has ever found a cave. Can you not call from here, to see if one will answer?’
‘Of course – I’ll try,’ Edmund said hastily. Fritha’s voice held more than a trace of panic, and he could feel the same fear beginning to squirm inside him. No, he told it firmly, and sat down on the ice, closing his eyes. Searching.
Cathbar’s eyes, focused and intent, scanning the mountain ahead where the ice gave way to bare rock. Fritha’s, looking anxiously down at him as he sat with his head bent. (Am I really that puny-looking?) He was crouched over, huddled in his furs, looking more like a beggar than a summoner of dragons. He straightened, casting his sight further afield … but there was nothing else.
He ranged still further. A bird of prey, soaring almost level with the peaks, its gaze on a patch of grey lichen on the mountainside … A small, vole-like creature, holding itself absolutely still in a rock crevice as it looked out at the sky. Insects, scanning the pores of grey stone through multi-faceted eyes. Nothing big; nothing powerful.
He could feel the other two shifting uneasily beside him. In desperation, he cast his gaze downwards, to the foot of the mountain. Ah: something bigger; fierce, picking its way between icy boulders – wolves! He caught a flash of white fur – like the wolf whose eyes he had borrowed in the forest: but what would they be doing here? No time for that now … he probed further, into the depths of rock beneath his feet. Nothing but darkness. A faint impression of … something … might it be Eolande, who had the power to block him out? Or Elspeth, her eyes hidden from him by the sword? No, it was something else, something unknown. It showed him a glimpse of red firelight, the red of molten stone; fire reflected off iron …
There was a flash like lightning: cruel; burning with too much power for his head to hold it. Laughing … Then something slammed shut like a stone across a well, and he was lying on his back on the icy plateau, gazing into the dark-blue sky as if he might fall into it.
Cathbar and Fritha were leaning over him, talking to him, but for the moment he could neither hear nor speak. As Fritha knelt beside him and tried to raise his head on to her arm, her face twisted with worry, Cathbar’s voice came to him, faintly at first and then more clearly.
‘… should spread out; search for cracks in the ice. Maybe the boy will have more luck if we can find where one of them went in.’
Edmund wanted to shake his head, but he had no strength to move. He closed his eyes again …
… and it was all around him. She was all around him. He had been searching for a nest of dragons, packed together in a lair somewhere, like wolves. He would have picked out one pair of eyes, a single point of consciousness from among many. But this was no nest, and no single point. The ice pressing up against his body was part of her, but only a part. He had missed what had been there all the time. Something sprawled, dreaming, huge …
He jolted back to his own eyes. The dragon was underneath him; the icy landscape as far as he could see was all one frozen, scaly back. As his perspective shifted he saw the ridges of the spine, which they had used to guide their journey to this place … and beyond them, almost impossibly huge, the bulk of the enormous head: an ear-shaped scarp sloping down and down, smoothly, to the delicately curved cavern of a nostril. The folds of a wing stretched out to the side, extending further than his sight could carry.
He could not take her in. Like the mind amid the fire that had thrust him out before, she was too big; his head would not hold her for long. But Edmund had nudged her; shattered her unconsciousness. Cautiously, he reached out again and felt her stretching; the first st
irrings of cool interest. But there was still nothing to see.
Open your eyes! he pleaded – and as if a door had been flung open, there was the mountainside: a huge swathe of it, covered in a strange, milky sheen like the thinnest layer of ice over water. He could see the mountain to the west, its snow still brilliant in the sun, and the top of his own mountain, too, the peak rising grey into the dark blue sky. The scene flickered sideways … and at the same instant the ground juddered beneath him.
Fritha gasped. Cathbar gave a bellow of amazement and grabbed her arm, dragging her down beside Edmund. They scrabbled for holds in the ice – suddenly moving beneath them as the dragon, with ponderous slowness, raised her great head and looked from side to side, lifting them high above the mountainside. A cracking and splintering filled his ears as all around them white scales burst through the ice – and beneath it all was the deep groan of shifting rock
‘Jokul-dreki,’ Fritha whispered. ‘A dragon of the glacier! We are on her neck …’
‘The whole time,’ croaked Cathbar. ‘And I thought I’d seen everything!’ His stolid manner had vanished: he pulled himself to his knees and gazed around him with the excitement of a child.
