Taken from the middle of my fantasy novel, these scenes are bookends to a death, a defining moment, a beginning hidden like hot coals under ashes. They contain a kind of warmth that might fool you, if you don’t know the characters in question—and maybe it fooled them too for a time. But the comfort these two people expected to find at this point in their story has unraveled. Now, slowly and just as unexpectedly, they begin to find it again.
Some context:
On one side of the mountains that divide the realm, Sam leaves her village after manifesting a rare, potentially dangerous form of magic—control over fire and water. Just before she is banished, she meets Safira, a woman who possesses deviant magic of a different kind. The two of them make their way to Peregrin, Safira’s city, and a city that welcomes magic like theirs.
On the other side of the mountains there is Ivy, princess of the Dragonwings, is exiled from her home for failing to bond with a dragon, as is the custom among nobility. Her two brothers, Scorpio and Shen, along with Scorpio’s dragon Ares, promise to leave when she does. They plan to meet in the city of Peregrin, which—if what they’ve heard is true—will welcome them.
Sam and Ivy arrive in Peregrin on the same day. At the city gates, Safira is killed by Dragonwing soldiers who have come to Peregrin to look for Ares and Shen. Ivy finds Shen, who tells her that Scorpio did not manage to escape—instead, he has been imprisoned in the dungeons of what used to be his home.
When Sam and Ivy meet, they find they have much in common. Both have come to Peregrin expecting a safe place and both have had their hopes decimated. Sam invites Ivy, Shen, and the dragon Ares to stay in Safira’s old house. This is where we find them.
***
Sam had moved past numbness and now the details of the house assailed her, brilliant. The fog blowing through the window she hadn’t closed despite the cold. The candles Ivy had lit, forgetting that Sam could do it with ease. An unintended kindness, but a kindness nonetheless—Sam’s fire lay dormant now, a fact she would rather not remember.
Yesterday was lost time. Somehow she had slept. Curled around what remained of her fire and water, she had felt asviren ignite inside her and she’d held onto it through the night. The rooms of Safira’s old house could have been forged from dying stars, the way they filled her vision with sparks of blue. Sight was not what she remembered, exactly. Only the half shapes of the house, just enough light to survive by.
Neither Sam nor Ivy could sleep. They kept to themselves at first. Ivy wandered through the house as if she wanted to learn it by heart. Sam kept still. Staving off thoughts of yesterday was rigorous work. Eventually her thoughts calmed, and they wandered to Ivy—a much more forgiving subject than the other.
“Ivy?” she said finally. “What about your brother, Scorpio?”
Ivy turned to Sam. Her eyes shone softly in the dark. “What about him.”
“You…you said you would wait years here if you had to,” Sam said.
“Oh.” Ivy looked away. “I won’t be waiting years for him.”
“So what will you do?”
“I don’t know,” Ivy said. “I know I said…I wouldn’t go anywhere, but I can’t just sit here.”
“Neither can I.”
“Then what?” Ivy asked. “What did you come here for anyway, before…”
“She was going to teach me,” Sam said. “She had this power…she could use magic not her own, find it in other people, anything. She called it her silver sight. Yesterday my fire wouldn’t catch, it was like there was something there I should have seen, something like what she could see. And when I lost control it would have caught me, if I knew how to find it, it would have moved for me.”
Sam said the last part with such bitterness that Ivy didn’t ask more, though she didn’t understand most of what Sam had said.
“I have to find it again,” Sam said, looking through the window to the half-wild town, as if the power she spoke of swirled out there in the darkness. Ivy realized Sam didn’t want to linger here any more than Ivy did. This was Safira’s place—home of a ghost Ivy would never know and Sam would never find here again. Yet the words Ivy had said to the council earlier seemed to float between them, at once a buoy and a dangerous tide: Where else could we go?
Those words contained question and answer both, and Sam and Ivy found nothing more to say.
***
Ivy and Shen both slept in the common room tonight, Shen curled up under Ares’ wing, his own wings coppery. A month ago, Ares would have chastised Shen for turning his wings to that shade. A week ago, Sam would not have let a dragon consume the common room, all of Safira’s belongings pushed to the edges to make space. But when Ivy came home from the eyrie leading Ares behind her, Sam made room.
Ares emitted a soft orange-gold glow in the light of Sam’s fire as she creaked open the door of the tiny bedroom and emerged onto the scene of him–because he was a scene in himself, so complete and sure. Here he was in this house full of uncertainties, alien to Sam, yet the most stable creature she knew.
