On Wings of Bone and Glass

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  My power poured back into me, and from me it spilled into the bodies, and someone beneath me gasped in on a shuddering breath and tried to push me off. I let him and rolled onto my back in the mud, waiting for feeling to extend into all my limbs. The moment it did I twisted, reaching for my friends, desperate to see them all hale. Guy woke first, and Radburn. And then, thank God, Ivy. Chester and Carrington dragged themselves upright afterwards, sorely hurt but living, and Eyre was last to sit up, wan and shaking but present. I would have hugged them all but had not enough room against my chest, so I settled for helping Ivy see to the wounds.

  “Sick stuff,” she said, grim. “If we couldn’t heal it, I shudder to think of the infections that would have resulted.”

  “But you can,” Radburn said. “So I say: thank God for women in academia!”

  A pause. Then Carrington burst out laughing, collapsing back into the mud. We all laughed, and bled the tension and fear of the last hours with paroxysms that bordered sobs without crossing into them.

  “What did you do to us?” Eyre asked. “Dare I inquire? I feel as if I’ve woken from weeks on a sickbed.”

  “The dead seek the living,” I said. “So... I made us appear dead.”

  “You made us appear dead by making us as close to dead as possible without killing us,” Chester said.

  I flinched, but nodded.

  “I’m glad I didn’t ask for details before you enacted this stunning bit of cleverness,” Carrington said. “But it appears to have worked. How long were we insensate?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But dawn approaches.”

  “And you can tell this through some mystical elf sense we lack,” she observed.

  Did I? “Life knows the sun,” I answered. “Feel it for yourself. Look up—under the clouds—”

  Silence broken only by the patter of rain on mud.

  “Oh,” Ivy whispered.

  “So,” Guy said. “At least six hours. Probably longer. The horde?”

  “Before us now,” I said. Dimly I could feel Amhric’s distraction. He could not fight, but he could give, and he was giving now, great waves of magic.

  “And all of them between us and the gates!” Ivy exclaimed.

  “Presumably,” I said. “But perhaps they have been winnowed, and we might find a way through.”

  “I guess that means we should go have a look,” Guy said, and pushed himself to his feet. “Shall we?”

  “Anything’s better than sitting here, getting wetter,” Radburn said, and turned to help Eyre up. As the others began to rise, Chester joined me, waiting for me to pull Ivy from the ground.

  “What of the Vessel?” Chester asked, quiet.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Toward the end I could sense nothing. I hope... but we will keep watch for her all the same.”

  He nodded.

  As Ivy straightened before me, she hesitated, eyes catching on my face.

  “What is it?” I asked, concerned. “Is there something we missed?”

  “Yes!” she said. “And I didn’t even notice until now...” She reached, trailed her fingers over the bridge of my nose. “They’re gone!”

  “What’s go—no, surely not.” I touched my temple, where I was used to feeling the leg of my spectacles. Together she and I looked to the battlefield, ankle-deep in filth.

  Behind me, Chester said, “That’s it for them, then. There’s no way we’ll find them in that.”

  “No,” I said, fighting regret.

  “You didn’t need them anymore, did you? Becoming an elf corrected your vision?” Ivy touched my jaw. “If it didn’t, I could probably try something....”

  I captured her hand and kissed it, mud and all. “No, my dear. I didn’t need them. It will be well.”

  She smiled a little. “It’s easier to see your eyes now, at least.” A spark of mischief managed to kindle in her weary gaze. “Kissing you will be easier too.”

  “I’m leaving!” Radburn called. “Right now!”

  Despite our state we chuckled and turned to follow... and I hoped that I was right. To lose the spectacles just as I was certain of what their enchantment had divulged—and I still not the best judge of character, with so much depending on my judgment....

  No, it would be well. I had promised her, and I would keep that promise along with all the others.

  It was a sorry group that straggled east toward the road and the bridge to Vigil. Visibility remained poor, confused by the weather and the strangeness of the time just before dawn. All around us the terrain had been trampled into uneven shapes by the passage of the dead, and much of the mud had been impressed with detritus sloughed from their dying frames. It stank. It pulled at our feet as we walked. And we were exhausted by the battle we’d barely survived.

