The Anvil: in the aftermath of The Last bastionthe new Marroc king of the Varyxhun valley is looking for someone to help him steal a forge from the Forkbeards before they can mass a new army. With Gallow missing, it falls to Arda.

In Solace, Gallow and the Vathan war-leader Mirraj travel together, each on their own mission. They carry with them the cursed Aulian sword, the Edge of Sorrows, a piece of armour from a demon, and something is following them.

In Dragon’s Reach, Oribas and Achista enter the second of the two old watch-towers overlooking the mouth of the Varyxhun valley. As Witches’ Reach before it, the ruined tower has dark secrets buried under its roots. Unlike Witches’ Reach they are still there.

The story “The Sin Eater” appeared in Unexpected Journeys in2013

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Sin Eater

Servants usher Sola into a sterile stone antechamber. They whisper to one and other, solemn and funereal. Sola watches their dead eyes, their pallid skin, the expressionless rictus of their faces. She’s seen it all before, the whole spectrum of it, the wild wailing abandon that comes from watching a cherished life crushed to an unexpected end, the tearful smiling farewells to a much-loved elder, the tomb-like masks of servants waiting for relief from a master who won’t be missed. The death she’s come to witness today has a savagery in the air behind its careful silence. Fear and envy and outright hatred boil together, their parts changing every hour. It glides over her like water over feathers.

The antechamber walls are bare, stripped. Faint outlines show where paintings and tapestries once hung. There are three doorways – the one she stands in; the next a battered wooden thing that once had a hanging in front of it; the last much grander, although its gilt has faded and the dark hardwood shows its age. An elderly servant with an etched face sweeps his arm with reverential ceremony, guiding Sola forward. All their motions are careful as if they’re afraid to disturb the air, as if that might hasten their tyrant master’s demise. Sola mimics their delicacy. Some of their hostility is for her. Sin-eaters are strange men and even stranger women, feared and revered, blessed and cursed, holy and damned both at once. Some say they are half demon. Others that the blood that flows in their veins has been touched by the essence of angels. The suppressed anger, though? They hide it badly. The man she’s here to save truly deserves to go to Hell.

Inside the bedroom the old man they all hate lies sleepy-eyed in bed. Sola looks him over. She’s never seen this man before but she’s heard of him, oh yes. Even knows his true name though he never uses it any more. She decides she will call him Magus, a reflection of the darkness at his core. She’ll call him that and come to no harm for it, just as she might call a king a fool to his face and feel no fear of the gallows. Sin-eaters stand outside judgement. Some have been murderers, rapists, plunderers and pirates, the very worst kinds of men and women – but they are always saints, outside any law but God’s, for to kill a sin-eater is to take on her sins.

Sola gathers herself and sits beside the old man’s bed ready to guide him to Heaven. The Magus has a blanket pulled up around his armpits; it was beautiful once, made by the weavers of Belasas a thousand miles away. A blanket like that costs more than a pair of good racing horses, probably more than everything Sola has ever owned, but this one before her is threadbare and stained. The old man’s head and shoulders are propped up by a wedge of fat goose-down pillows. His arms lie over the top, limp and pressed against his sides. His face is speckled with the marks of age, his hair thinning and white. He’s already ancient. Time, always fickle, has turned its back on him.

Two other men wait on him. A thug-faced soldier in a brigandine coat with a rapier on one hip and a pistol on the other, and an oily-skinned snake disguised as a man, preening his thinning hair as he stands in his fine red silk robes. The oily man speaks. “I am Eserleri, chancellor of Elsporth. If you have needs or grievances, please bring them to me at once.” He bows with an obsequious smile and an expansive flourish.

Sola nods. She looks from him to the second man, the soldier. He’s feigning boredom and a dull lack of interest but she sees right through him. Underneath is something else. His eyes don’t leave her and his gaze is hard and cold. If he had the freedom, she thinks, he would cut her down right here.

“Jarkko will keep you honest.” Eserleri keeps his smile, bright and wide with malice. “Jarkko is a Graved.” When the snake says that the solider will keep her honest, he means the Graved will never let her out of his sight outside this room until the Magus is dead. He’s there to see she doesn’t secretly vomit up the sins she’ll eat and bury them. No one knows what happens then. Is the sin-eater cheating God and Heaven? Do the sins simply return whence they came? Do they vanish, lost from the great divine account? Where do these orphan sins belong and who will be judged for them? Only God knows the answer and so the Magus is taking no chances.

Eserleri bows and withdraws, slowly and with reverence. The Graved Jarkko follows with a swagger that says he doesn’t give much of a shit one way or the other about any of this and doesn’t want to be here. The Magus hisses and waves his skeletal hand and then, at last, looks at Sola. His eyes crawl all over her. There’s meaning in that look. “So Jarkko finds me a girl,” he says in disgust. “Their bile is always there, spewed out behind my back though they’d never dare show it to my face, not one of them. A girl.” He spits out the word.

“I am a sin-eater, Magus,” answers Sola.

“And I’m dying.” He glares at her as if his very look might flay the skin off her face and so make her more to his liking. She holds his look, calm and steady. She’s seen a lot of old men on their deathbeds and a lot of old women too. Some shower her with words of gratitude. Others hate her.

“Death comes to everyone,” she says. “Kings and peasants, all must pass away.”

She bows her head and tries to hold a sombre moment and dangle it between but the Magus only frowns and scrapes his throat and spits a smear of phlegm onto his once-priceless blanket. “That supposed to cheer me is it? My death doesn’t come to just anyone.” He taps a bony finger to his skull. “There’s a beetle in my head, girl, and it’s eating me.” He bares his teeth and hisses again. When Sola doesn’t flinch, he cocks his head. “Did you hear? I said there’s a beetle eating the inside of my head!”

“The Lord Ambassador who preceded you,” Sola says quietly. “I heard he died the same way.”

“Everyone knows that story.” The Magus coughs a little laugh. “Does it make your stomach crawl, girl? I can feel her scuttling around in here.” He taps his skull again. There’s a twisted affection in his words. She’s seen it before, once from a farmer gored by his own bull and once from a duellist beaten and killed by a blade that dazzled brighter. The beetle in the old man’s head has the better of him. It has his respect.

“How long do you have?” asks Sola softly.

“She’s eating away at me now but she won’t kill me on her own. When she’s had her fill she’ll lay her eggs and die. Thousands of them. When I stop feeling her little taps and knocks scraping around in there then I have hours before they hatch. That’s when it happens. Do you have that long, girl?”

He calls her girl as though it matters, as though she should feel somehow lessened by it. Like the hostility of the servants, it slides away like water over oil. The old man will be dead soon and so she sets his unkindness as a railing against that end. “I have as long as you require, Magus.” She might ask whether the old man thinks he’ll have long enough for all the sins he’ll be spewing out of him but that doesn’t strike her as a very holy question, and for now she has a mask to wear. “Have you ever witnessed a sin-eating, Magus?”

“Of course not.”

“It’s best to start with some small thing so you understand what happens.” She bows her head. A sin-eating is a private thing, like confession, though she can’t imagine the Magus paying any heed if that ever got in the way of what he wanted.

“I’ve been unkind to my horse.” The old man laughs and then stops abruptly as Sola passes a hand over him. His eyes fly open; he jerks upright and coughs and retches and at last spits out a stone. He stares at it in wonder, the size of a holly berry and as black as the hollow eye of night. “God in Heaven, girl, I thought you’d killed me,”

Sola picks up the stone, slick with the old man’s spittle. She holds it between them. “This is the sin of being unkind to your horse,” she says, quiet and gentle as a whisper of autumn. “It is taken from you.” She places the stone in a silver bowl and rinses it with water, then dries it with a small square of white silk. She puts it in her mouth and swallows it down with a swill of herbal elixir made with ingredients bought from the Elsporth apothecary the day before. “I have eaten your sin, Magus. You may choose what you will give to me and what you will carry with you to bare before God. I will eat whatever you offer.” She meets his gaze again, level, ice for ice. “It is, as I say, best to start with something small.”

