Points of Departure (25 page)

Tarsia sprang. Landed half-on and half-off the white horse’s broad back, gripping its mane and pounding its sides with her heels. The animal leapt forward—was it by the horse’s inclination or her direction?
She was not sure—toward the prince. The horse reared as she strove to turn it, dancing in place and throwing its head back, startled past the capacity of even a well-trained horse to bear.

Tarsia fought for control, only partly aware of the men who dodged away from the animal’s hooves in the dim light of twilight. She could not see the prince.

A crackling of flame, a scent of sulfur, and the
mountain was no longer dark. Small thief—she had never dabbled in magic, never met a dragon. If she had imagined anything, she had imagined a lizard breathing fire.

A lightning bolt, a fireworks blast, a bonfire—but it moved like an animal. Where it stepped, it left cinders and when it lifted its head she stared into the white glory of its eyes. A sweep of its tail left a trail of sparks.

Half-flame,
half-animal—perhaps more than half-flame.

She could see the prince, standing in its path. The child of fire opened its mouth and for a moment she could see the jagged lightning of its teeth.

“Child of fire,” Tarsia called to it, “if I free you will you lead me to my mother?”

The crackling warmth assented with a burst of heat and a flare of flame.

Tarsia’s heart was large within her and she
was caught by confusion—burning with shame and stung by betrayal.

She saw the prince through a haze of smoke and anger.

The coins she had stolen from him were in her hand and she wanted to be rid of them and rid of him. “I give of myself to you, child of fire,” she said, and hurled them into the flames. Three points of gold, suddenly molten.

The heat of her pain vanished with them. She burned
pure and cold—like starlight, like moonlight, like a reflection from the heart of an icicle.

The dragon beat his wings and she felt a wave of heat.

He circled the mountain, caught an updraft and soared higher. His flame licked out and lashed the granite slope beneath him before he rose out of sight.

In the sudden silence, Tarsia fought the horse to a standstill. The prince stood alone by the
cave. The world was tinted with the transparent twilight blue of early evening in the mountains, touched with smoke and sprinkled with snow.

“You didn’t tell me you wanted to free the winds,” Tarsia said. Her voice still carried the power it had had when she spoke to the dragon. “You didn’t tell me you were a prince.”

“I could only trust you as much as you could trust me, daughter of the wind.”

“Ah, you know.” Her voice was proud.

“I guessed. You freed the undine,” he said.

“Had you planned to use me to destroy my mother?” she asked. “That won’t work; prophecy or no. I’m here to help my mother, not to destroy her.” She urged the horse up the canyon, following the mark left by the dragon’s fire.

She did not look back.

Up the mountains, following the trail of burned brush and cinders,
kicking the horse when it stumbled, urging it to run over grassy slopes marked by flame. The moon rose and the horse stumbled less often. Alpine flowers nodded in the wind of her passing. On the snowbanks, ice crystals danced in swirling patterns.

The towers of the Lady’s castle rose from the center of a bowl carved into the mountain. A wall of ice rose behind the towers—glacial blue in the moonlight.
The ice had been wrought with tunnels by the wind and carved into strangely shaped pillars. Tarsia rode over the crest of the ridge and started the horse down the slope toward the gates when she saw the giant by the towers.

She felt the strength within her, and did not turn. As Tarsia drew nearer she saw the figure in the ice wall—the slim form of the undine. She smelled the reek of sulfur and
the ice flickered red as the dragon circled the towers.

The gates had been torn from their hinges. The snow had drifted into the courtyard. The stones had been scorched by fire.

Tarsia pulled the horse to a stop in front of the grinning giant. “So you’ve come to finish the job,” he said.

“I have come to see my mother,” Tarsia answered, her voice cold and careful.

“I hope you know more than
you did when I talked to you last,” said the giant.

“I have come to talk to my mother,” she repeated. “What I know or what I plan to do is none of your concern.” Her voice was cold as starlight.

The giant frowned. “Your mother’s men have fled. Her castle is broken. But still she holds the winds in her power. She stands there where we cannot follow.” The giant gestured to the tallest tower. Tarsia
noticed that the wind had scoured a bare spot in the snow at the tower’s base. “Visit her if you will.”

