High in the bluffs, with its tower and its wicker-woven hut, we watched the long north road. We saw her as she came, head held high and her beating heart within her. We let her walk until she came to the river brink and rested.
Then, I was a servant of the old Grey Earl, and the Earl bid me go to her in the moonlight. She was young and foolish and beautiful.
How ugly I was, creeping through the bank brush with bluebells in my jaws. She laughed as she held out her hand.
I led her up the mountain paths, through the rocks which broke the scrub. I led her to the lantern light where Grey held open his door. He said, “Welcome,” and he looked at her. He looked at her for a long, long time.
He didn’t ask her name that night. He served her tea, with flatbread spread with honey so it stuck to her tongue. I sat by his feet as they spoke of nothing. When he stood and pointed down the halls of the Tower, he did not look at me.
“There is the guest room,” he said. “You are welcome to it.”
She thanked him, and I padded before her into the dim light. She laid her hand on my neck as we went.
The guest room was a lie, as each room was. At the cadence of Grey’s words a mirror beaded on the wall, a high bed pulled from the floor, rugs ruffled up to hide the hard ground. Lamps unfurled from the ceiling, thick blankets unfolded from air. I stopped by the door and inhaled, tested the illusion on my teeth. “Here.”
Her hand paused on my nape. “You can speak?”
“What did you take me for?” I asked. My disguise was everchanging; at times I seemed a demon, at times a dog.
She ran her hand from the base of my skull down between my shoulders, crouching to better examine me. “A lion,” she decided. “I thought you were a lion.”
“I’m as much a lion as you’re a lantern,” I said, and shrugged off her touch. “Sleep now.”
“What are you?” She kept one hand extended, fingers open in offering. I flinched.
“A servant to Lord Grey.”
“Yes, but what manner of being?”
“Manner enough to serve.” I flicked my whiskers forward. It was a rare joy, to hear the beating of a heart not Lord Grey’s and not my own. “I seem a lion to you?”
She looked me tip to tip, flank to flank. “A fine black lion with a very sleek mane.”
“Then let me be a lion.”
She didn’t press. “What’s your name?”
“I had a name once. Can’t recall it.”
She frowned. “What does Lord Grey call you?”
“He doesn’t. I know when I’m needed.”
“All right.” She dropped her hand, resting it on one bent knee. “What will I call you? Needed or not, it’s—I want to be polite.”
“Call me what you wish,” I said.
I tried to resist the question budding on my tongue. I tried to ignore her eyes in the lantern light.
I failed. “What should I call you?”
“Jessamine,” she told me.
“Good night,” I said.
“Good night,” she began, and I ran before she could name me.
She saw in me a lion. Perhaps I was flattered: how novel it was, how noble. What had I done to deserve that face of kings?
She slept in comfort that night.
Morning came as it came in those days, a slow lightening of the eastern sky without fire or fanfare. Twilights, in those days, we called akk-ha-mam: “when the sky gathers dust.”
I found her that morning on a balcony, watching the eastern sky. “They say the dawns were red once,” she said.
“Blood and plum and apricot,” I agreed.
“Then you’ve heard of them?”
I’ve seen them, I did not say. “Dragons sang at dawn. They sang the sun to rising, and their song spilled bright across the sky.”
“Every morning,” Jessamine said with reverence. She put her hand on my crown, tracing fingers through my hair. “And the phoenixes who loved them danced at sunset and were wild and beautiful, too.”
“They’re old stories,” I said. “Dead stories.”
“I want to find them,” she said. “I will find them.”
I looked up, studying her face in the pale light. “How so?” I asked. “They left the world. First the dawns and then the phoenixes who chased them.”
“Have you seen the north, where I’ve come from?” she asked me. “It’s a long road away, so far that the trees here are different, and even the song of the birds is in a language I’ve never heard. But I’ve come down the road, and changed my own tongue what seems a hundred times.” Her hand found my nape, smoothing the fur she found there. “I’ll find them because I’ll search until I do,” she said.
I could hear footsteps on the steps below, and pressed myself to her legs.
Grey attained the balcony, carrying soaps of roses. “Higher than this you must not go,” he said. “A strange beast broods at the tower top.” He looked at me darkly. I held my tongue.
