The Return

The sun was the first thing that frightened him.

Veyran had seen light all his life. He had seen the soft gold glow of the seeds in the Void and the cold white fire of his mother's hands and the warm red heart of a dragon's breath. He had seen the strange blue sky of the Hollow Sky, the one honest sky he had ever known, and he had thought, with a boy's easy certainty, that he understood what a sun was. It was a very big lamp. It stood in the air and shone.

Nobody had told him it would look at him.

They came out of the door in a rush of wind and cold. One moment he was falling through gold, with his mother's hand in his and the old black dragon's wing curved above them like a roof, and the next the gold tore open like paper and the world was there. It was huge. It was blue. It was a bowl of burning air a hundred miles across, and on the eastern rim of it, just clearing the black teeth of a mountain, hung a disc of white fire so bright that he flung up both arms and screamed.

"Veyran!"

"It's looking at me!"

"It's the sun, sweetheart. It's all right. It's just—"

"It's burning!"

"It's not. Look. Look, here—" She was beside him, her arm hard around his shoulders, turning his face aside. "Close your eyes. Slowly. There. Now open them a little. Just a crack. Look at the ground, not the sky. See? It's only light."

He opened his eyes a crack.

The world swam into focus, bright and strange and impossibly large. They were falling, he saw, still falling, in a long slow spiral, through air so thin and cold that his lungs ached. Below them lay a plain of white. It stretched away on all sides, rolling, dazzling, scattered with blue shadows, and at its edge a black mountain rose against the sky with a crack down its spine like a shattered egg. There were rivers in it. There were forests, dark green and smoking in the dawn. There was a long gray line, like a drawn thread, that might be a road.

"That's the ground," he whispered.

"That's the ground."

"It's so far."

"It's not far at all. It's just that you've never seen it from this high before." She was laughing, a little wildly. "Look, Veyran. Look at it all. That's the world."

He looked.

He looked for a long time. The cold wind bit his face. His wings, which had been clutched tight to his sides, shook themselves loose, and caught the air with a sudden jerk, and he felt himself lifted. It was a feeling like no other. It rose through his body from the soles of his feet, a joyful, giddy, terrifying lightness. He spread his arms. The wings opened. And with a whoop that rang off the mountain, he swung out of his mother's grasp and went spinning away into the morning, a small dark shape against the vast pale gold.

"Veyran!"

Let him, said Obsyra.

…

She had not been prepared for it.

She had thought she had been. She had practiced, in the long nights on the cliff, for the moment of landing. She had thought she knew the shape of her own grief. But she hung there on Gron's back in the wind of a thousand miles, with the cold in her eyes and her hair streaming, and watched her son tumble through the bright morning with his arms wide and his voice cracked with delight, and the grief that rose in her was not for anything lost. It was for everything that had been wasted.

Ten years. Twelve. All his life, in a cave. In the dark.

"Gron," she said. "Go after him."

Mother, he is flying very well.

"He is ten."

He is nine hundred and ten, said Gron, dryly, by the reckoning of this place. But he was already wheeling, his gray-scaled wings beating a great slow stroke, and Solaia felt the old creature's joy under her knees, shy and enormous. I will watch him. Be easy.

She leaned forward and pressed her face against his neck.

Mother?

"I'm all right."

You are weeping.

"It's the wind."

Of course, said Gron, with immense tenderness, and said no more.

…

The mountain rose to meet them.

She had seen it from the lake. She had seen it in dreams. But nothing had prepared her for the sight of it close: the colossal, ruined, broken-backed bulk of it filling half the sky, black rock and ice and green, the great scar of the glacier gaping down its flank. A cave opened in its side, a mile across. She felt Obsyra's wings falter.

The old dragon had been silent since the door. She flew beside them, a great black shadow, with her head bowed and her eyes half shut and her wings working in long slow strokes, like a woman walking up a hill. Her scales were dim. The silver in her horns had gone dull as pewter. She did not look at the mountain. She looked straight ahead, at nothing, with an expression of dreadful composure.

Obsyra, thought Solaia. Obsyra, it's—

I know.

You don't have to.

I do. A flicker of the old dry humor. It is only a body, little one. I have been without it a long time. It is very patient.

What will happen?

I shall go home, said the dragon. And the home will wake. A pause. And then we shall see.

She did not say more. She tilted a wing, and swung away from them in a wide curve, and Solaia watched her go, a black shape against the white, until she vanished into the throat of the cave. The mountain gave a long low shudder. A cry went up from it, vast and strange, the cry of a creature drawing its first breath after a very long sleep. Snow poured from the flanks in a thousand sliding sheets, and the air turned to glitter.

And then, rising out of the cleft, enormous, impossible, shaking the white off her like a dog, there came a dragon.