  I had seen many paintings of epic battles. The capital’s governmental hall, where my father kept an office, boasted four enormous murals depicting scenes from the final battle of the Revolutionary War; Leigh University had several similar ones in its buildings, historic frescos nearly forty feet long portraying entire battlefields crammed with soldiers in the uniforms of the kingdom during the Twins War, prior to the establishment of the Vow Empire. All of these paintings had featured enormous hosts clashing, and soldiers and generals with artistically torn clothes wielding their weapons in attitudes of grim heroism. But other than a streak of blood here and there, they’d been clean and glorious and stern. No painting, I thought, had ever shown drenched and draggled men and women, half-dead on their feet, slogging with slumped shoulders and bowed heads. Would we be remembered this way, I wondered? Or would some enterprising painter take it into his or her head to draw us as history would wish to remember us?

  Would I wish history to remember us thus?

  Too tangled in my own thoughts, I failed to discern that the lump on the road before us was not another hummock torn up by passing feet.

  “Oh, no!” Ivy cried. “Is that—oh it is!” She ran from my side, and I stumbled after her, and there, lying before us, was the drake. My heart shuddered and skipped several beats. I pressed my hands to its neck, its chest.

  “I had to send him away,” I said, hoarse. “I had to. To draw enough magic from him to put him to sleep... I would have killed him.”

  “Like a genet?” Chester asked.

  “Like a genet.” Ivy frowned.

  I ignored them and pressed my face into its dirty mane, behind one of the horns. I had thought myself beyond feeling, but this... this tearing grief rent my fatigue and welled like fresh blood, staining everything. I was crying into the fist I’d made in its hair.

  From a great distance I heard a voice, and I thought it was calling my name... but I did not lift my head until someone shook my shoulder. And there was Ivy, speaking. “...gan, Morgan. I think he’s alive.”

  “W-what?”

  “Not by much,” Carrington said. “But just barely. And we need your help.”

  “My... I... yes!” I sat up, struggling. “Anything!”

  “These creatures,” Carrington said. “What are they? Because there are pieces of things in here that feel not-part-of-it, and we need to know whether we should evict them or if they’re natural.”

  “Not part of it?” I asked, bewildered.

  “The drakes are constructs, like the genets, aren’t they?” Ivy asked. “Were they made by elves?”

  What had Kelu told me long ago? Something like, but what? “They were, yes. But... elves cannot make things, not from whole cloth. They are not God. The genets were made of my brother’s blood and an animal’s template.”

  “Then they must have used something for the drake,” Ivy said. “And I am betting that it’s a dragon.”

  “A dragon!” Radburn exclaimed. “Like the things big enough to use that cave under the city?”

  A flash of memory: the enormous vertebra hanging above the mantel in Thameis’s study. “There’s no way. The dragons were vast.”

  “But it’s possible,” Ivy sai
d. “If they used splintered bits of a dragon.”

  “Or the smallest pieces,” Chester offered. “A small tooth could become one of those claws, maybe.”

  “And if there’s a dragon under this creature’s skin....” Ivy set her hands on its ribcage. “Give me what you have left, Morgan. All of it. And Doctor Carrington too.”

  “What are you planning?” I asked, worried. Beneath my hands my companion was cold and heavy, and the rain slicking its skin felt too much like tears.

  “We’re going to save your friend, and ourselves,” Ivy said firmly. She looked over the drake’s body at Carrington. “Are you with me?”

  Carrington rested a hand over Ivy’s. “I’ll handle the shaping if you handle the breathing. You’re better at healing than I am.”

  “Done. Morgan?”

  “This is madness,” I whispered.

  “He’s not dead yet,” Ivy repeated. “Help us bring him back.”

  What could I do? To withhold the offering would be to consign the drake to a death I’d sent it to, and I could not when it had given me so much for so long. I rested my hand on Ivy’s shoulder and gave what was left of the power Amhric had wafted back to me, to her and to Carrington, and prayed I had not done ill. They bent to whatever work they planned, and I wrapped my arms around the drake’s head. If this was to be its dying hour, I was determined for it to sense my presence. I stroked its straggled forelock, no longer warm, whispered to it of its courage and faithfulness, promised that there would be a hero’s welcome awaiting it. I managed these words despite my own ragged breathing, and my anguish, and closed my eyes again when the words no longer served.

