HEART-HEALER

Deborah J. Ross

AFTERNOON light slanted across the infirmary which occupied most of the ground floor of Heron’s cottage. The windows, thick and ancient mullioned glass, had been left half open to admit the freshening breeze. Two iron pots, one for cooking and one for preparing medicines, hung above the patchstone fireplace, and the narrow trestle table which dominated the kitchen corner held distillation apparatus, mortar and pestle for grinding, and scales for measuring. On the bench just inside the door sat an old woman and her two grown daughters, hope and resignation on their faces.

Heron straightened up from listening to the old man’s chest. She had conducted her examination as she had been taught in the healers’ college at Temple. The stiffness of his limbs and rib cage, the brittle quality of his skin, the wheeze and creak of his lungs, all bespoke a lifetime of unrelenting struggle. Yet he had done well for himself and his family, a kindly man in a land that too often forced men to be harsh.

Were this Temple, or any of the easy southern lands where life followed a far more rational course, Heron’s work would be almost done. She would dose him with foxglove, prescribe that his food be prepared without salt, forbid him pickles and sour-cabbage, and order a daily measured amount of wine and gentle walking. He might rally, for the herb had true therapeutic qualities. In all likelihood, the extra care and the easing of his heart would bring some benefit.

But here in the shadow of the Basalt Mountains, men did not fall sick from merely physical causes. Age and hard usage weak-ened the body and thus allowed the influence of other forces. She already knew his heart was losing its battle with the demands of his aging body. It took no magick to see the swelling in his ankles or feel his thready pulse.

This man before her—this Jem Ryan—would surely die, despite her herbs and advice. Her only hope of saving him was to discover the true nature of his heart.

She went to her cabinet of camphor wood, set with tiny drawers, each one bearing a different symbol. The cabinet had come over the Willow Road from a land so distant she did not know its name.

Heron moistened the fingers of one hand with her tongue and with the other hand slid open the drawer bearing the mark like a running stag, fifth down and third from the right. Inside, in an even smaller box of oak lined with tightly-woven silk, her fingertips met coarse powder, like incompletely burned ash. It was not ash, nor was it one element, and it meant death to any who took more than a pinch of it. She touched her fingers to the underside of her tongue. The familiar bitterness swept through her.

It took only a moment for the powder to take effect. Heron’s sense of smell sharpened, changed. She felt as if she were breathing through a long tube. The hairs on her forearms prickled. Then the sensations faded and she turned back to her patient. “I’m going to examine you in a different way,” she told him with her best professional smile. “It won’t hurt, but it would be better if you not talk until I’m done.”

Jem Ryan stared at her, his eyes widening minutely, for he had endured the examination and answered all of her questions in monosyllables or gestures.

Heron settled herself once more on her padded stool and arranged the patient’s arms at his sides. The skin on his forearms was deeply tanned, like oiled bronzewood against the milky paleness of his body. The muscles of his chest and shoulders had withered with age, but she could see the traces of the powerful active man he had once been. She took her first reading, one hand on his left shoulder, the other on the tip of his breastbone, at the angle of the curving ribs. Her hands moved to the second position, two fingers’-width higher and to the left of the breastbone itself, then the hollow between the fourth and fifth ribs.

She lowered her eyes to better concentrate on her inner senses. Her fingertips slid over the old man’s skin, finding the anatomical landmarks. His chest rose and fell under her touch.

The pattern began to emerge, built up layer upon layer between her hands. Sometimes she envisioned swirls of colored smoke condensing into a veil calligraphed with the heart’s true name. Other times, the heart took the form of a musical phrase or a picture, bright and sudden, in her mind. Jem Ryan—husband and grandfather, a stoic, gentle man who asked no more than to tend his orchards season by season—bore the heart of a wild boar.

Heron smiled as she lifted her hands from his skin. Even knowing him as little as she did, this answer struck her as perfect.

Our bodies are our own, muscles and sinews and nerves, Wil-let, the old hedge-wizard who had been her final teacher once said, but not our hearts. We are loaned them for the space of our lives before they return to their true nature. In the south, they know nothing beyond what they can grasp with their own two hands. We of the mountains—and here he had turned his opal-white eyes toward the peaks—we know that only truth can call to truth.

