Firebirds Soaring (32 page)

Elexa shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“I couldn’t make her take the gold I wore and carried at my death home to my wife and daughter?”

Elexa shook her head again.

“You may not be able to order her, but you could ask her,” said Father.

Smudu nodded. “Ask her for me, please.”

“You took this man out of his family and left them in want,” Father said in dragonspeech. “Would you accept the gift of his ghost? Can you return his gold to them?”

The dragon lowered her head, her eyes half-lidded. “I don’t know about the gift of his ghost. I understand others here share their lifebraids with human and animal ghosts, though this seems strange to me. I cannot return the man’s gold to his family until after my sister’s eggs are laid and I am sure she has enough to eat.”

“The village will feed all three of you, and the babies,” said Father. “It’s been a good year for goats.”

Elexa thought of the blue-violet stone she had found that morning, somewhere in Sanric’s hoard now. She could sense it through cloth and walls; she knew its radiance. She would be able to track it down. If she explained to Yan, would he help her reclaim it? It would pay for several goats, or she could take it to Smudu’s family.

Leave Mountainknee. See the places her ghosts had told her about. Get away from Sanric and Yan, the death of her brother, the loss of her friendship with Tira.

Leave Father alone?

“Will you give my sister a child?” asked the dragon.

“To eat?” Father said. “Certainly not.”

“A slave child, like the ones the other dragons have.”

“We aren’t slaves!” Father cried. “Both gain from the bond. You would have to give to the child who bonded to you. But we had Bond Night a month ago, and all the children who were ready bonded with dragons. We have no more unbonded thirteen-year-olds.”

“What about this one?” asked the dragon. “The ghost catcher.”

“She is too young, and unprepared,” said Father.

Elexa said, “I won’t bond with a murderer!”

The dragon said, “Jakar and I have killed humans, but my sister has done nothing but try to survive and keep her children alive. She has killed no one.” The pale head lowered, snaked toward her, its crest rising, the dim eyes glowing brighter. “How prepared do you have to be? We don’t know your ways.”

“I don’t want to bond with your sister.” Elexa backed away from the dragon, her hand reaching behind her for Father’s. She wanted to bond to a dragon she had spent a year courting, someone she knew would be kind to her, someone she could respect. These strange dragons with ghost vision and no morals didn’t appeal to her.

Father took her hand in his, placed his other hand on her shoulder to steady her. The world swayed, she was so tired. She leaned against her father’s steadiness.

Smudu strode past Elexa to the dragon, who slid her head sideways so she could watch him with one eye. “Leave the child alone. Take me.”

Father repeated what he had said in dragonspeech. Smudu’s murderer turned her head one way, then the other, studying the ghost with each of her eyes in turn.

At last she laid her chin on the ground. Her waving whiskers stilled. “On my island that is no more, taking in another’s ghost is a large thing. It is a promise to carry forward a life, to nurture it and pass it on to another body when mine breaks, to weave it in with all the other lives I cherish and host. Man, I do not want you inside me, but I see now that I will have you. Come to me if you still will it.”

Smudu turned back to Elexa. She took a deep breath and translated for him.

The ghost walked to Elexa and kissed her forehead, a touch of chill. He turned and strode toward the dragon’s mouth, shrugging off Elexa’s net as he went. When he stood just in front of the dragon, she lifted her head a little and opened her mouth. Each of her wavy teeth was outlined in mother-of-pearl, and her tongue had three tips. Smudu stepped over the fence of her teeth and settled on her tongue. She closed her mouth, lifted her head, and swallowed.

She froze, head pointed toward the stars. Father held Elexa’s shoulders as she leaned against him. An age of silence went by, and then the dragon’s head lowered. “I understand,” she said, in her own voice, in the language of humans.

 

There were four human skulls among the bones at the mouth of the wild dragons’ cave. Father laid his cloak on the ground. He and Elexa worked the skulls free of the other bones and set them on the cloak. Each skull had a tooth-shaped hole in the back.

“My sister liked the brains best,” said the dragon Smudu had joined. Her name was Nasra. “She said they tasted like stories.”

Father stumbled down the mountain in the dark of morning, Elexa on his back and the cloak of skulls bunched in his hands. They went home and slept until the middle of the following afternoon, then took the skulls to the temple of the mountain god. Someone in the center ground rang the village bell in the pattern to share sorrow, and everyone who could set a job aside for an hour came to the temple to see the skulls, lined up atop the wooden bones of their funeral fire. From looking at them, Elexa hadn’t known which skull had belonged to Kindal and which to Smudu, or to whom the other two skulls had belonged.

