Harrowing the Dragon Read online

  Ace Books by Patricia A. McKillip

  THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD

  THE SORCERESS AND THE CYGNET

  THE CYGNET AND THE FIREBIRD

  THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLFE

  WINTER ROSE

  SONG FOR THE BASILISK

  RIDDLE-MASTER: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY

  THE TOWER AT STONY WOOD

  OMBRIA IN SHADOW

  IN THE FORESTS OF SERRE

  ALPHABET OF THORN

  OD MAGIC

  HARROWING THE DRAGON

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2005 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  For a complete listing of individual copyrights and acknowledgments please see page 309.

  Text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ACE is an imprint of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First edition: November 2005

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  Harrowing the dragon / Patricia A. McKillip.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Contents: The harrowing of the dragon of Hoarsbreath—A matter of music—A troll and two roses—Baba Yaga and the sorcerer’s son—The fellowship of the dragon—Lady of the skulls—The snow queen—Ash, wood, fire—The stranger—Transmutations—The lion and the lark—The witches of junket—Star-crossed—Voyage into the heart—Toad.

  ISBN 0-441-01360-0

  I. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3563.C38H37 2005

  813'.54—dc22

  2005051311

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Dave

  Contents

  The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath

  A Matter of Music

  A Troll and Two Roses

  Baba Yaga and the Sorcerer’s Son

  The Fellowship of the Dragon

  Lady of the Skulls

  The Snow Queen

  Ash, Wood, Fire

  The Stranger

  Transmutations

  The Lion and the Lark

  The Witches of Junket

  Star-Crossed

  Voyage into the Heart

  Toad

  Copyrights and Acknowledgments

  The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath

  Once, on the top of a world, there existed the ring of an island named Hoarsbreath, made out of gold and snow. It was all mountain, a grim, briny, yellowing ice-world covered with winter twelve months out of thirteen. For one month, when the twin suns crossed each other at the world’s cap, the snow melted from the peak of Hoarsbreath. The hardy trees shrugged the snow off their boughs and sucked in light and mellow air, pulling themselves toward the suns. Snow and icicles melted off the roofs of the miners’ village; the snow-tunnels they had dug from house to tavern to storage barn to mine shaft sagged to the ground; the dead white river flowing down from the mountain to the sea turned blue and began to move again. Then the miners gathered the gold they had dug by firelight out of the chill, harsh darkness of the deep mountain and took it downriver, across the sea to the mainland, to trade for food and furs, tools and a liquid fire called wormspoor because it was gold and bitter, like the leavings of dragons. After three swallows of it, in a busy city with a harbor frozen only part of the year, with people who wore rich furs, kept horses and sleds to ride in during winter, and who knew the patterns of the winter stars since they weren’t buried alive by the snow, the miners swore they would never return to Hoarsbreath. But the gold waiting in the dark secret places of the mountain-island drew at them in their dreaming, lured them back.

  For two hundred years after the naming of Hoarsbreath, winter followed winter, and the miners lived their rich, isolated, precarious lives on the pinnacle of ice and granite, cursing the cold and loving it, for it kept lesser folk away. They mined, drank, spun tales, raised children who were sent to the mainland when they were half-grown, to receive their education, and find easier, respectable lives. But always a few children found their way back, born with a gnawing in their hearts for fire, ice, stone, and the solitary pursuit of gold in the dark.

  Then two miners’ children came back from the great world and destroyed the island.

  They had no intention of doing that. The younger of them was Peka Krao. After spending five years on the mainland, boring herself with schooling, she came back to Hoarsbreath to mine. At seventeen, she was good-natured and sturdy, with dark eyes, and dark, braided hair. She loved every part of Hoarsbreath, even its chill, damp shafts at midwinter and the bone-jarring work of hewing through darkness and stone to unbury its gold. Her instincts for gold were uncanny; she seemed to sense it through her fingertips touching bare rock. The miners called her their good luck. She could make wormspoor, too, one of the few useful things she had learned on the mainland. It lost its bitterness, somehow, when she made it: it aged into a rich, smoky gold that made the miners forget their sore muscles and inspired marvelous tales out of them that whittled away at the endless winter.

  She met the Dragon-Harrower one evening at a cross section of tunnel between her mother’s house and the tavern. She knew all the things to fear in her world: a rumble in the mountain, a guttering torch in the mines, a crevice in the snow, a crack of ice underfoot. There was little else she couldn’t handle with a soft word or her own right arm. So when he loomed out of the darkness unexpectedly into her taper-light, she wasn’t afraid. But he made her stop instinctively, like an animal might stop, faced with something that puzzled its senses.