To call a man back from the edge of death, to heal a dying heart, she must speak to its true nature and form, not the outer shell of the flesh.

Wordlessly, she went back to her cabinet and selected herbs sacred to the spirit of the boar. Murmuring words of praise and power, she mixed them into a cup of apple wine. It was her last bottle, but the resonance was far better, the catalyzing effect upon the herbs more profound, than if she had used ordinary grape wine or even ale. And for a boar spirit, water would be unthinkable.

Boar, O most puissant boar whose eyes are carbuncles in the night and whose feet trample the unworthy! O Boar, symbol of courage and fidelity, abide with this man! Strengthen his human heart, sustain his human dreams. O Boar, remain with us this day! Smiling again, she offered Jem Ryan the cup. His flicker of suspicion vanished as the sweet heady aroma of wine and herbs reached his nose. Grinning broadly, he lifted the cup in silent salute—

—not only to her, but to the spirit which now bent its massive bristled head, tusks gleaming like mother-of-pearl—

—and downed it in a single gulp.

“Well-ah,” he said, running his tongue over his lips to catch the last droplets, “if this is a fair taste of yer medicine, lass, ye’ll hear no argument from me.”

Heron laughed and took the empty cup. ” Tis a different cure for each, so don’t go making promises to anyone else. I’ll be sending along a packet of dried herbs now and another in a month or so, to be mixed with apple wine, or cherry if you have any, and taken every evening.”

“Ah, and won’t the wife be loving that?” His eyes twinkled.

“By my orders!” Heron said, laughing again. “Or I will know the reason why.”

The room fell silent after Jem Ryan’s family had taken him away. Heron noted the skepticism in the eyes of the daughters, the wife’s disapproving scowl. But even a blind woman could have seen the rising color in his cheeks.

Sometimes, the spirit of the heart turned away from her, and all she had to offer was comfort. Occasionally, the human heart was too frail to hold its true nature. Sometimes, the end came blessedly quickly. Sometimes, the family might whisper a plea.

I don’t do that, Heron would answer.

A death with dignity, that’s all we ask, they would say, tearing at her with their basalt eyes. Who is to say it isn’t a blessing?

But not today. Not Jem Ryan. He would live to see another blossoming of his apple trees, another harvest festival. Well, Heron thought as she tidied up her workroom, maybe he wouldn’t dance at the festival, but she didn’t think he would mind. She might well discover a barrel of his best apple wine upon her doorstep on a frosty autumn morning.

Heron poured out the brew which had been cooling in the larger iron pot into a filtering apparatus and washed her hands in the basin. It sat, along with scrubbing brushes and a precious bar of honey soap, on a wide, worn shelf in the far corner of her kitchen. Pots of garlic sets, aloe, and false-ginger lined the windowsill. Beyond, in the tiny garden, twilight glimmered on the rows of medicinal herbs.

She wanted nothing more than to sit outside for a few minutes, in the seat one of her patients had carved at the foot of her rowan tree, inhaling the deep green scents. Yet she had several hours of work before she could put away her laboratory and cleanse the kitchen for cooking.

Using a scrap of chamois to insulate her fingers, she reached into her pantry, past the strings of beads and carved bone, and took out a wedge of cheese left over from her morning meal. It would be enough to keep her going, although she was afraid that this evening, like too many others of late, she would finish too tired to do more than crawl up the ladder to her sleeping loft and fall asleep in her clothes.

Heron was yawning and had stopped feeling hungry by the time she finished bottling the last of the feverbane. Unlike willow bark tea, which was simple enough for even a patient to prepare, the feverbane took days of attention to imbue it with not only pharmacological but magickal properties. If she could have done so safely, she would have waited until the morning to finish.

She wondered, not for the first time, if she ought not to look for an apprentice. But there had not been room in her life for another person since Darrin left.

What is it to be—this nonsense or me? he’d stormed. She had never really had a choice. Healing was all she knew, and once the magick had sung in her bones, she could never have lived anywhere else. Darrin had gone south, along the Willow Road. She thought of him sometimes, on long winter nights when her body ached with exhaustion.