Edmund tried to block them both out. The great dragon was aware of him, but not worried by his presence. He could not control her mind: it would be like trying to channel the sea, and if she wished she could cast him out like driftwood. Please help us, he tried – but there was only indifference in the vast mind.
And a flicker of curiosity. With a great cracking, one icy shoulder peeled itself away from the rock, swinging the head around to take in a view of the ice fields below, soft white dappled with streaks of shadow, stretching unbroken to the vague mass of the forest far away on the horizon. He could feel the dragon’s pleasure in the sight, but also her tiredness: she was so old; had slept so long. Did she really want to wake?
‘Yes!’ he hissed at her, speaking aloud in his urgency. ‘It’s important!’
He tried to nudge at the dragon’s thoughts. There was an enemy at the mountain’s foot, he told her: fly down! Attack! But there was no response at all. The long, slow unrolling of the dragon’s thoughts washed over him: peace; sleepiness; the beauty of her home … and a vague irritation at the little gadfly voice shrilling at the corner of her mind. No: there would be no commanding this dragon. Edmund thought of Elspeth, so far below, and wanted to cry out in frustration. Edmund of Sussex – king to be, he thought, and I can’t even order a dumb beast to fly!
But a good king must know how to guide as well as command, his mother always said. Could he, perhaps, persuade the beast?
Edmund took a deep breath, pushing down his anxiety, and let himself share the old dragon’s joy in the white snow fields, stretching beneath her from horizon to horizon. How wonderful it would be to soar over them, he thought, and he let his mind fill with the image: the freedom of it; the sun on his back; the wind washing over his scales … He felt the great body beneath him twitch in response. Yes! Riding the air, he pursued; wings outstretched, swooping and wheeling. The head swung around again, and he heard a rush of air as the dragon breathed in – but still she did not move.
And then the dragon snorted with a sound like a storm-wind, and a cloud of shimmering ice motes fountained around her head. Next moment, Edmund felt the ground jolt beneath him, and heard Fritha cry out in alarm as everything around them shifted.
There was a creaking and cracking like an avalanche of worlds. They were raised suddenly, forty feet into the air, as the glacier dragon pulled one vast foreleg, then the other, free from the rock.
Edmund was flung back into his own sight like a fly twitched from a horse’s flank. He crouched beside Fritha, blinking, as a folded-back wing lifted free beside them, sending cascades of rock and loose snow clattering down the slopes. The ridged back flexed as it began to uncurl from its long sleep. The dragon’s body was too big for Edmund to take in the whole as it unfolded, but he could feel the gigantic creature stretch herself, shaking off the long stiffness, and feel the sudden surge of energy as she lumbered to her feet, took a dozen crashing steps up the mountainside and launched herself into the air with one thunderous beat of her wings.
The white dragon banked and soared downwards, swooping joyously over the snow plain. Edmund clambered to his hands and knees on cold, rough scales, peering about him through the whipping wind. The dragon seemed too huge a thing to be airborne, but she was floating like a feather, her shadow drifting along the snow below her. She wheeled, sending Edmund skidding along her icy neck – and he saw that Cathbar and Fritha had retreated along the great body to a hollow where the spine-ridge began. He crawled to join them, and the three of them held on to each other, pressing against the ridge and clutching at raised scales in the ice to hold themselves steady, while the glacier dragon celebrated her freedom.
‘Well done, lad!’ Cathbar shouted, over the roar of the wind. ‘Now, can you get this creature to land?’
Edmund had been wondering the same thing. He reached for the dragon’s eyes again, ice and rock wheeling dizzily around him. Before he could feel for her thoughts, a voice shouted into his ear, and something gripped his arm painfully. He jolted back to his own eyes to see Fritha’s terrified face.
