1.1. Witness
The child brushed a mosquito from her forehead while she
wove a crown of flowers from the daisies and poppies that grew along the bank
of the river. Her horse nickered and leaned against its brother that drank from
the river, a tributary of the Thomulk River that split Sinefora into halves:
the western half the breadbasket of Sinefora; the eastern half a wilderness of
endless plains beyond which lay the slate cliffs that fell to the Eastern Ocean
nearly a mile below.
Her horse nickered again and she heard an answering nicker
from across the river where no one should be.
“Father!” she called and ran to the bearded man who finished
laying out their picnic.
“Yes, Makashti,” her father said.
“Father, come,” she said and led him to the bank of the river.
The girl and her father watched as a family of primitives
walked upstream along far side of the bank. They were dressed in leathers with
fur trim meant for the cold of Tur not the temperate climate of Sinefora. The
man carried a large pack on his back and led a horse which dragged two poles
which dragged behind it and upon which lay a burden. The woman’s only
decoration was feathers tied to her long braided hair. She carried a child in a
sling at her breast and another in a basket on her back. Two children, walked
with them, one Makashti’s age who watched her from across the bank.
“Quarajii,” her father said. “From Tur.”
“How did they climb the slate cliffs?” she said referring to
the defining feature the eastern border of Sinefora.
Her father reached out and plucked a mosquito from the air.
“Do you know the only creature that lives on more kinds of terrain than this
insect?” The girl shook her head. “Man, and the beasts he brings with him. If a
four-thousand foot cliff cannot stop this mosquito, it will not stop the Qu.”
“Where do they go?” she asked.
“To live,” her father said. “The North must be getting
harder for them.”
“Where to?”
“South. The Quarajii have old dreams of the South, beyond
the Spine,” he said and pointed to the high mountains that separated the North
from the South. “But the Spine will stop them.”
Makashti pointed to the burden the horse dragged behind it
which appeared to be a sick or elderly person “They care for one another,” she
said.
“Yes. But it will not help them,” he said. “If they do not
die in the Spine they will turn north to Sinefora where the governor will kill
them.”
“Why?”
“If the Qu come, the Horde will follow. Sinefora is the only
barrier to the Horde entering Sularia. And if the Horde comes they will scrub
the land like locusts, and leave nothing standing. The Emperor will come and
lay waste the rest.”
“But there are other places they can go?”
Her father shook his head. “To the south is the Spine and
mountains they cannot cross. To the east is the Eastern Ocean. To the west are
the fast rivers of Cherryth and the Northmen who will stop them.
Makashti feared for the children. “Will you tell the governor?”
“Perhaps not,” he said and sighed. “But I fear more will
come. This may be just a trickle of the flood to follow.”
“If the governor sees them, will he kill them?”
“Not if there are millions.”
1.2. Partners
Eighteen years later and a thousand miles to the south in
the high mountains of the Spine, another young girl had a vision of a different
future: a future that would intersect Makashti’s.
Astrid reined her dragon to fly against the beam of sunlight
that broke through the clouds, hoping to hide within the thunderstorm from the
fire-breather. Until the sun fully set, they would weave through the rose
tinted clouds amid flashes of lightning to evade the predator. It was cold up
here and a late spring. A drop of rain stung her cheek and she quickly leaned
over to hug her dragon and let the rain arc over her.
They had flown deep into the mountains of the Spine to free a
female dragon from the fire-breather’s lair. Astrid would be the first of her
kind to see a reclusive female, but only if they avoided being lunch for the
much larger hunter. For the moment they were free, and she closed her eyes to feel
the wind in her hair and smell the crisp damp air. She opened her arms wide
with the exhilaration of the chase and sang. From far away she heard someone
call her name, but she knew they could not leave their shelter in the clouds
just yet…
“Astrid!” the voice called to her from just a few feet away.
Her arms still outstretched, she opened her eyes to see the rector[1]
and the entire pod of twenty students staring at her. Their laughter burst her
day-dream; she blushed, and drew her hands into her lap.
“Astrid, what is the name of our mountains?” the rector
asked.
“Uh …the Spine,” Astrid stammered, struggling to drag her
attention back to the class.
“And where are we from?” the rector asked. Many children
raised their hands, but the teacher kept her focus on just one. “Astrid,
please.”
“The Old Empire,” Astrid said, but did not look up this
time, instead concentrating on adding a tint of rose to the clouds in her
sketch of a dragon flying through the clouds at sunset.
Spring came late again this year and Vinga had taken the
children outside to the walnut grove rather than stay inside the stuffy Clan
Manor where they had been cooped up during the long winter. Spring came later
each of Astrid’s twelve years, but this spring was here—she could smell it and
could not wait for school to end.
While Astrid sketched and hummed, the lesson continued. “See here. Our mountains separate Suleria and
the Old Empire,” the rector said, pointing to a region near the north-east of
the mountain range. “And this is our valley, here.”
But Astrid was
back in her own world, detailing the dragon in her sketchbook and singing
softly.
“Honorable Vinga,[2]
why did our people leave the South?” the boy who sat in front of Astrid asked.
This was the new boy in school and the focus of attention of all the young
girls, and like them, Astrid stopped what she was doing and looked up.
“It's not written, Finn,” Rector Vinga replied. “We left
long ago with only our clothing. The elders tell us that we were once slaves
that were freed by a miracle of the One God.” She waved her hands to the floor
of the valley and its tan checkerboard of tilled land. “Who taught us to farm,
children?” she asked and showed a drawing of their first years in the valley.
“We took this knowledge from the South,” Finn. “But the
pictures show we grew corn, and now we grow wheat. Why?”
“Corn grows better in a hotter climate in the South,” Vinga
said.
“But the pictures show that we grew corn here when we first
arrived…” Finn said.
Astrid stopped
listening and drifted back into her own world, singing softly as she captured
the oak grove in her sketchbook. From within the grove she heard a low hum in
harmony and she stopped and looked up. A head poked out from the leaves of the
tree: huge, with teeth as long as her arm and eyes as large and green as
melons. It was small for a dragon, perhaps five yards tooth to tail.
When Finn turned, the huge beast looked at him, flared its
nostrils and inhaled slowly and deeply, eyes now as bright and red as
pomegranates. Their fairy tales had told the children what to expect
next—incineration[3]—and
there was no time to run. Finn stood up in defiance to shield the smaller
children, but then closed his eyes and cringed. The beast put its jaws a few
inches from Finn’s face and—
— knocked
him on his butt with a puff of air, not flames.
The beast chuffed a few times, which for a dragon was
laughter, and all the children laughed with him: all except Finn who remained
unseared but with a red face and embarrassed smile. Everyone knew the dragon's
joke but Finn: dragons did not breathe fire, at least not outside the world of
myth.
“Thank you ahh…,” Vinga said, looking at the dragon. “You
are excused.” It was small for a dragon and she waved her hand as if to push it
back into the trees.
“His name is Little Wing,” Astrid said though dragons could
not speak their names to humans.
“Thank you Little Wing,” the rector said, not asking how
Astrid knew his name, and returned to her instruction.
The dragon purred at the attention, his eyes pearlescent. He
did not leave but instead returned to his place in the walnut grove and
continued to hum in harmony to Astrid's song.
“She will become a Rider,” said a teacher observing the
dragon's prank.
“But she is too young,” said another. “And the dragon is too
small.”
***
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