Outside, full night had fallen, and the breeze through the partly opened windows sent shivers along her skin. Oonat, her brindled cat, jumped through the window just as she leaned over to close it. She hoped the cat had caught his own dinner, for all she wanted at the moment was sleep, but then, as Oonat rubbed his sleek length against her legs, purring loudly, she relented. Dinner for both of them, then.

“What would I do without you to take care of me?”

The cat paused in his attentions, tufted ears pricked in the direction of the front door, and one forepaw raised in midstride. “Meerow?”

Heron felt the tension in the cat’s body. Oonat might not use human speech, but his instincts were infallible. He had woken her a full hour before the earthquake three years ago, batting her face with sheathed claws until she stumbled down the loft ladder and out into the garden.

Heart racing now, she went to the door, placed her palm upon the age-darkened oak. Listened. And heard nothing, not even the coo of a night-dove or the call of a neighbor’s child. She held her breath and reached for the latch. A moment passed, and then another. Then, like a storm breaking on the heights, sound returned. She heard the distant bark of a dog, voices muffled by distance, the hum of the village settling down for the night.

She was about to return to her meal preparations when she noticed that Oonat had not relaxed. The hair along his spine stood up in a ridge and his eyes looked twice their normal size. Head lowered, each paw placed precisely in front of the other, he approached the door.

That settled it. Heron grasped the latch and yanked it open. A man, still as death, fell across her feet.

She stood there for a long moment, looking down at him incredulously. Patients came to her or were brought by their families, sometimes literally carried, but inert bodies did not just appear. Surely she would have heard if someone had dragged him here, or if he had crawled on his own.

As best she could tell with her shadow falling across him, he looked to be a strongly built man in his prime, a head or so taller than she and broad in the shoulders. He wore the sort of loose tunic and leggings common in both village and farm. Hair, glinting red-gold where the light from inside her cottage touched it, tumbled over his face, masking his features.

He wasn’t dead. She knew that from the warmth of his cheek against her bare ankle. Nor would Oonat have kept up that low, barely audible growl for a corpse. Heron sighed again and bent over, mentally apologizing to her back muscles for how they were going to feel in the morning after dragging this fellow inside. She laid the unconscious man beside the hearth and rolled him on his back.

He was younger than she’d thought, though an odd redness, like sunburn, etched a mask on his face. His pulse, though strong, was slow. She touched skin moist with a fine sheen and fever-hot, lips dry and slack. She rolled back his eyelids to reveal irises the color of the sea. His pupils contracted symmetrically to light. His skull felt intact, his spine supple.

Heron opened the laces of his tunic. Healed, whitened scars marked his upper arms, one on his ribs. Sword cuts, she guessed, touching the calluses on his palms. He wore a pendant, a piece of polished rose quartz, drilled with a hole and looped with a leather cord. She placed her ear against the almost hairless skin of his chest to listen better. Air whispered through the delicate tissues of the lungs. The heart, like distant thunder, beat too slow, too strong.

There was nothing Heron could point to, other than the elevated body heat, no sign by which she might diagnose what was wrong with this man. Yet she knew as surely as she herself breathed, that he was dying.

She turned away, looking back out the kitchen window into the cave of darkness which was her garden. At night, the well-known shapes took on sinister forms; it became a place she did not know, a place in which anything could happen.

She was tired, that was all, and had been on edge all evening, filled with fanciful dark imaginings. She was tempted to wait, to eat something, to rest, before finishing her examination. But the delay might cost her the small measure of determination she now had.

Heron went to the cabinet, touched a fingerful of powder beneath her tongue, positioned her hands, and closed her eyes. Bitterness washed through her, quickly fading.

As she touched his chest, the sensation of lightless space engulfed her. She fought the rising urge to break off contact, to run away. When she opened her eyes, the coppery glow from the banked embers steadied her. She inhaled and tasted wood fire, the faintly medicinal smells from the kitchen, the lingering sweetness of the apple wine. Oonat flowed across the far corner, shadow upon shadow, eyes like fairy gems.

Heron turned her attention back to the image between her hands, the true nature of this man’s heart. Again, she sensed emptiness and dying light. As her fingers sought out the next contact points and layer built upon layer, her inner vision sharpened. The man’s own heart wavered like a ghost, a shadow compared to the compelling images. He carried the true nature of a second heart, and the weight of it was killing him.

