Hero Page 5

  “Troll blade,” said Betwixt. “Shoddy workmanship.”

  The dagger might have also been a thousand years old. “I’ll try to select a dwarf blade next time.” Forced to move on to another task, Peregrine lifted the laundry pot and dumped the dirty water into a runnel that led back down to the heart of the mountain. One by one, he began wringing the clothes out for drying. “I had a vision of her again last night.”

  “You had a dream. Stop calling them ‘visions’ or I’ll start calling you ‘witch.’”

  “Fine, I had a dream. Of Elodie.”

  And what a lovely dream it was. They’d lived in a rose-covered cottage at the edge of the forest. A low rock wall surrounded a garden and a small barn. The kitchen had two ovens and a pantry and a pump house for well water. The bedroom had been up a long flight of stairs that reminded Peregrine of one of the turrets at Starburn, but he had never seen this place before. He only knew that he was warm and safe and loved and that she was there, smiling at him over the dinner table. The light from the sun twinkled in her bright eyes and caught her hair and turned it gold.

  “Or not,” said Betwixt. “You can’t be sure it’s her. You haven’t seen her since you were small children.”

  “You’re such a killjoy.” Peregrine slapped the witch’s ratty dress against the side of the cauldron and wrung it out in frustration.

  Betwixt sighed and gave in. He was too kind to demean any visions of loveliness, however fleeting, insubstantial, and wholly untrue. “Go on. Tell me about her.”

  Peregrine nodded. “I see her as a goddess wrapped in waves of blue-green sea, or a terrible angel in a white gown sullied with blood, rising like the moon above a battlefield. Sometimes she holds a sword in one hand, sometimes an ax. Day or night, rain or shine, there is always a wind in her long golden hair and a fire in her bright eyes.” Peregrine sobered and moved on to the next item of laundry—it fell to pieces as he lifted it. He flung the rent fabric into the pile he used for torch rags. “I am a fool for getting myself cursed on the way to fetch her.”

  “You can’t keep torturing yourself,” said Betwixt. “If the circumstances had been different, who knows what might have happened. If Leila had encountered you together, you or Elodie might have come to harm.”

  “I might have fought back. Or declined her accursed wish.” Oh, all the things he might have done then. He’d gone over each scenario in his mind, futilely weighing his chances of success and defeat. “But you don’t think the woman I’m seeing is Elodie? I don’t see how it can’t be. I don’t know any other women.” Except the witch, her daughter, and some chamber and scullery maids he recalled as a child.

  “Peregrine.” That name was never uttered in the company of the witch. The chimera used it now to get his attention, and he had it. “You were an earl’s son betrothed to a towheaded little girl with pigtails. The woman you’re envisioning might be Elodie fully grown, but she might just as easily be one of those goddesses you’re always praying to, or a figment born of desperation and Earthfire fumes. I just wish you would stop using her to regret your past. Fact or fiction, she wouldn’t want that. I don’t think the real Elodie would want that either.”

  “You’re right.” But saying the words did not dispel the guilt he would forever feel for disappearing before he’d even had the chance to get to know his betrothed. He wondered if Elodie ever thought about him, or if she still waited for him. He wondered if she hated the idea of an arranged partnership, or if it would have afforded her the same freedom it had him. He wondered if similar visions haunted her sleep. Sweet Elodie. He would return to her one day, when he had learned all there was to learn. When he was worthy of her. For now, he would settle for visiting her in his dreams.

  “Stop it,” said Betwixt.

  “What?”

  “You’re beating yourself up again! I can tell by the look on your face. She’s a dream. Let her fade into memory like dreams are supposed to.”

  Peregrine stuck his tongue out at the dogsnake. Betwixt could decide what that facial expression meant.

  “If Elodie of Cassot still thinks of you at all, I’m sure she feels what the rest of us do: pity that you never had a chance to live your life once it finally belonged to you.”

  Peregrine’s childhood had been consumed with caring for an ill father, so he’d never enjoyed a life outside his family estate. Elodie embodied everything that might have been. “She was the only thing I was ever responsible for, and I let her slip through my fingers.”

  “So go back to her. The mountain is waiting.”

