In the western wing of the Eldest’s House was a long gallery in which all the kings and queens of Southlands were depicted in paint and preserved in gilded frames. Some of the depictions were nothing but fanciful notions. The Panther Master, for instance, who’d been Eldest of Southlands in the time of the Wolf Lord. His portrait depicted him in robes of office that had not been officially accepted until several hundred years after his lifetime. Despite the fierce expression and the dramatic sweep of his arm, his face was one of those dull, everyman faces that could be anybody and nobody simultaneously.
Rose Red rather liked this portrait at the beginning of the gallery. She lifted the silver lantern, allowing its light to illuminate the work as the strange half-light could not. The artist had painted, beneath those rich and unhistorical robes, many wounds scarring the Panther Master’s body. Vicious wounds he had received in another’s place. Rose Red saw the delicate red lines that were almost unnoticeable beneath the gold and saffron cloths and the enormous panther fibula on his shoulder. But when the lantern light shone upon those scars, one could not help but see them. The Panther Master was a kind man, Rose Red thought, though the artist had painted him with a warrior’s face. He was a good Eldest.
Suddenly, though she knew it must be a trick of the half-light, the Panther Master’s painted gaze shifted and he looked directly down at her.
Rose Red gasped, hiding her exposed hand behind her back, and hurried on her way.
She proceeded down the gallery. For the moment, the House held sway, and she caught glimpses only now and then of the Netherworld into which it was slipping. In that world, she walked once more in a narrow tunnel, so narrow that it was difficult to breathe. Better to stay as much in the House as possible.
The eyes of the ancestors stared down from their frames upon the little chambermaid. She could feel their gazes following her, could swear that when she glanced at them she saw the eyes actually moving. She refused to look.
“Why are you coming for me?”
Rose Red stopped. Slowly, she lifted the Asha Lantern so that its beam might carry farther.
Down at the end of the gallery, she glimpsed through the gloom a person standing. Her skirts blended into the shadows, as did her long hair tumbling down from its usual pile of curls, its striking red melted away into twilight hues as though the color had never been. But when the lantern light fell upon her, her eyes were brilliantly blue in her white face, even from across the gallery.
“M’lady!” Rose Red gasped and started to run toward her. The moment she set her foot down, however, the gallery vanished, and she was once more in the tunnel, which constricted around her. She gasped, barely able to breathe. The more she pushed, the tighter the tunnel grew. So she held quite still and felt the stones, like muscles, relaxing. She could draw breath again, and her eyes sought the end of the tunnel.
It was a gallery once more. Daylily still stood there, her face as motionless as those in the portraits facing each other across the long gallery.
“You should let me die, goat girl,” said the Lady of Middlecrescent. “I would if I were you.”
Rose Red dared not take another step. “I’m goin’ to find you, m’lady. I swear it! Don’t give up and don’t believe anythin’ the Dragon tells you.”
“If you should succeed,” said Daylily, “you will one day wish you had not.” Her mouth was hidden in shadows. Only her eyes were visible, as though peering through the slit of a veil.
“I promised Lionheart I’d care for his family. That means you too, m’lady.” Rose Red set her jaw and, without thinking, held up her hand. The ungloved one.
Daylily closed her eyes and turned away. Only her black silhouette remained, just visible against the half-light.
“Wait!” Rose Red called.
“You should let me die, goat girl.” Daylily’s voice faded. “You should let me die. . . .”
“M’lady!” Rose Red stepped forward again. The tunnel returned, crushing her. If her body were not so sturdy, the rocks would have pulverized her bones to dust. She screamed in terror.
Then it was gone, and she stood at the far end of the gallery. Daylily was nowhere in sight.
Rose Red gasped and drew a long breath, exulting in the ability to breathe. But the next moment she coughed and sputtered. A terrible smell lingered in the air. Like the smell of a match just gone out, but multiplied a thousand times. It wasn’t the smell of dragon smoke. More like the lingering smoke from a dead dragon’s carcass. Rose Red gagged.