Walls arched above her head, rising long and graceful like the inside of a cathedral. She saw not in shades of color, hue and tint, but in heat and taste, the metallic tang of blood, the singing silver, the deep rich harmonics of molten gold. With each passing moment, with each new triangulation, the world around her grew more vivid. She found herself moving forward. The ribs, smelling of alabaster and volcanoes, curved above her head. She could almost touch them.

Heron became aware of a pulsation, a rhythmic waning and strengthening, a musical chord just below her hearing, an intensification of color.

Red/gold/ebony/cinnamon …

She went on, though now the walls closed in on her and she could clearly see the knobs and interweavings where the ribs joined above her head.

Throb … Throb-THROB …

She heard it now, not with her human ears, but singing through the marrow of her bones. Sinking down, she felt it in every fiber of the cathedral cave. The alabaster ribs flexed with its rhythm.

Throb … Throb-THROB … Throb-THRRROBBBB …

A shape coalesced before her, emerging from a crimson fog. At first, it appeared to be an animal, one of the familiar forms she sought. But it was shape and not-shape, form and thought, rubies and dreams.

It was the heart of a dragon.

Not a heart with the nature of a totem beast, but the heart of a dragon somehow imprisoned in this human body.

For a long time after she came back to herself, Heron sat looking at the man who bore the heart of a dragon and wondered what she could possibly do to save him. The only one who might know was her old teacher, Willet. For five years, she had studied the true nature of things at his feet, swept his hearth and stirred his brews, and studied his ancient scrolls. From her training at Temple, she knew anatomy and diagnosis, how to observe, listen, probe, and percuss, how to question a patient, how to counsel his family. What she did not know was why the things which worked so well in the southern cities failed in the shadow of the mountains.

Heron forced herself to eat a little and sleep for those few hours until dawn. Oonat curled up in the crook behind her knees, purring softly. She drew as much strength from his presence as from the brief rest.

To her surprise, when she awoke, Heron discovered the man sitting up, gazing into the dying embers. He would not answer her questions, but he followed, willingly if slowly, when she took his hand and led him about the room. Sometimes he seemed like a simpleton, at other times a blind man.

Heron drew out her satchel, the one which had once held all her worldly goods, and packed it with everything she might need—changes of linens and socks, an extra shirt, her warmest sweater, packets of herbs and medicinals, a small sewing kit, her folding knife …

She needed a gift for Willet. He would not help her without a gift. Money? Too commonplace. Ale? Too heavy to carry. The stoneware pot with the rainbow glaze? Too feminine.

Ah! She sorted through the drawers of her cabinet until she found a vial of tincture of dragonsblood. It had nothing to do with dragons other than the name, being the crushed seeds of a plant which grew on the other side of the southern deserts. A few drops in a cup of wine brought dreams of unusual clarity and pleasure. It was exotic enough to please even Willet.

From one of her patients, a trader in livestock, Heron borrowed two riding animals. Her jennet was sturdy and quiet, with a black stripe running down her spine, a shaggy coat of soft gray, and dark liquid eyes. The beast trotted on willingly enough, apparently pleased to have a rider so light and so sparing of the whip. The man made no attempt to use either stirrups or reins, but when Heron tugged at the lead line and they started off, his body moved easily with the gait of his sturdy mule.

The days spent traveling to Willet’s hideaway passed uneventfully. Heron’s purse was considerably lighter from indulging in the hospitality of road-inns. The last two nights there had been none to take shelter in, only a burned-out shell the first night and the scant comfort of a small wooded area the second.

As dusk fell on the last day, rain drizzled fitfully, dampening clothing along with spirits. Heron was wet, cold, and hungry, and the jennet in little better shape. When she remounted after a brief rest, the beast tried to bite her. Only the man seemed unheeding of the weather.

As twilight coalesced into darkness, Heron spotted winking orange lights ahead. The jennet pricked her ears and surged forward. The place looked smaller than Heron remembered, the yard overgrown, the outlying sheds like dark sentinels. The door swung open, streaming firelight and the smell of parsnip and rosemary stew.

“Put the animals in the farthest shed,” said a rusty voice, “and get yourselves dry.”

