A Shade of Dragon 3(29)
“Theon… Theon.” Her eyes were clear and bright with pain. I thought of the sky over The Hearthlands—now Everwinter. Luminous. Opaque. And so low. “What if we can’t?” she asked. “What if we can’t change it?”
When I awoke, I still couldn’t get the conversation out of my head. The sun over the ogres’ island was cheerful, the palm trees whispering in the breeze, the ocean roaring and rolling toward our camp. The ogres feared us too much to disturb us, and it was a pleasant place to have relocated.
But it wasn’t home.
“Theon.” My mother’s familiar voice interrupted my drift through half-sleep. “You were gone all the morning. No one could say where you were. It would have been easy to believe you were dead, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “You know how I am.”
I didn’t have to see her to know that she was grimacing. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
I liked to act in solitude. That was my way. I didn’t like to report to anyone as if they were a superior, even a member of my family. Altair was the same way. Perhaps raising us boys with such confidence and courage had, in some respects, backfired on Mother and Father.
“Should I even bother to ask where you went?” she prodded.
“Not yet,” I answered. “Mother… do you ever think that The Hearthlands are just lost? That it is simply not our land any longer, and that we should make peace with that?”
“Theon.” Her tone changed to that of discipline. That tone would precede a lashing when I was a boy. “The Hearthlands are our home. Not just our home—our destiny. Our rightful place. We will reclaim them. We must. It is in the stars.”
I sighed and tilted my head away from her, almost with shame. “But it’s not,” I said. “It’s not in the stars. If it was in the stars, we would know it. We would find it under our feet without any effort. And that’s not happening. Even Einhen—the last time we were out at night, in our country—said he could hardly see the stars, but he knew that they had changed position to no longer favor our advantage.”
“What are you suggesting, Theon? For the sake of the gods, speak plainly. What do you want? To relocate? Shall we just take over the ogres’ island, and deem it The New Hearthlands? Is that what you want? To give up?”
“No!” I lurched up from where I had been lying in the sand. Mother swung into view, eyes shining and mouth stern. “I just wonder if, perhaps, an unending faith and patience in the powers that be is the correct course, when it seems that the winds have changed and we are only being blown further and further from the island.”
“I’m open to any new ideas you want to propose,” Mother said.
“That’s not true. When I took men and ran reconnaissance on the city, you didn’t want me to go. You wanted to stay and wait in the shelter. And when we were driven from the shelter by the ice people, you didn’t want to stay on the land—”
“We couldn’t have! The weather changed!” Mother cried. “You know what the cold does to us. Though our fire continues to burn hot, our muscles and bones stiffen and slow. We become statues in such heavy storms!”
“We could have stayed and fought until the weather changed,” I reminded her. It wasn’t in me to truly fight with my mother, whom I loved so dearly, who was the last remaining piece of my family to whom I could cling, save Penelope. But we needed to talk about this. We needed to talk about the fire dragon way, and how it might not have been as productive in war as… the human way. “You flew with our survivors away from the island before the first snowflake even fell, when Nell and I alone forged into the city. Admit it, Mother. You do not want to fight. Why?”
“Because it is not our place to fight! We were the born leaders of that land. The natural leaders of that land! And it will be returned to us, just as it was during the insurgence of Emperor Bram—”
“An insurgency which took almost all our females,” I noted darkly. “It was not the tale of fated triumph you imagine. We relinquish something great every time we decide to let the tide take us where it will.” My thoughts turned to Nell. What might have happened to us if I had listened to Pythia? If I had fallen in love with Michelle? My heart turned cold at the fantasy of our separate futures.
Mother dropped her head into her hands, so that I could no longer see her eyes. I winced. Dear gods, I had made her cry. I was a terrible dragon. “I don’t want to lose any more of our men,” she confessed. “I’ve lost your father and your brother… and you disappeared again… you want to go back and fight again…”