“What sort of beast?” Jessamine asked, blessing the horizon with a smile. Light caught her face and softened, lifting her color from the dull stone around us.
“A damned one,” he said, and set the soap bowls down. “What do you see out there?”
“I see the path I came down, and the paths I’ll take,” she said. “To the West or East, I’ve not decided. But I’ll take my leave of you this morning.”
“Stay,” Grey said, “at least until midday. I will draw a bath for you and we will give you lunch, and when you go, I will pack provisions for your journey.”
Stay, I thought, pressing against her thighs. You will find no dragons there, no phoenixes. Rather than walk forever, rest for a while with me.
She danced down the stairwell and told me of the places she’d been, the places she’d go. She told me of a place where they polished glass until it made the stars leap close to the eyes, of a place she’d heard about where a thousand years of lore were frozen on parchment scrolls. Lord Grey followed and sent me away to catch rabbits for our lunch. I returned, three brace in my jaws, to find Jessamine laughing in the sunroom with light wreathed about her.
I watched her from the shadows, and Grey took the rabbits to skin. Jessamine came to me and we talked, her begging tales and I recalling them, and Grey brought us stew with mountain herbs and tea that smelled of bergamot. Over the tea he said, “I know old tales of the sunrise and sunset; tales no one in the world remembers but me. But they’re not tales for the levity of afternoon. Stay, just for tonight, and I’ll tell you.”
The fragrance of tea buoyed her, and as she drank, I saw his words take hold of her.
That night she remained with us, drawing maps in the dust of the halls, dreaming of the long road ahead. The next morning again, she stayed—and, the more fool I, I was happy.
I can’t remember how long she stayed with us, drinking the Earl’s tea and forgetting, every night, how her imagined sunsets called to her. I’ve lost the will to number those days, the long slow pace of her dying. But there are moments I still hold.
Once, she watched me descend the tower, flowing from the ramparts to the path. The tower stretched its cold hand skyward, and she asked me what I saw there. If I could take a star into my jaws and bring it back to her.
“What would you do with it?” I asked.
“Remember you,” she said.
In that cold place she came to me, reveling in the shock of my fur, the strength of my limbs. She was a child, I a novelty—a wonderful beast in a place of dry wicker, grey stone and dusty dawns, a knower of tales in a land that had forgotten them.
And each noon she ate of the Earl’s food, and each night, she forgot her resolve to leave us.
One evening she found me in a study, carrying a package in her hands as if it held all the secrets of spring. She untied it, knot by careful knot, and spread its canvas before me.
Inside lay dancing shoes, soft and sable. She laughed as she put them on. “They call it catsfur,” she said, “but it’s actually velvet. These were my momma’s shoes. They fit me so well.”
“Do you miss her?” I asked.
She leaned against me, tying the laces. “Sometimes. Less often now. They say dead dancers dance beside the stars, and you can see the light flicker when their dresses fly around them. She’s there. But I wish I could see her, see which one was her.”
I could take you there, I thought, but kept quiet. She held out a foot, soft and tapered like a kitten’s paw.
“You shouldn’t wear those around here,” I said, nosing at the shoes.
“Why not?”
“Lord Grey isn’t kind to dancers.”
She looked at me. “He isn’t kind or unkind, is he? He’s just a earl and a scholar.”
“There are many unkindnesses, Jessamine,” I murmured, and lowered my head. I was ashamed of my own unkindness, and could not bear her gaze.
She laid a hand on my crown, twisting playful braids in my mane. She eased my head to her lap and curved around me, so I could feel the warmth of her breath at my ear.
“How is it,” she wondered, “that you can live here and be so somber—that you can serve a man you don’t love?”
“He is not a cruel master.”
“Is that enough?”
I closed my eyes. I trapped a cry in my chest and bound it, tight as iron. “It’s enough to have the sun at all,” I told her. “It’s too much to ask, sunrise and sunset. Enough is a sad term, and I do not seek it. Enough was the cry of the phoenixes who slipped away.”
“Did you know them?” she whispered.
“I studied their flames in the evenings, and I wished I could fly with them.”
“What were they like?”
I looked at her again, wondering what I could give. “They were glory,” I told her. “Sad, wistful glory like the passing of days. With a song they could break your heart to pieces and weave from the pieces a much stranger thing. In their eyes was the curve of the world, and the sun which set at its edge.”
