Burn(34)

“Others know this about you. It has been foretold. They believe that if they can stop you at the precisely correct moment, then the prophecy will be averted. And war will be upon us, men and dragons finally unleashed. This is why the assassin comes for you.”

“He wants war?”

“They do. He himself may not even know. The prophecy suggests he might believe the opposite, which would give his mission a holy imprimatur of peace. If so, he would be coming as a religious fanatic, the most dangerous lunatic of all.”

She crossed her arms against the cold. “So what do I do then?”

He shifted from foot to foot. “You will know.”

She glanced back up at him, realizing. “Oh, my God,” she said. “You don’t know either.”

The plow might do it. It was old, but it had been built to last, being mostly iron. Dragonhide was notoriously tough, but the plow could break it, if there was any way to get it moving fast enough. There was an old belief, possibly not more than a folktale, that if you rammed a dragon in the exact right spot, their fire-generating organ would burst, killing them from the inside. There were absolutely no authenticated dragon deaths by this method, but Gareth had put idle thought into how he might tie the plow to the front of his truck.

This new letter, though, told him differently. Apparently, he would have to poison it. That’s what had been delivered today. Three large bags labeled “fertilizer” that weren’t fertilizer at all. The letter told him it was a chemical that mixed violently with that same fire-generating organ and, in sufficient amounts, would corrupt its bloodstream, killing the beast. As dragons were sometimes known to die (on the rare occasions that happened at all) of a similar condition on their own—something like a human having a heart attack—there wasn’t much chance of a human action behind it being uncovered.

The letter suggested slaughtering a pig and filling its stomach with the “fertilizer,” then feeding it to the dragon, hoping it would swallow it down like dragons tended to do with their food. In order to throw off suspicion, the letter suggested, he should slaughter all three of his pigs as if they were the ones who’d been poisoned, leaving the fertilized one as the second.

Such a clear plan. It might even work. Sarah would be devastated at the loss of Bess, Mamie, and Eleanor, but with five thousand dollars in the bank, he could buy as many more as she wanted. And if the letter was right, she’d at least be alive to be devastated.

If the letter was right.

“You don’t know what’s supposed to happen or what I’m supposed to do.”

The dragon looked unhappy. “It is somewhat unclear,” he admitted, grudgingly. “The future shifts. It changes. It’s why prophecies are so vague, so that they may fit whatever circumstances come and still look true. We blues are right to treat them with suspicion. But this one describes things that went on to happen. More than once. It did not, however, fill in every connection or—as you keep demanding—why. Perhaps those events even happened not because they were foretold but because someone read the prophecy and caused them to occur. Regardless, the stakes are high enough that it cannot be ignored.”

“Who says it’s prophecy anyway? Who made it?”

“Our Goddess, of course, as I’ve said.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it, Kazimir. Everyone knows Believers worship one. No one knows dragons do, too.”

“We do not worship her.” He made a grumble of disgust. “She created us and then tried to destroy all Creation.”

“Why?”

“Because she is the untamed magic I spoke of. It exists just out of your sight, but it rages against your world like a tempest. She was the one who reached into it and brought all dragons into being in the blink of an eye. We contain only a fragment of that magic; she channels it all and cannot exist in this world for long without destroying it. She is fire without boundary and would devour everything. It is the nature of gods to do so. They must either be defeated or trapped in the confines of something like your human minds lest everything they touch turn to ash.”

“You defeated your own Goddess?”

“We did what was necessary. Millennia ago. But that does not mean that there are not those who would carry out her mission no matter what the cost.”

“But if we know it, know it’s coming, couldn’t that stop it?”

“Knowing the future is part of that future’s past. Perhaps the foreseen happens because we try to change it.”

“I don’t see any future,” Sarah said, truly fed up. She found herself thinking of Jason, how much she wanted him to be here now, hearing this. Not that he’d know any better, but he’d be a nice . . . touchstone. That’s a word her mother used. Touchstone. She used it about her father. A rock you could count on. A rock you could launch from and feel confident you wouldn’t fall.

“Nevertheless,” the dragon said, “the future is coming. A killer is coming. For you. I will try to stop him.”

She looked up at this. “Try? Doesn’t the prophecy say if you succeed or not?”

“It says both yes and no.”

“That’s just great.”

“Indeed, it says both yes and no about the ultimate outcome as well. We are in the hands of Goddesses and madmen, Sarah Dewhurst.”