“Oh you can have all of it, girly, every one of them. The devil might want me but I mean to disappoint him.”

Sola nods. She takes out a book and flicks to an empty page. As the Magus speaks, she begins to write.

The Lord Ambassador – the Magus as Sola calls him – lives in a fort atop a thrusting rocky outcrop called Biter’s Drop. Jarkko, who is quietly curious about the name, folds his arms across his chest and pretends to doze. A sin-eating is a private business but when the sin-eater leaves the old man’s side, Jarkko will never let her out of his sight until one of them dies.

In his mind’s eye he eyes up the innards of the little fortress. An old lookout tower rises from one corner, wrapped in a sheath of vines that reach almost to the top in their effort to drag it down. Elsewhere a collection of rickety wooden sheds press up against the walls: a kitchen, some hanging shacks and storehouses and a lean-to that passes as shelter for both servants and travellers. A tight road winds reluctantly from a shabby gatehouse down to the river below, too steep and twisting for a cart or a wagon. At the end of it, Biter’s Drop overlooks the Charred river and the little market town of Elsporth and then a thick wall of forest where the Graved live.

Elsporth still bears the scars from the last time the Graved came. Six years he’s been here. Six years since he came across the Charred with his kinsmen and gave them away. He’s waited a long time since then and he still doesn’t know how Biter’s Drop took its name, who bit whom and who fell or was pushed. Someone, once long ago. Probably he’ll never know.

He thinks of his prostitute who waits in Elsporth. Thyronis is slender and often mistaken for a woman. Occasionally he dresses as one too. Jarkko, on the other hand, is a brute. With his hair hacked short and his scarred face, most people see a Graved and nothing else. He carries a double-headed axe across his back which is how it came to be that he once rescued Thyronis from a gang of sodomites who didn’t seem to care much what he was under his dress. Or perhaps he needed rescuing because he was a thief. He still is. Right now, Jarkko imagines Thyronis looking up at the keep and its tower, his head full of thieving thoughts.

A servant comes through carrying a pitcher of milk. He goes into the bed-chamber and quickly comes out again.

“I’m hungry,” says Jarkko, but the servant only laughs and goes through the low wooden door. A curtain hangs half torn from the roof beyond. There’s the unmistakable sound of piss into a pot. The servant brings with him the stale smells of smoke and candle fat that remind Jarkko of the flop-house in Elsporth: a room with a hearth that hasn’t seen a fire for months, a table that wobbles, a handful of stools that aren’t quite straight and a single chair. He imagines Thyronis pacing back and forth, looking here and there, searching all the nooks and crannies for lost pennies and those cheap bone-carved loops and needles that the people here like to wear in their hair. When he closes his eyes he imagines hearing little yelps of delight whenever Thyronis finds one.

The Lord Ambassador would have Thyronis executed by shoving a red-hot iron spike up his arse if he knew of Thyronis’s tastes. It’s a dull, distant tyranny. Six years he’s been here. He still doesn’t know how Biter’s Drop took its name but he knows by now that the Lord Ambassador deserves eternal damnation more than any man he’s ever known. And now he must see to it that this sin-eater guides the old man to Heaven.

Sola is writing in her book again, tiny and precious and scribbled in code. Every sin she eats must be written down to be spat out again one day lest she be cast into Hell, fodder for greedy Lucifer. It’s not a life for everyone. At least priests with their confessions don’t damn themselves by what they do.

She looks up. They’re done now with how the Magus treats his servants no better than his horses, how he had one whipped to death one day for no better reason than he felt like it and wanted to set an example. There’s the matter of the war, half a decade back now when the Graved came across in boats and sacked Elsporth and the Lord Ambassador shut his gates good and tight and did nothing until the raiders tired of their sport. He let them have their fill. It was the start of an invasion, he claims, but he gave them Elsporth and set them to fighting among themselves and the grand war that might have been came instead to nothing. Eventually they settle on the sin of ‘acting in his own interest over that of the common folk who looked to him for protection.’ The Magus is reluctant but spits it anyway. Better safe than sorry. The stone he coughs up is the size of a small plum. It takes some swallowing.

“What about greed?” Sola suggests. Greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride, every sin-eater learns them. Abandoning his people to die under sword and fire might be called sloth, though Sola prefers the older term of acedia: an abandonment of duty, a neglect of one’s purpose and talent.

“Greed?” the Magus laughs. “You’ve heard the stories then?”

Hidden under her cowl, Sola bites her lip, forcing herself to be still and quiet. A good sin-eater coaxes the sins out of the man she means to save, one by one until all are gone and nothing more. Judgement is left for God.

When all the Magus gets is silence, he adds a little sourness of his own. “Very well. Yes, I murdered the Lord Ambassador Yardis, my predecessor. I murdered him for his wealth. There. Happy?” This is a rumour so widely spoken as to be a part of local history, a thing taken as fact. It’s why Sola has come here, to hear this. But still, behind her mask of bland acquiescence, the admission jolts her more than she’d expected. The horror isn’t so much that he did it. It’s how.

“Was it simple avarice, Magus?”

“What’s it to you, girl? I did what I did. The reasons don’t matter.”

Sola bows her head, hiding her expression. It’s hard enough to control her voice, never mind her face as well. “I would send you to God with your soul cleansed, Magus. Speak as much or as little as you wish. The saints will judge you for that which you still carry when you stand at Heaven’s gates before them. It’s for you to choose what you leave behind.”

The Magus shifts, uncomfortable but caught. As much as anything this is why he sent Jarkko to find him a sin-eater. Mere confession never feels enough. “Look about you, girl. What do you see? A little rural province too far from the Holy Court to attract attention. A thriving port with more boats coming in than you might think. Out there in the forests on the other side are the Graved, too busy fighting each other to offer much of a threat. And a Lord Ambassador clearly taking half of what should be sent to the Holy Father for himself? I came to Elsporth twenty years ago as a listener, as the eyes and ears for His court, and I saw the same. I told Lord Ambassador Yardis that he was a thief. I told him I’d say nothing if he gave me a piece of what he was keeping . . .”

Sola passes a hand over the Magus, who, startled, coughs up the obsidian sin of blackmail. She washes it in her silver bowl, dries it, swallows it with a mouthful of elixir and makes a note in her book. The Magus has coughed enough wickedness now that he barely breaks his stride. “Is that the greed you wanted?” He sinks back into his bed and stares up at the ceiling. He has a strange look in his eye, the first time Sola has seen any real emotion through all the litany of his life. A remembering. A regret, is it? A tightening of the lips betrays an old anger. “He cast me out,” says the Magus. “So after I returned I sent him a gift. Sugared dates from the homeland I left half a century ago, laced with the eggs of my little beetles. When he ate them they hatched into larvae. The larvae burrowed into the flesh of his gut and crawled through his body into his head. Once they were there they started eating. I’m told it took him an hour to die; that after he fell he was still for a while and then his face began to twitch and his head jerked and a swarm of beetles erupted from every orifice, from his nose and mouth and ears and eyes. When they cut him open his skull was empty. Scoured clean.” The same story that everyone knows for a hundred miles. Beetles like the one the old man has inside him now. Sola bites on the irony as she passes her hand over the Magus who spits out the sins of greed and murder. She cleans and swallows them, drinks and writes them in her book but the Magus is shaking his head. “Seven others died, sin-eater. His taster, who didn’t die quick enough to save the rest of them. His wife and his brother, two children and two of his guests.”