  His hair was dead white, with strands bright as worm-spoor running through it; his eyes were the light, hard blue of dawn during suns-crossing. Rich colors flashed out of him everywhere in her light: from a gold knife hilt and a brass pack buckle; from the red ties of his cloak that were weighted with ivory, and the blue-and-silver threads in his gloves. His heavy fur cloak was closed, but she felt that if he shifted, other
colors would escape from it into the cold, dark air. At first she thought he must be ancient: the taper-fire showed her a face that was shadowed and scarred, remote with strange experience, but no more than a dozen years older than hers.

  “Who are you?” she breathed. Nothing on Hoarsbreath glittered like that in midwinter; its colors were few and simple: snow, damp fur and leather, fire, gold.

  “I can’t find my father,” he said. “Lule Yarrow.”

  She stared at him, amazed that his colors had their beginnings on Hoarsbreath. “He’s dead.” His eyes widened slightly, losing some of their hardness. “He tell in a crevice. They chipped him out of the ice at suns-crossing, and buried him six years ago.”

  He looked away from her a moment, down at the icy ridges of tramped snow. “Winter.” He broke the word in two, like an icicle. Then he shifted his pack, sighing. “Do they still have wormspoor on this ice-tooth?”

  “Of course. Who are you?”

  “Ryd Yarrow. Who are you?”

  “Peka Krao.”

  “Peka. I remember. You were squalling in somebody’s arms when I left.”

  “You look a hundred years older than that,” she commented, still puzzling, holding him in her light, though she was beginning to feel the cold. “Seventeen years you’ve been gone. How could you stand it, being away from Hoarsbreath so long? I couldn’t stand five years of it. There are so many people whose names you don’t know, trying to tell you about things that don’t matter, and the flat earth and the blank sky are everywhere. Did you come back to mine?”

  He glanced up at the gray-white ceiling of the snow-tunnel, barely an inch above his head. “The sky is full of stars, and the gold wake of dragon-flights,” he said softly. “I am a Dragon-Harrower. I am trained and hired to trouble dragons out of their lairs. That’s why I came back here.”

  “Here. There are no dragons on Hoarsbreath.”

  His smile touched his eyes like a reflection of fire across ice. “Hoarsbreath is a dragon’s heart.”

  She shifted, her own heart suddenly chilled. She said tolerantly, “That sounds like a marvelous tale to me.”

  “It’s no tale. I know. I followed this dragon through centuries, through ancient writings, through legends, through rumors of terror and deaths. It is here, sleeping, coiled around the treasures of Hoarsbreath. If you on Hoarsbreath rouse it, you are dead. If I rouse it, I will end your endless winter.”

  “I like winter.” Her protest sounded very small, muted within the thick snow-walls, but he heard it. He lifted his hand, held it lightly against the low ceiling above his head.

  “You might like the sky beyond this. At night it is a mine of lights and hidden knowledge.”

  She shook her head. “I like close places, full of fire and darkness. And faces I know. And tales spun out of worm-spoor. If you come with me to the tavern, they’ll tell you where your father is buried and give you lodgings, and then you can leave.”

  “I’ll come to the tavern. With a tale.”

  Her taper was nearly burned down, and she was beginning to shiver. “A dragon.” She turned away from him. “No one will believe you anyway.”

  “You do.”

  She listened to him silently, warming herself with worm-spoor, as he spoke to the circle of rough, fire-washed faces in the tavern. Even in the light, he bore little resemblance to his father, except for his broad cheekbones and the threads of gold in his hair. Under his bulky cloak, he was dressed as plainly as any miner, but stray bits of color still glinted from him, suggesting wealth and distant places.

  “A dragon,” he told them, “is creating your winter. Have you ever asked yourselves why winter on this island is nearly twice as long as winter on the mainland twenty miles away? You live in dragon’s breath, in the icy mist of its bowels, hoarfrost cold, that grips your land in winter the way another dragon’s breath might burn it to flinders. One month out of the year, in the warmth of suns-crossing, it looses its ring-grip on your island, slides into the sea, and goes to mate. Its ice-kingdom begins to melt. It returns, loops its length around its mountain of ice and gold. Its breath freezes the air once more, locks the river into its bed, you into your houses, the gold into its mountain, and you curse the cold and drink until the next dragon-mating.” He paused. There was not a sound around him. “I’ve been to strange places in this world, places even colder than this, where the suns never cross, and I have seen such monsters. They are ancient as rock, white as old ice, and their skin is like iron. They breed winter and they cannot be killed. But they can be driven away, into far corners of the world where they are dangerous to no one. I’m trained for this. I can rid you of your winter. Harrowing is dangerous work and usually I am highly paid. But I’ve been looking for this ice-dragon for many years, through its spoor of legend and destruction. I tracked it here, one of the oldest of its kind, to the place where I was born. All I ask from you is a guide.”

  He stopped, waiting. Peka, her hands frozen around her glass, heard someone swallow. A voice rose and faded from the tavern kitchen; sap hissed in the fire. A couple of the miners were smiling; the others looked satisfied and vaguely expectant, wanting the tale to continue. When it didn’t, Kor Flynt, who had mined Hoarsbreath for Fifty years, spat wormspoor into the fire. The flame turned a baleful gold, and then subsided. “Suns-crossing,” he said politely, reminding a scholar of a scrap of knowledge children acquired with their first set of teeth, “causes the seasons.”