  The flesh beneath my palm skidded. Surprised, I lifted my head, and saw the skin spool out from beneath me, and I yelped as the friction burned my fingers. The drake was growing. Growing so precipitously that I leaped away from its head to keep from being crushed by it.

  Unlike me, Ivy and Carrington had taken up positions on the drake, so the body was growing beneath them rather than over them, and this was for the best for as it stretched a knob pressed at its side, then broke the line of its shoulders and elongated, and a pane of skin, translucent as a stained glass window, began growing between the fingers of the wings. Watching them burst free rendered me speechless; I could only stare as the vane arched over me, and saw with stunning clarity the droplets of rain bouncing off it through the flesh until it thickened and darkened and blocked out the sight.

  The process ended long before the drake became the size of the behemoths suggested by the claw marks on Vigil’s landing, but it was very nearly three times its original size when the light faded and the women slid from its body to stumble to the mud. For a heartbeat we all stared at it.

  “God Almighty,” Chester whispered.

  It lifted its head, snorting out a warm dry wind that smelled blessedly of ash and burning wood. I inhaled, letting it chase the stink of rot from my nostrils, and when I opened my eyes the drake was swinging its head toward me. I ran, fell in the mud, crawled the rest of the way and clung to its nose. Its eyes were now as large as my head and I could no longer reach up to its horns, but it was still the companion who’d rescued me from too many desperate fates, and as it nuzzled me I was not ashamed to cry at its survival.

  “We do good work,” Carrington said with satisfaction. “Look at that!”

  “Do you suppose it can fly?” Eyre asked.

  “Morgan!” Radburn called. “If you’ll come back from wherever you’re woolgathering?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Can the drake fly,” Eyre repeated with what I thought was far too much intensity.

  “I… don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”

  Guy pressed his hand to his brow.

  “If he can fly,” Chester said, quiet. “He can get us to Vigil. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

  “Can you ask?” Eyre said.

  Ask… the drake. If it could fly. We had changed its body without its consent—if consent it could have given, for I had never understood how much sentience it had owned—and now we wanted to know if it could fly? It had never had wings! Surely such things required practice to use, the way a child crawled before walking, and stumbled while learning. But if they were right…

  I set both hands on its nose and met one of the glowing ember eyes. “It appears there was a memory in you that belonged to an elder race,” I said. “And now, you have borrowed their wings. Do you think you could use them? To carry us?”

  It was staring at me intently, as if trying to understand. I stood and left one hand on its nose, then began to back toward its shoulder; as I hoped, it turned its head to follow me with its gaze. I set a hand on one of the new limbs. “These,” I said. “Can you use them?”

  The drake backed away from me, spreading the wings—not a purposeful motion, but as if in reflex as it squinted at me. I held up my hands to speak, and it rose on its hind legs. The wings thrashed once, blowing a rain-sharpened wind onto all of us. Again… and then it was up with a noise like enormous drums vibrating. Stunned, we all stared as it dwindled into the sky and was lost against the clouds.

  Drawing in a deep breath, I said, “Well. The answer is that, indeed, the drake can fly.”

  “Oddly enough, we could have deduced that with our own staggering powers of observation,” Guy said.

  “Honed by years in the prestigious halls of academia,” Radburn agreed.

  “We did that,” Carrington murmured, still staring upward.

  “We did.” Ivy sighed, smiled a little. “I admit, I am not as grateful as I should be, given that I was hoping to have provided our salvation. But it was astonishing, wasn’t it?”

  “And now what do we do?” Radburn said.

  “Now we walk,” Chester said. “And hope that Vigil will have put paid to the host before we reach it.”

  “I hate walking,” Radburn muttered.

  “I hate mud,” Ivy said. “But you don’t see me complaining.”

  “This is no time for apophasis,” Radburn said.

