Firebirds Soaring (25 page)

“Please, Grandmother, it’s me, Elexa. Old Peder told me to bring his ghost here.”

“His ghost?” The dragon paced out of the cave past her, a dark hissing presence as her belly slid across the rocks, her six legs striking sparks with their steel-tipped talons, her muscular, snakelike tail whipping back and forth. She ran to the edge of the terrace and raised her wings, rattled them against the sky. She belled, then, a low, loud cry like metal striking metal that resonated for a long while after. As the sound faded, other dragons came from their caves. Old Peder’s dragon belled again, and the others cried out, too, a cacophony of notes sliding in and out of each other, jangling, stunning. Elexa covered her ears with her hands, but the sound went right through her, jittering her bones. Once more the dragon belled, and the others called after her. She turned and came back to Elexa.

“My human is dead?” she said.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve brought me his ghost?”

“He asked me to.” Old Peder stood at her shoulder now, silent.

“You, an unbonded child, can speak with ghosts?”

Elexa dipped her head. Was that a bad thing? Everyone she knew had some ghost awareness, though others had less than she had. What if everyone else was half blind and deaf for a good reason? Would this huge, fire-breathing creature eat her? “Peder is the first human ghost I’ve spoken to,” she whispered.

“Does he give himself to me?” asked the dragon.

Elexa looked at old Peder’s ghost.

“I fed her and the children the ghosts of so many rats and mice and rabbits,” he said. “I never knew what they got from it. She needed them, and they made her stronger, but I never understood how. I could go through that door to the light, Elexa, but maybe this is a better thing to do. Yes, I give myself to her.”

“He says he does,” Elexa said.

“Can you bring him to me, child?”

Elexa flexed her mental net, directed it toward the dragon. Old Peder flew across the space to settle just in front of the dragon’s snout.

“Are you sure?” Elexa asked.

“Sure enough, I guess,” said old Peder.

“He’s just in front of you,” Elexa said. She released her net as the dragon’s maw gaped, big enough for a person to walk into. Red light from internal flames flickered in the dragon’s throat. Her teeth were long and iron-colored, and her tongue lay like a two-headed snake in the bed of her long, long mouth.

Peder stepped into her mouth. She shut her jaw, swallowed, a wave traveling down that long, pale throat, and said, “Oh! Oh, Peder, my lad. Ahhhh.” Her great eyes closed, and she laid her head on the ground between her front legs, her neck an upward arch. Small, panting puffs of smoke came from her nose.

Elexa knelt ten feet from the dragon. Had she killed the mother? Had she destroyed Peder’s hope of happiness in his next life?

A chill wet wind danced over the terrace, tugged on her hair and the edges of her robe. It crept in under the robe to freeze her arms and legs. Her face went numb.

Presently the dragon opened her eyes again, and in the yellow glow of her jeweled eyes, faint blue streaks flickered. “Elexa,” said the dragon. Her breath was a warm, smoke-scented wind.

“Grandmother,” Elexa said. Her teeth knocked together.

“Elexa,” said the dragon again. She took several steps toward Elexa. “I am more than your dragon grandmother; Peder is part of me, too. I know you now.”

Elexa’s face was thawing from the warmth the dragon radiated, but there was a chill inside her. “Old Peder?” she murmured.

“Yes,” said the dragon.

“Is this a good thing?”

The dragon lifted her head, pointed her snout to the sky. She coughed a spurt of flame, then three huffs of smoke. She was laughing. “It is glorious,” she said. She scuttled closer and rubbed the top of Elexa’s head with the underside of her chin. Strands of Elexa’s hair caught in the dragon’s scales and singed because of the heat, leaving a foul smell. Elexa cringed.

“I forgot. You’re not yet bonded,” muttered the dragon, sounding like Peder. She backed away. “Elexa, you have special skills. When others die, ask them whether they want to go through the door to the light or to this kind of afterlife. Now I know that sometimes our ghosts come here on their own and join with their bonded ones, for my dragon has known this to happen before, but only by chance. She tells me it was how the dragon settlement started here ages ago, a gift of ghosts from our village; it is why we can talk with these dragons, when no one else in our part of the world knows the way of it. Be a guide to the other dead in the village when they need you.”