Just as she had always done, Heron did as she was told. The man stood dripping inside the door until she pushed him onto a corner stool and toweled him vigorously. Heron offered Willet the dragonsblood, which he set aside. Soon they were all sipping the thick vegetable stew. Even though it was unsalted and pungent with last season’s turnips, Heron relished every bite. Warmth flowed along her muscles.

“So you’ve finally met something you can’t handle on your own,” Willet said when three empty bowls lay upon the hearth, “and you’ve come back to your old master for help. I knew you would.”

“So you always said.”

“Well now, you’d better tell me what this is all about.” Willet handed Heron a cup of honey-laced chamomile tea and settled back in the one good chair, stroking his tangled beard, ready to hear her story.

“Ach, I have not heard of such a thing in many an age, not in this one, that’s sure,” he said when she had finished. “A dragon’s heart is not a quest to take on lightly.”

He thinks dragons are better left alone, and he is probably right.

Willet examined the man carefully, even as she had done, as he had taught her. Afterward, he was silent for a long time. Slowly, he began to speak, at first in the rusty tones and halting rhythms of an old man too long alone. But soon, his voice gathered strength. He wove a tapestry of images, of the darkness beneath the mountains and things living there too ancient for naming, about the sendings of nightmares and the funeral pyres of dragons in the country beyond the sun. Heron recognized the traditional phrases, bits of ballad and folk story, mixed with vague allusions to terrors better left buried and something more, something which rang of the truth behind the legends. She allowed her mind to wander with his and gradually a pattern emerged.

The Basalt Mountains had once been the abode of creatures stranger than dragons. Mantichordons, born from the unholy union of scorpion and elephant, half-living lithiotropes who ate rock and belched forth ash … and men.

Necromancer, sorcerer, warlock. None of the words she knew could name them truly. Perhaps one of them still lived … and had summoned a dragon to do his bidding … and put the dragon’s magickal heart into this nameless soldier.

Then what had befallen the dragon? Whose heart did it bear?

Heron shuddered with a sudden chill, despite the nearness of the fire. “It’s hopeless, isn’t it? How could I find one of those creatures, let alone convince him to restore the dragon’s heart to its proper place? I have only my medical skills and the little magic I learned from you.”

He would have taught her more, had she asked, had she stayed. She saw that now with a pang of regret. Since she had left, she’d grown beyond these thorny confines, these age-stained vellum scrolls, had thrust herself into the very lives of those she served, and she could never go back.

“You have far more, though you have never chosen to develop it. My dear, I guide you on this quest. I am a cantankerous old hedge-wizard, dreaming before his fire. But you are a healer who has held the heart of a dragon, and it has left its mark upon you.”

This was not a thing Heron wanted to hear. She brushed aside his words. “Where—how do I start?”

He drew out maps from their leather storage tubes and unrolled them before her. Then he took the amulet from the soldier’s neck and, casting it into the fire, chanted invocations in a language Heron had never heard before. When he drew it forth again, the cord was a little singed, and the quartz glowed as if with its own inner light.

“Come back if you can,” he said, “and tell me how it all turned out.”

Willet took out the dragonsblood and sprinkled a portion in his cup of ale. She sat back, sipping the last of her tea, and waited. Soon his body sagged in the chair, the lines of care and petty fear lifted from his face, and a faint smile played over his thin lips.

Dawn found Heron and her companion on the trail again. She sang tunelessly to the jennet who, with repeated sighs and flicks of her long ears, expressed her disapproval of so early a departure. Fortunately, the rain had stopped and the day promised to be mild. The mingled smells of damp earth, grasses heavy with ripening seed heads, and late-blooming mountain daisies filled the air.

They climbed and rested and climbed some more. The bones of the land jutted out in lumps of misshapen rock unsoftened by wind or rain. Heron soon realized that for each stone and crag she could see with her eyes, there was another, a shadow stone, a phantom crag. When she took out the quartz amulet, their outlines grew stronger. She glimpsed colors she had no names for, and the very taste of the wind shifted.

… the metallic tang of blood, the singing silver, the deep rich harmonics of molten gold …

At the end of the jumbled slope, a relatively flat apron circled the mountain proper. With her newly awakened sight, Heron saw fissured gaps where only weather-smoothed rock had appeared. One such opening looked wider and blacker than the others. She felt a chill, like moon-cast shadow, flowing from it.

