Icefire (18 page)

The woman smiled. “Sometimes,” she said. Flowing forward, she took the lantern back and placed another small gift in Lucy’s hands. It was a pure white hedgehog spine. “Thank you for the shelter and the food you gave. Now you must bring me one last offering. Close your eyes, child. Let the fire guide you.”

Lucy let her gaze fall onto her palms. A hedgehog spine in one, the icefire in the other. She rolled her fingers into fists.

Then she closed her eyes.

“You’ve got three seconds,” Zanna said. “Tell me where David is or I send the dragon back to the clay. You know I can do it. I quickened this egg. I can petrify it, too.” She lowered her hand until the bright amber glow was breaking against her wavering palm. The dragon baby opened its salivating jaws. So thin was the membrane surrounding it now that its quiet
hrrrs
for freedom continually pricked the air.

“My dear, I’m quite impressed,” said Gwilanna.

“Cut the garbage, witch. Where’s David? Talk.”

“Under the floorboards. Buried. Gone. The boy is no use to anyone now.”

Zanna’s eyes darted about the floor. “You’re lying.”

“Use your powers, girl. A true sibyl can reach out into the underworld — in more senses than you imagine. Dream it. Let your mind cross over. Dream you can see his cold, stiff corpse. His bones crumbling to windblown ash. His lifeblood seeping into the dirt.”

“Stop it!” Zanna shouted as the images began to feed into her mind. A tear broke loose, cutting a strait through her neat mascara. “It’s a lie! He’s not dead. I know it’s a trick!” And she pressed her hand even closer to the egg. This, alas, would be her undoing. The baby, impatient to escape his gloop,
graarked
and pushed up eagerly to meet her. The touch made Zanna leap in fright. In that instant, Gwilanna swept forward and seized her.

She took her by the wrist and twisted her down to a kneeling position. “Ridiculous, love-struck, sentimental
girl. I will crush you like the frail black butterfly you are. You are the one who is playing tricks, hoping to distract me while the idiot cat” — Gwilanna flung out a hand and the scale flew again, almost slicing Bonnington’s ear tips — “tries to take what is rightfully mine.” She squeezed Zanna’s arm until the vessels bulged. Her pin-sharp nails raked the young girl’s flesh. Warm blood burst from three sharp cuts. Gwilanna wiggled her nose and sniffed. “Yes, you have the makings of a powerful sibyl. In another time, I could have taught you much. But harm this dragon? Your sickening sanctimonious charity would never permit you any such
wickedness,
even if you did possess the will.”

“Nnnph,
try this for will,” rasped Zanna, and brought a brick down on the old hag’s foot.

Gwilanna shrieked in pain and threw her rival against the wall. “For that, you will suffer, worse than the boy!”

“I’m not afraid of you!”

“No,” said the sibyl, “but you are afraid of
this….
”

Zanna screamed and put her hands to the crown of her head. Lightning! Her thought waves were turning to lightning bolts. She cried out and rolled into a fetal position, fists pressed hard against her ears.

Gwilanna gave out a contemptuous snort. This was far too easy. The boy, the girl, and the cat defeated (she kicked a clod of plaster at Bonnington’s head and he drop-tailed under a chair for safety), and all that the bears could muster was a blizzard. A blizzard, against the power of the ancients! Pathetic, blubber-chewing, plumped-up oafs. When her work in this house was done she would drive every one of them off their ice. She moved triumphantly toward the egg. A column of moonlight played into the room, lighting the bed like an operating table. The dragon baby made a
graarking
sound and its front paws reached for the everlasting auma of the natural world. “Yes, your time has come,” Gwilanna whispered, and from a fold of her sacking she withdrew what would be the dragon’s first meal: the lock of red hair she had cut from Elizabeth Pennykettle’s head. She held it up to the eyes of the
moon. So pretty. So very pretty. What a pity this particular daughter of Guinevere should have to be emptied of her precious
sap.
She let a strand of hair float down like a seed. It kissed the egg and a bubble appeared in the fragile crust. It broke, with more of a squelch than a crack. The dragon’s left nostril filled the rift. It sucked at the air and its claws tore keenly at the site of the rupture. Within seconds, its snout was poking clear.

“Come, my pet,” Gwilanna leered, rubbing the hair like pirate gold, teasing a spoor across the dragon’s nose. “Find the scent. Just one bite and — ow!” Impertinence! The little monster had nipped her! “The hair!” she snapped. “Eat the hair, you
grike!”

