No Ordinary Miracle

There weren't always dragons in the valley. Which, when all is said and done, is why we never expected them to return. Even now, there is no way to convey to you the shock and delight their arrival in Petris elicited from deep within us.

Do I believe this? I don't know. But it's the only way I can begin to make sense of what went wrong.

Annel and Willard didn't remember the green dragons at all, so it was only our mother's stories that kept them alive in their minds. At night by the stone hearth at the inn she would hold her own peasants' court, with the golden-haired Faeretons filling in as ladies-in-waiting and the ebony North Caldorians paying her princely tribute.

No one could tell a story like my mother.

For all our battles, I can't deny her that. Her tales were full of heroism and beauty, of love so big nothing could ever destroy it and courage so staunch it never wavered, not even in the face of the most terrifying monsters. In the Caldor of her girlhood, enormous-winged dragons the color of jade flew in V-formation over the town every evening on their way to the Redwood forests. In the mornings, fully rested and hungry for air, they would emerge from their caves and frolic in the sky, light as leaves caught in a summer breeze. Back then, the land glowed every possible shade of green.

Petris was better then, too, a real town as opposed to the deserted, soot-covered dump it morphed into. Half the shops were empty when my parents ran the inn and the three of us kids were, well, kids. As far back as I could remember, Main Street was nothing but a mess of poppy-seed stores, breweries, soaped glass windows and chipped signs.

But in my mother's version of Petris the mammoth skeletons of the mills shone with industry and the village bustled with the bright plumed hats of women on their way to market. Her parents' Green Glass Inn—now ours—was the hub of it all, with plenty of romance and even a dash of intrigue. In those days, the river ran clear and deep and fast. During the spring thaw, children would ride chunks of emerald ice all the way to Egan Lake.

I knew it was a lie, or at least exaggerated. Before the schools closed and I went to work at the inn full-time in the kitchen, I would spend hours flipping through the history texts at the Booktorium. I've never been much of a storyteller but when it comes to facts, I'm your girl. Dates, numbers, recipes, lists, maps, photographs—it doesn't matter what it is, but if I see something once it's stuck in my head forever.

Which is not as wonderful as it sounds because the past is always with me. Every stupid thing I've done or said, every insult and every mistake is imprinted on my brain. So even then I understood from the books that the dragons that once filled the valley were never as green or as graceful my mother made them out to be. I knew their wingspan didn't run the length of the Royal Palace from end to end. And I knew she didn't fall in love with my father the moment she laid eyes on him.

I remembered the dragons, too, from real life. Make that dragon. Singular. It wasn't so much a memory as a glimpse of some shining being ascending into winter sky and disappearing into the ether. There was a feeling too, a sense of my fingertips running over glossy scales that comforted me in a way nothing else did. I could feel the snow in them. I felt happiness inside the cold, in the same way I did when I saw the squares on a chessboard or the blank, expectant screen of an Abacus.

“Did I ever ride a dragon?” I asked my mother on Kellsmas Eve, when we stood kneading bread at the baker's table in the back room at the inn. We'd been at work since midnight due to the holiday and the room was hot from the ovens, despite the chill outside. “When I was a child?”

My mother's mouth quirked upward. “Was it so long ago,” she asked, “when you were a child?”

I punched down my dough as if it were the surge of annoyance that rose within me. At 16, I was not yet an adult it was true. But wasn't I working from dawn to dusk just so the guests could have soup and bread? Hadn't I given up school for the life of every woman of childbearing age? For that matter, the new king was but 19 and no one thought of him as a boy.

“Did I ride a dragon?” I persisted.

“Is that what you believe?” My mother was doing quite a lot of dough punching herself. And her smile had vanished.

We were alone in the kitchen but she stopped and glanced over her shoulder just the same. On the other side of the window, soldiers were passing by, despite the hour.

Lately the inn had been busy again, busier than it had ever been. Every day more and more soldiers were moving toward the Western Front. Every day more and more people were rushing south toward Faereton, Even with the holiday upon us and winter well underway, the rush of travelers only grew.

My mother no longer told stories by the hearthstone because the soldiers were tired and wanted nothing but a hearty meal and a good night's sleep. As for the others, their faces were hollowed out with grief. Their homes, their loved ones had been destroyed by the new dragons.

As for us, we were too busy baking and cleaning and falling into bed come morning. My mother didn't bother to tell me stories, as she had when I was little. Now and then she would gather Annel and Willard to spin a tale or two. But that was it.

