But she could not risk Queen Bebo’s wrath. Nor this one chance to find the Flowing Gold.
She clutched herself into a ball, rocking slowly back and forth. The shadows did not frighten her. They were shielding, so different from her fire. In here, no one could see her shame. No one could see her without her wings.
Outside, the children were brawling.
Wait. That could not be true. It was only the sound of the Black Dogs chasing that intruder. She was in Etalpalli. She was in her own city, not back in that dark, dank little hut in the mortal world. She was queen here. Queen over nothing but the ghosts of her people, yet queen even so.
But she heard them just outside, scuffling. Their voices raised in battle against each other.
Hri Sora rocked herself, her mind slipping in and out of the present as the fire inside flickered, rose, diminished, and flickered again. Her dragon mind was precarious without the appropriate body in which to house it. Time itself could not hold her. She was simultaneously in Etalpalli and in . . .
. . . her prison.
Outside, the children snarl like the little beasts they are, flailing in the dirt, bashing each other’s faces. They will come to her when they are through, full of cuts and bruises, expecting her sympathy.
The fire roils in her gut. How long has she suppressed it, here in this world full of mortal stench? How long has she believed herself one of these decaying creatures of dirt? For years now, the fire of her dragonhood has stirred so faintly that she hasn’t noticed it. But now it grows. And with it grows her memory.
“I . . . I am no woman,” she gasps. Smoke escapes her mouth.
If only those children would stop their squabbling!
She sits in a hut high in the mountains. It is dark. She should light a fire. Her man will be home soon, expecting a meal. But her fire circle lies empty, the ashes cold. A fresh kill is piled against the outside wall, undressed, swarmed over with flies. She can smell it, the stink of mortality. Her throat constricts and she gags.
“I hate this world,” she murmurs.
Someone outside, one of her young, yelps in pain as its sibling catches it with a hard hit. Monsters! She hopes they’ll eat each other up and never bother her again.
A groan escapes her lips, cut off abruptly by a sharp hiss. Her eyes bulge, and in the darkness of that mountain hut, they gleam like two bright coals. The pain, the fire in her gut—it threatens to explode.
The children fall silent. Drawing a deep breath, she smells the reason. Their father has returned, reeking from the hunt. She hears his heavy breathing as he approaches the hut, hears the soft scramble of her young as they hasten out of his way.
Then he is at the door.
“Woman!”
His voice is a growl.
She sees him silhouetted against the dusk. His shoulders are broad, his hands enormous as they grasp the doorway on either side as though to bar her passage. But she makes no move to escape her prison. She sits on the hut floor, in the dirt, in the dark, her teeth clenched.
“Woman, how can you let our brood tear into each other so?”
Her gaze rises to meet his.
The shadow of his form draws back in surprise. “What— No, swallow it back!”
The woman gasps as though breathing for the first time in years. Then she speaks:
“Swallow what back, Amarok? My words? Or my fire?”
Her jaw drops, and flames pour from her throat.
Fire lit up the walls of her tower, and Hri Sora was once more back in Etalpalli. Her flames hurled themselves against the stone and died ineffectually as they struck and found no hold. With difficulty she swallowed them. The last embers fell and sizzled upon the floor, leaving her standing once more in darkness but in possession of her true mind.
Or so she hoped. It was so difficult these days to tell past from present, waking from dreaming.
Etalpalli trembled.
Someone else had entered her city. Someone she had not herself opened the gate to. Which meant someone had actually dived over the edge of Cozamaloti Falls in its true form.
She snarled and felt her way to the wall, searching with hands and feet until she found the narrow stairway. The Sky People had never used stairs when they lived in Etalpalli. Why would they? But they had built crude stairwells out of courtesy to foreign guests who were not blessed with wings. Hri Sora had always sneered at these. Now she found herself painfully grateful. Otherwise she, the city’s queen, would have been unable to access her own tower.
Lady Gleamdren’s voice was a canary’s twitter coming from the birdcage in the middle of the rooftop. Hri Sora ignored her, striding to the edge of the roof and looking out. She saw the dark patch in her otherwise flame-bright city where the Black Dogs still pursued that luckless captain. This did not interest her. They would catch him eventually. They always did.
But who had dared cross her boundaries without her knowledge? Only one of great courage. Someone powerful.