I chirruped to him and shook the lead. He planted his hind feet, rocked back, and reared. Not a dramatic, sky-pawing rear, but a clear declaration that he was not moving.
It was honestly surprising we’d made it this far. “Good lad,” I told him, and turned him around to face downhill. I wound the fragile-seeming traces around a head-sized piece of pumice and tied them off.
Careful not to loop the lead rope around my hand, I stepped up beside the twitching horse and unfastened his halter. I stroked his sweating, ash-gritted shoulder as I slid the straps off his nose. He stood harnessed in sorcery, fate-threads, and kin-duty, leaning against the yarn-spun traces as if against a plow stopped by thick turf.
I stepped away and tossed the halter onto the cinders before turning back uphill. I cupped my hands to my mouth and used a little twist of luck, a scrap of thread wound ’round my fingers, to shift the wind so that my voice would carry. I took the deepest breath I could, tightened my diaphragm, and bellowed.
“Here, dragon, dragon! Nice fat pony. Lame, too! An easy dinner!”
For a long moment, nothing. The reek of fumes swirling on the breeze I’d conjured up; the steam rising from the cinders. The vast silence of the lifeless mountainside.
Then came a rumble, and a long hard clatter like a bag of armor bits and chopped-up candelabras dragged over stone. The scraping of stone on stone. I levered my neck back, peering through streaming vapors, blinking away the fume-begotten tears.
A great head that only seemed small because it was on a neck as long as a ship’s mast poked over the rim of the crater. The head was hammer-shaped, and scaled, and horned, and fanged. I could have called it red or orange in color and not been wrong, but the rough scales seemed translucent, and refracted rainbows in their depths, like the planes of light struck within an opal. Even under the dim overcast of smoke and the haze of fumes, it dazzled.
The owner of the head—and the neck—sniffed deeply. Once, twice. Then it reared back and struck with surprising speed.
I threw myself to the side, cinders bruising my palms. The horse, being nobody’s fool, took off. I winced for his bad foot, because I am a soft, womanish fool of a sorcerer. He galloped down the slope with all the alacrity and focus of a horse running Hel-bent away from a dragon, the boulder bouncing behind him in its traces. The glamour that I’d spun and sung and knotted around both horse and stone caught on the weave of threads and mirror-bright silver scrapings and made it seem the whole mountainside was collapsing into a vast horseshoe depression. The basalt-colored horse was just one more boulder bouncing along in the midst of the rest.
I was rather proud of the effect, and the way the sound of hoofbeats was lost in the simulated rumble of the rockslide.
I turned my attention back to the dragon as it pulled back again and took a long, slow sniff. Red nostrils flared darker in the fire-faceted muzzle. The upper lip drew back to move air across the palate and a forked tongue flickered.
Steam hissed from its nostrils. My vision swam with acrid tears. The head swung down again, falling toward me like the hammer it resembled.
If I’d been some hero out of sagas I’d have swung up a sword, or had a venomed spear at the ready. I just raised my empty hands as if that could somehow fend off an avalanche.
The blow stopped before it fell, the dragon’s enormous head so close that the heat of its hide and breath curled my hair. I smelled the ends scorching.
The dragon spoke, and despite the shape of tongue and mouth it surprised me by uttering words I could understand completely. Its phrasing was archaic, its voice as deep and hollow as caverns.
“I smell a horse,” it said. “But much closer, I smell a witch. Hello, little witch. That was a clever thing, for a wisp such as you.”
Well, I had been hoping to impress it. And I’d lured it out all right.
Now what?
It sniffed again. “Have you come to slay a dragon?”
A bead of saliva gathered along the edge of the dragon’s lip. I stepped to the side as it dripped, stretching a long thread behind it. The venom looked like honey glowing in the sun, but when it touched the ground it sizzled on the ash. The spot smoked slightly.
I thought about the jars in my pack and felt as cold as if the blood were draining from my body.
I gulped down the lump in my throat. “I came to bargain with one. You see I carry no spear, no harpoon—”
The rumble of the dragon’s words shook my diaphragm. “If you wish gold, I will not give it. If you wish ancient and storied weapons, there is nothing you can give me that I could not take. If you wish to die gloriously and be remembered in song, you should have brought a poet. You reek of sorcery. ”
“As long as I don’t smell like a snack. ”
“Hmmm.” It tilted its head to one side. “You smell pickled and stringy.”
The wings rustled as it shrugged.
Perhaps it was not strange that the dragon’s verbal jousting made me feel as if I had come from the wilderness into a safe and familiar hall. I was comfortable in an argument. The fear and tension drained away and in their place a manic energy buoyed me.
I crouched and held my hand over the smoking eitr. I turned my face up to the dragon. I was gray with ash and streaked with tears.
I felt the warmth of the poison and the warmth of the ashes on which it rested as if I held my hand over gentle coals. “I’ve come to bargain for this.”
The great head tilted and drew back. The lambent eyes with their shattered planes of iridescent scarlet and vermilion blinked lazily. “I could give you more of it than you wished for, little witch.”
“Your presence here, your awakening of the volcano—they’ve brought a blight upon the land. Men and women have died of illness and hunger. The cattle will die as well, if the grass is buried under ash and pumice, or they will choke on the poison fumes of the volcano. I have been asked to win your eitr to bring back those who have died.”
“Cattle die and kinsmen die, little witch. If they cannot live in a place, then they should go.”
“Look,” I said bluntly, “what can we give you to leave this place and not return?”
“What can you offer me? A fat horse is all very well, but I can fetch my own when I want one. I have… commitments that will keep me in this lair.”
“For how long?”
“Not long,” said the dragon. To my amazement, it placed first one and then the other enormous talon on the rim of the vent. Having done so, it settled its head between them, bringing its eye level down to mine. I could see the great humped shoulders, the leathery folds stretching back from its forelimbs. Like a bat’s, they seemed both wing and foot to walk upon. Unlike a bat’s, they shimmered with all the colors of flame.
It tilted its head and rippled the taloned fingers as if counting. “Hmm. Perhaps a hundred seasons more.”
Well, twenty-five years of active volcano and dragon occupation would certainly put paid to the village—and all life within miles. I rose to my feet and discovered that the air was slightly better up there. Apparently the fumes were heavy.
“Assume for a moment that I can get you whatever you desire,” I said. “If you will only leave this place, and give me some of your venom.”
The dragon curved its sinuous neck like a goose and glanced over its shoulder, back down the length of its body into the vent. I wondered if it were assessing a hoard I could not see. I wondered how anything remained unmelted, down in the hot mouth of the earth.
It turned back. With a sigh, it said, “I have no need of human treasures.”
“This obligation you mentioned—is there a way I could help you fulfill it?”