In the village below, one of the women started the death chant, a long wavering cry that turned corners, then went back. A second voice joined the first. They must have washed and prepared old Peder’s body for viewing, farewells, and burning. Elexa crept to the edge of the terrace and looked down at all the dark cottages rubbing shoulders with each other, gathered around the center ground and the gatherhouse like a ring of stones around a firepit, with the mountain god’s temple off to the side, near the forest. Smoke drifted from the gatherhouse’s smoke hole, lit by the flicker of flames below; it was the only building with any light in it. One voice rose and fell, the other echoing it two notes later, an outpouring of grief in the night.

“Yan will take care of you,” the dragon said, staring down at the village past Elexa’s shoulder.

Elexa sighed. She didn’t like Yan, the young man Peder had chosen to replace himself as village headman. Yan was more scornful than gentle. He had no patience with the mistakes of the young, and his plant lore was superficial. However, he drove hard bargains with the peddlers who came over the passes in the spring and summer, and he was strong. He knew how to shoot arrows, how to throw knives, how to build walls. He had bonded with the biggest dragon on the mountain. If danger came up the trail from the south, Yan’s dragon would help him fight it. And most of the village elders had approved him. The few who objected weren’t powerful enough to change old Peder’s choice.

“Get some rest,” murmured the dragon.

Elexa touched the dragon’s snout, then snatched back scorched fingers.

“I’m sorry,” said the dragon. “When you’re bonded, that will change.”

That promise sent Elexa down the mountain.

 

Since that time, she had spoken to several other village ghosts. Three were children, unbonded, and she had let them go. The village midwife and the smith and the teacher had wanted to go up the mountain to their dragons, so Elexa took them, and watched as they seeped into their dragons and the dragons changed. Only the weary goatherd had wanted to drift away and not join his dragon mother.

Elexa had seen other human ghosts. They were those confused on the trail to their next life, the ones who wandered.

She snatched the first one she saw almost by reflex. He had died after killing many women. He had come from a large seaside settlement far to the south. His own people had killed him once they discovered what he was. To Elexa’s ghost and jewel senses, he tasted sour and coppery, and he terrified her at first, until she knew for sure her net could hold him helpless, no matter how much he struggled. She didn’t know how to release him. What if his ghost could kill her?

She kept him for a long time, and he told her stories of what life was like there by the sea, a vast water that tasted of salt, with ships always traveling in and out of the harbor, bringing new strange things on every tide. House wizards spun houses out of sand, and everyone drank hot water flavored with leaves from another country. People ate things with tentacles and wore bright metal chains around their necks, arms, and waists. There, dragons were horrifying, dropping down at ill-favored celebrations and weddings to snatch up children and carry them off.

Were these true stories? Stories about male dragons? She could taste the truth in them. A dragon had stolen the killer’s niece. Most of the families he had known had lost someone to a dragon.

He told her stories, even about his murders, finally about his mother. With every tale, a little more of him faded, until there was nothing left for her net to hold. Most of what he told her horrified her, but she couldn’t send it out of her head once it had come in her ears. She had nightmares. She wished him away, but she couldn’t let him go; he had to make himself disappear a little at a time. She felt strange after he was gone; she had known him better than she knew anyone alive. After capturing him, she was more cautious about netting human ghosts. If they tasted bad, she didn’t touch them, and pretended she couldn’t see them.

As she grew toward thirteen, Elexa acted like the other children in the village for the most part, snaring the ghosts of small animals for the dragons, who couldn’t catch them on their own and drew some kind of nourishment from them. She gave her little game ghosts to her brother, who was dragon-bonded, or her best friend Tira’s older sister, Miri, whose dragon had a brood of four to provide for.

 

In her twelfth spring, Elexa packed a pouch for a day on the mountain: oatcakes spread with nut butter, a stoppered gourd full of water, and three small dried apples from last fall’s harvest. She and Tira would spend all day on the banks of Little River, looking for gems in the outwash from the storm the day before. Maybe she didn’t need to pack water. Sometimes the water at the river’s edge stayed cloudy for days after a storm, though. She didn’t like to drink water she couldn’t see through.