The new dragons were nothing like the ones of old. They flew in from Eire on dark mechanical wings, each empty eye black as the ground the manufactured beasts left in their wake. From what we heard, the whole of North Caldor was nothing but smoke, cinders, ruin. The King's Men had confiscated the Abaci and the Textors not long after Misnight, so it was hard to get information. But the travelers from the North had news and they always spoke of fire. It made sense the Palace wouldn't want us to know how bad it was. At least that's what everyone said.

The Eires were winning though, with their dark weapons made of metal that didn't melt and that bullets couldn't penetrate. If there was a chink in their armor, the Caldorian army hadn't found it. The Eires had even changed the name. Dragones, they called them. The gentle o dragged out into a moan that went on and on until it dissolved inside the mouth of a snake.

I pushed my knuckles deep in the dough. "I'm not sure," I said, "but sometimes I dream about it."

In my dreams I wasn't watching from below as my dragon rose into a leaden sky heavy with snow. I was looking down from far above, as if all my life was reduced to a patchwork quilt of pasture. A puzzle to be solved.

On the other side of the swinging kitchen doors, heavy footsteps echoed. We waited for whoever it was to enter. No one did.

The footsteps receded in the direction from which they'd come. It was too dark to see beyond the light in the kitchen.

Above us, Annel was having one of her mad tea parties, replete with broken dolls and sad-looking stuffed animals. During the month leading up to Kellsmas Annel kept our odd bakers' hours, in part because my mother didn't want her wandering unsupervised while we slept. Annel was singing a story, just like my mother did. In another time, she would have been a Muse or a Fabulist.

If the footsteps worried my mother, she didn't show it. Instead, she lifted her loaf onto a baking stone and sprinkled it with flour. “It was just a story I told you,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Once, when you were two or three years old. But you never forget anything.”

She sounded annoyed, as she so often did when she spoke of what she called my eccentricities. A smudge of flour stood out against the red of her cheeks.

“Tell me,” I pleaded, sensing it was my mother who could explain everything about me I didn't understand. My mind that was like a series of holographic plates but whose vision was mostly limited to pastels. My pale eyes, which bore no resemblance to my brother's and sister's, which were the rich green of all Caldorians. My inability to tell tales or heal anything or grow so much as a pea plant, when such things came so easily to everyone else. The invisible shell that encased me wherever I went. “Please.”

She studied me, her own green eyes serene, though pink still suffused her face. “Someday.”

I was about to protest when the doors swung open and my father burst into the kitchen. He was a tall, broad, laughing man and I'd grown used to his surprise visits. I supposed it must have been his footsteps I'd heard earlier, though I hadn't recognized them.

“Come on,” he ordered us. “Something wonderful is happening!”

My mother smiled back at him, his enthusiasm as infectious as it always was. “It's after four in the morning, dearest. What can possibly be wonderful at such an hour?” she asked. “Nothing good ever happens in the dead of night. Especially not in winter.”

He clapped his big hands together. “Come and see, you saucy wench.”

"Always the charmer," my mother said.

At that, he leaned in for a sloppy kiss just in time to catch her lightly floured cheek. Without another word, he turned and disappeared through the swinging door.

My mother and I exchanged glances. I could see she was excited, albeit skeptical. She was a consummate teller of stories, but to be a really good Fabulist you need to know it's all illusion. We were great cynics, my mother and I.

Not so, my father. He was bounding down the passageway to the front of the inn, shouting to the rooftops.

“Wake up!” he cried. “Look outside!”

Upstairs, we could hear him rousing Willard and gathering Annel into his arms. “We're going to have Kellsmas Eve, after all,” he was telling them. “King Darfin has come through, as his father and his father before him always did.”

“He forgets it was not old Darfin but Emaria who ruled for two quartercens,” my mother muttered under her breath as we hurried toward the front hall, our legs tangling in our skirts as we stumbled down the dim passageway.

I glanced at her sideways. Surely she knew to mention the old queen was punishable by death. I doubted the Caldorian court would enforce such a law but on the other hand, just last week I'd been Eben Milgram whipped in the public square. No one knew what he'd done but the strangest thing of all was the widower lived alone and seldom ventured outside his cottage.

Who had been witness to his offense? Every Abacus and Textor had been seized months ago, so there could be no cameras, no listening devices. At least none that the villagers knew of.

As we neared the front room, we could hear the guests shouting as loudly as my father. They pressed against the floor-to-ceiling glass window that looked out onto the town square. It was the palest shade of aquamarine and had been there since the time my grandparents bought the inn. In summers it made the ivy hanging from Petris's brick buildings seem even more verdant. In winters it shielded the world from reality with a lovely veil of spring.