Tarsia left the white horse standing by the tower door and climbed the cold stairs alone. She could feel a breeze tickling the back of her neck and tugging at her clothes. She was cold; so cold, as cold as she had been the morning she stole the loaf of bread.

A slender figure was silhouetted
in the doorway against the sky. “So you have come to destroy me,” said a voice that was at the same time silky and sharp.

“No,” Tarsia protested. “Not to destroy you. I came to help you.”

She looked up into the gray eyes. The Lady was as beautiful as Tarsia’s vision: slim, gray-eyed, ashen haired, dressed in a gown as white as a cloud. In her hand, she held on leash four hounds. They were silver
in the moonlight and their bodies seemed to shimmer. Their eyes were pools of darkness and Tarsia wondered what the winds of the world thought about. Where would they wander if they were not on leash? The breeze tugged at her hair and she wondered why they needed to be bound.

Tarsia stared into the Lady’s eyes and the Lady laughed a sound like icicles breaking in the wind. “I see myself in your
eyes, Daughter. You have come to help.” She reached out and touched the girl’s shoulder, pulling the young thief to her. Her hand was cold—Tarsia could feel its chill to her bones.

The wind beat in Tarsia’s face as she stood beside the Lady, looking down at the giant and the snowbank, silvered by moonlight. The dragon swooped down to land nearby and the glow of his flames lent a ruddy cast to
the snow.

“We are above them, Daughter,” said the Lady. “We don’t need them.”

Tarsia did not speak. Looking down, Tarsia saw the piece of chain still dangling from the giant’s arm and remembered wondering why he had been bound.

“You are waiting for the coming of the one who will destroy me?” called the Lady. “You will wait forever. Here she stands. My daughter has joined me and we will be stronger
together than I was alone. You will be cast back to your prisons.”

The dragon raised its fiery wings in a blaze of glory. The giant stood by the gate, broad face set in a scowl. The undine flowed from one ice pillar to another—her body distorted by the strange shapes through which she passed.

“All who have risen against me will be chained,” said the Lady.

“That need not be,” said Tarsia, her
voice small compared to her mother’s. Then she called out to the three who waited, “Will you promise never to attack us again? Will you vow to—”

“Daughter, there can be no bargains,” said the Lady. “No deals, no vows, no promises. You must learn. Those who betray you must be punished. You have power over them; you cannot bargain with them.”

The Lady’s voice gained power as she spoke—the cold
force of a winter wind. Not angry, it was cold, bitter cold. Like the bitter wind that had wailed around the towers of the city—alone, lonely, proud. Like the gusts that had chilled Tarsia when she slept on the city wall. Like the chill in the dungeon when she was chained and unable to escape.

Tarsia looked at the hounds at her mother’s feet: shimmering sleek hounds with eyes of night. Why must
they be chained? She looked at the Lady: sculpted of ivory, her hair spun silver in the moonlight.

“Go,” Tarsia told the hounds. “Be free.” The words left her body like a sigh. And the power that would have been hers, that had been hers for a time, left her with the breath. With her sharp knife and an ease born of a magic she did not understand, she reached out and slashed the leashes that held
the hounds. Beneath her, the tower trembled.

The hounds leapt forward, laughing now, tongues lolling over flashing teeth, sleek legs hurling them into the air, smiling hounds looking less like hounds and more like ghosts, like silver sand blown by the wind. The Lady’s hair whirled about her. She lifted white arms over her head, reaching out to the faraway moon. Tarsia watched and knew that she
would never be so beautiful, never be so powerful, never would the winds heel to her command.

The tower trembled and the scent of sulfur was all around and crystals of snow beat at Tarsia’s face. She felt herself lifted—or thrown—and caught and tumbled like a coin through the air.

Somehow, someone shut out the moon and stars.

A scent of a charcoal fire—damp dismal smell in the early morning—and
… damn, she thought. Will I never be free of this? She forced her eyes open.

“You’re awake,” said the prince. “How do you feel?”

She had been angry, she remembered. And she had been cold with a frozen bitterness. Now she felt only an emptiness where once the power had dwelled within her.

