The Strange Child

Veyran learned to fly before he learned to walk, and he learned to walk only because his mother was tired of retrieving him from the ceiling.

It happened in what the Hollowkin called the second turning, which by the world's reckoning was a handful of days and by Solaia's own was nearly a year. She had stopped trying to make the two agree. She had learned instead to count by his teeth. There had been one tooth when the third storm passed, and four when the Pale Mist crept up the shore, and by the time he first said her name in the human tongue, there were enough that he bit her with real authority.

He was a small, grave, black-haired child with the Aldren jaw and an expression of permanent calculation. He did not cry often. When he did, the air changed. It happened the first time on a quiet afternoon, when he stubbed a bare toe on the black glass and sat down heavily with his lower lip thrust out, and Solaia, who had been scraping a pot in the next chamber, dropped it and ran. The cave was full of Hollowkin. All forty of them, tall and gray and soundless, were weeping.

They did not make any noise. The silver tracks ran down their wax faces in silence. They sat with their hands in their laps and their eyes turned inward, looking at nothing, and one of the oldest was shaking from head to foot like a leaf. Even Gron, in his corner, had drawn up his legs and lowered his great gray head, and she could feel through the stone the long deep grief of a dragon who does not know why he is grieving.

In the middle of them sat the boy, red-faced and indignant, holding up his foot.

"He didn't do it on purpose," she said, afterwards, to Obsyra.

No. That is the trouble. The old dragon's voice was careful. He does not push it out. It simply goes. He feels, and everything near him feels it too. It is a gift of the Queens of the Sky, but it was never meant to come so young. And he has the other thing in him, besides. The Night.

"Does it hurt him?"

Not yet. A long pause. Not as it will.

She picked him up. He weighed more every day. He put his arms around her neck with a satisfied sigh and his small hot cheek against her collarbone, and the weeping in the cave stopped at once, as if a hand had passed over it.

"Mama," said Veyran, into her hair, "that hurt."

"I know, sweetheart."

"The big gray people were sad."

"They felt it with you."

"Why?"

"Because they're kind," said Solaia, and kissed the top of his head, "and you're very loud."

He considered this, with the air of a magistrate. Then he smiled.

Outside the cleft, the snow that had been falling for seven weeks, thin and silent, out of a sky that had no business producing it, stopped.

…

She never got used to the wings.

They had come at the end of the first year, two small tight buds between his shoulder blades that she had mistaken for a rash. By the second they had unfolded: a pair of dark fans, no bigger than a hand each, covered in a down as fine as a moth's. They were violet at the root and black at the tips. They did not look as though they could lift a cat. But he flapped them, constantly, in his sleep, at meals, in the middle of her instruction on the Long Tongue, and once, on a day when she had turned her back to hang a cloth, he lifted off the floor of the cave and rose six feet into the air with a look of mild surprise, and drifted gently upward until his head knocked the roof.

"Veyran!"

"I'm flying," he informed her, from the ceiling.

"You're stuck."

"I'm flying and stuck."

Obsyra had to fetch him down. The old dragon did it with a wingtip, plucking him from the rock like a ripe fruit, and set him on the floor, where he lay giggling, and the whole cave shook with the sound. It was a bright, hiccuping, irresistible laugh. It rolled out into the Void, and the seeds of light turned toward it. A strip of pale rock on the shore, which had lain bare since before the Hollowkin came, put out a single crack and a single green blade.

Solaia stood very still, with the cloth in her hands, and looked at that blade for a long time.

"He's making things grow," she said.

He is making things remember, said Obsyra. That is the same, here.

"Is that a good thing?"

The dragon did not answer for a while. When she did, her voice had the careful flatness of a woman choosing her steps on ice.

It is a power, she said. I do not know that it is good or ill. I know that I have lived long, and I have not yet seen a power that did not cost its bearer something. And I know that you must teach him to hold it. For when it comes out of him in anger...

She did not finish.

She did not have to. Solaia had seen the red bolts on the Ridge. She had seen what a man's rage could do when it was fed by a god's.

…

"Mama," said Veyran, on a day she could not afterwards place, "where is my father?"

He was sitting on the floor of the cave with his legs crossed, in the clean rough tunic she had made for him out of the lining of her ruined gown. He was perhaps three, by his own scale, which meant he had been alive for a little over nine hundred days and had grown as quickly as nine hundred weeks. His hair had grown out thick and wild. He had been drawing in the dust with a stick, and he had drawn a house: a square with a pointed top, a window, a door. Beside it he had drawn a dog.

She looked at the dog for a long time.

"Where did you see that?" she said.

"I didn't see it. I knew it." He frowned. "It was in my head when I woke up. Is it a real house?"

"I..." She sat down opposite him. The glass was cool under her. "I don't know. I think it might have been. Once."

"Whose?"

"I think it was supposed to be ours."

"Yours and his?"

She said nothing.

"Mama." He put down the stick. It was a gesture so adult, so grave, so exactly her own, that something in her chest turned over. "Where is he? The other children's fathers are— no. They don't have any. The gray people don't have any." He flushed. "But I think I'm supposed to have one. I can feel it. It's like..." He put both fists against his sternum and pushed, frowning. "It's like a thing that is shaped like a door but doesn't open."

She stared at him.

There was a name behind that door. There had been, for three years, and she had gone on throwing herself against it every morning of her life. She had said the name aloud at waking, the first week, and the Void had eaten it. She had written it on the wall of the cave in charcoal, and found, one morning, a row of strange signs she could not read. She had whispered it to the baby. She had sung it. It had not stayed.

She knew he had loved her. She knew that, certainly, as she knew the color of the sky. And she knew, in the cold level place where she kept her facts, that she had left him in the ash because the thing inside him had reached for this child.

She also knew what she could not say to a three-year-old with his father's eyes.

"Your father," she said, slowly, "was a man who did a brave thing, and a terrible thing, on the same day. He is a long way from here. Further than anyone could walk."

"Is he sad?"

"I think so."

"Is he coming?"

"No," said Solaia.

It came out clean. It came out in a voice she did not recognise, a flat, final, brittle voice. She heard it hang in the air of the cave. She heard it travel out into the Void and strike the seeds of light, and the little worlds in them tremble.

"Your father is dead, Veyran."

The boy sat very still.

"Oh," he said at last.

"I'm sorry."

"It's all right." He looked down at the dust. His small mouth quivered once, bravely, and was still. "I thought he might be."

He picked up the stick. He drew a line through the house. Then, with great care, he drew another line through the dog, and sat looking at the two small crossed-out pictures, with his chin on his knees.

The cave was very quiet. Even Gron, in his corner, did not stir.

She became aware that someone was watching her.

Obsyra had lifted her head. She lay on the far side of the cleft with the great black coils of her neck folded under her chin, and she was looking at Solaia with one violet eye, vast and still and unblinking, as she had looked at her on a night of fire when she had said, Sleep, I will keep the door. She did not speak. She did not need to. The eye said it all.

You do not know that, it said. You do not know it at all.

Solaia looked away.