The Magus coughs seven more times. Sola swallows the seven black stones he spits out.

“After the Graved razed Elsporth I sent a few more gifts to their king and their barons.” The old man winces. “And there’s the sin of vengeance for you, girl, and wrath as well.” He stops and stares at Sola long and hard and then smiles a bitter smile. “All the wealth you think I have? Gone. There’s nothing, sin-eater. All I have are my beetles.” He fluffs his goose-down pillows. “I bought enough to kill every Graved between the river and the sea. I sent my presents to the court of every baron I could name. All dressed up as gifts from one to another and certainly not from the Lord Ambassador of Elsporth. I don’t know how many of them were taken. A lot. Ask Jarkko if you like. I’ve noticed they’ve been busy killing each other these last few years. Very little trouble to me at all. What sin is that? I was protecting my people. Doing my duty. I have no idea how many of them died. Is it a sin at all?”

Sola passes a hand over the Magus. “For all the Graved.” The old man coughs and spits out a gobbet of wet black sand. Hundreds of tiny grains, perhaps one for each man dead. They both look at the sand staining the once-priceless blanket, then Sola scrapes up as much as she can and swallows it. She fastidiously licks her fingers. Grains are left stuck in the soft weave. More cling to the Magus’s lips and inside his mouth. She passes him a pitcher of milk and a cup. “Get every grain and spit it out. Every one you miss you’ll carry with you to the gates of Heaven.” While the Magus does this she gently pulls at the blanket. “How much time do you have?”

“I still feel her crawling around in there. She hasn’t laid her eggs, not yet.” The Magus looks at her. “Come again in the morning.”

“Is it quick, this death of yours?”

“Quick enough. Once her eggs hatch they’re voracious little things.”

“You know the price for a sin-eating, Magus?”

“You want my treasure? I told you I don’t have any.”

“It’s no use to you in Heaven, nor in Hell.”

“What remains is yours when you’re done if you want it.” He laughs. “I’m sure we can find you something.”

Sola takes the blanket and carefully folds it, making sure that none of the grains of black sand fall out. She carries it from the Magus’s bed, through the antechamber, down the stone stairs into the hall below and to the tiny room she’s been given while she stays. The servants leave her alone and keep out of her way. The Magus’s watcher, Jarkko, falls in behind her. He moves too quickly, giving away the anxious burning in his thoughts. Now and then he simply stares as if looking deep into the past or perhaps the future. Each time, Sola sees the transformation of his face, the ugly twist of hate and murder that lights with bloody fire in his eye.

“Tomorrow,” she says as she watches him. “It’ll all be done tomorrow.”

Jarkko grunts and follows her into her room. Sola lights a lamp and prays and then with painstaking care sucks out every last grain of sand from the blanket. When she’s done she cuts out the piece now stained wet with her own saliva and eats it. Best to be sure. She drinks milk to force it down and then takes another draft of her elixir. It’s unusual for a sin-eating to take so long or for there to be so much. All the old man’s sins make a weight in her stomach. She’ll have cramps in the morning, bad ones. She lies for a while, staring at the ceiling while Jarkko sits silent in the corner, watching. A sin-eater must grow used to sleeping like this, with eyes looking over her. Eventually she goes to sleep.

Jarkko sits, sleepless and restless. In the dead of night he hears shouts in the yard and screams and a clash of arms. The Magus isn’t yet dead and already his men are fighting over the spoils. It calls to him, urging him to make an end to this.

Sin-eaters carry the secrets of the men they save. Some travel with bodyguards to protect them from devils and plunderers who would steal them. Not this one. Silently Jarkko draws a knife from the sheath at his belt, ready to kill this sin-eater who will save his master. But he stays his hand. This woman has eaten half the old man’s sins. Slit her throat and they become his. He doesn’t know how he could live with that.

Sola hears the commotion too, the screams and the shouts, a quiet for a while and then a hue and cry of alarm and more fighting. She doesn’t move. She watches Jarkko through half-closed eyes and sees him draw out the knife and pause and slowly slide it back. She sees the anguish in his face and wonders what it can mean.

“You can go if you want,” she murmurs but he shakes his head. She lies back and listens, in the quiet moments, to the rhythmic tread of boots back and forth on the wooden boards outside her door.

She’s asleep again long before the commotion subsides but before dawn she wakes again with a gasp, stricken by crippling pain. Stomach cramps. Vicious ones, every bit as bad as she feared. The sooner this is done the better. The manor has a different feel to it today. There’s an emptiness as she returns to the Magus and Jarkko tramps wordlessly behind her, a sense of the forsaken. She doesn’t see a single servant as she walks to the Magus’s bed. The smells are wrong, the air adrift with the scents of unlit fires and cold empty bread-ovens. Everything is absence. The room where the Magus lies is near-lifeless too. A plate sits beside his bed and a half-empty pitcher of milk. The Magus regards her. His eyes glitter with hate.

“You did this.”

Sola gestures calmly to Jarkko. “Your watcher never left my side.”

The Magus stares on until the venom transforms to something else, something more bitter still. “I had a wife for a while. She bore me three heirs. I was cruel to them all. I beat them. She despised me. I knew she had a lover and knew she planned to run and I knew the Graved were coming. I sent her down into Elsporth the morning before the Graved crossed the river. I didn’t mean for her to take my sons. I didn’t know until it was too late. They were all murdered amid the slaughter the Graved wrought. I brought that down on them. There. The heart of my vengeance. Take it.”

Sola passes her hand over the Magus but nothing comes. She shakes her head. “Grief is not a sin, Magus. I cannot take it.”

“My servants are looting my carcass before the light fades from my eyes.”

“At the gates of Heaven, all counts for naught but that which you carry on your soul.”

“Lift your hood, sin-eater. Let me see you.”

Sola hesitates. Her cowl comforts her and keeps her features half-hidden in shadow and hides her emotion. But the Magus is looking hard and won’t be moved and so she draws it back.

“You have a resemblance to Yardis, you know.”

She imagines her eyes all a-glitter. She lets out a grimace of pain, screws up her face and clamps a hand to her stomach. “Forgive me, Magus. The cramps have the better of me for a moment. I . . .”

“He had four bastard boys from three women among his servants. I found the women and hanged them. The bastards were drowned in the river.”

When the cramps ease, Sola passes her hand over the Magus seven times, one for each murdered woman and one for each child. The Magus spits six black stones like grapes onto his blanket, another gem from Belasas but even older than the first. The seventh stone is smaller. The two of them stare at it.

“Why aren’t they the same?” asks the Magus.

Sola takes the stones and rinses them, dries them and one by one swallows them each with a sip of her elixir. She looks at the last before she eats it and then writes them in her book. “I don’t know, Magus. Perhaps one of them didn’t drown after all.”

The Magus spits in disgust. “Then I should hang the man I sent to do it except I had rid of him long ago. But if one of them didn’t drown then why is there a stone at all?”

“There is sin in the intent, Magus.”

“Oh there’s sin in everything isn’t there, girly? Perhaps some lucky bastard out there will raise a toast to my passing, then. Will that be a sin too?”

Sola doesn’t answer. She’s been taught that God judges men by their deeds, not by their thoughts.

After a moment the Magus sighs and looks away. “Shall we be on with it, then? Would you hear of the other men I’ve had killed?”

She must. It’s what she is and she’s eager to be finished. It’s hard, knowing what this man has done, not to despise him.

The Magus speaks. One after the other, a procession of murders and betrayals and with each one the old man spits out a stone and Sola swallows and writes it down. The cramps grow steadily worse. She’s sweating and pale and her voice starts to shake. But with each stone she drinks nevertheless. Until the Magus stops.