  “Waiting to kill me,” said Peregrine. “If it had been that easy, I would have left long ago.”

  Betwixt swatted at Peregrine with his tail. He wandered to an opaque section of the wall where calcite had dripped down long ago in rippled lines and scratched his back against it. “You didn’t exactly have a choice. You got cursed, remember?”

  “How could I forget?” Enough of this folly; it was time to lighten the mood. “But if I hadn’t been cursed I never would have met you, my dearest friend.”

  “That would have been a pity,” Betwixt agreed, and they chuckled in unison.

  Neither was ready when the first tremor struck.

  Startled and confused by the sudden sense of vertigo, Peregrine lost his footing. Betwixt—fully awake now—snapped the sleeve of Peregrine’s shirt between his massive jaws and dragged him away from the fire. Peregrine huddled with Betwixt in a small archway. The mountain shivered beneath him. Fingers of icerock that had pointed down from the ceiling now joined them on the floor. Some crushed the pillarstones that grew up from the ground, splintering into white shards and glittering dust. Crystalline protrusions rang out like church bells as they crashed. Mighty columns that were created with the mountain toppled and fell. The air grew thick with ice and chalk. Peregrine coughed and hoped that slow, molten Earthfire was not soon to follow. Betwixt howled, his tail rattling madly.

  “Dragon?” Peregrine yelled to Betwixt over the thunder of the cave. “Could it be?”

  Happily, Betwixt’s canine hearing had not been compromised. “If so, it’s been lovely knowing you,” said the chimera.

  The thought of death had once given Peregrine a great sense of relief. Now he prayed to gods unknown to preserve his meager life, pretense and all.

  After what felt like a lifetime, the vibrations dulled like a forgotten note on a harpsichord and the caves wrapped themselves once more in a shroud of cold, dark silence. Peregrine shook debris out of his hair. He was unhurt. In the dim light of the dust-covered fire he examined Betwixt from head to toe, giving his unscathed friend a hearty pat on the hindquarters in both reassurance and gratitude. He retrieved the overturned lantern, all the while silently counting to himself. Shortly thereafter, the shrieking started.

  “Thirteen seconds,” he said to Betwixt. “She must have been knocked unconscious.”

  Betwixt huffed, sneezed, and rattled his tail for good meas-ure. He pointedly ignored the banshee wail, returning instead to the fire and nosing rocky debris from his former spot there. The screeching began to resolve itself out of the echoes.

  “HE’S ALIVE!”

  The witch’s familiar burst out from behind a still-standing column, a flurry of black wings. Cwyn’s usual perch had been upset by the quaking, so she flew once around the room and landed on Betwixt’s giant head. The chimera snapped at the mischievous raven.

  Now that Cwyn could see the room, so could the witch: she used the bird’s eyes as her own to move about the caves. The witch had summoned the bird in the mad wake of her blindness for just this purpose. Peregrine had worried about being found out, but this secondhand sight was less than perfect. Even better, the witch had a new obsession to distract her from sensing that her daughter no longer shared her demon blood.

  “JACK WOODCUTTER!” The witch stood in the archway, eye sockets gaping blank holes in her pale blue face, a contrast to her pink, gaping mouth.

  “That scoundrel again? I w
ill summon him directly and order him to clean this up.” Peregrine had found that jesting and teasing were the best way to converse with the witch. Betwixt had found that the best way was not conversing at all.

  The witch blamed everything on Jack Woodcutter, from burned hair to errant farts, so this conclusion did not surprise Peregrine. Jack was the only human he’d ever known to venture this far up into the White Mountains by choice. The witch had captured Jack and forced him to complete her list of impossible chores. Jack had repaid her by stealing her eyes. Peregrine had helped Jack escape her clutches and disappear back down the treacherous mountainside.

  Oh, what fun that had been. It felt like a million years ago and only yesterday that Jack had left them. Peregrine had no way of knowing if the bravely stupid man had survived, but he hoped so. He wished Jack well in his adventures. He did miss the company, but not more than he treasured his immortality.