She ran her hands through my mane, cupped them beneath my jaw and held my gaze to hers. “You loved them.”
“More than anything, save one thing.”
“What could you love more?”
She held me there. She could not overpower me, and yet I could not go. I quailed, begging escape—and to my shock she released me, bowing her head to hide her flushing cheeks.
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t my place.”
“It is always your place,” I said, words tumbling form my teeth. “But I cannot give you an answer.”
She reached out again, but stopped short of my fur. Her hand hung in the air between us. “Can you tell me why you can’t?”
“Because I have no answers left.”
She looked at me strangely; I don’t know if she understood. I hoped she never would, that she would never have cause to. I tore myself from her and went, swift as the retreating days of summer.
Each morning, the sky stretched thin in anticipation of daybreak. Each evening, it ached a deep bruised blue hoping to be assuaged by alpenglow. I wanted to protect her from that—the long days of waiting, listening for a whisper to warm the blood. A kind of ghosting took itself upon the night; even surrounded by multitudes, you would find yourself standing alone. I smelled its dust falling about us while our voices faded by the stars.
One twilight she walked to the wicker room, wearing her catsfur shoes.
Black-cat feet against the wicker floor, she was beautiful as missing dawns. I should have urged her back down the passageway to the guest room, but I was enraptured; shoes and skirt together made her more than an entranced girl, and lantern light moved around her, entreating her to join.
Lord Grey watched, face a net of creases. She was unaware of his intent.
He said, “Dance for me,” and she did.
She stood with her body curving around her, with her beating heart within her, and lifted her arms and turned her neck, and she danced. She danced in circles, in crosses; she moved like water, she moved like wind. Light danced around her, touching her limbs like dancer’s silk.
Lord Grey rose. He stepped close, near enough to touch her. He breathed the wind her moving hands pulled, gasped at the shine of lanterns on her hair.
“Excellent,” he said. “Lovely. You are too beautiful, too beautiful for the dust and wind and unkind sun.”
She opened her eyes. She had the wonder of youth in those eyes, in the way she kept dancing.
“Look, my Jessa,” he said, and spread his arms wide. “I’m a gangled, tattered thing, but I am not unkind.”
She slowed. I caught my breath and held it.
He touched her, fingers trembling at the edge of her neck where the pulse moved the skin. I closed my eyes, I bent my head; it didn’t matter. I could still see them, and they were blind to me.
Grey’s fingers traveled up her jaw, the smooth curve of her cheek, and he took one teardrop upon his fingertip. “My sad dancer,” he breathed.
I fled.
Coward, I called myself—coward and deceiver, I lead her to this, to Lord Grey and his artist’s touch, to dancing in the wicker room beneath his thousand lanterns. I lead her to this night.
I heard footsteps fall behind me, landing light as pawpads. I ran to my cavern and she followed, catsfur soiled in the moss and mud.
“What is it?” she begged. “What have I done?”
“You didn’t listen!” I cried, staring stricken at those glinting eyes. “I told you not to wear those shoes, and you did. You danced for him, do you understand that? You danced for him!”
“It was only a dance,” she protested, begging understanding and pardon and I dared not ask what else, “a simple farmer’s dance to pass the time.”
“You know nothing of magic,” I spat, and leapt away.
She reached out and I turned to her, pressing her to the ground, wrapping myself around her shaking form, pawpads curling at her back, head beside hers. “Stay here,” I whispered. “Stay here, Jessamine, stay here with me. Stay here where I can keep you safe. You won’t find the phoenixes because they don’t want to be found ˆ “
She pulled away. “I can’t stop looking,” she said, but she had. “You don’t understand. I have to keep looking.”
“Then go,” I choked. “Lord Grey will have you here forever. You will dance for him forever. You will never see your phoenixes here.”
She drew back, brown eyes looking into mine. The grace of ages echoed in those eyes, forgotten graces like forgotten light. “Will you come with me?”
“Jessamine,” I whispered, “you cannot try to save me.”
“What would I save you from?” she whispered back.
“The twilight,” I said, at a loss for all else.
I held her with the thunder of our hearts between us, until night bore her eyelids down and pulled her breathing deeper. I took her weight upon my back and carried her through the corridors, laid her to rest.