Outside the door to the Lord Ambassador’s room, Jarkko paces. He’s hungry, waiting for breakfast and impatient but no servants come to their master’s chambers today. He hears commotions here and there, voices off, shouts, the clatter of falling bowls and the shatter of broken clay.

“I’m hungry,” he calls, but no one comes.

He wonders if it’s too late, if the sin-eater has made his master pure. Perhaps he could run and kill the old man before she’s done. Suffocate him with one of his goose-down pillows. The Magus deserves his Hell, he thinks. But Jarkko is a godly man and murder is a sin.

“It’s coming, girl.” When the old man finds his voice again it’s cracked and has a tremor to it. “I don’t feel her in there any more, crawling against my skull. She’s laid her eggs and died.” He shivers and speaks more quickly now, driven by a fear that Sola has heard so many times before – the fear of dying with a weight on your soul, the sudden recognition of the ticking clock with its hands so very close to midnight. The old man slumps back when they’re done, exhausted and spent. He is, at last, pure. She’s done this. She’s swallowed his wickedness, all of it. She feels the weight inside her, the stones grinding in her belly.

“Is there more?”

The Magus shakes his head. “Go. Take your payment. Take whatever you want, whatever is left. Jarkko will show you.”

“Your soul is free, Magus. Heaven awaits.”

She leaves him then, though she’ll come back for the end because she always does. Jarkko follows like a faithful hound. She stops by the kitchens but there’s no one there and so she takes an empty pail and goes out to the yard to soak up the morning air. The watchtower door hangs open. The gates in the wall as well. Three guardsmen lean beside them, nervous, agitated and frightened. Two bodies lie in the middle of the yard, testimony to the bloody murder of the night. A wave of cramp doubles her over. She staggers and sinks to her knees.

“Is it done?” asks Jarkko.

“Your master is close to the end now,” she gasps. Even from here she can see the bloody mess inside the tower. As she cries out at the next stabbing wave of pain, a man comes hurrying from the manor with a sack over his back and the look of a frightened mouse. One of the guards starts towards him and then the other two. He runs but they catch him and put a sword through him. Food and stolen pots and candlesticks spill out of his sack across the yard. Another servant freezes on the open threshold of the house as the guards look up from what they’ve done. They give chase again and all run inside. Sola can’t see what happens but she hears a muffled shout and then a scream. She turns to Jarkko. “Please go!” Her insides feel as though they’re ripping themselves apart. “Please.”

Jarkko shakes his head but Sola cannot bear this pain much longer. She ducks into the darkness of a servant’s shack where the air carries a faint whiff of Goso bark. The elixir she’s taken with each of the old man’s sins has held them fast. In this way his sins remain whole, not yet dissolved, not yet hers, but there are simply too many to keep inside her; her belly is swollen and stretched and the pain is insufferable. She looks at Jarkko, here to stop her from exactly what she must now do. She’d meant to wait, to do this where he wouldn’t see but that choice is lost to her now. She must take the old man’s sins and make them hers or she must spit them out; and so in the gloom she takes a second gourd from her belt and gulps it down and then vomits up stones and sand into her stolen bucket, all of them, expunging them until every last one is out. The piece of blanket comes last. It sticks in her throat, almost choking her as she retches until finally she pulls it free. The relief is indescribable.

Jarkko stands and watches. She doesn’t see the expressions change on his face as she throws up the old man’s sins but when she’s done she looks up at him. Will he kill her now? At the very least he should make her eat them again. But he does nothing and only looks. Sola spits and washes out her mouth and carries the bucket outside into the sunlight and slumps with relief. She’s vomited blood but only a little. She hasn’t left it too late. She takes a mouthful of filthy water and spits it out again and cleans the stones and tips them into a leather bag and then counts them, one by one against the record in her little book. Then she waits for Jarkko. She can’t run from a man like that and she can’t fight him. She steels herself. He’ll tell her she must eat them. She’ll refuse. Maybe he’ll dare to kill her then, maybe not, but there’s certainly a great deal of other unpleasantness he can give.

The Graved comes and squats beside her. “You meant to do this all along?” he asks quietly. There’s an unexpected sadness to him, that’s all: nothing that speaks of anger or violence.

Sola nods.

The three guards return from inside the house. They have sacks of their own this time. They glance at Jarkko and hurry away and don’t look back.

“Now what?” Sola asks. Perhaps he has the strength to force the old man’s sins back down her throat. If he tries then she’ll bite his fingers to the bone. But she remembers him too, in the night, with the drawn blade in his hand, looking at her with such pain.

Jarkko gets to his feet. “Now nothing.” He walks away.

Sola sits a while longer, waiting, but Jarkko only walks to a corner of the yard and stands, deliberately turning his back to her. When he doesn’t return, Sola slowly gets up. She takes her bag of the old man’s sins and walks inside his house and returns to his room. The Magus is abandoned, shaking in uncontrollable spasms. Behind closed lids his eyes roll. It seems he’s already crossed the veil, that he doesn’t see this world any more, but he’s not quite dead, not yet. Sola leans over him and touches his face.

“One of those bastards you meant to drown wasn’t a boy.” There are no servants clustered around, no weeping women. They’ve all left him. She takes her bag and empties the stones and sand into the old man’s unseeing lap. “Here are your sins. Will someone come to save you? Will someone love you into Heaven?”

No one comes. The manor is empty, soundless but for the songs of birds in the warm summer sky. Sola stares at the dying old man. She feels a fire inside her, a great warmth or release. Slowly she passes a hand over her own face, gags for a moment and retches and spits out a black stone like an apple pip. She throws it down among the rest. The sin of vengeance.

“Burn in Hell you bastard!”

She stays to watch him die. After a time the Magus falls still, his skin fading to the translucent pallor of death. His jaw starts to work, wriggling up and down, and beneath closed skin his eyes pulse and squirm. Their lids sink into his face and a swarm of black beetles bursts from inside him, from his eyes and mouth and ears. They spread across the blanket, over the side of the bed and across the floor, scurrying away into shadows and gloom. Sola watches for a moment and then walks to the door. She closes it behind her and leaves.

Outside in the yard, Jarkko is still there. “I’ll walk you down to Elsporth,” he says.

.

“Dragon! Dragon!” The cry broke the quiet. Lyna froze. She looked up. A few dozen yards away, Gerla stood frozen too. The cry came from further away, from the look-out standing in the long yellow grass at the edge of the forest, close to the line of trees that marked a little brook. If you looked hard enough, on a clear day, you could see for miles from there, on up the gently sloping fields towards the line of hills in the distance that were the moors. There were dragons up on the moors. There was a time when there had been dragons everywhere.

“Dragon!” The lookout was Lyna’s little brother, Pazile, although everyone called him Paz. She could see him now, running up through the grass, lifting his little legs up so high it looked like he was dancing. Paz was nine years old, and in places the grass was taller than he was. Gerla had already started to run, the other women from the village too, all of them bolting deeper into the trees, to the shelter they had waiting for them. Lyna should run too, she knew that, but Paz was her brother and he was only little. It wasn’t fair, when you were nine, to be the last. So she ran towards him, out into the fringes of the grass.

He waved frantically at her. “Lyna! Dragons! You have to run!”

“I’m waiting for you!”

She wasn’t supposed to and they both knew it, but she could see the relief on his face. He was terrified. Paz had never seen a dragon before. Neither had Lyna, not close enough to be anything more than a dot in the sky, but some of the village men had. Dragons had come once, with men on their backs, right to the edge of the forest. The stories of that time were the most terrible stories Lyna knew, of fire and murder, of men and women dragged screaming from their huts and the whole village set on fire. Dragons were death. Them and the men who rode them.