Perhaps it was not chill at all, but only the gulf between the sorcerous world and her own …

The man shifted in his saddle, his eyes moving in sharp little jerks as he scanned the mountains. His breathing quickened and he opened his mouth as if to speak, but only a low moan came out. His eyes were as blank as ever, as if focused on that invisible second world. When Heron touched his hand, she felt his skin burn even hotter, as if he were being consumed from inside.

Heron left the animals, reins tucked under a stone, easy enough to pull free. Grasping the man’s hand, she stepped inside the fissure. Daylight cast a slant of brilliance across the floor, fading to black beyond that narrow space. The quartz amulet grew suddenly light and tugged at its cord.

The fissure narrowed and twisted, but she worked her way carefully along it, always finding just enough room for them both to pass. Within a few minutes, the crack opened into a vast echoing space. Daylight faded into a soft golden effulgence. The walls themselves glowed as if living.

She started across the cavern at a shambling walk, then faster and yet more smoothly. Her feet skimmed the dust and never struck a pebble or one of the weird rock formations growing from the cavern floor like arthritic fingers. She heard the man cry out. His hand tore away from hers, but she could not stop to retrieve him.

Something bright and singing danced in her veins, cantatas of molten carnelians, garnets like stars, the ecstatic smell of burning rubies …

Is this what it is to be a dragon?

Her human heart wept at beauty too great for flesh to bear.

Heron’s soundless cry died down and in its wake, she became aware of a presence. Vaster than vast, more crimson than blood, blacker than jet, yet bounded by a thousand scales, each thinner than a feather and harder than tempered steel. The dragon condensed before her, as mist become carborundum. It breathed upon her. For a terrible moment, she felt her flesh tear away, whipped into ghostly streams, felt her bones turn crisp and shatter. But she had touched the heart of a dragon, and part of its nature had seeped into her. She stood fast within its realm and knew its deadly fire could not touch her.

“You have taken something which does not belong to you,” she shouted.

The eyes blazed vitriol. From the great throat there came a bellow of anger, brass and thunder.

Instinct dropped her to a crouch. The flame passed over and through her, for she offered no resistance. Instead, she slipped her pack from her shoulder and plunged her hand inside. Her fingers brushed the packets of oiled paper. They were as she’d placed them, tied with a bit of yarn. The one she sought was under the knot. A twist freed it. She dipped her fingertip into it, felt the familiar gritty powder. Slowly, she lifted her head.

“You must return what you have stolen.”

I WILL BLAST YOUR FLESH AND SCATTER THE ASHES OF YOUR BONES.

She recoiled in surprise, for she had not expected her words to have such power over a dragon. Its power was that of volcanoes and of stars. It need not have noticed her at all, let alone answered her.

The dragon leaped forward, pouncing like a cat, one foreleg on either side of her. Extended, its claws gave off a smell like hot metal. She had not realized the creature was so large; it had not seemed so a moment before. The claws grew larger still as they closed around her, elongated now like prison bars. Knocked to her knees, she found herself carried toward the massive chest. The heat of the eyes burned her skin. Every instinct urged her to shrink in upon herself, to bury her face under her arms, to hide. She kept her gaze lowered, but not from fear. It was not the dragon’s eyes she sought, but the keel of its breastbone.

The claws opened. Thunder echoed in the back of her mind, or something very like it, some parody of malevolent triumph.

SO YOU THOUGHT TO COMMAND A DRAGON? LOOK NOW UPON THE TRUTH, O MORTAL, AND KNOW YOUR FOLLY!

Heron covered her face with her hands, as if despairing. She slipped her fingers into her mouth, beneath her tongue, welcoming the familiar bitterness.

She slid one hand along the obsidian claw, then lunged forward and slapped the other palm against the dragon’s breastbone, as low as she could reach. And held the heart of the dragon between her hands.

The dragon pulled back. Rearing, it drew its forelegs—and its captive—to its chest. Heron shifted her position, pressing her advantage. She could only guess at the anatomical landmarks, for to either side of the midline, armored plates covered the dragon’s underside. Surprisingly, these seemed to conduct the images she sought just as well as bare skin. In her mind, the shape and rhythm of this heart took form.

