The Door Opens

They decided to go on the night the water in the lake turned to glass.

It was Obsyra who first noticed. The old dragon had been sitting at the lip of the cliff for three days, motionless, with her great head turned north and her eyes half closed, in the way of one listening for a sound too faint for ordinary ears. On the morning of the fourth, as the pearl light came up, she said, Little one, and Solaia, who had been braiding Veyran's hair beside the cave, put down the comb and went to stand beside her.

The lake was still.

It was not frozen. It was not even cold. It lay in the hollow of the valley like a plate of black glass, perfectly flat, without a ripple, and in its depths the sky was reflected clear to the last cloud. A single leaf lay on it, motionless, a green scrap, as if painted there. Along the shore the reeds stood stiff and silent. Not a bird sang.

"What is it?"

The edge of something. The old dragon's voice was very quiet. Listen.

She listened.

At first there was nothing. Then, very faintly, from somewhere beyond the cliffs, beyond the sky, beyond the thin curved shell of the world itself, she heard it. A sound like a distant bell. A single clear note, low and tremulous and endlessly patient, rising and falling like the breath of a sleeper.

It was a name.

It was the name she had lost. She heard the shape of it and could not grasp it, as one hears the shape of a word in a language one used to know. But the note was warm, and desperate, and so unmistakably hers that she put a hand to her throat.

"He's calling me," she said.

Yes.

"How long has he—"

Nine hundred years, give or take. The black head turned. It has been rising for some months now. I think it is the only thing in the world loud enough to carry. That, and the mist.

"The mist?"

You did not know? A pause. Every time you reached, little one. Every time you pulled at the thread. A little of this place went out through the hole you made. It is the leakage of the Void. It is the grief of a thousand forgotten things. The great eye closed. The Hollowkin were not the only ones who needed a door.

She stood very still.

"I did that."

You did not mean to.

"I made the Pale Mist."

You made a wound, said Obsyra, gently. And a wound weeps. It is what wounds do. She laid her head on the stone. But a wound may also be closed, if one has the courage. That is why I think it is time.

…

The dragons gathered on the cliff at dusk.

They came from the whole length of the valley, from the caves and the meadows and the high nesting-ledges, until the lip of the Hollow Sky was a living wall of wings. They did not speak. They stood and settled, one by one, in their scarlet and gold and green, and looked at the human at the heart of them, and her small dark son.

She had thought a great deal about what to say.

She had practiced it, lying awake. She had composed it to the stars. And now, standing in the glow of ten thousand eyes, with the silver light on her face and Veyran's hand in hers, every word of it went out of her head.

"I'm leaving," she said.

It came out much smaller than she had meant.

A long rustle went along the cliff.

"I'm sorry. I should have said it better. I've been thinking about it for such a long time." She drew breath. "I came here by accident. I fell through a hole in the world, and you took me in. You gave me a fire and a roof and a family. You let my son grow up in the sun. I will never, in all my life, be able to repay it."

There is nothing to repay, said a voice from the crowd. It was the young emerald one, the one who had laid its head in her lap. It was larger now. We are the Sky. You are the Mother. It is the law.

"It isn't a law. It's a kindness."

Is there a difference?

"I used to think there was." She smiled, though her eyes were wet. "I'm not so sure now."

She looked out over them. She saw the old scarred reds and the shy young blues, the matriarchs with their milky eyes, the half-grown ones with their wings still too large. She saw the place on the shore where the ash of the bronze dragon had been strewn, and the green blade of grass that had come up there, a little taller each year.

"I want to come back," she said. "When it's done. If I can. But I don't know if I can, and I don't want any of you to wait. I want you to live. I want you to fly in the sun and raise your young and be happy, whether I'm here or not. That's all."

She stopped.

For a long moment no one moved.

Then the old green dragon at the center of the cliff, a vast mossy matriarch with a torn ear and a deep, slow, creaking voice, lowered her head until her chin touched the stone, and said, in the Sovereign Tongue, in the ancient formal cadence of a vow:

The Sky is yours, Mother. And you are the Sky's. Go and do what must be done. We shall keep the hearth.

One by one, the others bent their heads.

…

They said their farewells in the cold gold hour before the light gave out.

