The wild creatures of the earth are as milk for the human spirit; to destroy them is to starve our souls.
—Private journals, Landerath
Short of breath from running, Kaeldra burst into the clayhouse. She couldn’t see her at first, for the sun had nearly set and darkness webbed the edges of the room.
“I should have thought,” came Granmyr’s voice, “that you’d be prompt. You’ve been hounding me to let you try this for so long.”
Now Kaeldra made out Granmyr seated at a bench in the corner.
“I am sorry,” she said. “Jeorg was banding birds. Some men from the eastern reaches came and had to take them right away. He says I’m the only one who can calm the birds, and he said it would take only a moment. But then one bird escaped and we had to chase it all through the cottage. . . .” Kaeldra smiled, recalling how Jeorg had leaped through their cottage with a net, while the men from the east roared with laughter.
“That husband of yours seems to have found his occupation,” Granmyr said.
True enough. Jeorg had not taken to farming, but he did have a way with animals. They gentled at the touch of his big, work-roughened hands; they obeyed at the sound of his voice. Men brought him their horses to be broken, their dogs to be trained for flock keeping. And now, two years after he and Kaeldra had returned from Rog, they had their own small string of horses.
Jeorg was famed as well for his skill with homing birds; but few guessed his true purpose in this. He had devoted himself in secret to continuing the work of Landerath: training the birds, banding them, sending them to outposts from which they would alert him of a dragon hatching. For he still had hopes of a hatching yet to come. He and a few trusted companions had vowed to watch over a lair if the time ever came, to protect the draclings by whatever means possible until they could fly north with their dam.
Now Kaeldra sat at the wheel. Her hands trembled as she slapped the wedged red clay onto the bat and moistened it with water. Long had she awaited this moment. She could not vision what she sought when Granmyr worked the clay, and so must work it herself. But now that Granmyr had at last deemed her ready, she was afraid. What if nothing happened?
Kaeldra’s knees bumped against the rim; she had to splay her legs and hunch down over the clay. This wheel of Granmyr’s had been too small for her since she began clay working over a year ago. But now, with the child growing inside her, it was more uncomfortable than ever.
“Left foot,” Granmyr said.
Kaeldra kicked the spinner; her boot made a satisfying thud. She wore her boots high these days—Kragish style. She clothed herself in vibrant colors; she cropped her hair at her shoulders and let it coil as it pleased. Folk had stared at her at first, yet most seemed eventually to have grown accustomed to her unconventional garb. “I belong here,” Kaeldra told herself whenever she felt the impulse to shrink and hide. “I will not be a sun lizard.”
Now she leaned into the clay, feeling its cool, gritty wetness beneath her hands. It felt awkward, balky, moving in the wrong direction.
Center, Kaeldra thought. Center.
Gradually the clay grew compliant. She coaxed it to rise, then pushed down again until it no longer thumped against her hands but spun smoothly, without resistance.
“What now?” she asked.
“Make a bowl.”
Kaeldra kicked again, then pressed two fingers into the center of the clay. It opened up like a blossom turned to the sun. Gently, she brought her hands together, feeling the wall rise and narrow between her fingers. It was a good bowl; she felt the centeredness of it in its wobble-free spin.
Kaeldra pushed against the wall, felt a resistance in the clay. She pushed harder. The clay closed in upon itself, lurched suddenly, seemed to tug against her fingers and rise of its own accord to form a mountain, a mountain chain. The landscape rolled beneath her hands, a strange, wild country, covered with ice. It tilted and pitched as though she soared through the air above it: cliffs and canyons, smooth snowy expanses of plain and floe and sea. Something dark in the distance: a cave? It was a cave; the earth opened up and she was hurtling down a high, dark passage into a cavern, an immense cavern, where a spring of turquoise water bubbled and steamed.
And there, in the warmth, in the sulphur-reeking, billowy-white mist, slept the draclings. Many dragons slept in that place—but Kaeldra saw Embyr and Pyro first, nestled in the curve of a big green dragon’s tail. They had grown, Kaeldra saw. Never again would they squeeze through a porthole or curl up inside an empty cask.
As Kaeldra watched, Embyr lifted her head and looked about her, as though she had heard or felt something odd. She nudged Pyro; he, too, looked up. And a thrumming touched Kaeldra’s mind, a ticklish vibration that grew stronger and still stronger until it hummed inside her bones.
Something shifted. The mists swirled past her, blurring the draclings. The cave began to shrink and slip away. No, not shrinking; Kaeldra was moving back: back through cavern, back through the passage, back across the chill, snow-driven expanse. She held on to the dwindling thrum for as long as she could, as though by clinging she could capture it forever in her mind.
And the earth slowed and grew stiff beneath her hands, and in the clayhouse it was dark. And the only hum was the sound of the wheel, slowing, slowing . . .
“Did you find what you sought?” Granmyr’s voice.
Kaeldra nodded, unable, yet, to speak.
“Are they well?”
“Yes. But they are lost to us, Granmyr. They’re in a strange place, unlike any I have heard of. And it is far, so far.”
“Perhaps there will be others. This hatching cycle may not have run its course.”
“But they’d only have to leave,” Kaeldra said. “They can’t stay here; we’d kill them.”
“The Ancient Ones live,” Granmyr said. “You’ve seen to that. A day may yet come when men appreciate what we have lost. Someday, if the Ancient Ones survive, they may return.”
Someday.
Kaeldra’s gaze drifted to the hills, where the dragonpod blooms, with their promise of fertility, rippled in the moonlight. They look so like milk, she thought. Like dragon’s milk. Her hand strayed to her belly, and she felt a sudden joy: This child would wake to a world still touched by the splendor of dragons.
The Ancient Ones live. There may be others.
And that will have to do, Kaeldra thought, until someday comes to pass.