"Are they really green?" someone asked in a rush. "Maybe it's just the glass."

"It's not the glass," someone else answered emphatically. "Come and look through the little window in the door."

When I glimpsed what lay on the other side, I gasped. The green dragons of my mother's stories swooped and somersaulted across the gawdy night sky. The starlight glinted off their wide feathery wings and the air was a fireworks of color.

Even with my poor vision, I knew it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

"Maybe they're just dragones," one of the soldiers said. "In disguise."

"No," said an old woman, "the dragones are clumsy, ugly things. Mechanical things. Look how they dance, how they swirl and dip with such ease. No dragone can move like that."

"I remember them," her companion chimed in. "They've come back."

"Look at how fast they are, how regal," the old woman agreed. "Just like they used to be. As if nothing's changed."

Beside me, my mother pressed a hand to her chest but didn't speak. When I looked her way again, her eyes were closed, as if the return of the dragons that had deserted her were too much to bear.

Annel broke free from my father's arms and ran over to us. “Daddy says it's a miracle,” she said solemnly.

“But where did they come from?” I asked, lowering my voice so Annel wouldn't hear me. “I thought the green dragons were all dead. Or gone.”

It struck me that for all her intricate tales, my mother had always been vague on this particular point.

My mother opened her eyes and peered out at the fantastical display. “Where indeed.”

“And. . . why?” I whispered. "Why now? Because it's Kellsmas?"

She pressed her lips together. “I don't know.”

“They're. . .exactly like the ones in your stories.”

“Yes,” she said flatly. “They are.”

More guests joined the others until the hall was a mass of bodies. Children wove between the adults to get a closer look. Soldiers stood toward the back of the room, unshaven and half dressed in breeches but no jackets. They looked as sleepy and confused and awed as everyone else.

Annel grabbed my mother's hand and pulled her toward the front door. “I want to go outside.”

“No.” My mother didn't budge and Annel's hand slipped out of her grasp. “It's too cold. And you don't have your coat.”

“I don't need a coat.”

“I said no.”

But guests had already pushed the door open and not just at the Green Glass Inn. From every side, sleepy travelers began to pour into the square. Annel ignored my mother and shot through the open door into the street. She was coatless, dressed only in socks and a sheer white nightgown. Her unbraided hair flew out behind her like fire as she ran.

Stragglers emerged from vacant shops. Their rags glimmered in the wild light as they shuffled forward. Soldiers left their posts and edged closer toward the green dragons above, hands on their guns and mechanical bows. Villagers stood with their heads thrown back as the dragons frolicked in the cold. They soared higher then lower, so low that the flapping of their wings sent out gusts of air. People's hats blew off their heads and a drunken alesman staggered backward onto the snow-covered sidewalk.

My father allowed himself to be carried along by the stream of watchers, his hand clamped onto Willard's shoulder so they wouldn't be separated. Everyone, it seemed, had gathered in the center of Petris.

The place where the Kellstree usually stood was dark, as were the gas streetlamps. There were no trees anymore, not the ancient redwoods or even the immense saplings that took six men to hoist to their full height at the center of the square. Power was in short supply throughout the kingdom too, and most had taken to using candles.

The inn had a special ration card but even so, we worked at a lowered capacity most nights. After so many months of weak, artificial light, the blaze of dragons above was blinding.

Annel was far ahead of us. “Annel!” my mother shouted into the crowd but she was well out of earshot.

“Hamond!" she called over the heads of the onlookers. "Get Annel!”

My father stopped in his tracks. I swear he could hear my mother if she whispered his name all the way from Faereton. He turned and gestured to her.

“I will, I will,” he shouted, his voice nearly lost in the din. He pushed through the throng with Willard in tow. My brother scrambled to keep up but his eyes were locked onto the dragons.

It was a minute or two before Willard vanished from sight as well. In the distance, I could just make out the top of my father's crimson hair as it bobbed above the crowd. It looked to me more like what my mother says is pink or salmon, but it stood out nonetheless. He was making rapid progress now, forcing his way forward.

I peered up at the dragons, who had filled the entire sky. Yes, they were graceful. Yes, they moved like no dragone moved. Still, something was not right. Toward the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. Something about the dragons' color was off.

Or was it a trick of my insufferable eyesight? Yet another sign that I lacked even the amount of imagination required to see what really was there?

Inside me, a coldness was spreading its branches to the very tips of my fingers. “This is no miracle,” I said to my mother.

But she was no longer next to me. She had fallen behind and to the side. From several yards back, she fought her way forward but had been caught in a kind of human riptide.