He opened an eye as she approached, but sunk quickly back into sleep. Sam relaxed. She had never once explained herself to him—she had never needed to. She had lain in bed in the tiny room these past nights and felt the pull of his thoughts, and she had let him hold her mind still until she slept. Had he had done the same for Ivy and Shen, had their thoughts convened in him and come to know each other there?
Sam wanted to think so. She spread out her bedroll beside the dragon and snuffed out her fire, her vision blooming blue, and waited for the dragon’s thoughts to pull her toward sleep.
***
Ivy woke when the moon was high and stood over Safira’s map of the world. She traced the cut of the mountains all the way back to her homeland. What would it take to cross all of that again, just to find herself in a cell beside Scorpio’s—if he hadn’t perished already!
Her hands whispered over the river and every town it carried on its banks. The places Safira had marked with notes: Bridge fallen, avoid this road, on the pinprick of a town, no longer standing, on another, Vikus’ hometown—visit next time! Then north to where the towns were sparse and Ivy could picture the land well, and Safira’s notes filled with the names of eyries. But this was not Dragonwing land. And who would build an eyrie so far from any towns?
Wild dragons!
At first Ivy didn’t believe her own thought. Her hands hovered above the map as if she could ruin it, this possibility, with a touch. Slowly the idea of the wild dragons burned into her mind.
Was it possible they still lived, those creatures who had denied Kalador, receded from the stories after the world became his?
Here were people who had been confined to their patch of the mountain range, exiled in their own way. Here were people who might have cause to help her. Her mind filled with the thought of leaving this place for good. Already the Icthean forest seemed to pull her back into its thickets, push her toward the chance of these strange new allies. Ares would take them—Shen and herself. They would go north. She had found her way through the Icthe before and she would do it again, but this time to a place that held promise.
Something stirred behind her, and she felt the press of dragon thoughts on her own. Ares. She turned around and there he was, awake, his wings catching the candlelight. His look was intense enough to make her question herself. He had plucked her plan from her mind and no doubt he would kill it now.
If you want to know a dragon, know me, he said, not those wild ones.
Did he think she was after bonding? That’s not what I want!
No?
Maybe once. But not since a long way back in the forest, she said. I will go nonetheless.
Why? For Scorpio? Ares made a low sound that might have been laughter. The wild ones will be no help in that regard. You can’t save him.
How can you know?
Ares gave another possible laugh. I know.
Because he’s your bond. She returned his laugh, finally feeling like she owned the conversation. That doesn’t mean as much as you think it does.
It means more to me than you know, he said.
I’m not going for him alone, she said. She hadn’t known that until she said it to him. Neither had she known how deeply this idea had taken hold of her, and in so short a time.
For yourself, then?
More than that. Kalador’s book gave me answers but no solutions, Ares.
And the wild ones will give you your solutions?
I told Shen I would find a way back. This is the way! And the wild ones will be glad to hear what we have to tell them about Kalador. I’m not going to lie here knowing what our kingdom is without doing anything.
You will have to prove yourself to them, Ares warned. The wild ones are vicious—untrusting. They don’t take well to our kind.
Our kind?
Yes, he said with a smothered laugh, mental this time, that says all you need to know.
That is… She couldn’t imagine what kind of creatures would call Dragonwings and bonded dragons one and the same. Even her family knew there were stark divides, though they downplayed them.
You know nothing of it, Ivy. He rarely spoke her name to her, and it felt like a title meant to put distance between them.
Let me learn then!
You walk into a mistake and you would have me lead you there? he said. She realized he resisted her not for her sake now, but for his own. She felt Kalador’s influence rising in her. Hadn’t her ancestor done just this to his own dragon?
I will go on my own if you won’t, she warned him.
And if the wild ones don’t take you?
Then I will sleep on the forest floor. She smiled. What a shame!
He was considering. Maybe he would withdraw from her mind and let her slip out the door in the morning, alone. The forest seemed to fill in the shadows around them. She would go without this stranger of a dragon, but the prospect of it raised bile in her throat. So she pitched her voice softly now and gave him a reason to go for himself.
You would be able to hear Scorpio’s thoughts, I think, from that far north.
Ares looked at her with his soft-fire eye. Go for your reasons and I’ll go for mine, the dragon said. And maybe they will meet each other somewhere on the road, far from here.
