Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

“Bee, you have to swim.”

She did not answer.

“Bee!”

I spun around. She was gone.

A hatchling crawled over my boot and into the water. A fish rose up with mouth gaping. I stabbed the cursed fish and flung it high. Its body spun off my blade and hit the water. Following its arc with my gaze, I saw Bee.

She was under the river, walking through a coruscating whirlpool that had created a tunnel of water leading to a bright net flung deep within the current. Hatchlings swam on all sides of her; many had latched on to her clothes. She should have been drowning yet she walked as if through air. So fixated was she on herding the hatchlings forward that she didn’t even look back for me.

The last little hatchling launched after her, diving fearlessly into the water.

I slashed my blade through the water to keep biting fish away from the last one. I waded in past my hips, past my chest, my skirts sodden and dragging, calling Bee’s name, but she could not hear me. Water slopped into my mouth. The current dragged at me, pulling me down. The river wanted to drown me. Panicking, I struggled back toward shore, gasping with fear and swallowing more water.

White light splintered the horizon. The frenzy of feasting ceased abruptly. A distant vibration, as of a village bell heard across miles of empty countryside, sounded like the toll of death. The feeding eru in the field rose in a battering of wings and headed for the road. Earthbound animals scrambled after.

“Little cat! Hurry! The tide comes!” The coachman called from the road.

I leaped from rock to rock past the smashed remains of hatchlings and one little grub still working its way toward the river. The coachman stretched out a hand and hauled me up onto the road just as the knife edge of the dream cut over us. I covered my face with my hands, coughing and choking on the memory of the river’s water filling my mouth. I hadn’t been able to follow her.

As the bell’s long reverberation faded, a rush of sound filled its silence. I looked up to see hundreds of eru rising off the road and flying away. Closer, my eru waited beside the coach-and-four. Blood smeared her mouth. I winced away, and my gaze swept the landscape.

Only there was no land. We stood on a causeway, surrounded by a wild gray sea. Waves broke over shallows in foaming white caps. Spray stung my face. I saw not one sign of life, nothing except a single black crow fighting the wind, the eru watching me as she wiped blood from her lips, and the coachman checking the traces on the horses.

My voice trembled. “When the tide came, Bee wasn’t on warded ground. She’ll be changed.”

“Little cat, she who walks the dreams of dragons cannot be altered by their tides,” said the eru.

I thought of how I had clung to Bee when the tide had swept over us at the first river. Other creatures had changed, but she and I had remained as we were.

“You see why we who live in this world hate such as she,” added the eru.

A wave spilled over the causeway. I pressed against the coach, clinging to the open door. “So she’s crossed back to the mortal world?” I said desperately. “I couldn’t follow.”

“You are not as she,” said the eru. “What binds her does not bind you.”

“What binds me?” I whispered.

The eru laughed in a way that made me cringe.

The coachman nodded toward the door. “The master is waiting.”

Bee had escaped. Surely that was all that mattered, the best outcome I could have hoped for. Weary to my bones, my face moist with sea spume and my body battered by a tearing wind rising off the wide, dark sea, I climbed into the coach and sank onto the cushions.

“What were those grubs she dug up?” I asked, looking out at him.

Without answering, he shut the door, although he left the shutter open. Outside, four gray birds with long beaks swept into view, battling the wind. One dove and snatched a fish out of the water. They flapped to rest on the rocky revetment that shored up the causeway and began pecking life and entrails out of the fish. I looked away, down at the brass latch. Glimmering eyes watched me.

The coach rocked as the coachman climbed up into the box. As we began to move, the latch spoke in a hissing gremlin voice, its elongated mouth drawn tight in a mocking grin.

“Dragons. Silly girl. Those that survive will become dragons. Some will breed, and some will nest, and sleep, and dream, and then the tide of their dreams will wash through this country. It can never end until they are all dead. The master is waiting. He is very angry.”

We rolled on as night poured over the sea and blinded me.

I did not sleep. I could not sleep. I closed my eyes, but my thoughts tumbled in time to the rhythm of hooves and the rattle of the turning wheels. As the wheel turns, we rise and we fall. So say the Romans, who rose and fell and rose again, even if their second empire was smaller than the first.

Take Beatrice with you, the headmaster had said. Bee had walked unchanged through the tide of dreaming when everything around her was altered. She had known where to find the nest because her dreams had told her, and she had drawn the landmarks and the actual spot. The hatchlings that survived had crossed back to the mortal world, and through water Bee had shepherded them home.

I could not rest, and I had no one else to talk to. I looked down at the latch.

“Is that what it means to walk the dreams of dragons? That you aren’t changed by the tide?”

The gremlin face snickered.

“You remind me of my young cousin Astraea.” I folded my arms on my chest.

After a long pause, it said, sulkily, “Why?”

“I’d like to tell you, but we haven’t been formally introduced. What can I call you?”

“What can you call me? A good question. Names, like blood, can be eaten in this country. Do not spill names lightly. I have no name. What can I call you?”

“You already know my name.”

It added a smirk to its repertory of unpleasant smiles. “True. The cold mage called you Catherine.”

A sudden inquisitive urge overtook me to learn more about the man I’d been forced to marry. “Did the cold mage talk to you?”

Light glinted where its eyes should have been, like lantern light picking up the sheen of polished brass. “Why should he? If he didn’t know I could talk? He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does.”

“No, so I’ve discovered. What else do you know about him?”

“He weaves threads of magic into images. That was nice. It is a bit boring, you know.”

“Is it? Can’t you see outside?”

It sighed, with a squinched grimace. “No. That’s the other latch. We never talk.”

“Did the cold mage do anything else?”

“Not until you got into the coach. And I must say, except for looking at you a lot when you were asleep, he sat very still, not like you, shifting about and rubbing the cushions and snoring when you sleep.”

“I do not snore!”

“You do! So did the dreamer.”

I realized that every word Bee and I had said, in the privacy of this coach, the gremlin had overheard and could repeat.

It spoke as gleefully as that little beast Astraea when she had been thwarted of something she wanted and felt her only leverage to sway you was just being mean. “The Wild Hunt knows she exists. Her scent is on me, on you, on these cushions, on the wind. When next the gate opens to the Deathlands, they’ll ride through, hunt her down, and kill her.”

I riposted with an attack. “Are you glad of it?”

“Oh, I don’t care,” said the gremlin, mouth flat as if hiding another emotion. “Why should I care? She would have hacked me to pieces.”

“No, because I would have hacked you to pieces first. No offense intended. We just wanted to run away. Can you blame me?”