“Annel!' she cried from behind me. Her voice was hoarse and full of dread.

“I'll find her!” I shouted but she had already faded from sight. "I won't let anything happen to her!"

When the first package grazed my shoulder, I didn't know what it was. I wrote it off as a stray hand or an accidental shove. Then another fell out of the sky, and another and another after that. The sky, the whole heavenly dome overhead, was raining presents. Kellsmas presents, I thought, and a rush of excitement coursed through me.

Then I remembered: these were not my mother's dragons. This was no ordinary miracle. We were at war. And it was snowing gifts.

They landed everywhere, on the tops of buildings and in the thin alleyways between them. At the feet of the statue of the old King Darfin in the square. They bounced off the heads and shoulders of the villagers, the soldiers and the children. A few cried out but most laughed at what was, by any account, an extraordinary happening

Still, by now some were suspicious. After all, the war with Eire was only a matter of months. The desolation of Petris, and of the great green land of Caldor, a matter of quartercens. My mother and I weren't the only skeptics in town. But it was too late.

The first explosion came from the other side of the square. I couldn't see who opened the box but I heard the scream. More explosions, more screams. Screams of pain, mostly from children who had picked up the boxes.

Some of the gifts weren't wrapped. They were simply—and not simply at all—toys. A doll waiting to be hugged. A miniature plane in need of a pilot. A spinning top, a flying horse, a stuffed bear in a blue raincoat and a floppy red hat. Old treasures full of old magic.

Annel stood near the statue of old King Darfin. His larger-than-life form loomed over her in full regalia, its dark iron a testament to power.

At her own sock-covered feet, a doll whose arm cracked on impact lay on its side. My sister's face held no disappointment, only compassion. I knew her mind as if it were my own, though we could not have been more opposite. She would nurse this broken thing, she would heal it. Not because she was different but because she was the same—the same as all Caldorians, whose first impulse was to help and to heal.

I opened my mouth to speak but there were no words. There was no time left. I watched as her small hand reached for the tiny porcelain body.

Willard appeared out of nowhere, a ghost of Kellsmas present. It was a matter of seconds when he darted out from behind the statue. Then the doll in his arms, the fire bloom born from some dark center. Then the stillness and the shattered form that once was my brother.

Annel stood a few yards away, her face oddly peaceful, as if she were at my mother's hearthstone, listening to a story about a boy who became a hero.

The shadow of a dragon passed over us and when I looked up its eyes were empty, like the eyes of all dragones. Soulless. Behind it, the entire swarm of dragones opened their mouths on cue and let fire uncurl across the dawn.

In the frail, rosy light, their paint seemed elaborately false, their newfound grace a trick not of mechanics but of the mind.

The ice that had always lived inside me found its way to the surface. I raised my hands as the dragone before me dove and opened its mouth to burn me into oblivion.

I watched as its fiery breath froze in mid-air and thudded to earth. I noted how its metal body went frost white and tumbled after it, knocking Darfin's statue from its pedestal. When Annel flew toward me and wrapped both arms around my legs, sobbing, I realized her hair had turned silver.

Not silver. Red. As it always had been, like my father's.

What little sense I'd had of color was gone. Later, when my mother visited me in prison she would describe how the dragone's frozen fire had split into a thousand rubies on impact. How so many townspeople and travelers and even soldiers had scooped the cooling stones into their aprons, their coat pockets, and hidden them away.

She told me that they had hidden other things away, too. That they kept in secret parts of themselves the kind of stories that could no longer be written down—stories of what I had done that night. Of how I had destroyed the dragones and saved them all.

Dragonslayer. Fire Freezer. These were my names now. Names outlawed and punishable by death under the New Alliance for Freedom.

Annel came to visit as well, though she no longer spoke and her hair fell in ratty knots over her shoulders. On one visit her hair had been shorn close the skull and I found I missed the gossamer spider's webs I'd grown so used to.

Every time they came, my sister and mother looked at me with their gray eyes and waited for me to say something wise. To be heroic again, as I had been that night.

I would like to have said something wise. Or heroic. I would like to have comforted them in the way dreams of riding dragons as a child comfort me in my cell at night. I would even have settled for words that would repair their hearts in some clumsy, well-intentioned way.

But I, too, prefer to live inside the silence these days. I've gotten used to walls.

During her final visit my mother told me old King Darfin's statue had been repaired and resurrected. It stood, she said, where it always had and on Kellsmas Eve there were fireworks in the square to celebrate our remarkable prosperity.