They were all apparently receding from him as he moved. The ground that
should have been running sharply uphill was simply lying there, no matter
which way he turned, flat and vaguely rocky underfoot. He heard something
finally: his own heartbeat, uncomfortably loud, as if the fog had pushed
powerful, invisible hands against his ears.
“Val?” he said, suddenly without much hope of an answer. He had wandered out
of the world he recognized, leaving even Val and their father behind, along
with his sight, his hearing, and, once again, any kind of a weapon.
He heard an inhuman snort, an answer to his call, as though he had awakened
something within the fog. He froze, hoping it would go back to sleep. A stone
skittered across the ground. Something enormous yawned, sucking in mist; it
swirled, ebbed toward the indrawn breath for a long time, it seemed, before
fog blew back out again, accompanied by an odd smell of charred, damp wood.
Pierce stopped breathing. His skin grew colder than the fog. The fire-
breathing cousin of the wyvern was, unlike the extinct wyvern, a myth. It had
inspired a rich hoard of tales in early Wyvernhold history, especially those
illuminating the prowess of legendary questing knights. It was a fantasy, a
symbol, no more than that. At least it should have been.
He heard the dragon’s voice.
Pierce.
He caught a breath, coughed on cold, ash-soured air. The deep voice seemed to
resonate from the stones buried beneath the earth; Pierce felt it underfoot,
heard it with his bones. The constantly shifting mist frayed just enough to
give him a glimpse of an outline paler than the mist: an enormous, crested
neck, a lizard’s maw trickling smoky mist out of nostrils the size of
platters and ringed with a red, pulsing glow.
Go no farther. You are not welcome in the north.
“I’m— We’re just on our way to Chimera Bay,” Pierce stammered. “Only
that far. At least for now.”
No.
He cudgeled his brain a moment, trying to remember any scrap of story that
gave him a clue about how to talk to dragons. Mostly, he guessed, there was
not a lot of talking, just fire and gore. He gave up, asked baldly, “Why not?
”
The mist flamed in front of him; he felt the warmth, smelled the harsh, dry
dragon’s breath.
You have chosen. Come no closer. This is my world.
He blinked and recognized the cold encircling him, the soundless, invisible
landscape, the baleful dragon: the heart of the matter. Val had seen it, felt
it, immediately.
Mistbegotten.
“Mom?” he whispered, and the dragon roared.
That cleared the air, though Pierce, dropped and clinging to earth under the
weight of the vast, endless, reverberating thunder, didn’t notice until the
sound growled and echoed away into the distance. He raised his head
cautiously, opened his eyes, and heard the plaintive cry of gulls, the surge
and break of the waves.
“Pierce!” his father called, and he got up, brushing away the needles that
clung to him, dropped from the finally visible trees.
He stumbled downhill, saw the limo across the road, waiting in a viewing area
overlooking the sea. Val and Leith stood with their backs to the water, trying
to find Pierce among the thick, silent ranks of giants climbing up the
mountainside.
“I’m here,” he said, reaching the road, still feeling the smoldering glare
of invisible dragon between his shoulder blades. Its thunder echoed in his
heartbeat, his blood. The mist clung to his skin like the touch of the
sorceress’s hand. He wondered if even his shadow had turned pale.
As he crossed the road to the overlook, he saw Leith’s face grow tight, his
brows knot. Val’s normally unruffled expression mutated into an odd wariness.
“Mist,” he said for the third time, and Pierce nodded wearily. Leith’s eyes
flicked between them.
“What?” he demanded. “What was up there? What happened to you? You look
white as a ghost. You’re shivering.”
“Ah—” Pierce said, and stuck. One angry parent seemed more than enough. But
this was between the two of them, he remembered; the seeds of the dragon’s
wrath had been sown before he was born. “She—ah—she doesn’t want to see
us. Any of us. She thinks that’s why we’re travelling north. I must not have
explained things very well when we talked.”
Leith took a step closer, his hands tightening. “What did she do to you?”
“She roared at me.”
“She what?”
“Well, it probably wasn’t her. It was her making. Her illusion. I couldn’t
see it too well in that mist. But it was huge, and it smelled like burning
embers, and it made a noise like a mountain blowing its top.”
“Dragon.” Val’s face had gone pale, but it had lost its tension; his eyes,
vivid with sudden comprehension, narrowed at his father. “She still loves
you,” he said incredulously, and Leith’s face flamed as though the dragon’s
fire had scorched it.
“I doubt that her passion has anything to do with love at this point,” he
said brusquely.
Val gazed quizzically at him, looking unconvinced. Pierce, remembering his
last evening with his mother, the fierce anger in her that had shaped flames,
that had shaped tears, wondered at his brother, who could draw such
conclusions out of a seemingly impenetrable mist.