“Are all dragons such cowards?” Infidel asked. “Or is it just you?”
“Have a care, human,” said Hush. “You stand in the antechamber of my mind. With a thought, I can erase you from existence.”
“You would punish her when she’s right?” I asked. “I spent ten years in the company of the woman I loved without confessing my feelings. I’ve no excuse for these wasted years, other than my own cowardice. I, too, was afraid of exposing myself to rejection and isolation. I dealt with my pain in pretty much the same fashion you do. You want the world to be so quiet and dark that you can go into a slumber that’s like death. You want to just stop feeling anything. I did the same thing with booze. I’d drink until I couldn’t remember my own name. I’d drink until I couldn’t remember why I was drinking. Self-obliteration is the coward’s path.”
The flat blade of the Jagged Heart turned toward me. I swear I could see a dark green eye peer at me through the ice.
I said, “If you want to feel alive, you have to take the bad with the good. You can’t feel joy unless you open your heart to sadness. You can’t feel love unless you’re willing to bear loneliness. When Glorious arrives, tell him how you truly feel. Confess that you love him. What do you have to lose?”
“It’s too late for conversation,” said Hush.
“Infidel and I are proof that it’s never too late,” I said.
“You don’t understand. It is, indeed, too late,” said Hush. “Now leave.”
Suddenly we were back on the ice, standing exactly as we’d stood when the blizzard had surrounded us. Well, two of us were standing. Deprived of legs once more, I hit the ice with a loud
splat
and clawed the frosty surface to hold on as it suddenly tilted beneath me. All around us, the once solid sheet of ice had shattered into a thousand ice floes, bobbing on violent waves.
My eyes widened as I saw that Glorious had arrived while we’d been talking to Hush. He was pushed to the ice, wings down, his throat exposed, his body limp. His eyes were open, full of fear, wet with tears that ran down his golden cheeks to freeze on the ice beneath him.
Hush sat upon his chest, her jaws clamped around his throat, ready to rip through this windpipe.
“We’re too late,” Aurora cried, dropping to her knees, sounding beaten.
“Like hell we are.” Infidel cracked her knuckles, loud enough that even Hush’s green eyes shifted toward the noise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
COLDER EVERY SECOND
I
BLINKED AND
Infidel was gone, leaving a swirl of snow in her wake. I turned my head in time to see her punch into the side of Hush’s jaw with the Gloryhammer. The thunderous blow spread in waves from the tip of the dragon’s snout all the way down her serpentine neck, causing an avalanche to fall from her scales. Hush craned her head to snap at Infidel as she zoomed skyward. Infidel surprised Hush by making a mid-air U-turn and darting between the dragon’s closing jaws, into the vast chasm of her mouth.
The tree-sized teeth near the back of Hush’s jaws burst outward with an explosion of blinding light as Infidel hammered through them. Hush roared with pain as Infidel spiraled back into the sky.
Glorious lifted his head to see what had halted his planned suicide. His throat was bleeding, but it didn’t seem to be a mortal wound. As large as Hush was, Glorious was even larger, and her initial attempt at tearing out his throat had resulted in little more than an extra-nasty hickey.
“Now that I’ve got your attention...” Infidel shouted down at the dragons. “Stop fighting! If you don’t, I’ll tear out your teeth and claws until you’re too mangled to misbehave!”
“You dare threaten us?” Glorious growled, rising to all four legs. He glared at her with a look of elemental contempt.
“This isn’t a threat, it’s a promise,” Infidel shouted. “Everyone acts like primal dragons are one step removed from gods. You’re more like one step removed from spoiled teenagers, and trust me, I know about spoiled teenagers. I’m not going to sit by and watch the world get destroyed by a pair of self-important brats too childish to discuss their feelings for one another!”
“I feel only hate!” Hush screamed.
“And I deserve your hate,” Glorious screamed back. “I was a fool to spurn you, too vain and arrogant to see that I might one day long for your company. I can no longer stand the suffering! End me!”
