“We have come to rescue a harper,” I said bitterly. “We were five, when we crossed into this land.”
“Ah.”
“Do you know this dragon?”
She did not answer immediately; beside me, Justin was oddly still. The staff shifted; the jewel glanced here and there, like an eye. The woman whose name was Yrecros said finally, “You may ask me anything.”
“I just did,” I said bewilderedly. Justin’s hand closed on my arm; I looked at her. Her face was very pale; her eyes held a strange, intense light I recognized: she had scented something intangible and was in pursuit. At such times she was impossible.
“Yrecros,” she said softly. “My name is Nitsuj.”
The woman smiled.
“What are you doing?” I said between my teeth.
“It’s a game,” Justin breathed. “Question for answer. She’ll tell us all we need to know.”
“Why must it be a game?” I protested. She and the woman were gazing at one another, improbable fighters about to engage in a delicate battle of wits. They seemed absorbed in one another, curious, stone-deaf. I raised my voice. “Justin!”
“You’ll want the harper, I suppose,” the woman said. I worked out her name then and closed my eyes.
Justin nodded. “It’s what we came for. And if I lose?”
“I want you,” the woman said simply, “for my apprentice.” She smiled again, without malice or menace. “For seven years.”
My breath caught. “No.” I could barely speak. I seized Justin’s arm, shook her. “Justin. Justin, please!” For just a moment I had, if not her eyes, her attention.
“It’s all right, Anne,” she said softly. “We’ll get the harper without a battle, and rescue Fleur and Christabel and Danica as well.”
“Justin!” I shouted. Above us all the pillars and cornices of stone echoed her name; great, barbed-winged birds wheeled out of the trees. But unlike bird and stone, Justin did not hear.
“You are a guest in this land,” the woman said graciously. “You may ask first.”
“Where is the road to the country of the woodland king?”
“The white stag in the oak forest follows the road to the land of the harper king,” Yrecros answered, “if you follow from morning to night, without weapons and without rest. What is the Song of Ducirc, and on what instrument was it first played?”
“The Song of Ducirc was the last song of a murdered poet to his love, and it was played to his lady in her high tower on an instrument of feathers, as all the birds in the forest who heard it sang her his lament,” Justin said promptly. I breathed a little then; she had been telling us such things all her life. “What traps the witch in the border woods in her true shape, and how can her power be taken?”
“The border witch may be trapped by a cage of iron; her staff of power is the spoon with which she stirs her magic. What begins with fire and ends with fire and is black and white between?”
“Night,” Justin said. Even I knew that one. The woman’s face held, for a moment, the waning moon’s smile. “Where is the path to the roots of this mountain, and what do those who dwell there fear most?”
“The path is fire, which will open their stones, and what they fear most is light. What is always coming yet never here, has a name but does not exist, is longer than day but shorter than day?”
Justin paused a blink. “Tomorrow,” she said, and added, “in autumn.” The woman smiled her lovely smile. I loosed breath noiselessly. “What will protect us from the dragon?”
The woman studied Justin, as if she were answering some private riddle of her own. “Courtesy,” she said simply. “Where is Black Tremptor’s true name hidden?”
Justin was silent; I felt her thoughts flutter like a bird seeking a perch. The silence lengthened; an icy finger slid along my bones.
“I do not know,” Justin said at last, and the woman answered, “The dragon’s name is hidden within a riddle.”
Justin read my thoughts; her hand clamped on my wrist. “Don’t fight,” she breathed.
“That’s not—”
“The answer’s fair.”
The woman’s brows knit thoughtfully. “Is there anything else you need to know?” She put her staff lightly on Justin’s shoulder, turned the jewel toward her pale face. The jewel burned a sudden flare of amethyst, as if in recognition. “My name is Sorcery and that is the path I follow. You will come with me for seven years. After that, you may choose to stay.”
“Tell me,” I pleaded desperately, “how to rescue her. You have told me everything else.”
The woman shook her head, smiling her brief moon-smile. Justin looked at me finally; I saw the answer in her eyes.
I stood mute, watching her walk away from me, tears pushing into my eyes, unable to plead or curse because there had been a game within a game, and only I had lost. Justin glanced back at me once, but she did not really see me, she only saw the path she had walked toward all her life.
I turned finally to face the dragon.
I climbed the slope again alone. No jewels caught my eye, no voice whispered my name. Not even the dragon greeted me. As I wandered through columns and caverns and hallways of stone, I heard only the wind moaning through the great bones of the mountain. I went deeper into stone. The passageways glowed butterfly colors with secretions from the dragon’s body. Here and there I saw a scale flaked off by stone; some flickered blue-green-black, others the colors of fire. Once I saw a chip of claw, hard as horn, longer than my hand. Sometimes I smelled sulphur, sometimes smoke, mostly wind smelling of the stone it scoured endlessly.
I heard harping.
I found the harper finally, sitting ankle-deep in jewels and gold, in a shadowy cavern, plucking wearily at his harp with one hand. His other hand was cuffed and chained with gold to a golden rivet in the cavern wall. He stared, speechless, when he saw me. He was, as rumored, tall and golden-haired, also unwashed, unkempt and sour from captivity. Even so, it was plain to see why Celandine wanted him back.
“Who are you?” he breathed, as I trampled treasure to get to him.
“I am Celandine’s cousin Anne. She sent her court to rescue you.”
“It took you long enough,” he grumbled, and added, “You couldn’t have come this far alone.”
“You did,” I said tersely, examining the chain that held him. Even Fleur would have had it out of the wall in a minute. “It’s gold, malleable. Why didn’t you—”
“I tried,” he said, and showed me his torn hands. “It’s dragon magic.” He jerked the chain fretfully from my hold. “Don’t bother trying. The key’s over near that wall.” He looked behind me, bewilderedly, for my imaginary companions. “Are you alone? She didn’t send her knights to fight this monster?”
“She didn’t trust them to remember who they were supposed to kill,” I said succinctly. He was silent, while I crossed the room to rummage among pins and cups and necklaces for the key. I added, “I didn’t ride from Carnelaine alone. I lost four companions in this land as we tracked you.”
“Lost?” For a moment, his voice held something besides his own misery. “Dead?”
“I think not.”
“How did you lose them?”
“One was lost to the witch in the wood.”
“Was she a witch?” he said, astonished. “I played for her, but she never offered me anything to eat, hungry as I was. I could smell food but she only said that it was burned and unfit for company.”
“And one,” I said, sifting through coins and wondering at the witch’s taste, “to the harper-king in the wood.”