The dragon clicked its teeth.

“Of course, the scale. It must be served upon the scale.”

And she turned toward the window in search of it — in time to see Bonnington on the sill. He had the scale in his jaws, ready to flee.

Gwilanna’s rage was instant. What was it about this
purring dolt? Did it
want
to become a pair of
mules?
How could it dare to try again?

The answer, had she been aware of it, was easy. What the sibyl had failed to remember was the primary function of the dragon, G’reth. The universe had been quite clear on this: G’reth’s task (phase two, wish quotient three) was to aid the return of the scale to its source — that source being the last true dragon, Gawain. Only when this need of the earth was served could the critical part of his wish be granted: the disclosure of the secret of the dragon’s tear. A fall into a basket of ripped-up paper was never going to stop him from completing his mission. So, while Gwilanna had been distracted, he had crept out of hiding and pitched up finally in the corner by the window. There, to his woe, he had come upon the husks of his brave companions: the guard dragon, Gruffen, and the David’s faithful servant, Gadzooks.

They looked in a terrible state, Gadzooks especially, who had frozen trying to write a message. This pushed G’reth into a frenzy of smoke rings. He desired with all
his spark to aid these dragons (and in turn the stricken David), but knew he must keep to his fated path. That had led him to the wounded Bonnington. Closer he’d crept, under the chair where the cat had taken refuge. With a delicate
hrrr,
he’d warmed the cat’s tail. Bonnington had sprung around hissing at first, and only an expeditious dip of his head had saved G’reth’s snout from a savage mauling. Cat and dragon faced each other. Communication would not be easy. Bonnington had minimal dragontongue and G’reth had even less felinespeak. A flurry of signing had followed. If the cat were to take another route — onto the bricks behind the chair, and from there, onto the chair back itself — the leap to the sill was not that great.

And so this simple plan was enacted. While the argument between the sibyls raged on, Bonnington had cleaned the last few stings of glass from his paws, then gone for the scale while G’reth had stood guard. What dreadful, dreadful luck it had been to see Gwilanna turn around at the very last second….

Hrrr-rr-rrr!
cried G’reth as loudly as he could. In
dragontongue he’d shouted, “Down here, whale-breath!” Not the best of slurs, but it had done the trick. Gwilanna’s gaze had shifted away from Bonnington and the cat was gone in a furry flash — G’reth, too, diving under the chair as the sibyl’s black tongue lashed out like a whip, catching his wing and slicing off a minor stabilizing sprig. Now he was afraid. Very afraid. This time the sibyl’s rage would be ruthless. She wouldn’t rest until his fire was quenched. The lash came again, with a spray of sour spittle that drilled small burn holes into his scales. In the name of Gawain, he must think quickly. The tooth. He still had the piece of Ragnar’s tooth. Surely he could use its auma
somehow?

The tongue came again, arriving with such explosive force that he was catapulted backward into a nest of wallpaper, one of many scattered loosely about the floor. Quickly he tunneled through it, using the overlapping strips as cover, emerging on the opposite side of the chair, nose to tail with the dragon Gadzooks. And that was when the idea came. It was difficult and
desperate and it might not work, but it was all he could think to do. The tongue flashed again, lassoing his torso. He winced and clamped his feet to a gas pipe. Just a few seconds. That was all he needed. He stretched toward Gadzooks, wedging the tooth between his pencil and pad. Gwilanna tugged. The copper pipe buckled. G’reth let one leg go. It was burning with pain, but that was not the reason he needed the release. As the angle of his body had changed, it had brought him snout to snout with the writing dragon. He closed the gap between their nostrils … and blew.

A millisecond later he was in Gwilanna’s hands. “Wretched interfering puffler!” she screamed. “I will peel your scales and —” She turned him over and examined him closely. Frozen. Like the others. How could that be? How had he suddenly lost his auma? And what … what was that noise?

She threw G’reth away (he sank into the folds of the long-discarded curtains) and turned her gaze to the quivering ceiling. There was a rumble in the Dragons’ Den. Auma, great waves of it, was returning to the
house. She flashed a glance at Liz. After nearly two days in the world of the ancients, the daughter of Guinevere opened her eyes. Her dry mouth breathed one short word, “Lucy …”

“Eat the hair!” Gwilanna screamed, and dived for the egg. It was empty, wasted like a worn-out soccer ball, the baby it had quietly nurtured, flown. One four-clawed print in the glob of amber goo on Liz’s tummy was the only evidence of any kind of hatchling.