Paz reached her. He clutched at her shirt and bent over, catching his breath. After a moment, he half turned and pointed up at the sky and looked at her, all at once.

“Dragon!” he said.

He had good eyes, that’s why he’d been chosen, but Lyna could see them now. They were coming from the moors, high up in the air, and not just one or two, which was how dragons usually came. No, today there was a whole cloud of them, a swarm. There must have been a hundred, a haze of distant dark specks in the air.

“Come on!” Paz pulled Lyna’s arm. “They’re coming this way!” And he was right, they were coming straight towards the forest. They were miles away, but dragons flew fast. Lyna turned to run.

Lyna’s village was, if it wanted to be, invisible. A man on the ground could walk right through it, and if the ladders to the tree-houses had been pulled up and the trapdoors down to the tunnels pulled down, he wouldn’t even know it was there. There were plenty of reasons why the forest-dwellers would want to hide. When men came, more often than not it was with swords and nets and cages, and they came to take slaves. The worst menace were the snappers, the man-eating lizards that tore through the forest in packs. Too fast to flee, too strong to fight, so Lyna and her kin hid up in the trees, out of their reach and out of their sight, and if a snapper pack came through, that’s where they stayed until the lizards moved on. Dragons, they were another matter. Dragons didn’t come into the forest much, not unless men led them and that hadn’t happened for years. The towering trees, hundreds of feet high and as wide as a house were too large even for a dragon to push down. The canopy above was a single unbroken sea of leaves and branches. A hard place to land and hard to get around, but that didn’t mean that dragons never came, and if they did, they could simply reach up with their long necks and pluck Lyna’s tree-house out of the branches. So for dragons, the village had tunnels. They were old and dark and smelly and hardly ever used, but Lyna’s kin had a long memory, and dragons in the forest hadn’t always been so rare.

When Lyna and Paz reached them, there were still men up on the surface, the village hunters, the handful strong enough and fast enough and brave enough (or stupid enough, if Lyna listened to her mother), to leave the forest and go foraging in the grasslands. They stood together, wary but not afraid, holding their long spears.

“Come on! Hurry!” they snapped at her, then saw Paz. “Was he your watcher?”

Lyna nodded, and when the men smiled, even if it was a grim smile, she knew that that meant everyone had come home. There wasn’t anyone missing, left out there, either lost or hurt or else strayed far enough that they simply hadn’t heard the warning. If there were women left behind, it was these men who would have gone searching.

“There were hundreds,” gasped Paz. The nearest of the men rolled his eyes and cast a glance at Lyna. He didn’t say a word but he didn’t have to – his eyes did it for him: how many really?

“He’s right!” Which wasn’t what they wanted to hear, so Lyna quickly added: “Well, maybe not hundreds, but there were lots, too many to count. They were coming off the moors and they were heading this way!”

The nearest man snorted and pushed Lyna and Paz towards the trapdoor. Lyna scurried down the steps. They were old and made of stone, worn by feet over countless years. All the tunnels were like that, lined with stone except in some places near the surface where tree roots had made cracks and split them apart and sometimes even crumbled them to bits. Where that had happened, the tunnels had been repaired with wooden beams by Lyna’s clan, the people who’d lived in the village here for more time than any of them could count. The stone – that had been there even before. As far as Lyna knew, it had been there when the world was made.

“Is it true?” whispered Paz. “Are the fire-times coming?”

Lyna held his hand and squeezed. Down in the tunnels there wasn’t much light – wasn’t any at all when the trapdoor was closed. “Who told you that?”

“Uncle Bedev.”

The trapdoor closed above them. Lyna had to feel her way down the rest of the steps, but she’d been down here enough times to know where things were. The steps were all the same, down and down, until there was a wonky one that wobbled a bit and then a few steps later they’d come to the bottom; then a passage to the right to get to the big hollowed-out place where everyone simply sat and waited for however long it was they needed to wait. By the time she reached the wonky step, she could hear the murmur of voices. Quiet. In the dark, everyone whispered.

“Uncle Bedev spends too much time out on the plains, that’s what it is. Fire-times?” Lyna laughed. “That’s just stories. Dragons burning the world? That’s silly. Everyone knows that dragons only come with men sitting on their backs and it’s the men who says what’s to burn and what’s not. Dragons, I reckon they’d be nice and friendly creatures if it wasn’t for their riders making them so mean.” The last bit was said for Paz. Secretly, Lyna hoped it might be true too, but no one had ever told a story with a dragon that was nice.

She whispered her way through the darkness and the huddle of villagers until she found their mother and their little brother and settled in beside them, all squashed together. The village was getting too big for the tunnels.

“The fire-times were long ago,” she whispered to Paz. “Not like now. That was when men were fighting men and they’d fly their dragons to war. There used to be great castles, huge things, with walls as high as the trees and thick as houses and towers as tall as mountains, and there were knights with shining silver armour and lances that gleamed in the sun, but all of that was nothing when the dragons came, because they just flew right over those walls and landed inside and they knocked down those towers with the lash of their tails, and they picked up the knights in their shiny armour and squeezed them tight in their fierce claws. Like squishing an egg, it was, when you hold it your fist and you give a bit of a squash and nothing happens and so you clench a bit tighter and there’s still nothing and so its bit tighter still and then squish splat and there’s all egg running over your fingers. Only it wasn’t eggs and bright yellow egg yolk but knights and dark red blood . . .”

“Lyna! Enough!” That was her mother. “You’ll frighten him.”

“Paz stood dragon-watch and he’s seen dragons too. Nothing frightens him now.” Paz gave a little snort of agreement. That was the way it was when you were children. You got bigger and faster and bolder and then one day they set you to dragon-watch and after that they all treated you a bit different, like you were more grown up.

“Still! Enough!”

“It’s just a story,” sniffed Lyna.

“You ask your uncle Bedev what happens when dragons come,” growled a voice in the dark. She couldn’t tell who it was. One of the old men who’d seen dragons close, back when the village had burned in her grandfather’s time.

“People die,” rumbled Bedev. Lyna jumped. She hadn’t heard him come down and settle close by. The hunting men were like that, almost like they could see in the dark.

“Bedev! Don’t frighten Paz,” snapped Lyna’s mother.

“He’s not a boy any more, Lianna. Dragons come, people die. Yes, maybe when the old dragon-knights fought each other then it was like Lyna says, but mostly they don’t fight, they come here, to people like us, and then it’s them in their armour with their swords and their monsters against us with nothing to do but scatter and run. You youngsters, you’d be the lucky ones. They’d take you as slaves to sell to those black-skinned bastards from over the sea. Pazile, they’d chain you to the oars of a galley and whip you every day . . .”

“Bedev!”

“They’d take you too, Lianna. But your aunt, your little brother, all the ones they can’t sell, do you know what they do? They round them up and murder them and then they have their dragons burn the bodies. It’s a smell you don’t forget, not ever, that burning.”

“Bedev! Enough!”

For a while, a silence fell. Then Bedev spoke again. “You want to know what we saw? Little Pazile was right. There were maybe a hundred of them. They were coming this way. And they were fighting. Dragons fighting dragons, even as they flew. I saw a pair of them fall together. It’s all changed out there. Something’s happened. The potion men don’t come any more. We saw their place last time we left the trees. It had been burned. They’re fighting each other again.”

