The Dragons of Noor (5 page)

A thrill raced up Miles’s spine. He hadn’t been summoned to be expelled. Meer Ellyer had called him here to give him a mission. He rinsed the cloth in the kitchen, wiped his hands on his trousers, then crossed to the fireplace and hugged Breal’s furry neck to hide his trembling.

The High Meer lit the oil lamp and took a large black bowl down from the shelf. The bowl had intricate patterns cut into the sides. Sitting down, he turned the dark bowl over and held it above the lamp like a helm. Light shone through the tiny holes in the bowl and lit the ceiling with a thousand stars.

“Can you see the prow star of Mishtar’s Ship in the night sky?” asked Meer Ellyer.

Miles pointed to the star pattern, shaped like a great seagoing galleon. “There,” he said.

“That’s the star Meer Zabith followed. The seer took the same seaways the Mishtar followed east when he chose to fight alongside the dragons.”

The High Meer did not move the bowl, but let his guests gaze upward as if he were bringing the night to them, a gift you could not touch, nor claim, but one that filled the eyes with pleasure.

“The journey will not be an easy one,” he said. “The Boundary Waters are well guarded by the king’s ships, for there’s been a history of piracy in the east, spices mostly, but other goods as well, and the seas between here and Jarrosh are treacherous.”

“My ship is sound.” Meer Kanoae seemed offended.

“Still, you should prepare yourselves to face tempests. And if the gulf between the worlds grows wider, there may be earthquakes.”

“May the Old Magic send us favorable winds,” said Meer Eason.

They spoke together for another hour as the night drew closer in around them. And when the hearth fire was burned down to red coals, they made ready to leave.

Slipping off his rush sandals, Miles crouched by the door to put on his boots. The High Meer touched his shoulder. “One last thing,” he said. “In the scrying stone last night I saw a girl with sqyth-eyes. She was walking in a dream.”

Miles left his boot unlaced and stood. “Sir?”

Meers Eason and Kanoae had also stopped by the door to listen.

Meer Ellyer took Miles’s cloak from its peg and held
it out to him. “The scrying stone is often dark. When images come, I pay attention.” He took a breath, the crease lines on his forehead deepening. “Dreamwalkers have all but disappeared from Noor. I sensed when I saw her that she is to come with you. But I was given no clue about where she might be. Did the deya say anything about a Dreamwalker?”

Miles felt the air between them expanding. “No, sir, she didn’t. But I know the girl you saw,” he said. “She is my sister.”

T
he sound of children’s laughter drew Hanna out her window. In her dreamwalk she did not feel the cool night breeze blow against her skin or sense the damp grass at her feet. She passed through Mother’s garden, where rose petals lay in the grass, following the sound across the dirt road.

The moon hung pale as an oyster shell where the starry night crowned Mount Shalem’s peak. More laughter. Moving through her dreamwalk, Hanna crossed the dirt road and entered the place that had only a week ago been Shalem Wood. All down the mountainside, the elder trees lay dead, their branches pointing up at the sky.

Near a fallen log a little sapling trembled in the wind,
but Hanna was warm as she moved deeper into her dream. She stepped around the giant logs. Dead. All dead. A week ago, after Tymm was taken and the Waytrees in Garth Lake toppled, the rest of the Waytrees in Shalem Wood began to fall. Thunder had rumbled along with their falling. Hanna had fled the lake, the timbers nearly crushing her as she ran. More ancient trees fell that night and more in the days to come. Seven days and nights they fell. No one had dared venture into the forest then. Hanna had stayed by her mother. Neither of them had slept more than an hour at a time. Grief for Tymm kept them awake. Stunned, they walked empty-handed from room to room.

Along with Mother’s grief and her own, Hanna bore Da’s anger. Da blamed her for losing Tymm and wouldn’t speak to her. Taunier had tried to cheer her a little, but she was deaf to his encouragement. She, too, blamed herself.

Tonight the wood was empty, the mountain bare but for a few small sapling groves.

More ringing laughter drew Hanna up the trail until she reached a broad, grassy meadow where a colossal black tree stood in the very center of the field. It seemed as if all the trees in Shalem Wood had gathered into one and swept up from the earth to touch the moon and
stars. The massive trunk was curved like the body of a woman, gowned in silky, black bark. There were holes in her trunk as if she were only half finished, yet as Hanna moved closer, she felt the hairs rising on the backs of her arms. This tree was very much alive.