  The witch did not glare at him with her hollowed sockets as she might have looked at him with eyes, but Peregrine could feel Cwyn’s unyielding stare. “Snip-snap-snurre-basselure! No man alive could shake the bones of the earth so, except him. That rascal stole my eyes! I will have them back!”

  Peregrine went about the business of resetting the room to rights, demonstrating to the witch just how seriously he considered her histrionics. “You haven’t found Jack in all this time, Mother. What makes you think you’ll locate him now?”

  “Shivers and shimmies! Every earthquake has a center. Jack is at that center. I’d bet my eyes on it.”

  Peregrine was tempted to take that bet. “Even if he is, how do you propose to find him? Betwixt isn’t exactly in any shape to travel.”

  The chimera in question feigned sleep on the hearth. The snakehound’s eyes were closed, but Peregrine marked his still, shallow breaths. Betwixt was the only one among them who could descend the mountain unaided, albeit perilously, and only when he was in a form that afforded him both wings and skin thick enough to withstand the unbearable cold. Peregrine had seen Betwixt assume a form like that only once. He wasn’t yearning to see it again anytime soon.

  “I will cast a spell,” said the witch.

  “Of course you will, Mother. How silly of me.”

  “Yes, you are! A silly girl, I always say.” The witch was hit-or-miss when it came to spellcasting, but it was her favorite hobby. She kept at it every day, siphoning off the sleeping dragon’s magic, trying to open a portal back to the demon world from whence she’d come. She rarely succeeded in doing much more than infusing light into stone or summoning strange magic objects from afar. Once, she’d succeeded in making the cave walls taste like cake. Peregrine missed that particular spell, stomachache or no.

  The witch’s spellcasting lair and bedchambers were a series of caves very close to the dragon’s tomb—proximity to the dragon boosted a spell’s power, for better or worse. Every spell she cast drained her physically—the stronger the attempted spell, the quieter she was afterward. She often retired directly to the adjacent room, when she didn’t pass out in front of the cauldron. If she was deep enough into a spell, she could waver indefinitely between the lair and her bedchambers, disappearing for rather notable lengths of time. This could go very well or very badly for Peregrine and Betwixt. Possibly both.

  “I’ll need a map for the scrying,” she said. “East and west. West and east, and always south.”

  The whole of the world was south of here; she could mean anywhere. “They’re in the library,” answered Peregrine. “I’ll fetch one for you.” He didn’t want the witch anywhere near that particular cave.

  “Thank you, my silly green darling.” Idly, the witch scratched the dark blue stumps of her horns beneath her hair. “We’ll go prepare.” Cwyn launched herself off the rocks to fly back down the tunnel. The witch followed like a tethered ghost, all white hair and blue skin and gray rags against the shadowed archway.

  The “library” housed the few precious scrolls Peregrine had collected from the witch’s hoard . . . and from the skeletons of those who’d met with the dragon once upon a time and hadn’t lived to tell the tale. There were some spells but more maps, all with vague descriptions of how to reach the dragon’s treasure using tunnels long since buried under ice, crystals, Earthfire, and time.

  Peregrine and Betwixt took their time journeying up to the small, out-of-the-way alcove. Betwixt’s great hound’s feet slipped on the steep path, which made for slow going. Peregrine had selected this particular niche for its dry warmth, its proximity to the dragon’s lair, and its difficulty to reach. Betwixt often had a hard time getting there while sporting particularly large shapes, or aspects without wings. Peregrine was only forced to bow his head to avoid the low ceiling, and watch his knees on the knobby floor.

  He slipped off his soft boots, lit the library’s lantern from his torch, and then scrubbed the torch out against the rough, pitted ceiling. “There were a few maps of the continents that I recall . . .” Peregrine muttered. He set the lantern on the gnome-shaped icerock pedestal beside the piles of books and papers with a “Thanks, Old Man.”

  Betwixt sniffed from pile to pile, sneezing at some particularly old documents and rendering them into dust. “Oops.”

  “It’s okay. That one was Trollish. I never could read it. I put all the maps over on this side, but I thought I had separated out the ones that weren’t just of the mountain . . . yes, here.” He gently unfolded a large, wide sheepskin sailing map of the three continents, with the ocean between them. Above the ocean, at the highest point of the map, a star marked the Top of the World. The shadows on the wall bent over to examine the work of art with him. Whoever had created this map had been quite the traveler. Before seeing this, Peregrine had had no sense of exactly how large the world was.