There was thunder in the air the next morning. Dark clouds scurried overhead, barely seen past the canopy of leaves. The sun didn’t shine and the forest floor was cast into gloom. Rain and low clouds meant there wasn’t much chance of a dragon-watcher seeing anything until it was too late, and so Lyna and the other village women stayed away from the edge of the forest. Instead they went the other way, deeper in among the trees. There was plenty of food to be gathered that way too – hamberries later in the year and sometimes they’d work together to scale one of the mighty trees. Took half the village and all the rope they owned to do that, but when they came down again it was with basket after basket of delicious sweet sunfruit. Other times of the year they went looking for the dragonnut trees. This time of year there wasn’t much to be had up in the trees and so Lyna and the women kept their eyes on the ground. There were mushrooms – goldcaps and the like – and if you were lucky, the rare treat of a nest of spider-ants and the sweet syrup they fed to their grubs, if you didn’t mind the stings.

A distant rumble growled above the canopy of leaves. The air was thick and dim. Lyna walked quickly, following trails she’d learned as a child. There were places to go for mushrooms, over by the great caves where a stream twisted its way out from the depths of the forest. She never liked the caves because they were large enough that almost anything could have gone in there looking for shelter and a place to sleep. A bear was one thing, a pack of wolves she might have faced down, but there were snappers out here and nothing faced a snapper down except maybe a dragon, and even then Lyna wasn’t so sure.

There were fallen branches on the trail today, a few small ones at first, then getting bigger, as though there had been a raging storm the night before. The storm was coming right enough but it would be tonight – last night had been still as a mirrorpond; but as she came closer to the caves, she saw what had happened. One of the giant trees had fallen.

No, that wasn’t right – what she was seeing were still branches, but they were the massive branches that sprouted from the tops of the trees, still fifty feet long and as wide as uncle Bedev’s belly.

It started to rain. Under the canopy that didn’t matter much. The trees caught the water. Here and there, fat splats fell around her. She looked up. The canopy was ripped open as though some lightning bolt had been hurled from the sky and smashed through the branches up above. She could even see the scars on the trees, the long bright marks where branch and bark had been ripped away.

Closer still to the cave, the path petered into nothing. The rain was coming down steadily now, the distant thunder getting closer. In front of her, the ground had been ripped to shreds. Fresh earth lay scattered for dozens of yards either side of two great furrows, each as deep as a man and a hundred yards long. A huge gouge had been taken out of the trunk of one of the trees.

A dragon. A dragon on the ground! They’d have to hide in the tunnels for days! Weeks! What would they eat? But that didn’t matter because there was only one thing for it when a dragon came by and that was to hide. She turned back the way she’d come, the first shout on her lips . . . And froze. Back through the trees, fifty paces away, no more, a snapper was staring at her. Long strong legs, vicious sharp claws, all scales and fangs and muscle, bigger and faster and stronger than any man.

She screamed. Turned back and ran. That’s what you did. With a dragon, you hid. With a snapper, you ran and you climbed. She bolted for the caves, for the rocky crags above them. If she could reach them and climb . . . but she couldn’t – as the largest of the caves loomed in front of her, she could hear the ground shaking as the snapper pounded after her, gaining with every step, and she knew it was so close that she could never climb high enough before it reached her and so she went for the cave instead. She knew these caves. There were places she could hide. Nooks and crannies too small for a snapper to reach inside.

She sprinted into the gloom. The air was warm and damp. She didn’t dare slow down, and so she didn’t see the ridge of rock that lay across the flat bottom of the cave. It caught her foot and sent her flying and she screamed because she knew the snapper must be right behind her now and she’d never get back to her feet quickly enough . . . She closed her eyes but the bite didn’t come. When she opened her eyes again, the snapper was standing back at the cave mouth, staring at her. It took a step towards her and then danced nervously back again. Lyna watched it, didn’t dare take her eyes off it as she backed away.

Her hands touched the stone behind her. It was warm, almost hot.

There shouldn’t have been any stone behind her. She’d been coming to these caves since she was a child. She knew them, but how could they change? A rockfall?

The snapper started to come towards her again, slow and cautious steps. Lyna looked frantically around her. The cave was blocked! All the cracks and crevices she remembered, they were gone!

The snapper came on, still strangely wary. It stepped over the ridge that had tripped her. A ridge of stone that hadn’t been there the last time Lyna had come this way.

The ridge moved. She saw it clearly, rising up into the air behind the snapper, a silhouette against the light coming in from the mouth of the cave, slowly slowly lifting off the ground. She screamed again, and as she did, the hot stone behind her quivered and the ridge of stone that was now floating in the air whipped like a striking snake and grabbed the snapper around the neck. The snapper shrieked and scrabbled at the ground, but the thing coiled around it lifted it up now so it was hanging, twenty feet away from Lyna, and now the stone wall behind her was shifting. Lyna jumped away. She didn’t dare run out of the cave because that meant going past the thrashing snapper, but the rocks were moving. They were falling!

The snapper rose higher, and that was when Lyna saw that the moving rocks behind her weren’t rocks at all. They were the dragon. She’d walked right into a sleeping dragon, and the ridge that had tripped her up hadn’t been a ridge at all but a tail, and now the monster was rising up. She could see the shape of it, dark shadows within the gloom, a long neck, the endless tail, the huge head with the opening jaws, fangs as long as her arm, eyes like moons, towering over her.

It’s tail carried the squirming shrieking snapper to its mouth. It bit the monster in two and ate it. Lyna couldn’t move.

I will not eat you, little one, said the dragon. Lyna didn’t know how the dragon spoke – it’s mouth was still full of snapper, but the words were clear as though it had whispered them into her ear. Go. Run away. I do not wish to devour you, little one. The dragon moved again, lowering itself down, settling its head back onto the cave floor. Go! I am dying. Leave!

She bolted for the forest, too witless to even think, but at the edge of the cave, she stopped. Out of reach of the dragon’s tail, she paused. It was a dragon, the most terrible thing in the world, but it hadn’t eaten her. It had saved her from the snapper. And there was something about snappers that every forest girl knew. When you saw one, the first thing you did was look for its friends, creeping around behind you, because there were always more, never just the one. She hovered by the cave mouth, lingering, uncertain what to do. There would be more snappers between her and her home. That was almost sure. And there was a dragon behind her. She sat back against the stone and held her head in her hands.

“I don’t know what to do!” she cried to herself.

I do not wish to eat you, little one. Not today. So go!

“Well the snappers do wish to eat me,” she said. “So no.”

Do not come any closer. I am hungry, little one. As hungry as ancient mountains. My last days are here and it will do me no service to eat you, for I will die nonetheless, but we are as our makers intended, and the hunger cannot be denied for long.

“My name’s Lyna, not ‘little one’.” Lyna sat and shivered. If she didn’t look back into the cave, she could pretend that the dragon wasn’t quite real, that it was something she’d half-imagined, even if she knew that wasn’t true. That made it easier not to be scared of it. The snappers stayed real, though. They were out there. Everyone knew snappers and everyone knew someone who’d been eaten by one. There were plenty of people in the village who’d seen it. The dragon – much easier to pretend it wasn’t real.

I am Irresistible Song of the Wind Through the Waves, not ‘dragon’.

“Are you the dragon that fell out of the sky?”

Yes.

“Why? Why did you fall.”

We fought. My wings were broken and so I fell, and now I die. The dragon must have sensed the twinge of sadness to Lyna’s thoughts. You mourn for me, little one? That is foolish. We are not like you. Already, a new egg awaits me. I will travel through the realm of the dead and find that egg and give my spark of life to the flesh within it and be reborn. Death for us is not as you know it. It is not the end. Save your tears for your own kin, little Lyna. You will need them in the years that are to come.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The Black Moon is coming. Some will try to stop it, but it will come nonetheless. Your kind will find a way to call it. It will be the beginning of the end of the world. All will fall to the dark and the cold. Even us, though we may be the last.