Hush’s eyes widened. “You long for my company?”
“My loneliness is unbearable,” Glorious whimpered. “The pain of knowing that you once offered to save me from my self-inflicted fate doubles my suffering. As I gaze down upon the world, I see the polar regions, white and dazzling like a pearly crown upon the globe, and I think of you. You were so open when you came to me, so courageous, risking your heart. My hunger to tame the sun blinded me. It was not worth the cost of your love.”
“Was it not?” Hush asked, her voice calmer now. “With each passing century I’ve watched you as you traveled through the sky. I’ve hated you more with each passing year, but also envied you, and admired you. You’ve truly changed the world by taming the sun. If you had not rejected me, you would never have accomplished this great task. ”
“But I knew it must cause you pain,” said Glorious, on the verge of sobbing. “It hurts you still. My sunlight drives away frost from much of the world. I knew I was keeping you from your full potential. This is why, as I abandoned the sun, I sent it hurtling away. Even now, it slowly fades from the sky of the material world. In a month, it will be only a speck, indistinguishable from the faintest planets that travel across the night sky. Then, at last, the world will be forever dark, and you can know your final peace.”
“Oh, Glorious,” Hush said. “This is such a beautiful gift.”
“But it’s going to be an even better gift if he puts the sun back into its rightful path, right?” shouted Infidel. “That way the two of you can see each other every day. You don’t have to be lonely any more!”
Hush sighed. “The annoying creature is right. If you don’t rejoin the sun, you shall wither and perish. You cannot survive as a spirit untethered to matter. I... I would rather the world remain in light than lose you forever.”
Glorious clenched his jaws together tightly for a moment. I couldn’t read the emotions in his luminous eyes. At last, he said, “So be it. Perhaps my thirst for oblivion has proven... premature. I shall return to the sun. We will continue our conversation, come the dawn.”
“I look forward to it,” Hush said. Her body fell apart into a great mound of snow.
“What just happened?” Infidel asked, sounding worried as she looked down upon the collapsing white mountain beneath her.
Glorious stretched his wings. “Hush has abandoned her abstract form and returned to her true body in the material world.” He gazed at Infidel and said, “Do not in any way think that your threats have altered our actions. Either of us could have crushed you with no more effort than you would put into crushing a bug.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Infidel. “You just run along and jump back into the sun now.”
“You speak to us with such insolence! You fail to respect our power,” Glorious growled as he turned away, his eyes narrowed. Then he paused, and glanced back over his shoulder. “And for this... thank you.”
“No problem.” Infidel smiled as she brushed the hair back from her eyes.
“Son of a bitch,” Aurora whispered, as she glanced down at me. I’d grabbed hold of her ankle to keep from sliding around on the bobbing ice. “Did Infidel just save the world?”
“Isn’t she going to be a great mother?” I said.
Glorious flapped his wings and rose into the air. This created an instant blizzard as all the snow from Hush’s body roared around us in hurricane winds. The air cleared as Glorious rose higher, radiant as noon. He was looking down at the ice. I followed his gaze and saw what he was looking at: a man in stark black robes standing amid the white snow, an unfurled scroll before him. Judge Stern was nearly a hundred yards away, but his deep, authoritative voice could be heard even at this distance as he shouted the verdict toward Glorious. “By the power of the Divine Author and the One True Book, the Voice of the Book has judged you, Glorious, and found you guilty of crimes against nature itself. You have trespassed upon the sun, claiming it as your own when the Divine Author gave it freely as a gift to all. The enormity of this crime is unforgivable.”
“Infidel!” I shouted.
“This judgment is final and cannot be appealed,” said Stern.
“Don’t let him finish reading –”
Infidel started moving before I even finished my sentence. She’d barely flown a yard before Stern read, “The sentence is death, carried out by the utterance of this truthful statement.”
Infidel reached Stern, flattening him with a punch that sent him skidding across the ice on his back.