The gallery stretched behind her, the impersonal stares of the old kings and queens still following her progress. But before her, rather than the wall and following passage she knew she was supposed to find here, a great cliff stretched for miles upward into the darkness. Tufts of struggling vegetation grew from ledges, evil-looking plants, parasites sucking life from the very rocks to which they clung. If those were flowers growing from those stalks, they were not flowers that would bloom with new life. The jagged petals looked more like razors, the centers like evil faces.
Little witches,
Rose Red thought.
In the cliff, there was a door like the one that was supposed to be in the wall at the far end of the gallery. Except where the real door had been delicately carved with starflowers, this one was carved with replicas of the witch flowers on the rocks. Rose Red put her hand to the knob.
“Don’t touch that.”
The voice sounded like ashes with just the faintest hint of life still glowing in their depths. Rose Red turned. Someone materialized from the darkness on her right. A woman, or at least, what had once been a woman. She was tall and thin and walked as though she had been beautiful at one time and had yet to acknowledge that she was beautiful no longer. Her skin was burned black and gray all over, and the ends of her hair smoldered like dying matchsticks.
Rose Red knew what she was the moment she saw her. She could see in an instant that this woman was a dragon.
The woman approached. The evil smell came from her blackened skin. She stepped between Rose Red and the door, her head bowed so that Rose Red could not see her face. “Don’t touch that,” she repeated. “You don’t know where it might lead.”
“I have a fairly good idea,” Rose Red said, though she retreated a few steps into the gallery. “Ain’t many places Death’s Path can lead, now, is there?”
“Only one end ultimately,” said the woman. Her rasping voice sounded as though it pained her throat. “But you are yet living. Go back while you may.”
“Another said as much, but he let me by eventually.” Rose Red tried to put more courage in her voice than she felt.
The woman took a menacing step forward. Her eyes, like two lumps of coal, smoldered with remnant heat, hideous to behold. Her nose wrinkled as she sniffed, and her lips curled back in a sizzling snarl. Rose Red clutched her lantern tight.
“I smell him on you,” the woman said.
Rose Red made no reply. The woman took another step toward her, her face wagging slowly back and forth. She was blind, Rose Red realized. But she sniffed again, and her snarl grew.
“I smell him,” she growled. “The father of my sons.”
“Oh,” Rose Red whispered. “I know who you are now.”
“Do you?” said the woman, drawing herself up to her full height. She stood at least seven feet tall. Her burned hair crumbled and fell from her scalp with every movement she made, yet somehow was always replaced with more burned hair. “Who am I, then?”
Rose Red did not like to say the name out loud.
“I am the firstborn,” said the woman. “Most powerful, most glorious, most beautiful of all my Father’s children. A dragon such as the worlds have never seen before or since. I was a glory!”
She was so hideous and so repulsive, her words fell more awfully from her lips. Rose Red adjusted her grip on the lantern and raised it so that its silver light fell on that ravaged face. But the woman could not see the glow of Asha. All hope had long since fled her blind eyes, leaving her in this dark place on Death’s Path.
“I rivaled the Father himself in might and flame,” said she. “I could not be bound. I could not be stopped by any who moved in the Near World or the Far. Again and again, their finest warriors sought to kill me. Yet though I was slain twice over, Death himself could not bind me. I returned stronger than before. At last I sought even to vanquish the Spheres in their dance in the sky. I could have swallowed Hymlumé herself!” She snarled again, looking far more like a dragon than a woman.
When she spoke once more, her voice was a pathetic whisper. “Thus my Father took my wings from me. In jealousy, he bound me to earth. A dragon trapped forever in the body of a woman.”
Her blind eyes fixed on Rose Red. The girl felt as if her soul were exposed.
“But we can be strong, can’t we, child? We are not so weak as they like to think.”
The smell of her burned flesh was sickening. Rose Red wanted to turn away but could not, not even when the woman put out a trembling hand and almost, but not quite, touched her veil.
“Don’t let them fool you, child,” she hissed. “You are strong. You don’t need them. Not the Prince. Nor my Father. You don’t need anyone! You are alone and you always will be. So was I. But I became a goddess, did I not? Do not the worlds still tremble at the mention of my name?”
