Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

“Quick. The dragons wake.”

They broke into a jog. Alain puffed and wheezed, more out of anxiety perhaps than from being winded. He had heard stories of dragons, of course, but everyone knew they no longer existed on Earth. They had all been turned into stone a long time ago, like the one at Osna Sound which had become the ridge running between the village and the now-destroyed monastery. But this talk of dragons made him nervous anyway. If they were just a story, then why did people hide away under mounds of earth?

So many things were different here. In seven months, he had not seen a single iron tool. Most of their implements were chipped out of stone. They made buckets out of bark, dug ditches with antlers, and carved canoes out of whole logs. Their ploughs were little better than a smoothed shaft of wood that couldn’t turn more than a finger’s depth of soil, and they didn’t keep any horses, although they knew what they were. Even the grains and food were different: no wheat, no oats, no wine, not even turnips and cabbage, although big game was far more plentiful. He’d never eaten so much aurochs meat in his life.

In the afterlife, if that was what this was, maybe wine had been banished, but dragons still existed.

He tried to imagine them, creatures formed out of earth and fire.

Their breath of flame might consume the unwitting traveler, and the unremarked lash of their thick tails might hammer soft flesh into the dirt.

Adica had gone up to the fjall to meet them.

He got a second wind and actually moved out in front of his companion, the nervous hounds lagging behind as though to watch their trail. As they picked their way onto the fjall, they came fully into the teeth of a strangely warm wind, almost seductively pleasant. He saw the stone circle immediately. Upright and in perfect repair, it looked nothing like the old ruined stone crowns he knew. It didn’t seem right, somehow, that it should look so… new.

A dozen human figures stood inside the stones. Eight wore the skins typical of the Akka people, furs and hides sewn into clothing. These eight bore stone mallets, and with those mallets, to a rhythm they all seemed to understand, they beat on the stones.

The stones sang. High and low harmonics rang off the rock, throbbing through the air, as first one mallet, then the next and then a third, swung into a stone and dropped away.

Laoina stopped at the edge of the scree, hunkering down in the shelter of an overhanging boulder. “We wait here.”

But the humming of the stones drew him forward to the stone circle. At the center of the circle a woman wearing an eagle-feather cloak stood behind two men. One of them, tattooed like his Akka tribesfolk, sat on a litter. His frail body rocked back and forth in time to the ringing of the mallets on stone. Beside him, an ancient man with white hair and weathered skin had tucked his face into his cupped hands, praying.

Where was Adica?

Crossing the threshold, stepping over the invisible line that demarcated the inside of the circle of stones from the outside, Alain walked from a world filled with a throbbing hum to one of silence except for the murmuring of the two sorcerers, for surely that was what they were. They wore like an invisible mantle an aura of power, just as Adica did: the Hallowed Ones of their tribes chosen for their ability to walk the path of magic.

The old man, then, was Falling-down, whom Adica often spoke of fondly. The other, Tanioinin, seemed not much older than Adica, as far as Alain could tell, but he lived in a broken body. By the evidence of the litter, he could not even walk.

At last Alain saw Adica, curled up into a ball on the other side of Tanioinin. The hounds padded past him and nosed her. She started up, alarmed to see him. He hurried over to crouch beside her.

“I would have sent for you after the danger was over,” she whispered.

“I do not leave you,” he said stubbornly. “Do not ask me to go, because I will not.”

She knew him well enough not to argue when he spoke in that tone.

He indicated Tanioinin and bent closer to murmur in her ear. The singing of the stones concealed his words from anyone except her, who was accustomed to his whispered endearments. “How can this one be a sorcerer? Can he even walk?”

“Spits-last is the most powerful sorcerer born into the human tribes.” She regarded Tanioinin with an expression of respect and, perhaps, a little pity. “His people nurtured and raised him because of his exceedingly clever and deep mind. He has served them as sorcerer for many years. But his body is so crippled that he is helpless in the middle world. Others have to take care of him. Only in the spirit world can he truly roam free. That is why he is so strong.”

Alain could see by the man’s blank expression and the way his eyes had rolled up into his head that he was already gone into the spirit world. He was calling to the dragons… wherever they were.

Adica hissed under her breath, caught Alain’s wrist, and pointed.

Those golden-stone hummocks arrayed along the eastern horizon like six giant tumuli were not stone at all. They glowed with the rich gleam of amber and the lustrous fire of molten gold. They hummed and, slowly, as he sank down—too stunned to cry out in astonishment—they woke.

They lifted great heads first. Their eyes had the winking fever of the hottest fire. Some had crests along their heads and necks, fans of gold unfolding as they rose. A tail lashed to dislodge boulders which smashed through the landscape, thrown about like pebbles. It was then that he realized how huge they were, and how far away. The noise of their waking rumbled and crashed around him, echoing against the heavens.

First one, and then a second, huffed mightily. Sparks rained from their nostrils. Fires bloomed and faded on rocks and among the mosses and low-lying scrub that lived in the fjall. Alain stared. Rage and Sorrow were whining, although it was hard to hear them above the distant crash and clamor of the waking dragons.

Adica struggled to her feet. She still held his wrist in a crushing grip; perhaps she had forgotten that she still held on to him. Mallets struck stone. The world hummed. As though drawn forward in a dream, Adica let go of Alain’s arm and stepped forward, past the two murmuring sorcerers, to stand with arms raised at the threshold of the protective circle of the stone crown just as the first dragon launched itself into the air.

Alain leaped after her, but he did not even reach her. The backwash from the dragon’s wings drove him to his knees. The screaming wind pounded him as a second, and then a third, dragon leaped toward the sky and caught the air under their vast wings, wider than houses. Their bellies shone like fire, and their tails lashed the air. Ice billowed off the distant eastern peaks, blown by their passage. A fourth and fifth rose. Battered by the wind of their rising, Alain struggled to stay on his knees. A hot stream of stinging wind passed over his back. His hair singed, and his hands and lips cracked under the sudden blast of heat as all his tears dried away.

He crawled forward. Adica stood framed by the stone lintel, arms still raised. The wind did not batter her down, nor did she bow beneath it. She didn’t need his help. She was the Hallowed One of her tribe, as powerful as the dawn, able to face without cowering the great creatures they had woken. All he could do was keep low to the ground and pray.

The dragons rose in glory, as bright as lightning. The wind of their rising stirred the clouds into a rage of movement, swirling in a gale stronger than any storm wind. As the dragons rose, the heavy layer of clouds began to break up, shredding in all directions. Drops of rain sizzled on stone. A single snowflake drifted down, dissolving before Alain’s eyes.