She went from one to another, with her hand on their scaled brows. She did not say much. There was little to say. A word of thanks. A promise. A kiss for the emerald. The Hollowkin, who had followed her up the long path from the lake, stood in a silent line at the back, and when she came to them, the tallest, the one who had given her the bowl of water, stepped forward and laid something in her hand.

It was the button.

She had not known it was missing. She had left it in the cave, sewn into the lining of her old gown, and she had not looked at it for years. It lay in her palm now, small and brown and chipped, with its two holes.

"It... is yours," said the Hollowkin, in its slow dry voice. "She... wished... you to... have it."

"She?"

"The small... one." The faceless head turned toward the dark. "She... is gone. Last... winter. But she... said... to give it... back. When... you went."

Solaia closed her fingers. "Thank you."

"We will... remember." A long pause. "As much... as we can."

She put her arms round it.

She had not thought she would. It was thin as a bundle of reeds, and cold, and it smelled faintly of dust. But she held it, and after a moment, hesitantly, awkwardly, it lifted its long arms and returned the embrace, and they stood together for a long moment in the gold light, with the dragons silent around them.

"Be well," she whispered.

"Come... home," said the Hollowkin.

…

The door opened at midnight.

They went to the shore of the lake, to the place where the black glass lay flat as a mirror. Solaia stood at the water's edge, with Veyran on her right and Gron on her left, and Obsyra, vast and dark, rising behind them like a wall. The seeds of light drifted overhead. A hush had fallen on the whole valley. The dragons stood in a ring around the lake, a thousand of them, silent, bright, waiting.

"Mama," said Veyran. His voice shook. "I'm scared."

"So am I."

"What if it doesn't work?"

"Then we try again."

"What if it does?"

She looked down at him. He had grown tall; he came now to her shoulder. His wings, folded at his back, were the length of a man. His eyes, violet and gray, were wide and dark and bright. She took his hand. It was warm and a little damp, and his fingers closed round hers with a fierce unconscious strength.

"Then we'll go and meet him," she said. "Together."

"And if he's a monster?"

"Then we'll find out what kind."

He gave a shaky laugh. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." She squeezed his hand. "Are you ready?"

He drew himself up. He looked, for an instant, so exactly like his father at the foot of a stair, with his chin up and his shoulders square and his terror locked behind his teeth, that the breath caught in her throat.

"Ready," said Veyran.

She lifted her free hand.

The words came out of her in a low warm stream. The Seven Words of Welcome. The Nine of Restraint. The Twelve Names of the Door. They were old words, older than the Throne, older than the Church, the words the First Queen had spoken when she made her bargain with the Night. She felt them rise from the floor of her heart, one by one, into the air above the lake.

Veyran spoke with her.

His voice was clear and high and rang like a bell. It joined hers at the second line, and the third, weaving through the old syllables like a thread through cloth. She felt the power in it, the dark and the light, twined in the boy's throat, and she closed her eyes and let it carry her. Behind her, Obsyra drew breath. The deep black thunder of the old dragon's voice came in beneath them, steady and vast, the bass note of the world.

Then Gron joined, and the sky rang.

The lake split.

A line of white fire ran across it from shore to shore, and the glass buckled and curled back, and from the crack a column of light went up, straight and clean, into the dark. It rose and rose. It opened like a flower at its crown. And through it, small and clear and very far, she saw a night sky she knew: cold stars, a black ridge, the long pale line of an ice-capped range under a waning moon.

She saw a mountain.

It lay along the northern horizon, huge, dark, silent, with a glacier cracked down its spine and green creeping up its flanks. A cave yawned in its side. She had seen it before. She had flown over it in a dream. She knew it as one knows the face of a friend who has died.

Home, breathed Obsyra.

The great black body shuddered. A long low sound went out of her, half sob, half song, and she folded her wings and bent her neck and waited, as a creature waits at a door she has not seen in nine hundred years.

It waits for us, she said. My bones. My mountain. It has waited all this time.

"Obsyra—"

I know. The old eye turned. I know what it will cost. Do not say it, little one. Let me have the moment.

Solaia put her hand against the dragon's cheek.

She turned to the boy.

"Together," she said.

"Together."

They walked into the light.