Kingfisher(58)

Pierce stopped breathing. His skin grew colder than the fog. The fire-breathing cousin of the wyvern was, unlike the extinct wyvern, a myth. It had inspired a rich hoard of tales in early Wyvernhold history, especially those illuminating the prowess of legendary questing knights. It was a fantasy, a symbol, no more than that. At least it should have been.

He heard the dragon’s voice.

Pierce.

He caught a breath, coughed on cold, ash-soured air. The deep voice seemed to resonate from the stones buried beneath the earth; Pierce felt it underfoot, heard it with his bones. The constantly shifting mist frayed just enough to give him a glimpse of an outline paler than the mist: an enormous, crested neck, a lizard’s maw trickling smoky mist out of nostrils the size of platters and ringed with a red, pulsing glow.

Go no farther. You are not welcome in the north.

“I’m— We’re just on our way to Chimera Bay,” Pierce stammered. “Only that far. At least for now.”

No.

He cudgeled his brain a moment, trying to remember any scrap of story that gave him a clue about how to talk to dragons. Mostly, he guessed, there was not a lot of talking, just fire and gore. He gave up, asked baldly, “Why not?”

The mist flamed in front of him; he felt the warmth, smelled the harsh, dry dragon’s breath.

You have chosen. Come no closer. This is my world.

He blinked and recognized the cold encircling him, the soundless, invisible landscape, the baleful dragon: the heart of the matter. Val had seen it, felt it, immediately.

Mistbegotten.

“Mom?” he whispered, and the dragon roared.

That cleared the air, though Pierce, dropped and clinging to earth under the weight of the vast, endless, reverberating thunder, didn’t notice until the sound growled and echoed away into the distance. He raised his head cautiously, opened his eyes, and heard the plaintive cry of gulls, the surge and break of the waves.

“Pierce!” his father called, and he got up, brushing away the needles that clung to him, dropped from the finally visible trees.

He stumbled downhill, saw the limo across the road, waiting in a viewing area overlooking the sea. Val and Leith stood with their backs to the water, trying to find Pierce among the thick, silent ranks of giants climbing up the mountainside.

“I’m here,” he said, reaching the road, still feeling the smoldering glare of invisible dragon between his shoulder blades. Its thunder echoed in his heartbeat, his blood. The mist clung to his skin like the touch of the sorceress’s hand. He wondered if even his shadow had turned pale.

As he crossed the road to the overlook, he saw Leith’s face grow tight, his brows knot. Val’s normally unruffled expression mutated into an odd wariness.

“Mist,” he said for the third time, and Pierce nodded wearily. Leith’s eyes flicked between them.

“What?” he demanded. “What was up there? What happened to you? You look white as a ghost. You’re shivering.”

“Ah—” Pierce said, and stuck. One angry parent seemed more than enough. But this was between the two of them, he remembered; the seeds of the dragon’s wrath had been sown before he was born. “She—ah—she doesn’t want to see us. Any of us. She thinks that’s why we’re travelling north. I must not have explained things very well when we talked.”

Leith took a step closer, his hands tightening. “What did she do to you?”

“She roared at me.”

“She what?”

“Well, it probably wasn’t her. It was her making. Her illusion. I couldn’t see it too well in that mist. But it was huge, and it smelled like burning embers, and it made a noise like a mountain blowing its top.”

“Dragon.” Val’s face had gone pale, but it had lost its tension; his eyes, vivid with sudden comprehension, narrowed at his father. “She still loves you,” he said incredulously, and Leith’s face flamed as though the dragon’s fire had scorched it.

“I doubt that her passion has anything to do with love at this point,” he said brusquely.

Val gazed quizzically at him, looking unconvinced. Pierce, remembering his last evening with his mother, the fierce anger in her that had shaped flames, that had shaped tears, wondered at his brother, who could draw such conclusions out of a seemingly impenetrable mist.

He said uncertainly, “Maybe you should talk?”

Leith spread his arms wordlessly, dropped them. “She doesn’t want to see me. You just said.” He turned abruptly, walked back to the limo, then paused before he opened the door. He spoke again, his back to them. “She told me as much the last time I saw her, before you were born. From what I understand of quests, we go where they lead.” Val opened his mouth, promptly closed it again. Leith added, as though he had taken the unspoken point, “It led us here. Yes. But was that the quest, or was that your mother interrupting it? Let’s get back on the road, see where it takes us next.”

Not far, Pierce saw with disbelief. They might as well be walking, considering how difficult it had become to move just a few scant miles along the road. They had passed through an elegant little resort town with wide beaches and monolithic rocks crusted with sea life wandering in and out of the tide, when the town’s four lanes dwindled again into two, then into none. The limo came to a halt at the end of a long line of traffic curving along the water and disappearing around the next bend.