It was the heart of a man. In that moment, she saw him truly, a small, cowardly man, so terrified of his own mortality that his soul had shriveled into a knot of bitterness.

His own body, so decrepit that not even centuries of sorcerous power could sustain it any longer, had disintegrated at last, a pile of dust and splintered bone. Unable to destroy the dragon’s heart outright, he had lured a stranger, a man without place or kin, to carry it until both perished.

Once, Heron had summoned the true nature of a man’s heart, whether it be hawk or fish or stag. She had called the beast back to life in order to save the man. Now she must reach the man’s heart within the dragon.

I swore I would never use my gifts to send a man to his death. The thought rocked her to her marrow. Then she remembered the nameless soldier, enslaved without hope. The man with the heart of a dragon. Let all things be as they are. Nothing more than this, let dragon be dragon and man be man. She shrank away from what she must do next, for the nature of this sorcerer’s heart was so turned in upon itself that she could not imagine even a small space for joy or love. She heard the rumbling of his thoughts, slow and grinding strange, year upon year of twisted greed, of vengeance nursed and sucked dry like pumice… .

He was what he had made of himself, how he had shaped his life, the centuries of spite and fear. Nothing she could offer would change that.

O man, O creature of wonder and of misery, whose eyes penetrate the heavens and whose hands bring forth glory from the earth. You who dwell between the two, depart now to your own place—

A roar of anguish, turbulent as a tidal wave, a desert storm, an avalanche on the heights, answered her. I WILL NOT! I AM DRAGON NOW!

You are man! You are kin to the eagle and the tortoise, the mayfly and the whale. But you are not any of these things. As all things of the natural world pass in their season, so you must pass—

I AM DRAGON—DRAGON—DRAGON—

The glare of the dragon’s eyes built into an inferno glare. It battered her exposed skin. She dared not shift her position or risk losing her contact. For the first time, she felt its breath—copper and phosphorus. The smell engulfed her. It was so real, so different from that of any natural creature. A dragon’s breath from a dragon’s body.

I name you man! she cried once more, and I summon you by that name.

“Man—I am man—” The words came now from behind her, and across her mind flickered the image of eyes the color of the sea, no longer blank but seething with inner storm. The heart of the dragon even now tore at his soul.

Heron turned her full concentration back to the husk of the man within the dragon. She now knew that she could not compel, she could only call. Her sole weapon was the truth. If she failed, she might survive in some crippled state, but the soldier would surely die and along with him, the heart of the magickal beast. She did not know which would be the greater loss.

The sorcerer, why had he done this thing? She forced herself to think, to gather her next argument.

He so fears his own death that he would do anything, pay any cost, to escape it.

I FEAR NOTHING! I AM DRAGON, IMMORTAL!

In her mind, she held up the images, like silken banners spread upon a gusting wind. Dragons soaring against a sky which had no name … mantichordon and sphinx … towering trees, mountains raw from the belly of the earth … each exultant in its glory, each fading with time… .

She had heard it said that for anything new to come into the world—a song, a dream, a baby’s first cry—something old must pass away.

The sorcerer had caught her thought. What remains? What endures? Neither stone nor fire nor the memories of men, that much is certain!

“Only this,” Heron said, shaping the words with infinite sadness. “That each thing which has ever been has had a secret name, a true nature. That in the end, it is this to which we all return.”

She released her hold on the heart which bore the nature of a man, encased in the body of a dragon, but she left one hand on its breast. The fine quivering could be felt all through its body. Moments stretched one into the other, time marked only by the slow beating of the dragon’s heart, the bellows of its breath. At the edge of her senses, rubies wept their songs, silver shimmered as if lit within by fairy fires.

“You are a man,” she whispered into that silence. “And out of all the creatures who have walked upon this world, since time began and the heavens took shape, you alone know what you are.”

I have always … loved dragons. 1 thought that if 1 became one, I would change. But I have not changed. Nothing has changed.

In that moment, she saw beyond the fear of his dying to an even greater fear—of being alone. The fear that once he passed from this life, everything would be as it had been, as he had made it.

She could not change death. Sometimes, she could postpone it for a while. But this she could help. “Tell me your name,” Heron said with all the gentleness she had to give, “and I will sing you to sleep.”