She glanced across the cottage at her father, who was packing his own lunch; it was his turn to guard the herds of sheep and goats the village kept for the dragons. When she was sure his head was turned, she stole a handful of beet sugar, funneled it from her fingers into the little gourd she carried for spices.

Her brother Kindal came from behind the curtain that hid the sleeping pallets. His dark brows lowered. He had seen. Would he tell? Sugar was expensive; Father had bought this for festival cakes, but the spring festival wasn’t until next week, and Elexa had a sweet tooth now.

“You owe me a ghost,” Kindal muttered as he passed her.

She sighed.

Kindal took his quiver of arrows and his bow from their hooks on the wall.

“Good hunting,” said their father.

“Good herding,” Kindal replied. He tied a game pouch to his belt and ducked outside.

Elexa took a loot pouch and hooked it to her belt, along with her old knife. She slung the lunch pouch across her chest and took her dowsing/digging stick from its place on the wall. “I’m off,” she said.

“Good hunting to you, too,” said her father.

“Thanks.” If she found enough gems, she’d be able to buy a mountain of sugar, and that new red-handled knife Mats the peddler had shown her on his last trip through the village. Father wanted a new scythe, though; that came first. He had sharpened the blade of his old one thin. “Back by suppertime.”

Tira waited by the path that led to the dragon terraces. She looked longingly up the mountain toward the nesting sites. The girls were a year away from bonding with dragons. Tira’s mother told them they should enjoy their freedom; once they had bonded, they would spend most of their days hunting small game and ghosts to keep the dragon mothers and babies fed, in addition to their village work. A dragon bond lasted a lifetime; but the hardworking part of it, where human children provided food for brooding mothers and nestlings, lasted seven years, the length of dragon childhood. Tira’s mother, who told Elexa things her father wouldn’t, said it was a wonderful and a terrible time. The dragon bond was a treasure and a joy, but the work was difficult. If you didn’t catch enough gophers, pheasants, fish, rabbits, squirrels, and ghosts, the dragon babies’ hunger groaned in your own belly as loud as it did in theirs.

Kindal’s dragon mother had two nestlings; he didn’t get as run-down and ragged as Tira’s sister Miri, with four to care for. Miri hunted from dawn to twilight and set snares and fish traps at night.

“Bond to a mother with fewer eggs,” Tira’s mother advised Tira and Elexa.

Elexa had asked her father about this. His dragon mother’s nestlings had fledged and flown away, though they returned for the dragon gather at midwinter. At that time, there was a flurry of unbonded dragons dropping to the village center ground, greeting those who had helped raise them.

Elexa’s father said, “Visit the mothers before Bond Night; get to know the ones who want to bond. You won’t be able to tell how many eggs they have until after you bond; no dragon lets an unbonded youngster into a cave. You’ll know which dragon to bond with on the night of the bond. She will choose you; you don’t choose her.” He still took the occasional rabbit up the mountain for his dragon mother; sometimes she brought him a deer she had hunted deeper in the mountains where there were no people. Sometimes, now that her children were grown, she spent winters on the southern beaches, but she always came back to the terrace in the spring to help with the year’s crop of fledglings.

“When I bond, maybe my dragon mother will take me flying,” Tira said as she stared up the path to First Terrace.

“Most of them won’t, though. Dragons aren’t made to carry humans,” said Elexa.

“Kindal’s Maia does.” Kindal’s dragon mother took him scouting in early spring so he could report back to the village whether the passes were choked with snow or open, whether there were peddlers or raiders on the way. Maia’s fledglings, Peep and Seek, were strong and adventurous and unusually independent. They had second-bonded to another dragon mother, so Maia wasn’t afraid to leave them with their aunt and take Kindal flying.

Tira went up to the dragon terraces sometimes to visit the nests. She talked to her sister Miri’s dragon, but she couldn’t understand the dragon’s answers. She didn’t have Elexa’s gift for dragonspeech, one of the subjects they studied in the gather-house in the evening.