“I saw you. Coming off the moors. There’s never been so many dragons.”

There are more, little one. We are called to war, as we were made. But our guides are gone. Some chose the Black Moon, others do not, but the Black Moon will prevail. It is written in the stars, little one. Soon there will be none of our kind in this land.

“No dragons?”

None.

The dragon seemed to sigh. Lyna turned away from the cave, put her back to its darkness and scanned the forest. High above, the rain was forcing its way through the canopy. The light between the trees was grey and the air damp. She couldn’t see any snappers but that didn’t mean much. Could be anywhere. When they stayed still, they were hard to spot at the best of times, with their stripped skin that seemed to merge with the endless tree trunks. And snappers excelled at staying still.

They are out there, little Lyna. There are four of them.

She jumped. “What? Snappers? How’d you know?”

I feel their thoughts. They are watching you. They know I am here, so they do not come close.

“How do I get home?”

I do not know, little one. Wait until they are gone.

“That could be ages!”

They are patient. It is their nature. They are not like us.

She pulled at her clothes. If there were snappers out there, she ought to be warning people, but if she shouted a warning, it would get lost over the hiss of the rain on the leaves overhead. Or maybe someone would hear something, but they wouldn’t hear what and then they’d come looking and the snappers would eat them.

A rumble of thunder rolled overhead.

They do not like the dark. In that way we are the same. They become sluggish and slow.

“If I wait until it’s dark, I won’t be able to see past my own fingers,” Lyna snapped. “Have you seen what it’s like under these trees at night?”

Yes, I have. I will make a bargain with you if you like, little Lyna.

“What bargain?”

I am dying. If it were not so, I would have eaten you and these snappers too. I feel others of your kind are here and I would have torn their hiding places from your thoughts as I devoured you. But the little death comes. I feel the heat inside me and I welcome it. I feel hunger too, but I do not wish to die alone, little Lyna. Stay with me a while and I will tell you stories of the world as I have seen it. When the darkness is full, I will guide you to your home. Stay with me, little one. I will not forget.

So Lyna stayed where she was, sitting against the mouth of the cave, staring out at the trees as twilight fell, watching in case the snappers came, and sometimes she would ask the dragon if they were still there and the dragon would say yes, they were, but mostly she listened as the dragon told her tales of the world as the dragon remembered it. It told her of the life it had led, this life, filled with fire and death, of all the men it had eaten, the towns and cities it had burned, the fearsome ire that raged within all dragons against the races of men. It told her of awaking, as if from an almost endless sleep, of lifetime after lifetime of dreaming, dull-witted by the potions of the alchemists, the very same men who had once come to the forest and sold knives and arrow-heads to Lyna’s people as they foraged among the plants and mushrooms. It told of a time before, of a creator clad in silver. It told her of the realms of the dragon-kings, of their places of power and what they held, back and back, lifetime after lifetime until the world was much as it was now and men hid in caves and among trees and dragons ruled the skies, and then back further still, back to the beginning, to the war that broke the world, to the Silver Kings, the half-gods, the sorcerers who walked the land and raised mountains with their breath and the war they fought between them that had split earth apart. It told of battles beyond imagining, of creatures like hills that walked, or armies that flowed like rivers across the fields and blackened the skies with their numbers. It told stories of gods that Lyna had never known, stories that made no sense, so strange that she could barely understand what the dragon was saying, never mind perceive any meaning. But she listened because there was nothing else to do, and the last light of the day had yet to fail and there were still snappers among the trees. She listened until it was quite dark. The dragon’s thoughts, she realised, had changed. They were losing their strength. It seemed to forget, now and then, that it was speaking.

“I think I can go home now,” she said, when the air was chilled and it was so dark that she could no longer see her own hand in front of her face. She had to wait before the dragon answered.

Yes.

She walked straight for a bit and then a bit to the right. Each step was slow and cautious, her hands held out in front of her. Sometimes, the dragon seemed to fade right away, but it was always there, in the end.

No. Go a different way. There is a beast ahead of you.

So she went a different way, feeling her way in the night, as good as blind, sure she was going to die, or else walk all night and find she was lost and far from home; and yet the dragon kept its word, and it guided her, and as the first light of the morning touched the trees above and she began to see again, there was her home, there in front of her.

I will not forget, little one, that you stayed.

“You saved my life,” she said, and felt strange and a little silly that she was talking to the empty air. Maybe there were no snappers at all. Maybe the dragon had made them up. She didn’t know. It didn’t really matter, did it? She started to run, towards the tree that was home. Towards Paz and her mother and her little brother and uncle Bedev. Shouting their names.

The Black Moon comes, little Lyna. Do not return to me, for in the end, the hunger will always win and I will eat you. But when I am reborn, when the final battle is done and the earth is dying, I will find you here again and I will bring you a gift.

“Corn cobs! Bring me corn cobs!” She laughed as Paz’s bleary face peered out of the tree-house home above her. Laughed for joy as she saw his face light up.

“Lyna!”

“Paz!”

Good-bye, little one.

The dragon was almost forgotten. Uncle Bedev lowered the ropes and she climbed up and they all held each other, sobbing and laughing.

“We all thought you were dead,” sighed her mother. “There were snappers. Another girl taken. And then you didn’t come back.”

“I hid,” said Lyna. “In a cave. Until it was dark.” And she said nothing of the dragon, for she knew no good would come of such an unlikely tale.

It was the last time any of them saw a dragon. Seasons passed and then one day a Black Moon rose and blotted out the sun and cast the world into shadow. The forests grew dark, even the daylight no brighter than evening twilight. Food grew scarce and the air grew cold and the snappers grew hungry and bold. Many died, until in the end, Lyna and her kin abandoned their village and moved out onto the plains, cold and windswept.

It snowed. None of them had ever seen snow. Food was no more easily found in the failing grasslands than in the forest, yet Lyna found she had a knack of leading her family to places where relics remained, old shelters, safe places. Places from the dragon’s stories.

More years passed. Snow fell every day and for half the year, the land became lost under a blanket of white. Her uncle Bedev died hunting wild horses. Pazile grew into a man, eager yet bitter. And Lyna, who always knew where to go when winter came, became their leader and a warrior too. She took them to others and led them all, from one shelter to the next. To hilltop fortresses, to tunnels that ran forever under the ground, to caves and shelters, all of them under the earth and yet with blessed warmth and light.

“Dragon! Dragon!” The cry broke the quiet at the edge of the snow. Lyna froze. She looked up. A few dozen yards away, Gerla stood frozen too. The cry came from further away, from the look-out standing at the top of the white-crested hill behind them, close to the line of trees that marked a frozen brook. If you looked hard enough, on a clear day, you could see for miles from there, on up the gently sloping snowfields towards the line of hills in the distance that were once the moors.

“Dragon!” The lookout was Lyna’s little brother, Pazile the warrior, whom no one called Paz anymore. She could see him now, running up through the snow, lifting his long legs up so high it looked like he was dancing. Pazile was nineteen years old and in places, the snow was deeper than he was. Gerla was standing still, looking up, the other warriors from the village too, all of them searching the skies. There was no shelter waiting for them. They should run, Lyna knew that, but there was nowhere to go and there hadn’t been a dragon in this world for ten years, and Pazile was her brother and if they were going to burn, they’d burn together. As least, for a moment, they’d be warm.

Pazile reached her. He clutched at her furs and bent over, catching his breath. After a moment, he half turned and pointed up at the sky and looked at her, all at once.

“Dragon!” he said.

He had good eyes, always had, even as a boy and that’s why he’d been chosen, but Lyna could see it now too. It was coming from high up above the moors. One distant dark speck in the air.