She felt empty and light.

She looked back at her mother’s castle. A ruin: scorched stones marked with the
handprints of the giant, dusted with snow and tumbled by the wind. The ice had crept over the ruin, cracking some stones. Tarsia shivered.

She struggled to her feet and stepped away from the castle, toward the village. Ahead, she could see snow crystals whirling on the surface of a drift. The grass around her feet shifted restlessly in the breeze. She looked at the prince and thought of all the
things that she wanted to explain or ask—but she did not speak. The wind flirted with the hem of her skirt and tickled the back of her neck.

“I’ll take you with me to my land if you bring the Winds along,” the prince said. His gaze was steady, regarding her as an equal.

“I can’t bring them,” she said. “I’m not their mistress.”

“They will follow,” said the prince. “You’re their friend.”

The
breeze helped him wrap his cape around her and the winds made the flowers dance as the prince and the thief rode away from the ruins.

T
HIS IS THE STORY
of how Lucy, the fireborn, became the North Star. It happened last month.

(What do you mean—the North Star was there the month before last? I’ll bet you believe in dinosaurs too. Take my advice. Don’t.)

I’ll start the story in an Irish pub in the heart of New York—a pub full of strangers and dark corners and the smell
of good beer. Beer had seeped into the grain of the place and you could scarcely get away from the scent, any more than you could get away from the sound of laughter and the babble of voices. The locals were puzzled by the strangers in their pub, but the Irish have always recognized the fey. The fireborn and the shadowborn are fey without a doubt.

It was a party and Lucy was there. Of course
she was there: Lucy always found the parties or the parties found Lucy, though sometimes it was hard to say which.

Lucy was fireborn and a bag lady. No sweet-lipped heroine she. A chin like a precipice, a nose like a hawk, a voice like a trumpet, and eyes of a wintery blue.

Lucy was charming the bartender, asking him for a full pint measure, rather than the half-pint he usually drew for a lady.
The rings on Lucy’s battered hands caught the dim glow of the lights. Lucy herself glowed, just a little, with stored radiance. A glitter from her buttons, a sheen from her gray hair. Her eyes sparkled with the light of distant stars.

She was explaining to the barkeep with a straight face, “… but you can see for yourself that I’m not a lady.”

The barkeep grinned. “So tell me who you all are
and what you’re all doing here.”

“We’ve always been here,” she said.

“In my pub?”

“No—but around and about. Under the city and over the city and such.” She waved a hand in a grand gesture to include the world. “Everywhere.”

The barkeep nodded. It was difficult to disagree with Lucy when she fixed you with her blue eyes. He drew her a pint.

I will tell you a little more than Lucy told the
barkeep, just so you’ll be satisfied with the truth of it all. Lucy and her friends are the people who run the world. Often people confuse them with bums, hobos, and bag ladies.

People don’t know. Lucy and her friends are the people with the many small-but-important jobs that you know so little about: the man who invented ants; the strange-minded dark-dweller who thought that boulders should
be broken down into sand and sand shaped back into boulders again; the woman who puts curious things in unlikely places—like the gold lame slipper you saw by the road the other day.

Some say that Lucy and her friends are gods and some give them names like Jupiter, Pluto, Mercury, Diana. I do not agree. They are people—longer-lived and more important people than most, but people nevertheless.

Lucy took her beer and drifted away from the bar. She wandered—talking to people she knew and people she didn’t and people she might like to know. She drifted toward a dark corner where she heard a voice that interested her. And so, she met the man in the shadows.

A cap like a ragpicker, boots like a rancher, a shirt with holes it is better not to discuss—he was one of the shadowborn. No matter
what you have heard, they are not all bad, these shadowborn. Not all bad, though their minds are a little twisted and their bones are in the wrong places. Sometimes, they are very interesting people.

He had a nice laugh, and many a meeting has been based on no more.

“Hello,” said Lucy to the laughter in the darkness. “My name’s Lucy.”

“I’m Mac,” he said.

“And what’s your excuse for being here?”
she asked.

He laughed again—an interesting chuckle, more interesting because it held a hint of shadow. “I’m in the business of inventing the past and laying down proof that it really was.”