“Will the Earl be angry?” she asked, voice soft in its passage from sleep.
“That is my concern,” I murmured, and padded away.
He came to my cavern in the witches’ hour, and I knew I would be punished. I accepted, though the fault he struck for and the fault I bowed to would not be the same.
But he did nothing. Rather he stood there, starlight seeping around him as I waited.
He reached behind him, and, with those frail magician’s arms, hefted a huge whole salmon and flung it at my feet.
Neither of us spoke. I stared at the dead thing, gleaming with riverwater, still river-cool. Then I laughed.
The absurdity of it—had he gone to any trouble to fetch this thing for me? I could find it in half the time, with a fraction of my strength. Had I become a pet to him, to be fed when I could not feed myself?
“Lord Grey,” I said. “Grey Earl.”
“She is mine,” he hissed in the darkness, and his voice slid through the cavern like snakes. “You are mine. Betray me and I will destroy you.”
Destroy me? I felt the darkness knot at my shoulders. “Then destroy me,” I said, “for I have already betrayed you.”
His jaw worked, his fingers clenched. “She is mine!” he yowled, voice a petulant princeling’s, a child’s denied its toy. He spun on his heel, sweeping out of the cavern and taking his arrogance with him.
I opened my jaws and devoured his offering in two snaps. I thought I heard the rustle of fabric, but when I turned to the entrance I saw nothing.
I slept deeply, dragged down by grey magics and dim thoughts. I think Lord Grey returned to me in darkness, possessive as he was of Jessamine. “If you tell her,” he whispered, “I will tell her what you are.” I knew then that I was no one’s protector.
Perhaps only in dreams I roused myself, walking to the guestroom door. I thought I could hear her breathing, peace like dew disappearing with day. Did she dream of sunrises? Or did she dream of akk-ha-mam?
I stepped in, approaching her bed in the truth of myself—not as a lion, but as an ancient, scarred thing. What had I seen that I could tell her?
She opened her eyes and beheld me. But then I was shadow, I was shade; I escaped her and came back to myself, roused by the sun in its colorless sky.
I sought Jessamine charged with purpose, burning with the intent to warn her, to tell her, to chase her away, but I stumbled, and all of my words abandoned me. “Jessamine,” I begged her, “the Grey Earl will bewitch you. He is a conjurer and enchanter, and he will keep you….”
Jessamine knelt, sensing my fear. “Has he wounded you?”
I could not comprehend that gentleness of soul. “I no longer remember what wounds are.”
“How old are you?”
“As old as night and day. As old as the sun on its horizon.”
I wanted her to see the truth; I wanted it hidden forever. I wanted to guard her, but she had danced for Lord Grey and her search had all but ended. Had she stepped from the tower since drinking his tea?
She looked at me. “You’re more than a lion,” she said. “Much more.”
“More, but not greater.”
“As old as the skies—”
“No,” I said, and in my eyes the old light gleamed. “As old as the dawns.”
Her spirit fell like curtains from her eyes. I watched with nothing left to spare her.
“You were one of them,” she breathed. “You were a dragon.”
“I am,” I said.
“How could you?” she whispered, hand climbing to hang before her lips, to catch the horror of her words.
“This was never a place for dragons,” I said. “I was young once, spitting fire to the sunrise. I stayed when my brethren had all gone. I was the last, Jessa, and when I tired I slipped from the sky, and I took my sunrises with me.”
She reached out, caressing my neck, and I let her. Perhaps she could feel the scales beneath the skin, now; perhaps she could feel the molten blood beneath them.
“Am I a lion to you?” I asked.
Her eyes were overfull with tears. Her hand trembled. I eased my head under it, sliding so it rested on my brow. “As much as I am a lantern,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, but sadly. “Exactly as much.”
She buckled, falling like a rag-silk doll. Jessamine, did I ever lie to you? I was older than you and far wiser. I saw the heights of day and depths of night you could never fathom. I saw how sunsets flickered into nothing, all ignored. Who would I sing for?
Her tears ran little rivers on the cavern floor. “This is the world,” I said. “A cold, dark place where we huddle for warmth. My Jessa, I have no more warmth to give.”
She jerked up. “Don’t,” she gasped, recoiling. “Don’t call me that.”