He did, and she sang. Not the songs of molten silver or red-gold embers, the high sweet harmonies of the stars. She sang of cats curled in the sun, of the smell of herbs after a rain, of the coolness beneath her rowan tree, of the curve of a woman’s arm holding a baby to her breast. She sang of the nights of weariness, of the sickness of the soul when she could not help a dying child, of the warmth in her lover’s arms, of the kind, dark eyes of her jennet, of chamomile tea, and of the taste of tears.

She never felt the exact moment when he was gone. He slipped away as day slips away, twilight into gloaming, when the first stars appear between the blinking of an eye. For a long moment, she felt only emptiness, the familiar grief when a patient died. She wondered if he had found what he so feared, or only an ending to those fears. Her eyes stung with unexpected tears.

Around her, the cathedral rumbled and shuddered. The soldier cried out as his body thudded to the ground. Pale flames roared from the mouth of the dragon. They did not burn, but each nerve in her skin thrilled on the edge of pain.

Suddenly released from the claws, Heron landed on her feet. The great crimson form reared above her, eyes glowing, wings unfurled. She saw now the old scars lacing its underbelly, the crooked claw, the chipped tooth. The age of the beast, old beyond its kind, shivered through her. The dragon bent its head. Its form, outline and color, wavered in her sight like a heat-born mirage. Something deep and atavistic rushed through Heron, as if its magick stirred in her bones. She stretched out one hand to touch the dragon one more time. Red/gold/ebony/cinnamon …

Heron blinked, startled in the realization it had spoken to her. Wings spread wide against a sky like fire opals, the taste of burning copper, the crackle of unseen lightning. On the far side of the stars, others of its kind waited …

The dragon gathered itself, and in its shadow she glimpsed the fallen soldier. She cried out, wordless, and in that instant she once more held the heart of the dragon. Though its nature made it immortal, a thing of ancient magick and not of flesh, she felt it answer her.

The massive tapered head bent over the body, over the long muscled back and legs. Slit nostrils flared wide, taking in the man’s scent … remembering. Where it had been, what it had been. The edge of the dragon’s breath caught Heron and swept through her, furnace-white. Blinded, she fell to her knees. Her outstretched hands slammed against rock, jagged and laced with pebbles. The impact jarred the breath from her lungs. Tears streamed from her eyes. She could not see, could not breathe, her only thought that the dragon was gone forever.

“Come on,” a man’s voice said, husky as if from long silence. “This is no place for the likes of us.”

At his touch, she turned. The eyes which had been so blank now burned with urgency. They transformed the man’s face into one which, if not handsome, was unforgettable. Everything he had witnessed and suffered, the evil he had done and the good he had defended, were etched upon his features.

A cavern of ordinary stone, shaped by volcanic fire and centuries of dripping water, surrounded her. Only the lingering radiance, crimson fading into gray, held any evidence of the dragon’s presence.

“The light won’t hold,” he said, and took her hand. His fingers around hers felt warm, but no longer fever-touched. She felt the callouses on his palm, the strength and gentleness of his grip.

Together they raced through the cavern, tripping over the weird stone shapes which protruded from the floor. By the time they reached the fissure, not a mote of dragon light remained. Darkness enveloped them. They made their way by touch along the rough walls.

As they stumbled into the day, the jennet and the mule looked up from their browsing. Heron grasped the saddle, shaking too hard to mount and afraid that if she fell again, she would not be able to get up. She startled when she felt hands, warm and strong, on her waist.

Turning in the soldier’s arms, she saw the spark of wonder in his eyes. He was as surprised as she, as each recognized the echoes of the dragon in the other. Like called to like, truth to truth. She heard his thought, I can never repay what you have done for me. And she knew that he heard hers, I would have done the deed for its own sake—slipping her hands into his.

But 1 am glad it was for yours.

Then he put his hands around her waist again and she rested her cheek against his chest. The warmth of his body, now a human warmth, soothed her. His strength held her up. Loneliness melted from her. No matter what happened now, no matter where their separate lives led them, she would always have this perfect moment, as she listened to the beating of his human heart and beyond, that other pulse, slow as a mountain, strong as a dream.

Red/gold/ebony/cinnamon …

The heart she had once held between her hands and which now and forever beat as one.