She was the color of midnight. She was the size of a cathedral. Her wings spread across half the valley, and the sun came through them violet. She lifted her head, and the silver in her horns blazed up like lightning, and the roar she gave was the sound of the world beginning.

I am Obsyra! she cried. I am the Sky's! I am awake!

Gron answered her.

He did it without thinking. A great gray bellow tore out of him, ragged and cracked, and the two dragons wheeled together in the morning, black and gray, tumbling and dipping like swallows, while the valley rang. Veyran shrieked with joy somewhere above. And Solaia, clinging to the gray neck with her face turned up and her heart in her mouth, laughed aloud, helplessly, for the first time in five thousand years.

…

They saw the wall at midday.

It came up out of the south like a white line drawn with a ruler, forty miles long, perfectly straight, running along the lip of a vast plateau of snow. Beyond it she saw a mountain, an old dead volcano, terraced from top to bottom with tiers of houses, and a great gray scatter of smoke from ten thousand chimneys. Banners flew from it. Bells were ringing. A tide of tiny figures was pouring out of the gates and down the slopes in a long dark stream.

They are coming out, said Gron.

"They don't know who we are."

I think they do.

She looked down.

They were kneeling.

She saw them as she came in lower, in the full gold light of the afternoon: a vast sea of people on the white slopes below the wall. They were not shouting. They were not cheering. They had gone down on their knees in the snow, thousands upon thousands of them, and they were bowing, with their faces to the ground and their hands spread flat. The banners fell. The bells stopped. A hush came over the whole plateau.

And at the very head of them, on the open ground before the great gate, there stood a single old woman in a gray cloak. She had not knelt. She stood quite alone, with her back straight and her gray head bare, and her hands were clasped at her breast. Even from a hundred feet up, Solaia could see her face. It was seamed and brown and wet, and it was turned up to the sky, and on it was an expression of such naked, shaking, helpless hope that she felt something break in her chest.

Land here, she said.

Gron came down in a flurry of snow.

…

She slid from his back. Her legs, stiff with cold, failed her at once, and she would have fallen if the old woman had not sprung forward and caught her.

"Majesty."

"I'm sorry. I'm— my legs."

"It's all right." The old woman's arms were strong. Her voice trembled. "I have you. I have you."

"Who are you?"

"I am Teodra. Wardmother of the Ashborn." The grey eyes were swimming. "I am the daughter of Kessa's daughter's daughter, nine hundred years removed. I've waited for you since before I could walk."

"Kessa..." Solaia put a hand to her mouth. "She— Kessa's still—"

"She's dust, Majesty. For a long time now." Teodra smiled through her tears. "But she left a message."

She reached into the breast of her cloak and drew out a roll of coarse gray linen, rubbed soft with handling. She held it out in both hands. Solaia took it, and unrolled it, and read, in a thin angry hand she knew:

Welcome home, girl. You took your time.

She laughed.

It came out half a sob. She sat down in the snow, quite suddenly, with the cloth in her lap and her face in her hands, and the Wardmother knelt beside her, and the whole vast crowd around them bent its head. Gron lay down. The wind stirred the banner on the wall, a white dragon on black, with violet eyes. Somewhere above, a boy was shouting.

"Mama!" cried Veyran. "Mama, there's a cow!"

She looked up, still laughing, still weeping, and saw her son come tumbling out of the sky in a cloud of snow, and skid to a halt on the ground a few paces off, flushed and wild and exultant, with his hair standing straight up on his head. Behind him the vast black shape of Obsyra was settling on the plain.

He stopped.

He had seen the people.

He stood quite still, with his wings half-open and his mouth ajar, staring at the silent sea of kneeling forms. He looked at the white-haired Wardmother. He looked at the banner. He looked, at last, at his mother, and she saw a sudden, wary, hopeful understanding come into his face.

"They know us," he said.

"Yes."

"How?"

"I'm not sure." She wiped her eyes. "I think they've been waiting a very long time."

"For us?"

"For a queen."

He took a step closer. He took hold of her sleeve, hard, with a hand that shook. "Mama," he whispered. "I'm not a queen."

"No, sweetheart."

"What am I?"

She did not know how to answer. She took his hand, instead, and rose, and stood in the snow before ten thousand bowed heads, with the sun on her face and her son's fingers in hers. The wind was cold. The mountain was green and silver behind her. She thought of an ash-gray gaze and a lopsided smile. She thought of a bell, ringing, ringing in the dark.

"Teodra," she said.

"Majesty."

"Is he alive?"

The old woman raised her head.

She did not ask whom. A silence fell, so deep that Solaia could hear the beating of her own heart.

"Yes, Majesty," said the Wardmother Teodra, very quietly. "He is."