“Jessamine—”
“Don’t say my name!”
I had nothing left to say. Could I describe how the skies felt at the end? When I was the last, yet burning, we were already gone. I turned away from her, and she from me.
I heard her footsteps falter, a wounded retreat from the great betrayer. I heard her run down the one path she knew now—not away from this place with its false rooms and dust magic, but deeper, to the wicker room. I followed her, drifting like a shadow with nothing to cast it.
I wove myself in with the cage-weave, watching though I had no place. Jessa wept, far away as phoenix flame and as cold as dusk without it.
Lord Grey rose from his seat, cares carved upon his aged face. She tripped to a stop, and swayed.
“Jessamine,” he breathed, and went to her.
I stayed hidden, deepening shadows about me so they would not see. Lord Grey took her in his arms, bundling her away in his conjurer’s cloak. His hands touched her shoulders, moved down her back to tuck beside her ribs. She settled into the embrace, face against his chest, tears gleaming under tight eyelids.
I watched her as she paled and flickered from within. Lord Grey’s hands moved. She stifled a sob in his collar.
I closed my eyes and mouthed her name.
“I am so, so sorry,” he whispered into her ear. “My Jessa, beautiful Jessa, let me make everything all right.”
A tiny gasp—a quiet thing. A moment of silence with unspeakable alarm. I heard her sigh. I heard Grey humming with the gentle-touched magic he made inside her. I heard the air displace. The rustle of cloth. Then nothing.
I opened my eyes and the Earl was kneeling, holding in his hands a wistful blue lantern. It bore the color of dawn skies now; skies without sunrise, skies without hope.
Gently, he lifted it and bade it rise. Inside its paper walls fluttered a weak and weary flame.
“There is no beauty left but this,” he murmured, and she rose. Light as smoke she rose. “And you will be beautiful forever.”
I watched her as she reached the myriad points of light, joining the sway and glimmer. The Grey Earl turned and regarded me without words. Then he left, through his magician’s door, to a place only he could go.
My feet carried me through the firelight, eyes uncomprehending what my heart knew all too well. My Jessa, Jessamine of the raven hair and knowing eyes, of the hands that could cup the starlight or brush against my brow, Jessa of her dreams and desires, of that hope I had eclipsed—my Jessa hung among a thousand lanterns, whose light sung loss.
Lord Grey came back to the wicker room late. “It won’t do any good,” he said. “You dragons never wanted for anything. You’re right; you did betray me. And the men in the village, and the children who watched the sky. How does it feel to have something taken from you, dragon? How does it feel to lose that light?”
A thousand lanterns. All alive once, dancing; all caught here, kept like pinned scarabs so that Grey would not lose them again. He’d called her My Jessa. Jessamine.
“You don’t know the value of things,” he told me. “You say you loved the sunset and the phoenixes who sang it, but you left the world that had them.”
He stepped to the center of the room and looked up, and the lanterns lined every shadow on his face.
“You’re such an elder creature that you think life a game,” he said, “and us reed dolls for pups to gnaw on. Do not pretend an injury. I know your heart untouched.”
The lantern light enchanted me. I heard his words but made no sense of them. “Lord Grey,” I asked, “what am I to you?”
The Earl looked at me with high dispassion. What could he see? A dog, perhaps—a black dog trained in hunting. Or a sphinx with a heavy iron collar, riddling curtailed.
“Nothing,” he said at length.
And I, “Nothing?”
“Nothing.” He turned away from me. “A clot of shadows with a rumbling voice. Shade in the mountains. You should thank me for taking you in; where else would you find a shadow deep enough?”
“Nothing,” I repeated, tasting the dust of the word on my tongue.
“You were something once,” he went on, “something proud and singular that we all admired. Now I’m the only child left who remembers. And I remember the east sky paling as you fled. Once, we all dreamed of meeting a dragon, offering spring harts and garlands. What are you? Nothing, now. A fable of better days.”
I listened.
“She’ll never feel that,” he said. “She would have searched forever. You would have let her wander in vain.”
“Jessamine….”
“My Jessa,” he whispered, “will be as beautiful as the stars until we all are swept to reckoning. She will never lose her innocence. She will never fall on the road. You will not destroy her, dragon. I deny you that.”
Quietly, I unfurled my wings.