Children’s voices came from above. Hanna peered upward. Figures were moving high in the boughs. A small blond head poked out between the branches.

“Tymm! It’s you! I’ve found you!” Hanna’s heart sang as she shouted to him. He was back!

Far above, Tymm clung to a bough with one hand as he ran his other hand along the smooth black trunk. As his fingers moved, pressing, shaping, a face began to form.

“Tymm, you’re too high up. Come down from there, now!”

Laughter trickled down the dark branches. If he wouldn’t climb down, she’d have to go up. She leaped for the lowest branch. The black wood was as slick as wet glass. Curling her fingers around the lowest limb, she swung her right foot upward. Her hand slipped; she grappled, fell, and hit the ground below. The fall knocked the wind out of her, and she awoke with a start, struggling to breathe.

Still dizzy from the fall, she jumped up, shouting, “Tymm!”

The enormous tree was gone. Falling to her knees, she let out an angry sob. She’d almost had him, if she’d been able to climb up the branches and wrap her arms around him.

“It was a dreamwalk,” she whispered, wiping her eyes. Even if she’d reached him, he would have faded with the dream; she couldn’t have brought him home.

Hanna brushed blades of grass from her sleeping gown, her hands moving rhythmically as she made up her mind. The dreamwalk had told her Tymm was alive. The wind had blown him and the other children high up into a tree. She would go after him. A tree that massive could not grow in Noor. She’d seen trees close to its towering height only once before, when she’d crossed into the Otherworld. The wind must have blown the children into Oth.

Hanna tried to picture the tree again. Where in Oth would a giant black tree grow? Not anywhere near Enness Isle, she knew, for the tallest Waytrees here had been the ones in Garth Lake, and they were nowhere near that tall before they fell.

The Falconer used to say Oth was as close as breath and just as invisible. She’d seen the maps in his book, the mountains and valleys of Oth reflecting exactly those in Noor, though the names were different. Still, no one could see Oth or reach it without the aid of magic. She would need help to cross over and find the place where such a tree could grow.

The dewy grass chilled her bare feet as she made her way to the far edge of the meadow. She’d flown world to world with the wind woman, Wild Esper, last year. Esper might carry her to Oth. In fact, she would have to if Hanna asked it of her. Wild Esper owed her a boon.

She climbed onto the broad boulder Miles called the watching stone. From its top, one could see Brim Village far below. She curled her toes against the rock. Beyond Brim Harbor, the ocean gleamed red with the rising sun. The sight troubled her. She’d never awakened from a dreamwalk to daylight before. What if she began to dreamwalk in the morning hours, or in the middle of the day? It would be harder to keep her dreamwalks a secret from those outside her family. She tasted the possibility of future humiliation, then forced herself to turn those thoughts aside. She couldn’t worry about that now.

Arms up, fingers spread wide, she shouted, “Wild Esper, if you’re here on Mount Shalem, show yourself to me!”

Orange-capped waves rolled in on the shore far below. She would let herself be blown to the place Tymm and the others had gone.

She wiggled her fingers, testing the air.
I will make her come
, she thought,
I am sqyth-eyed, and my blue eye gives me the power to befriend sky spirits
. Even as she thought this, she knew how small she was against the elements. How old was the wind, the earth, the sky? She was nothing, and no one to command a wind woman.

Gathering her courage, she shouted again. “Wild Esper. Sky kith, come now!”

She called a third time and a fourth. At last, the wind woman swept up from the sea, cold blue as morning, with the smell of the ocean in her hair. The sudden gust blew Hanna backward. She caught herself with her hands, her palms scraping against the rough stone.

The wind woman swirled overhead as Hanna scrambled to her feet. “Wild Esper, take me to Oth.”

Wild Esper breezed nearer, her giant face clear and untroubled. “Why?”

“My brother has been Wind-taken. I have to find him.”

The wind woman swirled to the left. “Can a sister find a brother?”

