Temptation surged in me. Tell her I had dreamed of a wolf tearing white rabbits into bloody shreds. Tell her of a man with a battle-axe chopping the heads of squirming white snakes.
NO. Wolf-Father was adamant. In a breath of awareness, he added, Do not provoke another predator until your pack is ready to tear it apart. Be small and still, cub.
“I don’t remember any dreams now.” I scratched my face, looked at the bits of dangling skin, wiped them on my shirt, and then pretended to pick my nose until she made a small sound of dismay. She moved away from me, taking book and quill with her. I looked carefully at my finger and then put it in my mouth. Odessa moved away from me. I did not let myself smile.
Chapter Seventeen
Blood
There are seventy-seven known medicinal uses for dragon parts, and fifty-two unsubstantiated ones. The seventy-seven are listed in the scrolls called Trifton Dragon-killer’s Remedies. Of great antiquity, this scroll has been translated many times, to the extent that seventeen of the remedies make no sense. For instance, we are told that “ground dragon scales applied to the apple with brighten coal a maiden’s eyes.” Yet, mistranslated as these remedies may be, for each one the original scribe provided the name and apparently the attestation from someone who had used the remedy to good effect.
The fifty-two unsubstantiated remedies are those with no attestations, and ones that seem unlikely to be real. As they are at the end of the translation I have, I suspect they are a later addition by someone seeking to present the medical properties of dragon parts as having more wondrous uses. There are potions made from various bits of dragons that are said to render a man invisible, to give a woman the gift of flight, ones guaranteed to bring twins to term, healthy and strong, in three months, and one startling remedy that assures the user of being able to see anyone whose name he speaks aloud, regardless of the distance or if that person is still alive.
With the reappearance of dragons in our corner of the world, perhaps these remedies may again become available, but I hypothesize that they will remain exceedingly rare and expensive. Thus the opportunity to test the beneficial effects of Trifton’s remedies may evade us still.
—Unfinished manuscript, Chade Fallstar
When one misses a stair in the dark and begins to fall, one feels that terrible lurch of wrongness combined with fear of the impact that will surely follow. I fell with the same horrid sensation of moving in the wrong direction, but my fear was that there would never be any impact. Only endless falling. The points of light were like dust. Bodiless, I flailed at them. Never before had I retained such a sense of self, such a sense of mortality inside a Skill-pillar.
And when I recognized that I had a self, I suddenly sensed I was not alone. He was beside me, streaking endlessly down like a comet as his being unraveled in brightness behind him. That was wrong. That was very wrong.
Between knowing it was wrong and wanting to do something about it, an indeterminate amount of time passed. Then I struggled to know what to do. Limit him. Define him. How? Name him. One of the oldest magics known to men. Chade. Chade. But I was tongueless, voiceless. I wrapped him in my self, containing him with all I knew of him. Chade. Chade Fallstar.
I held him. Not his body, but his awareness. We fell together. I held my awareness of my separate self and hoped without reason that there was an end, somewhere, sometime, to this endless falling. Despite my efforts, Chade was leaking away from me. Like a basket of meal in a high wind, he seemed to waft away, carried off by the Skill. Worse, I had no sense of him resisting it. I held him, gathered back what I could of him, but I also felt myself shredding in the constant blast of that place that was neither a place nor a time. The very timelessness of it was terrifying. The journey through the star-studded vastness of the stone passage seemed to slow. “Please,” I breathed, terrified that we might never emerge, that no one would ever know what became of us, that Bee would live or die believing that her father had never attempted to rescue her. But that agony was fleeting.
Merge, whispered something that was Chade but both more and less than he was. Let go. It doesn’t matter. And he surrendered to that glittering attraction of the spaces between, to the darkness that was neither a distance nor a location. Like a seedhead that, at the whisper of the wind, launches itself into a thousand pieces, so was Chade. And I, I was not a sack to hold him, but a net. With the least part of the will that remained to me, I strove to hold him together within myself, even as the lure of the sparkling darkness sought to disperse us into bits of light.
Chade. Chade Fallstar.