Fire

THE king’s men look at their captain. Sir Greyson stares at the scene before him. Children. Dragons. Danger, all around. They will not survive a battle with the dragons. But they have been ordered, by the word of the king, to bring him the children or not return at all. And the children are there, stretched out in a line as if ready for capture, though it will not be an easy capture. They will have to ride hard, and he will lose many, perhaps even all. This he knows.

But he will also lose all if he returns to the king with this story. So he knows they must at least try.

“Prepare for battle,” Sir Greyson says. His men straighten their backs, but not before a collective breath is sucked through every one of them. They did not realize they had signed up to battle dragons, you see. Many of them shake. Many of them would like nothing more than to turn on their heels and run. But they are brave men. They are loyal men. They will do what needs doing.

It is a fool’s errand, at best, but Sir Greyson whispers the words again. “Prepare for battle. We must ride hard.” The two men beside him whisper it to the men on their sides. And on and on down the line it goes. The men put their hands on their swords. They do not know how to fight dragons, do not even know whether swords will help them at all, but they will try. Oh, yes. They will try.

Death steps from the shadows, his black hood flapping in the wind. No one can see him, but he is, dear reader, quite a horrifying sight. He knows, you see, that this reaping will be quite easy.

***

ARTHUR turns to look behind him, just as the king’s men straighten their backs, just as their hands move to the hilts of their swords, and he knows precisely what their movements mean. So he, dear brave man, turns to them. He holds up a hand. He yells to the line of men. “Stop. Please.”

They remain still. Not even their horses flinch.

“Take me,” he says, turning back to Zorag. “Take me instead of the children. Please. Let them go. And the king’s men will get what they want, and everyone will be on their way.”

“Arthur,” Maude says, for she does not know the plans in Arthur’s heart. She merely hears that he intends to hand them all over to the king’s men, that he will not be with them to plan for what comes next. Her throat catches. She coughs, but it is more a cry than anything else. Whatever will she do without Arthur? She has never done anything of merit without Arthur. How will she survive? How will the children survive, in the hands of the king? She is not the one skilled in escape. That has always been Arthur.

Oh, Arthur. He cannot leave her.

Maude grabs his hand. He looks at her with all the love he has in his heart. They have shared many lives and many years. And she knows, by that one look of love, that he is asking the dragons in all earnestness to take him. To spare the children, so they might be captured by the king’s men, the lesser of the two evils. She knows, too, that this is the only way. It is the only way they will survive.

And so she breathes, deep and long. She closes her eyes, and another single tear drops down her cheek. Arthur would give anything to wipe it away, but he must not. He must not make any movement at all, for he does not want to break the spell he may be weaving with words around the dragons.

The king’s captain speaks. “No,” he says. His voice carries all the way across the great distance between them. “We must have you as well, sir. King’s orders.”

The dragons fill the air with their rumbles again. Zorag speaks above the noise. “The king’s orders have no rule here in our lands.”

The dragons glare at the king’s men, and the king’s men shake ever more, their armor clanking. And then one of them breaks. He is a man who has been far too long without his grieving wife, who has wondered for far too long where his little boy may be, who does not know what else to do with his desperation but move. And so he does. He charges forward, so entirely forlorn that he does not consider what his moving may unleash. And, oh, dear reader, what it will unleash.

This man gives a cry such as no one in the land has ever heard, a decidedly human cry but other-worldly as well, as if all the sorrow of all the world was confined in that one call from a soldier’s mouth. It is grief that nudges the horse and races him toward the greatest danger there is in a world like Fairendale, if one were not considering the Violet Sea or the unnamed creatures of the Weeping Woods. This man does not even care that he rushes forward to his death, dear reader. Grief makes a man do strange things. Grief can turn a man reckless.

His movement throws the king’s men into a frenzy. They have no idea what to do. They merely follow after him, though he is not their leader, though their leader, in fact, remains at the border, watching his men race to their deaths. He is helpless to stop them. And so it is that he, their leader, follows his men into death, a hundred paces behind.

Enough paces behind.

***

THE world explodes in a ball of heat that burns red and orange and the deepest of blues. It burns in an unstoppable way, and it burns long and hard and hot. It consumes everything. It sets one small line of trees on fire, and so sets the entire forest ablaze. It scorches all the men and their horses, so the land is filled with horrendous screaming and the painful crying of men burning within their armor. Though, if one were to listen closely, one would hear only the cries of men and horses. No cries of a woman and children.

Where are they? How is it that they have escaped from a fire such as this one?

Maude has, in truth, underestimated herself. In the moment before the dragons loosed their fire, she urged the children to run. And so they did, Maude bringing up the rear. They ran toward a stretch of land that did not contain burning soldiers, for they knew that the dragons would be preoccupied with clearing the king’s men from their lands and would not, perhaps, notice their direction. They found another cave, a smaller one, on the perimeter of the land, nearer to the forest than to Morad, and there she and the children watch the madness, watch the burning bodies and the burning woods and the burning everything. They are safe. At least they are safe.

But this is only momentary comfort, you see, for she left her dear Arthur where he was, crouching beneath the belly of the dragon Zorag. He was safe for the time being, but what will happen once the king’s men are gone? What will the dragons do to Arthur?

And what will she do without him?

Maude turns away, herding the children as deep into the cave as they can possibly go. They should not look on the terror. But they have seen enough. They will remember it all their days, the way the dragons tore into the king’s men and left not one of them standing. Oh, yes. One does not easily forget a horror such as that.

They will remember the voice of the massive dragon, rumbling over all the cracking and screaming and pounding: “You dare defy me. I will dare defy you.”

They will remember the way it shook them in their deepest places and held them down in a cave dark and damp, damp enough to keep the fire that consumed all the land away from their bodies.

Death moves over the wreckage on silent wings.