  “Not here,” Ryd said. “Not on Hoarsbreath. I’ve seen. I know.”

  Peka’s mother Ambris leaned forward. “Why,” she asked curiously, “would a miner’s son become a Dragon-Harrower?” She had a pleasant, craggy face; her dark hair and her slow, musing voice were like Peka’s. Peka saw the Dragon-Harrower ride between two answers in his mind. Meeting Ambris’s eyes, he made a choice, and his own eyes strayed to the fire.

  “I left Hoarsbreath when I was twelve. When I was fifteen, I saw a dragon in the mountains east of the city. Until then, I had intended to come back and mine. I began to learn about dragons. The first one I saw burned red and gold under the suns’ fire; it swallowed small hills with its shadow. I wanted to call it, like a hawk. I wanted to fly with it. I kept studying, meeting other people who studied them, seeing other dragons. I saw a night-black dragon in the northern deserts; its scales were dusted with silver, and the flame that came out of it was silver. I saw people die in that flame, and I watched the harrowing of that dragon. It lives now on the underside of the world, in shadow. We keep watch on all known dragons. In the green midworld belt, rich with rivers and mines, forests and farmland, I saw a whole mining town burned to the ground by a dragon so bright I thought at first it was sun-fire arching down to the ground. Someone I loved had the task of tracking that one to its cave, deep beneath the mine shafts. I watched her die, there. I nearly died. The dragon is sealed into the bottom of the mountain, by stone and by words. That is the dragon which harrowed me.” He paused to sip wormspoor. His eyes lifted, not to Ambris, but to Peka. “Now do you understand what danger you live in? What if one year the dragon sleeps through its mating time, with the soft heat of the suns making it sluggish from dreaming? You don’t know it’s there, wrapped around your world. It doesn’t know you’re there, stealing its gold. What if you sail your boats full of gold downriver and find the great white bulk of it sprawled like a wall across your passage? Or worse, you find its eye opening like a third, dead sun to see your hands full of its gold? It would slide its length around the mountain, coil upward, and crush you all, then breathe over the whole of the island and turn it dead-white as its heart, and it would never sleep again.”

  There was another silence. Peka felt something play along her spine like the thin, quavering, arthritic fingers of wind. “It’s getting better,” she said, “your tale.” She took a deep swallow of wormspoor and added, “I love sitting in a warm, friendly place listening to tales I don’t have to believe.”

  Kor Flynt shrugged. “It rings true, lass.�
�

  “It is true,” Ryd said.

  “Maybe so,” she said. “And it may be better if you just let the dragon sleep.”

  “And if it wakes unexpectedly? The winter killed my father. The dragon at the heart of winter could destroy you all.”

  “There are other dangers. Rockfalls, sudden floods, freezing winds. A dragon is simply one more danger to live with.”

  He studied her. “I saw a dragon once with wings as softly blue as a spring sky. Have you ever felt spring on Hoarsbreath? It could come.”

  She drank again. “You love them,” she said. “Your voice loves them and hates them, Dragon-Harrower.”

  “I hate them,” he said flatly. “Will you guide me down the mountain?”

  “No. I have work to do.”

  He shifted, and the colors rippled from him again, red, gold, silver, spring-blue. She finished the wormspoor, felt it burn in her like liquid gold. “It’s only a tale. All your dragons are just colors in our heads. Let the dragon sleep. If you wake it, you’ll destroy the night.”

  “No,” he said. “You will see the night. That’s what you’re afraid of.”

  Kor Flynt shrugged. “There probably is no dragon, anyway.”

  “Spring, though,” Ambris said; her face had softened. “Sometimes I can smell it from the mainland, and I always wonder… Still, after a hard day’s work, sitting beside a roaring fire sipping dragon-spit, you can believe anything. Especially this. She looked into her glass at the glowering liquid. Is this some of yours, Peka? What did you put into it?”

  “Gold.” The expression in Ryd’s eyes made her swallow sudden tears of frustration. She refilled her glass. “Fire, stone, dark, wood smoke, night air smelling like cold tree bark. You don’t care, Ryd Yarrow.”

  “I do care,” he said imperturbably. “It’s the best worm-spoor I’ve ever tasted.”

  “And I put a dragon’s heart into it.” She saw him start slightly; ice and hoarfrost shimmered from him. “If that’s what Hoarsbreath is.” A dragon beat into her mind, its wings of rime, its breath smoldering with ice, the guardian of winter. She drew breath, feeling the vast bulk of it looped around them all, dreaming its private dreams. Her bones seemed suddenly fragile as kindling, and the gold wormspoor in her hands a guilty secret. “It’s a tale.”