“I can, and you know it.” The wind woman knew that well enough. She’d helped Hanna find Miles in Oth last year. Wild Esper sent out tickling breezes and toyed with Hanna’s hair.

“Miles and I took care of the Shriker for you and the Sylth Queen, and freed Oth from his curse,” Hanna continued. “You told us then we could ask you for a boon for all we’d done. Have you forgotten?”

Wild Esper whisked higher above. “Does a wind spirit forget?”

Hanna didn’t know how to answer. “Will you take me to Tymm?”

“Ask for another boon.”

“Why?”

“The Old Magic has awakened. No wind will blow against it.”

“Can’t you carry me to Oth the way you did before? I’ve had a vision of a great black tree. I think that’s where Tymm was taken. I don’t know why that is, but I saw—”

“The Wind-taken were not blown into the western lands of Oth. They were carried east.”

It was true enough. Hanna had seen Tymm and the others blown east over the sea. She’d been to the Oth lands here in the west—the Oth that matched her own island, for one place mirrored the other. She’d seen maps of eastern Noor and eastern Oth in
The Way Between Worlds
, the handwritten book the Falconer had given her before he died. But she’d not traveled east when she’d gone to the Otherworld. How far had the Wild Wind taken Tymm? How long might it take to get there?

“Do you know how can I reach the Oth lands of the east?”

“Ask your great-uncle Enoch and Old Gurty.”

“Why ask them? They’ve never been east.” She might borrow Great-Uncle Enoch’s little sailboat. But it would take weeks and weeks, maybe months, to cross the Morrow Sea in that old rickety thing.

“I need you to blow me east, Wild Esper. You have to take me now!”

Wild Esper gusted down the steep hill and up again. “Now, now,” she echoed. “I ride only the west wind. Ask Noorushh, who rides the sea winds, to take you there.”

“But … I don’t know that wind spirit! And he doesn’t owe me a boon.”

Wild Esper shrank down to ride a playful breeze and spun behind Hanna’s back. “I do not go where the west wind does not blow.”

Hanna dug her nails into her palms. “Can’t you change course this once, Wild Esper? Are you so completely powerless?”

At that, Wild Esper’s wind rose from breeze to bluster. The wind woman swelled to an enormous size with the powerful wind. Rushing at Hanna, she swept her off her feet, blew her sideways, then flung her onto the ground.

Hanna lay stunned as the wind woman drew back again, her face gray with rage.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Hanna called. “Come back.” She got up, stood unsteadily, and waved her arms wildly at the vanishing wind. “Surely we can find a way. Only please, come back!”

C
ome back she did, and with a vengeance. Hanna was halfway down the mountainside when the wind woman blew in on a great black cloud. It had not taken her long to gather a storm in her skirts. Soaring overhead, she released a torrent of rain.

“I’m sorry!” Hanna shouted. “Really, I didn’t mean it!” But the rain only battered her harder, drenching Hanna’s hair and gown. She could find no shelter in the fallen forest, so she stumbled down the path, slipping in the mud. She was not much closer to home when she heard Taunier calling.

Mother found my cot empty and sent him out to look for me
, she thought bitterly.
And here I am in my sleeping gown!
She
crouched behind the blueberry bushes, hoping he wouldn’t see her as he passed, but his eyes were too sharp for that.

“What are you doing out here?” Taunier’s words were harsh and biting as he helped her to stand. When he saw what she was wearing, he looked away and offered her his cloak.

A blush burned up her neck, but she didn’t explain herself. Taunier had been working with her da long enough to know that she sometimes disappeared at night. He was the only one outside the family who knew she was a Dreamwalker. Her parents were ashamed of her “night rambles,” but Taunier had caught her walking through the woods at night three times since he’d come to work for her da, so he knew.

“Come on, then,” he said more gently. “You’re soaked through.” Draping his wool cloak over her shivering shoulders, he was about to slip off his boots when she said, “I can walk barefoot, really I can.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am a mountain girl,” she said with pride.

“You are that,” he replied, laughing.

Rain slapped their heads and backs, drumming the ground. Hanna peered up through her wet bangs. The
wind woman was not visible in the clouds, but she was somewhere near, riding the storm and probably delighting in their misery down below. What would Taunier think if she told him what, or rather
who
, was behind this storm?