Cold Steel

Bee touched clasped hands to her lips, then lowered them. “From everything I have learned, it seems your people somehow bred or created the women who walk the paths of dreams. Your people infested us, if you will, with the curse of walking the Great Smoke in our dreams. You did so because you want us to walk into the spirit world and unearth a nest and guide its hatchlings into the mortal world.”

“That is correct.”

“But we can also glimpse meeting places in the future.”

“Your visions allow you to find a nest. All the rest is coincidental, not of importance to us.”

Bee’s expression sharpened to her axe-blow glare, and I was sure she was about to say something cutting, but instead she sat back. “Surely nests hatch without our help.”

“They do. And they have across the passing of many generations. Understand that we are far older than your kind. It is the way of my people that our mothers live in the Great Smoke. They lay their eggs on the shore of the spirit world. The eggs hatch in the spirit world, and hatchlings seek water, through which they fall into the Great Smoke. After a time swimming there, those who survive surface into this world, for it is here we must grow to maturity. Thus the cycle starts over. But in recent ages, our ancestors began to notice that fewer and fewer were reaching this world. We came to believe that the creatures of the spirit world were deliberately devouring the hatchlings in the hope of eating them all and thus causing us to die out completely.”

“Why would they want your kind to die out?” Bee asked.

I said, “Probably so there will be no more tides. That’s why the eru and other spirit creatures build warded ground, so they won’t be changed when a tide sweeps over the land.”

He smiled as he once would have at the academy, approving a pupil’s correct answer. “That is what we believe. We can only know what we have learned from humans who have walked there.”

“How did you make the dream walkers?” Bee asked.

“Only the mothers know. I do not.”

Kemal held open the door to allow a woman to carry in a tea tray. As she set down the tray on a worktable and poured, I recognized her. She had been the housekeeper for the dying man we had stumbled on while escaping from the Barry household, an old man who had exuded heat, sheltered loyal hounds, and asked Bee for a kiss. Now she was working for the headmaster.

“You may go, Maestra Lian. Kemal, you may also leave us. I will ring if I need you.” When the door had closed, the headmaster took a sip of tea. “For a very long time now our numbers have suffered, and we have become few. We have come to expect at best three hatchlings to survive from a mating swim. Two days ago, on the equinox, eleven hatchlings swam ashore from the nest you unearthed, Beatrice. They were all brought safely to the house. Quite astonishing, and a reason for us to hope our numbers may increase.”

I thought of how many had been eaten and crushed in their race through the spirit world. Truly, few if any would have survived if Bee had not been there to shepherd them into the river.

“Why would they only be coming ashore now when it was so long ago that Cat and I dug them up?” Bee asked.

“While they are swimming in the Great Smoke, hatchlings cannot sense the mortal world. However, here in the mortal world, a male announces his readiness to crown by marking a river’s shore with a scent. That mark attracts any rivals who wish to challenge him. The scent is so strong that it penetrates the Great Smoke as well. Hatchlings follow it into the mortal world.”

“What does it mean to crown?” I asked, for I could not help but wonder if the word was a euphemism for mating.

With a frown, he glanced out the window as if to suggest I had been rude for asking.

We sat in an uncomfortable silence. I did not know what to say, and Bee did not speak.

“Can it be?” He sat forward abruptly. An unexpected grin brightened his expression, and he rose. “What rich bounty showers on us! Yet more arrive!”

He limped into the garden and down the lawn. Bee and I ran to the window.

A spout of water swirled up from the river like an unraveling thread pulled off the fraying hem of a piece of cloth. The water poured into the headmaster. His human shape changed. I suddenly understood that his human form was nothing more than an elaborate illusion. The body absorbed the water and grew into a glistening dragon, one with a mouth large enough that it could eat me in one gulp. The slippery texture of its black scales swallowed light. Its head had a whiskered muzzle, and a shimmering crest ran down the length of its spine, waving like grass in the wind. Its body tapered into a flat tail more like a fish’s than a bird’s. Yet despite the creature’s perilous aspect and daunting size, it waddled in a remarkably ungainly way down the sloping ground.