Nasra, Maia, and Birta landed in the center ground near the temple midway through the death songs. Yan, never anxious to take on god duties, had let Father take charge of this ceremony and farewell. When the dragons arrived, Yan glared at them, especially at Nasra. Some of the other villagers hid.

Elexa felt as though she were in a strange country where all the colors were gray and all the edges soft. She had touched the skulls as she set them on their pyres. One was smoother than the others, with faint patterns across it in the shape of scales. She knew it had belonged to her brother. A dragon bond changed you from skin to bones.

She prayed for all four of the dead, that they were happy in their next lives, and after she had set the fires to consume what they had left behind and watched the bones scorch, she turned and saw the dragons, next lives to Kindal and Pewet and Smudu.

Nasra rested her forehand on a cloth-wrapped bundle. “Elexa,” she said.

Elexa walked through the crowd, saw faces of people she had known all her life, locked in the quiet of sorrow. Tira, kneeling near the back, watched Elexa as she passed. Tira did not smile, but she didn’t frown, either. She looked pale.

“I have collected what belonged to my man,” Nasra said when Elexa reached her. She shook the bundle and it clinked with coin. “We want to take it back to his family, but I cannot give it to them directly; the city will shoot me. Will you come with me, and walk it to them?”

“Now you can leave your sister?” Elexa asked.

Nasra dipped her head, glanced toward Birta and Maia. “I understand she won’t be alone or abandoned. I am coming to appreciate the advantages of this life.”

“I’ll come,” Elexa whispered.

Father headed for the house. Yan strode to Elexa. “You can’t leave. You’re the village deadspeaker. You have no right to risk yourself on a journey with a known killer of humans,” he said.

Suddenly she had status, after all the years she had done the job alone? She didn’t want a job if it meant Yan could order her around. “My father can be the village deadspeaker,” Elexa said. “I need to take care of my ghosts.”

Father returned with the leather saddle Kindal had used when he rode Maia; a hide coat, gloves, and helmet; and a pouch of food. He went to Nasra and strapped the saddle on her over a dragonhide pad to protect Elexa from the dragon’s heat. Elexa put on the leather clothes. They were all too big for her and smelled of Kindal. Her eyes swam. She looked at Maia.

“Go,” said Maia in Kindal’s voice. “Go and come back, little sister.”

There were stirrups for her toes, and straps on the saddle she could cling to. Nasra wasn’t as hot as other dragons—still not healthy yet. Elexa strapped the food pouch across her chest and took the treasure out from under Nasra’s forefoot. Her father helped her tie it to the back of the saddle with leather strings, then boosted her into the saddle just in back of Nasra’s first pair of arms and the bunched muscles that powered her wings.

Elexa clutched the straps and glanced around at her village. She suspected it would never look the same to her again.

Someone tugged on her boot. She looked down into Tira’s face. Tira stretched up a closed hand. When Elexa opened her gloved hand, Tira dropped the beer-colored gem into it. “Maybe you’ll find a good place to sell it in the city,” she said.

“I’ll look.”

“I’m still mad that you get to fly first.”

Elexa laughed, wiped her eyes, watched the smoke rising from the farewell fires. Nasra gathered herself and leapt up into the air.

THREE TWILIGHT TALES

O
nce upon a time, a courting couple were walking down the lane at twilight, squabbling. “Useless, that’s what you are,” the girl said. “Why, I could make a man every bit as good as you out of two rhymes and a handful of moonshine.”

“I’d like to see you try,” said the man.

So the girl reached up to where the bright silver moon had just risen above the hills and she drew together a handful of moonshine. Then she twisted together two rhymes to run right through it and let it go. There stood a man, in a jacket as violet as the twilight, with buttons as silver as the moon. He didn’t stand there long for them to marvel at him. Off he went down the lane ahead of them, walking and dancing and skipping as he went, off between the hedgerows, far ahead, until he came to the village.

It had been a mild afternoon, for spring, and the sun had been kind, so a number of people were sitting outside the old inn. The door was open, and a stream of gold light and gentle noise was spilling out from inside. The man made of moonshine stopped and watched this awhile, and then an old widower man began to talk to him. He didn’t notice that the moonshine man didn’t reply, because he’d been lonely for talking since his wife died, and he thought the moonshine man’s smiles and nods and attention made him quite the best conversationalist in the village. After a little while sitting on the wooden bench outside the inn, the old widower noticed the wistful glances the moonshine man kept casting at the doorway. “Won’t you step inside with me? ” he asked, politely. So in they went together, the man made of moonshine smiling widely now, because a moonshine man can never go under a roof until he’s been invited.