“You have no name,” Rose Red whispered. “It was forgotten.”
The woman stood as though frozen. Then she bowed her head, and her hand fell to her side. “Forgotten,” she said. “Always, we are forgotten.” She clenched her fists and, for just that instant, ghostly fire flickered in the corners of her mouth. “No, it cannot be so! I won’t believe it! The Dragonwitch will live on forever in the nightmares of all worlds!”
“But
you
were forgotten,” Rose Red said.
“I
am
the Dragonwitch. I need no other name, no other title.”
Suddenly her hands gripped Rose Red’s shoulders, pinching deep into her skin. It hurt. Rose Red screamed, as terrified by that horrible blind face so close to her own as she was wracked by the pain.
“Go back to the living world,” the Dragonwitch said in a voice as hot as steam. “Go back and show them all who you truly are. Forget who you have been. You don’t need any of them! Be beholden to no one!” She drew a long breath, then recoiled. She spat, and her hot spittle ate through a corner of Rose Red’s veil.
“I smell the devotion on you. Evil stuff! It will enslave you, this willingness to serve others at cost to yourself. What do they care for you? Have they ever even
seen
you? Yet you care for them . . . for one in particular.”
She flung Rose Red from her. The chambermaid screamed and lost her hold on the lantern, which rolled away in the darkness.
The light went out.
Rose Red lay in the half-light, worse than any darkness, for it did not conceal all but revealed only the horrifying shadows of the cliff, the witch flowers, and the looming Dragonwitch. She saw the long arms reaching out, feeling for her in the gloom. Rose Red pushed herself up and crawled away, her bare hand clutching at stones, feeling for a possible weapon. Where had the lantern gone?
“Love no one,” said the Dragonwitch. “That is the first lesson you must learn if you will become the woman you might be. Love no one. Trust no one. Make them love you instead.”
Rose Red tried not to breathe, afraid the sound might draw the Dragonwitch her way.
“You’re alone now. You must be strong.”
Rose Red could almost hear her own voice speaking, telling herself the same thing. Her own voice made far more horrible in the snarl of the creature’s words.
“Love will betray you. Better to betray love first.”
She did not know what the dead woman might do to her. She only knew that she did not want those burned hands touching her again.
Where was her lantern?
“You need no one. You need nothing.”
The voice was seductive. It seared down into her heart to brand its message there.
“Stand alone, stand apart. Depend on nothing but your own strength.”
Rose Red’s bare fingers touched something cold and smooth.
“Then you too might become a queen, a goddess, as I did.”
Rose Red grabbed the lantern’s handle, and the world filled again with light. It poured through the silver filigree, casting shadows far away, filling Rose Red’s heart with hope once more.
The Dragonwitch towered directly over her. The light shone into her ruined eyes, and she saw nothing. Nevertheless, she turned away, bowing her head and covering her face with her hands. And now, for the first time, Rose Red could see another strange aspect of her appearance. Though she was burned so badly that her features were scarcely discernable, she was also soaking wet.
“Leave this place,” she said. Water streamed down her face like tears, but she cried no real tears. “I would if I were you.”
Rose Red recalled the stories she had heard and shuddered. The Dragonwitch had not burned to death the third and final time: She had drowned.
Keeping the lantern between the Dragonwitch and herself, Rose Red got to her feet and moved toward the door. The light of the lantern cast images on the cliff wall . . . stars and moons and suns. Those images danced and changed as she moved, and became men, women, and children; they became birds and horses and trees; they became winds and waters, mountains and skies. All pictures made of light, moving through the darkness with hope and beauty.
The Dragonwitch saw none of it. She did not move until Rose Red stood at the little door in the cliffside and put her hand to the knob once more. Then she said, “You walk freely into Death’s arms. Why?”
Rose Red made no answer. The poor, dead monster could not understand. She turned the knob and stepped through into the inky blackness beyond, taking the light with her. The door shut behind her.
T
HE
N
EAR
W
ORLD
I
T SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE
to add insult to injury that night, but somehow the fates declared that it must be so.