  “You’re not going to give her that one, are you?” There was a growl in the chimera’s voice. “She’ll probably just destroy it.”

  “I know.” The map itself didn’t matter; Peregrine had long since memorized it and every other scrap of vellum and skin he’d collected here. But holding the thing gave him some wistful measure of hope, reminding him that there was still so much of the world yet to see.

  “Copy it on the wall, here,” Betwixt rattled his tail at an odd blank space to the left of the niche’s entrance. “For safekeeping.”

  As long as the dragon slept on, as it had for centuries, everything here at the Top of the World would be safely kept. And if the dragon ever woke . . . well . . . there would be nothing left worth keeping.

  Peregrine took up a sizeable chunk of charred coal. On the right side of the alcove’s opening were hash marks he had begun making when he’d first discovered this place, both drawn and scored with a knife, in an effort to mark the passage of time. Eventually he’d tired of the exercise and progressed to more productive things like bettering his artistic abilities, or teaching himself how to play the silver flute he’d found on a wispy old skeleton of unknown origin.

  He sketched the lines of the map onto the uneven wall from memory; it was easier than trying to hold the skin open, balance himself, and scratch on the wall at the same time. The coast of Arilland sloped downward into the desert wastelands. Also in the south lay the island kingdom of Kassora and, an ocean beyond that, the Troll Kingdom.

  Peregrine leaned back and held up the lantern to see how closely he’d come to recreating the map. Betwixt, who had spent the time sniffling and sneezing and rattling through more stacks of papers, stumbled over the bumpy ground to have a look.

  “It’s amazing how you do that,” said Betwixt.

  “What?” Peregrine slapped his hands together and tried to dust the worst of the coal onto his skirt. “Draw something from memory? I’ve had quite a bit of practice.”

  “No, I mean telling yourself you’re drawing one thing, and then painting another picture entirely.”

  Peregrine lifted the lantern higher and scooted back from the wall. The shadows fell away to reveal his masterpiece. As close as he had been,
he could only see the coasts of the continents outlining the sea. From this vantage point, he realized that he had drawn the woman from his dreams.

  Peregrine’s shoulders dropped. “Not again.”

  “I’d expect nothing less from a man obsessed.”

  “Or a lunatic.” Peregrine joked to mask the fear that his mind would one day run rogue and leave him, just as his father’s had. Thanks to Leila’s curse there would be no living death for him, only death, swift and sure. Not that he needed to hide anything from Betwixt.

  “You’re in good company, my friend,” the chimera said, and nosed the back of Peregrine’s hand. “Let’s go. The Queen of Lunatics is waiting.”

  Peregrine rolled the map and secured it inside his shirt, his hand brushing his father’s ring on the chain around his neck as he did so. He looked back at the woman who haunted him, hair streaming lines of continents, eyes bright even when outlined in dark coal. She meant the world to him, and he had failed her. This isolation was the price he must pay.

  Peregrine lit the torch again from the lantern. “I’m sorry, Elodie,” he whispered to the drawing, and then blew out the lantern, banishing her once again to the darkness of his dreams.

  Betwixt led them under the swollen ceiling and down the slide to the witch’s sanctum by scent more than torchlight; even Peregrine could discern the acrid smell of spells in the air. The cold met the heat in the chambers just outside her caves, creating drafts that sometimes threatened to blow him off his feet. All around him the stones perspired, dripping both clear and cloudy tears to the floor. He carried his shoes; it was easier for him to find purchase on the slippery ground. Betwixt was not so lucky.

  His bare toes paused at the edge of the moat surrounding the witch’s lair. Even after all this time he’d never gotten quite used to the natural illusion this stretch of still water created, mirroring the high ceiling above into a yawning chasm below, while only in truth a mere finger’s-length deep. It was a constant reminder of the falsehood in which Peregrine lived: lies built on top of other lies living inside yet even more lies. Before his reflection could add to the treachery, he kicked a stray rock into the moat and broke the spell.