“Come on!” Pazile pulled Lyna’s arm. “It’s coming this way!” And he was right, too, it was coming straight towards her. They were miles away, but dragons flew fast.

“No,” she said, and pulled Pazile close to her. “No, we don’t run. Not this time.”

She stayed where she was, with Pazile beside her, as the dragon drew closer. As it spread out its wings and beat at the air and slowed. As it landed on the hillside and a storm of snow swirled around them all.

Little one, it said, and it came closer and closer until it towered over Lyna and she could feel the warmth of it, glowing on her face.

It opened up one of its claws and some dirt trickled to the ground. And then it lowered itself and offered her what it was holding.

The Snow Fox

“Lady Katharine!” Nikolai exclaimed, jumping to his feet as she swept into the room, almost tripping in his haste to pull back her chair. “I am honoured, as always, that you accept my invitation.” Lord Brasil’s steward clapped his hands, and servants swarmed into the room, weighting the small elegant dining table with exotic and wondrous foods, the names of which Nikolai could only guess. He waited patiently until they were done.

“Please, allow me.” He poured Lady Katharine some tea. She glanced at him, sipped, then sat patiently, her arms in her lap, smiling faintly. Nikolai beamed happily and helped himself to a plateful of sandwiches.

“Lord Brasil has found yet another exquisite setting for us, don’t you think?” He looked across the room, through the far wall, to where a sickly green moon glimmered over a dark and golden sea. Sleek black shapes, indistinct of form, slid silently through the sky, extinguishing the stars as they went. Here and there, dim meandering patterns burned through the ocean as though spasms of lightning racked the murky depths. Countless delicate ripples crossed the surface, writing nameless symbols where they crossed, and far off on the horizon, a black column, darker than the night, raked the sky.

“It is strange. I wonder where he finds these visions.” Lady Katharine sipped her tea again and did not reply.

“I shall tell you of my journey here,” said Nikolai, tearing his eyes away at last. “I have come alone, with only the Snow Fox for company. I know you have not seen her, but she is beautiful beyond compare, a pale quicksilver phantom, shifting through the seas as though she could fly if I would but let her. One day you shall sail her, and when you stand at her prow, the waters will bow before you and summon forth a great wave to carry you to the land of your desire. Her timbers are clothed with silver bark that shines at night with a light of its own to guide me to you; her silken sails are gossamer white, woven through with gold, and shimmer in the sunlight. Her figurehead is a fox, slender and graceful, carved silver and white of ice that does not melt.

“For a week I sailed her day and night, not thinking or caring to search for land, for such is her speed that not even the fastest storm could catch her. When at last I sighted shore once more, I found I was in a desolate place, the reek of fire stifling the air. By day the sky was dark as night, by night as black as death; the obsidian cliffs were rent and seared, and the sea churned its discontent. I tarried there awhile to wonder, ’til bloody flames lit up the sky and thunder tore the land, and a great wind blew down from the shore and cast me back to the ocean. For days I rode that wind, and when it died I found myself in a frozen land, where vast shards of ice reached up like great towers of glass to shake free the shackles of the earth. Gliding high above me, great white birds hooted, their mournful cries echoing through the frosty crags. Here I put to shore, at last a safe harbour for the Snow Fox, and wandered through the snow, staring at these frozen spires, wondering what they dreamed with their heads so pillowed among the clouds, until at last I could resist them no more. For a day and a night I climbed, one hand one foot, the ice wall always in my face, until I thought I could climb no further, but by then the ground was a mile below and I had little choice but to go on. I climbed another day, my limbs burning like fire and my face dead with cold, yet when I reached the summit, Oh what reward! Below me clouds arrayed themselves like island mountains in a milky sea, while above, wispy strands of grey scarred the darkening sky. As I sat and stretched my aching muscles, I watched the setting sun, never so bright, colour the sky with fiery bronze. Entranced, I could not bring myself to move until dark was full upon me.” Nikolai sighed. “Alas, I fell asleep before the dawn, and shall never know what majesty I missed there. When at last I awoke, the phantom islands and their ghostly sea were gone, and in their place a pale desert, flat save for the rippling of its dunes. And in the distance sat an implacable grey anvil of thunder, driving like a chariot towards me, whipping a white flurry at its heels. If it had not been for that, I would have stayed on my airy perch for another day and perhaps watched the dawn, but though the storm was many leagues away, I feared for my life and for my ship if I did not descend.” On the horizon through the wall, a brilliant light flared between the flickering moon and the black tower. One by one, the shadows that moved across the sky fluttered and fell silently into the golden sea. Nikolai stared until the light faded, and poured himself another cup of tea. Lady Katharine’s, he noticed, had been left to go cold.

“I left those spires behind me, and sailed the frozen seas yet a month before once more I entered the realms of men. Ah! I will not tire you with my adventures there, though I did not stay long. Suffice to say the sight of my fellows was a welcome one, as was the warmth of their fires and their hearths. I left replete with good cheer, yet barely were the harbour lights extinguished from my sight when I was beset by the raiders of the Taiytakei. By night I heard them on my track, their distant hooting and jeering taunting me across the still waves, their fleet hard upon my back. Wherever I flew they followed on, and though none may outspeed the fox, yet when the morning sun rose, ever they remained at my heels. By day I watched their crimson clippers, by night I heard the rattle of their sail, and still I could not vanish them from my sight, until at last, sat in squat menace upon the horizon I spied another storm. Straight and true, headlong as a wintry stream I sailed for its bleak heart, until the ocean gave way around me and the skies spun like a drunkards reel.

“He who dies can die no more, but he who lives may face death a thousand times. Tossed and torn by the storm, I felt my senses come and go as the maelstrom boiled and the endless waves heaved and hurled my tiny ship across the sky, her sails rent and cast away. For a week or maybe two the mighty winds raged; I saw one of the hounds that dogged me fail, its mast split asunder, and of the others? I can only guess their fate, for when the sea fell silent and life reassured its lingering hold, there was no sight to be had of them.

“I shook down the torn sails and made on with what remained, looking for a friendly shore where I might beach and make more extensive repair. It was not long before I came upon an island, awash with verdant green, and in its centre the tallest of mountains, capped in white, its jagged summit tearing wispy threads from passing clouds. The sea was calm and clear, the sky brilliant and blue, and when I had finished stitching my sails, I swam naked with the fishes, and ran mile upon mile over the creamy sands of the shore, intoxicated by the heady freedom to roam as I wished. Yet as I wandered through the trees, or sat in serenity and watched the gentle waves, ever did I turn my eyes towards that mountain. Hour on hour I stared its dizzy heights, until I knew I could not leave without a part of it in my heart.

“I climbed through wild forests, strewn with great boulders from high upon its jagged face, passed gushing falls plunging through ravines so deep I could not see their end through mist and spray. I drew higher, the slopes grew sharper, until naught but rocks and ravens remained. When I turned back to look from where I had come, I saw only a green ocean of leaves, rolling gently away to the sea. The climb grew steeper still, yet I could not stop, until at last I reached the mighty summit, the sun blazing warm and bright in a field of deepest blue, so high that even the ravens had long since given up their chase. Can you but imagine the feeling, to skate upon the sky, the clouds coiling at your feet? Such freedom! Such Joy!” Nikolai turned, his face radiant with the memory. “Oh Katharine, one day I shall take you there, and we shall fly together.” She returned his gaze, half sad, half wistful. Then she folded her napkin, stood up and walked to the door.

She turned for a moment, a longing smile on her face, but he was gone. She saw only the cobwebs of a house she would never leave, only dust in the space where he was supposed to be, her lover, lost these last ten years at sea.

“Thank you,” she said.