It was too late. Glorious shuddered in mid-flap. The internal luminance that filled his form instantly snuffed out, leaving his spiritual form a pale, ashen gray. With a soft sigh, he fell, but never reached the ice. His body changed into a fine powder that crumbled, billowing out as a dense cloud.
I stared, mouth agape, as the dust swept toward me. What was there to say? The world had just been condemned to death.
Infidel drifted down from the sky next to Aurora. We gave each other worried looks just as the dust engulfed us. Infidel leaned over and scooped up my legless torso, holding me tightly against her side. I wrapped my arm around her and squeezed.
No one spoke a word. Perhaps we each were hoping someone else would be the first to speak, to offer some clever, last-second plan to save everything. But the minutes simply ticked by as the dust slowly settled, revealing our grimy faces one by one. We looked like miners, covered in grit.
Infidel sighed. “Maybe the Black Swan is already traveling back in time to give us another shot.”
“That’s not really how her powers work,” said Aurora.
“So what are you saying?” asked Infidel. “That we’re screwed?”
Aurora shrugged. “I’m not sure I’d use the word ‘we.’ I don’t see how things are going to change much for me. The material world is going to freeze, but I don’t know that things will change for the dead.”
I thought this was a slightly selfish stance to take, but I didn’t feel like picking a fight by saying so.
At this moment, there was a cough from the dust cloud behind us and we all nearly jumped out of our skins. Sorrow stumbled out of the fog, hacking up dusty spittle. She was wrapped in the coat her father had draped over her, and dragging a black walrus coat taken from one of the ogresses. In her other hand she held some oversized boots. She tossed the coat to Infidel. “Figured you’d be pretty chilled by now.”
“Getting colder every second,” Infidel said, softly.
“What happened?” Sorrow asked, through chattering teeth. “After Purity knocked us for a loop, I was running back to join you when the ice in front of me split open. I was trying to work my way around it when I heard a lot of shouting. Then, poof, dust everywhere. I’ve been jumping from floe to floe, completely lost, until I saw the light of the Gloryhammer.”
“Your father succeeded in killing Glorious,” I said. “Dust was all that was left.”
“Oh,” she said.
“To complicate matters, Glorious said he’d sent the sun away,” said Infidel. “He said it would take about a month to turn into a speck in the sky. After that, permanent winter.”
“I see,” said Sorrow. She sat down on the ice. Her lips were completely blue. She stared out into the distance, not looking at any of us. After a moment, she sighed and shook her head. “Two minutes ago, my biggest worry was that I was going to lose my toes to frostbite.”
Her toes were dark black and shiny. She started to put on the boots, which were about three times bigger than her feet, when Aurora knelt before her and said, “Now that I have the Jagged Heart once more, I can treat your frostbite.”
She took Sorrow’s right foot in her huge hands, rubbing them, then paused.
“Um,” she said, “this isn’t frostbite.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sorrow.
“For some reason, your toes are covered in black scales. It’s like snake skin.”
Sorrow’s eyes grew wide as she stared at her toes.
I asked, “Maybe Rott is somehow –”
She held up her hand, cutting me off. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll deal with it. Somehow.” Then she quickly pulled on both boots and stood up. She said, “A more pressing question is, where’s my father?”
“Somewhere out in the dust,” said Infidel, waving in the general direction she’d left him. “I punched his lights out.”
I thought this was an unfortunate choice of words.
“Do you want me to go find him?” Infidel asked.
Sorrow shook her head. “If I saw him again, I’d kill him.”
“I’d be okay with that,” said Infidel.
“I wouldn’t,” said Sorrow. “The greatest curse I could place on my father is to let him live with the full weight of his actions upon his conscience. Death would be too merciful.”
Before we could further debate the appropriate fate for Judge Stern, I heard a distant cough. I spotted what looked like a naked woman stumbling towards us on an adjoining ice floe. She looked exactly like Infidel.