The Empty Sky

The dragons had been hiding in the Void for four thousand years, and not one of them had thought to mention it.

It was Gron who found the way. He had spent most of the long gray season after her return sulking in a corner of the cave, curled like a sulky cat, and Solaia had let him, because the grayness in his hide had not receded and she did not know what to say. One morning he was simply gone. He came back at what might have been dusk, flying low and fast along the shore with his scales dull and his wings ragged, and landed so hard that the glass of the cave floor rang. His eyes were wild.

Mother, he said. There is a sky.

"There's always a sky, Gron. It's the thing we're under."

No. He shook his enormous head. A real one. Blue. With wind. Over the edge of the black cliffs, on the north side, past the place where the Hollowkin do not go. He trembled. And things in it. Flying.

She went at once, with Veyran on her hip and Obsyra pacing behind her. It took the better part of two days. The path wound up through a country she had never seen, broken white stone and ink-black pools, past mile on mile of dead gray grass that crunched underfoot like old bone. The seeds of light grew sparse. The air grew thin. At the end of it, at the lip of a great cliff of glass, the ground simply stopped, and she stood on the edge, and looked out, and forgot to breathe.

It was a valley.

A great hollow in the world's skin, a bowl of green miles across, ringed with cliffs and roofed with a sky of shining blue. A river wound through it, silver in the light. There were trees. There were meadows, and a lake as clear as glass, and along the shore of the lake, smoke rising from a hundred small fires. And through the blue, wheeling and rising and falling on the warm current of the air, so many that she could not count them, there were dragons.

They were every color. They were scarlet and gold, green and blue, bone-white, bronze, black. They were small as a hawk and large as a barn. They turned together in the sunlight like a flock of starlings, and the sound of their wings came up to her across the miles in a long warm rushing thunder, the sound of a thousand banners in a wind.

"Oh," whispered Solaia.

Veyran, on her hip, drew a very long breath.

"Mama," he said, in a small awed voice. "They're real."

…

They called it the Hollow Sky.

She learned that from the first of them to come down: an old bronze female with a scarred chest and a milky left eye, who landed on the cliff in a gust of hot wind and stood looking at the human with her head cocked. She was the size of a house. She had the broken-horn look of the very old. She sniffed, once, long and deep, and the great cavern of her chest shuddered.

Queen, she said.

Solaia could not answer.

Queen, said the dragon again, wonderingly, in the old thundering Sovereign Tongue, and went down onto her forelegs in the dust. Behind her, one by one, the others were landing. They came down on the cliff in a rush of wings, scarlet and gold and green, until the whole lip of the valley was a living wall of scales, and one by one they knelt. She had not seen it since the night of the fall. She had not thought to see it again. A hundred dragons on their knees in the light, with their great heads bowed to the stone, as they had bowed at her crowning.

We heard you, said the bronze one. We heard you scream, on the day of the Roar. Across the gap. Across the years. The milky eye closed. We are the ones who got out. When the collars came, some of us were away. Some of us were fast. Some of us found this door in the dark and fled through it, and the door closed behind us. A long breath. We have waited. We did not know for what.

"Get up," said Solaia hoarsely. "Please. Please get up."

You are the Mother of the Sky.

"I'm a woman who got lost."

All the Mothers are, said the bronze dragon, with great gentleness. That is how we know them.

…

She stayed.

She had not meant to. She had come to look, and to learn, and to leave. But the sky of the Hollow Sky was the first honest thing she had seen in seven hundred years, and she could not bring herself to walk away from it. She took a cave in the cliff above the lake. She moved Veyran into it, with his charcoal and his sticks and his drawings of the house. Obsyra, who had not stirred from the shore in all that time, lifted her great black frame in a long slow spiral and came down at the cave mouth, and the whole valley fell silent, and every dragon in it bowed.

Be easy, said the old black dragon wryly, folding her wings. I am only a grandmother.

They gave her a place at the fire.