  “I don’t know, it seems the most proper time for it,” Chester said. “The world is ending, by all means, let us discuss the propriety of rhetorical devices.”

  Ivy began slogging her way down the road, and we straggled along behind her. “Was that apophasis or antiphrasis, anyway?”

  Chester smiled a little. “Sadly, my memory for the matter is failing me.”

  “I wonder why that might be,” Guy said.

  “But we have professors with us,” Radburn exclaimed. “How about it, sir, madam?”

  “Don’t look my way,” Eyre said. “Language arts is a different department.”

  “And I’m technically a historian,” Carrington said—

  The drake dove from the sky, sending a wave of rain over us as it skidded to a landing before us. Startled, we halted.

  “It came back!” Ivy exclaimed.

  “Hypophora,” Radburn said. “Very bad taste.”

  “Hypophora requires a raised question,” Chester said. “That was more of a pleonasm. I think.”

  I ignored them and ran to the drake, which nudged me with its fire-warm nose. And I… I was laughing, and had not remembered starting, and could laugh even though my heart hurt in my chest. “You did come back,” I whispered. “I could not have doubted.”

  It huffed softly, eyes softly lidding.

  “Come,” I said to the others. “It’s big enough to carry us all now.”

  “Thank God,” Radburn said. “Because I’m weary of the muck.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Chester said with a sigh.

  As I helped them all up onto the back of the drake, I said, “There may be one issue with this plan of yours, Ivy.”

  “That being?” she asked as I drew myself in front of her. Glancing over my shoulder I found all my companions arrayed behind her, and a sorrier lot I could hardly imagine. The drake’s mane sprouted halfway down its back, so they had their hands ra
veled in it, but even so it wasn’t an easy perch.

  “None of us have flown as birds before,” I said. “I can only hope it’s as easy as riding a horse.”

  “It’s better than dying,” she said firmly.

  There was no arguing that, so I didn’t. I made sure the staff was well strapped to me, then wove my hands into my friend’s mane. “Great heart, go!”

  The drake smashed its new wings down and thrust itself up, and with a jerk that knocked most of us back against one another, we were airborne.

  We were privileged to share with angels and birds an experience no human had ever experienced… and yet I don’t think any of us really remembered that first flight, save as a collection of terrors and discomforts. The rain drove into our faces, and the wind was punishing; my arms ached with the tension needed to hold myself steady, and Ivy’s arms around my waist were a vise that left bruises. The fear that my friends would be torn from the drake’s back was so powerful I could barely breathe through it. No doubt they were all equally dismayed by the precariousness of our perches.

  Then we looked down, and saw the host we would have had to push past to reach the gates of Vigil, and anything seemed preferable to that fate.

  The drake could not glide, not in the weather we were suffering. It paid for every furlong with enormous strokes of those wings. We brought with us a brief respite from the rain as we occluded the clouds over the wall, and beneath us the defenders glanced up and we heard their distant cries. And then the courtyard was reaching for us, and I had enough time to fear the landing before the ground yanked us from the air. I clung to the drake’s mane. I might have yelled, effort and shock and panic. And then we were down, and behind the battle lines, for the fight had extended into the city past the newly erected gate.

  I pushed myself off the drake, hurried to the others. Everyone had made the journey successfully, and looked shaken but hale, save for Guy whose white face betrayed him.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Arm,” he said.

  Ivy pushed past me, scraping her hair off her face. “Let me… Morgan, move, find out what’s going on.”

  I left them, then, and stretched my senses as I walked. Amhric I could feel like a sun on one of the southwesterly walls. The elves were in the fray, like smoldering embers among the humans who burned at their sides. I started jogging, had made it all of a handful of feet before the drake joined me, scraped me up from the ground like prey and deposited me on its back. I grabbed for its mane as it trotted through the ruined edges of the courtyard and was absurdly grateful that it didn’t attempt the air again. Its longer legs and larger body made far better time than I would have, and when it reached the wall I hugged its nose before going up the crude stairs toward the light in my heart. I had but put one foot down on the wall-walk when Amhric had his arms around me. I staggered, leaned into him, accepted the flood of magic he gifted me and shuddered through the revelation of just how much he loved me.