‘Kvöl-dreki!’ she was screaming. ‘Edmund – he comes for us!’
Edmund looked where she was pointing. A black rift gaped in the mountainside below them, and from it the blue dragon was swooping towards them, claws outstretched. It will take us as it took Elspeth! was his first thought – but the dragon’s master had no use for them: it was only the sword he wanted. So this was a quarrel between dragons, and Edmund and his companions mattered no more than trapped flies.
Torment’s mouth was open, spitting gouts of flame as it came at them, and the black-streaked eye held nothing but death.
Chapter Eighteen
We feared that Loki would next unleash a dragon of stone: Kvöldreki, or Torment, as he was known in our tongue. Most of our army would venture up Eigg Loki to try to stop the dragon before he flew.
I was to go into the fiery chamber inside the mountain where the demon was doing battle against his older bindings. Only a small force came with me: three men of the Ice people – the bravest, since they fear fire above all else; half a dozen of the Stone people; and the Fay themselves, my wife with them. Starling would not be left behind, and looking at his face, I saw how much he had changed from the laughing boy who had said those same words to me back in Hibernia.
The white dragon seemed not to notice their danger – or perhaps it was no danger to her, Edmund thought as Torment streaked towards them, wheeling in the air to attack her flank. She did not turn her head to the blue dragon, but Edmund felt the scales beneath him ripple as she brought her wings up, then down. The single wingbeat sent Torment toppling away through the sky.
‘She is the whole glacier, this dragon,’ Fritha said in wonder. ‘She does not fear Kvöl-dreki!’
‘But we still have to!’ Edmund muttered. He pulled himself to his feet, looking back along the expanse of the glacier dragon’s tail, to where Torment floundered in her wake. The blue dragon had almost been swatted back against the mountain, but it had pulled itself up, and was beating its own wings, climbing higher.
‘Watch out!’ Edmund cried. ‘It’s trying to fly above us!’
Cathbar, his boyish enthusiasm vanished as if it had never been, was already on his feet, his sword drawn. ‘Behind me, both of you!’ the captain snapped. Fritha obeyed, and knelt to get her bow from her pack. Edmund had no weapon – except that of a Ripente, the power of sight. He threw himself down to lie full-length, squeezed his eyes shut and focused again on the ice dragon’s eyes.
Fly higher! he begged her. This is your enemy!
The dragon was aware of Torment’s pursuit, but only as an irritation. She brought her head around to focus better on the approaching shape; wary but not fearful. Why should she be afraid of a creature so much smaller than she?
He is fire! Fire and destruction! Edmund insisted. He felt like a man on a mountain-top screaming into the wind. He could not awaken her fear. But there was anger now: Jokul-dreki had no love for fire. Of course! He conjured up flames in his mind, pouring out of the mountain over the white plain, boiling away the snow and turning the rock beneath to slag. He pictured Torment flying high above the desolation, bellowing his master’s triumph – and he thrust the picture into the huge mind surrounding him.
A shock went through the ice dragon’s body. She lifted her head and snorted like a warhorse, sending a jet of icy vapour down the length of her own side to engulf Torment as he rose above her. The blue dragon’s flame died instantly, and he bucked in the air and shot away.
The battle was joined now. The white dragon was angry at being attacked; angrier still that this interloper would burn her beloved ice lands. But still she was bewildered: how could something like this happen?
Edmund summoned all his strength, calling up the memory of the burning thing that had mocked him and cast him out when he cast his sight under the mountain. Loki. A being all fire, all devastation; that wanted only to destroy. That could take your mind and twist it to his will … even the mind of a dragon as powerful as Jokul-dreki. He felt the ice dragon’s furious outrage, and slid away from that thought. There was Torment, his jaws wide as the blue flame reignited, wheeling for another attack. Through the ice dragon’s gaze the creature looked smaller, somehow. Lesser. He is controlled by the fire-thing! Edmund told her, and he felt Jokul-dreki’s belief, and her slow-burning rage.