It was the loveliest and the strangest of all the things that happened there. The dragons did not make fire as men did; they simply were it, banked and warm. They sat in a circle on the shore of the lake in the long blue evenings, a ring of vast bright shapes, and she sat in the middle of them with the boy on her knee. They told her stories. They told her the history of the Seven Thrones from the viewpoint of the creatures who had flown them. They told her how the First Queen had made her bargain with the Night. They told her, in the low grave music of the old tongue, of the day the silver masks came, and the long dark fall.

She wept at that one.

She was not ashamed. Nobody asked her to be. The dragons were quiet, and Veyran put his hand in hers, and the fire burned, and when it was over, a very young emerald one, no bigger than a pony, crept up and laid its head in her lap.

Mother, it said shyly. Will you tell us a story?

She told them the one her own mother had told her. She told them the lullaby. Under the sky, a throne. Under the throne, a flame. She sang it softly, in the dusk, and as she sang she felt a slow tide of warmth rise in her chest, and she looked up and saw that the whole circle was singing with her, in a low humming undertone, a hundred great throats rumbling the old tune like a river under ice.

Under the flame, a little one,

Who will not be afraid.

The boy on her knee had fallen asleep. His mouth was open. His wings were folded round him like a blanket.

…

"You will teach him," said the old bronze one, a month later.

She had come to the cave in the cool of the morning, and lain down across the entrance with her chin on her forelegs, and watched Solaia grind seeds. It was a quiet hour. The valley was full of the sound of birds. Down by the lake, Veyran was running along the shingle with a pack of half-grown dragons at his heels, shrieking with joy, and every few seconds one of them would flap, and he would flap back, and for an instant both would hang in the air together over the water, a little dark shape and a large bright one, wings spread, laughing.

"Teach him what?"

The Tongue. The true one. The Sovereign. The milky eye turned. He has it already. In his bones. But it is no use to him as a feeling. He needs the words. He needs the grammar of the fire.

"I've been teaching him a little."

A little is a pebble. He needs a mountain. The old dragon sighed. He is not like our young. He is not like yours. He holds two flames in him, and one of them is dark, and a flame with no name is a flame that burns the house.

Solaia put down the stone.

She had known that, of course. She had known it since the cave, since the strange old second heartbeat under her palm. She had watched him, as one watches a pot, and she had been grateful for every quiet day. But she had pushed it down. She had pushed everything down, for years. It was the only way she knew to live.

"What do I teach him?"

How to hold it. The bronze head dipped. How to name it. How to say no. A pause. You know the words. You were the one who taught the first of us, once, when we were young.

"I was nineteen."

You were a Queen.

"I'm not sure I remember how."

You will find that you do. The dragon rose. She stretched her great wings, and the light poured through them, copper and rose. She stood a moment at the mouth of the cave with the sun behind her, and Solaia saw the grief in the slow lines of her face.

Mother, she said. May I say a thing, which is not mine to say?

"Say it."

It concerns the boy.

"I'm listening."

The old bronze dragon looked down at the lake, where the child was laughing.

He asked me, she said, three days ago, where his father was. I said I did not know. He said that you told him he was dead. The eye swung back. I have lived five thousand years. I have seen a hundred wars. I know a lie when I see one told by a good heart. I know what it costs.

Solaia said nothing.

You must tell him, said the dragon, very low. You must tell him of his father. All of it. Not the part that is easy. The part that is true.

"I don't remember him."

Then tell him what you do.

"It isn't enough."

It never is. A faint rumbling sound, which in a gentler creature might have been a laugh. But it is what a child needs. And it is a great deal more than a lie.

She went down to the lake alone, a little later, and sat on the shore and watched her son. He had stopped running. He had found a smooth stone and sat with it in his palm, turning it over, frowning. The wind lifted his black hair. He looked up as she approached, and his violet eyes, with their ash-gray slits, met hers.

She sat down next to him. She did not say anything for a long time.

Then, very quietly, she began.