Lord Grey stood, watching in confusion. A shadow or none, nothing or not, I could choose to be seen.
I chose.
Lantern light—a thousand sparks flickered on my scales. “And I am nothing to you,” I said.
Grey stepped back. I felt my talons, now, my eyes bright and gleaming, my teeth curved and strong. I felt my shoulders roll out. No more dog or golem, lion, shade—no more. This was the end to my hiding.
“Nothing but shadows, swaying to the light. Nothing but a voice from the darkness you despise. Why keep me here, old Earl? Would you have made me a lantern?”
“Stay back!” he hissed, hands raised between us. “Stay shade!” My jaws had formed, my flanks. I beat the magic from his fingers. He staggered before me.
“You would like to hear a story?” I stepped nearer. The ceiling closed in, lanterns swaying with the wind in my wings, fables uncoiling in my mind. “Lord Grey, let me tell you a story. A man. A girl. A black tower….”
He recoiled, hands against the wicker cage that was now too small to contain me. “My tower,” he whispered.
“Grey, do you remember her dancing? She was already as beautiful as the light.”
My wings half-spread, touching the edges of the room, catching in the weave. My rough spine crested, rolled down my back in jagged waves. My tail curled tight against the curving wall, blocking the magician’s door.
“Grey, did you ever see her crying? She did, at the last. But it wasn’t you who broke her.”
The Earl made a sad heap by the curve of the wall, hands searching for a weakness through which he could escape. His eyes gaped wide and frightened and dry. I hardly saw through the water in my own.
“Grey!” I implored him, and he heard not a shadow’s voice but a dragon’s. My claw shot out without thought, plucking him up as a lion snares a mouse. “Why am I here?”
I lost myself then. Between that instant and the next I spread my wings and burst the wicker cage, flung the magician over the edge of the mountain and down toward the cold blue river. The lanterns scattered when I bucked my head, flying and rolling into crevices, landlocked stars aglitter in the darkness. I howled, and the stone howled with me.
What was I doing there? Where had the sunsets gone, and where had they searched, all without finding?
The sky ached, ink-black above me, the land below cut in patterns of stone-silver and obsidian-green. The fading stars were the only ones to watch me, the lanterns the only ones to hear.
The lanterns….
I crept over the rocks. I lifted each light from its resting place, put them inside the Tower beside the wicker room’s remains. You are too beautiful, Grey had said—an old story, a thousand times, to a thousand dancing ears. Too beautiful for the dust and wind and unkind sun.
I knew no magic of undoing. Could I have broken the spell I would have, in an instant, in half—by blood or bond I would have pulled flesh from those lanterns and showed it the long road home. But I had nothing, save a promise: You will be the last. Jessamine, my Jessa, you will be the last.
And I had one last choice to make.
The tower rose above me, forgotten and ill-used. Its stone bore mute attest to Grey’s atrocities. How many others had I failed to save?
I scaled the tower. And when the sun rose, I howled out its light.
Heat! The sky ran molten with my breath, bloodlight and goldlight and godlight and sunlight searing my throat. I’d abandoned this; I could scarcely bear it now. But I roared it, lantern light, love light, the clean light of betrayal and the raiment of judgment. I sang the sun to rising, and when risen, sang it still.
Beneath me the city roused, spilling out of doors and hovels to stand in the streets in their nightgowns and gape, screaming, laughing, crying. I lit the heavens. They burned ardent before me.
The sun slipped higher, and I kept singing. I would make perpetual this fire in the east. For the days I had hidden, the nights I slept beneath the Earl’s watch. My breath grew hoarse, my flame burned raw. The sun rolled down the edge of evening.
Night settled without sunset, the east yet alive with our terrible fire. The stars faded, the moon glinted sanguine. The villagers knelt and prayed. Catsfur night slid along my scales, and my wings pushed cool breezes. The stars set. The moon lolled lower.
The sun rose fearfully, creeping through its sunrise. Noon light flooded me. Evening soothed and cooled the world, and the east shone bright as daybreak. The world fell into a second red night.
One by one, the lanterns faded to nothing. One by one, they escaped into the heavens with a final weak ember and a last breath of smoke.
Day came, and lasted, and lasted, and went.
I sang. I stayed. I wept. I stood.
I sang.