“No!” yelled Gwilanna, in a voice that could have brought the whole house down … or the floorboards ripping up …

With a thunderous crack of wood, a fist appeared from below floor level. Clenched within it was what looked, at first, to be a kind of dagger. It was not a dagger. It was a polar bear’s tooth, curved and yellowed, grown to the size of an adult fang. Gwilanna backed away from it, fear in her throat. Even Gadzooks took a flutter to the wardrobe. It was he who had brought about David’s revival. Woken by the transfer of auma from G’reth, he had taken in everything that dragon
had known and applied his unique brand of dragonfire to it. While Gwilanna had been puzzling over the switch, Gadzooks had flown to where David was concealed and squinted carefully between the boards. A hand was all he’d been able to see; but a hand was all he’d needed. Through a knot in the planking he’d released the tooth. It had bounced and settled in David’s palm. Like a fly trap, the fingers had closed around it. A remarkable change then began to take place. The tooth had grown from a fragment to a fang and the rubble over David had slowly stirred.

Kerrowww!
The floor erupted. David emerged, detritus pouring off his head and shoulders. He looked terrifying, slightly ghoulish even, his brown hair dressed in choking dust; spiders’ webs, long blackened with age, clinging to every lobe and contour; his cheeks a mess of cuts and grazes; his mouth spitting pellets of sand and lime. He rose into a room that was now very different from the one he had left. The auma was overwhelming. Not only had the dragons come back to full
strength, but something was melding their sparks together into a single purging fire. There was no escape for the sibyl Gwilanna. She writhed in terror as the force consumed her and drove her back against the fireplace wall, her arms splayed wide like a pinned-up moth, white fires raging in the orbs of her eyes.

This ordeal was enough for any evil to bear, but the nightmare was only half done for the crone. Now David seized her, pressing the tooth hard up to her throat. He looked into her eyes and knew, despite the burning, she could see and understand. His body shook with a silent anger, mirroring the fury in his voice. “In the Inuit village of Savalik, in a time before I can even imagine, you caused the death of a polar bear cub. This is his father’s tooth.” He touched the point to the skin of her neck. “You turned The People against the bears, beginning a conflict that lasts to this day, all because you wanted the fire of Gawain. Your greed destroyed their world. Guinevere was right to keep the tear from you; Lorel was right to protect her
secret. Would it be so wrong for me to end your pathetic existence,
sibyl?”

“Yes,” said a voice. “Let her go.”

Panting, David tightened his grip. “I can feel the auma of the ice bear Ragnar. He says she deserves to die.”

“David, it’s over. Let her go.” Elizabeth Pennykettle laid a hand on his arm. “Use that and the line of Guinevere ends here.”

Gwilanna gave out a rasping croak. “They need me, boy. Make your choice …”

David had one last push. “Come near me and my dragons again and I’ll leave your blood on this tooth, I swear.” And he pulled back angrily, leaving Gwilanna spluttering for breath.

Lucy hurried in then, carrying the icefire in her hands. She started slightly when she saw Gwilanna, but one tilt of the ice toward the sibyl made her reel like a frightened crow.

“That’s enough now,” Liz said quietly, crossing her
arms over Lucy’s shoulders and hugging her tightly into her body.

Lucy stared hard at her one-time “aunt.” “Go away,” she said, in a voice so small yet so full of menace that Gwilanna, the sibyl, could only obey.

Reverting into her suited clothes, she moved warily toward the door. Defeated, yet still as cantankerous as ever, she scowled at the shell of the suitcase and hissed, “Thieves. You don’t know what you’ve done. This is the beginning, not the end,
Elizabeth.
Come!” she barked at the watching Gretel.

But now there came another blow for the crone. Gretel spread her wings — then lowered them again. She looked at Gadzooks, who had flown to the bed to comfort Grace; then at Gruffen perching on the ledge. (G’reth, oddly, was nowhere to be seen.) Pennykettle dragons: foolhardy, but brave. A strong sniff of dandelion would not go amiss with most of them. This house could use a good potions dragon. She curled her claws and refused to move.

Fury blazed across Gwilanna’s face. “You will be sorry for this,” she ranted. And with one last glower at them all, she was gone.