5. Incendiary
To Princess' band came red fire blackening,
Gold fire crackling,
White fire sizzling.
Charnel her name, searing fire and snow.
True dragon, dragon born, flames to sow.
—
Cel's leg was wrapped and lifted on straps through the ceiling, and in his hands he used a knife as quick as ever to pare down the last of our synth-grown potatoes. We knew already that it'd heal shorter than his other and lucky if he could still walk on it. Cat hadn't dared show her face around here after she'd helped Kesuk hold him down and splint it.
I knew the names of those three anguta-daughters, none-daughters, nithing-ones. Iluq. Asdis. Kivi. The dragons Ukkarnit. Kakor. Suinnak. Frost Hunters, Frost null-tribe. Next time there'd be price-reckoning by all the spirits of sky and sea, all the hunter's stars and signs.
Inge and I had hunted all we could past the time even the dragons were tired to the bone-marrow. Winter was coming and nobody can replace meat with scrip. Aardal stayed in the cave and looked after Cel, and didn't complain though his skin lightened with all the time indoors and his eyes longed for a bit of light before it was all gone. We hauled in our catches and stayed up half the night skinning them.
Truth be told Cat hadn't known it, lowlander that she was. "But broken bones can be fixed," she'd tried to say. "I am not well versed in the healing arts myself but a simple medscan and bonesetting machine can repair even compound fractures."
"Then you get those up here," I told her gruffly, and she blanched. Cel said Kesuk knew his stuff, but with bone all over the place it was like trying to tie a knot below mud without being able to feel your hands. No equipment.
"My resources are...limited. I had no idea it was like this. Perhaps I have been too unobservant," Cat said. "Still, at least it was not you or Inge, for you are the hunters." Again I resisted punching her in the slapper.
"I'll do all I can," Healer Kesuk promised. He'd small but warm eyes, a broad brown face, dark hair loose and messy over his forehead. He was taller and wider than you thought from his slumped loose stance, but he didn't move like he was accustomed to a fight. I knew he'd left Ikiaq to study nursing in a lowland city, and came back despite getting away. We watched his hands carefully go over Cel's leg bit by small bit, and Cat fed Cel the metheglin tonic drip by drip to try to keep him from screaming too hard. Cel fainted three-quarters of the way through and didn't wake up until after the nurse was done.
"Qagassakung," he said weakly, politely to Kesuk afterward, his face soaked with sweat. "Thank you. You did your best."
"I'm sorry," Kesuk said, overly apologetic, stretching out his long wide hands to him.
"None...you," Cel said. "Mind if I...go out again...?" he asked, eyes rolling in his head, and deadened to the world one more time.
The light was getting low already and I shivered below my parka in our cave. If winter wasn't here already, then the Sharplady was knocking at the doorstep and stamping an iced boot. I strapped our carcasses over Pak's back and in a borrowed cart for the road down to the tannery. We'd cached dried meat by all our neighbours' caves; even if Turuk's bullyboys got ideas they'd never find it all. Aardal put on the new furs we'd given him for the cold air. He rushed out.
"Sedna, can I come too? There are errands I want and it's far to walk..." He'd stuck with Cel all these days.
"Hop in." I put him on the cart. Thane leaped up beside him—you had to watch that greenish imp. I half-smiled. Pak pulled us down and away.
"I want to go see Umma-Hublu and ask how she and her giant pot are going, and I want to give her these for it—" Aardal showed a handful of old synth-grown onions encrusted with dirt; he must've saved them up carefully. "And I want to see if Orvar has any new sculpts and vidds in his stall before wintertime, and I saw Kangka the day of the pits but I didn't have time to talk to him—I'm going to give him an alinak strip I saved, and then Thane wants to go for a run above the Sivi roads—"
"A longer journey than I planned, but that's all right." I might throw something into Hublu's giant iron pot myself: I'd never had to go to her door in winter myself, but there were plenty of folk who'd have frozen or starved to death as a kid without her. Aardal and Thane balanced out the cart as we teetered down the last rough stretch of scarp.
"That's where the smoke was, wasn't it?" Aardal asked, jumping in his seat. I'd seen the wide black smear on the ground below fallen charcoal walls on the outskirts of Ikiaq. "The fire!"
"It wasn't a big fire." We'd seen only a trace up in our cave. Two households gone from the blaze.
"It was big to the people who lived there." I glanced back to see the kid look downcast and concerned. Too much of a heart for things you couldn't help.
"They'll get over it. Don't cry over fallen snow. Come on, tannery first then all your errands."
"You can let me off here and come back for me, right? C'mon, Thane!" I sighed and nodded. It was this part that the folk poorer than usual for Ikiaq roamed the streets and slept curled around their dragons for half warmth—where Aardal came from, where that kid Kangka had stared at us on the way to the pits. I wondered if he'd search for Cat while he was here. It didn't change the price of meat.
The tannery gave me neither less nor more than I was expecting for the load, and made threatening noises about sacking Cel. His skills'd get him back there working with his hands, and nobody treated us too different after the pit. Turuk kept her word and gave her anger to her gladiator crew for letting us win, and I'd no need to go back in the pits and shoot more dragons. Maybe there was a bit of respect we didn't have before, maybe not. I didn't give a scrim where Cat had run to with her tail between her legs.
Pak and I rode down to the markets with the drakkals in hand; with the cold closing in the deals aren't the best, but we needed a few repairs and hunt's supplies. I tied the new saddlerope around Pak and loaded a bolt of slight-stained cloth on his back; hesitated over a pair of boots in my size. Umma-Hublu sold a stack of her herblore messes and Orvar's stall looked bare. The two boys ran around getting underfoot, Aardal and Thane cleaner than Kangka and a small black-stained dragon that looked like a giant rat. The boy looked fit to eat a full krawhal from the depths. A bunch of skinny street dragons crowded around Pak and he let them share his warmth.
"Your friend's at Sangyi's, isn't she?" Nal Nalak asked, binding up my set of bait nails with a piece of string. "The dragon witch who faced the two gladiators at once."
"She's not my friend and never was." I snatched up the supplies. "She's a lowlander and no kin nor claim to me."
"She's going round the cliff, if you ask me from what they say," Nal said, sketching a curved line with his forefinger down from his scalp. "Talks a lot, sticks her nose into things—and thinks she's one of yours."
"It's none of mine if she jumps off Agliuk cliff," I said. I caught Thane moving out of the corner of my eye and went to call back Aardal.
It was a dark day; I sat fixing my arrows and oiling the bow. Ice covered Lake Itigaituk below. Yesterday I'd speared a selky coming up in an ice hole. Cel mixed blubber with herring oil over the lit stovepit, leg still in a cast but well enough to move on a pair of sticks. Inge fixed one of Orvar's old comms and Aardal played with a counting frame. The dragons could sleep off this time of year, Mauja and Hemlock curled over each other for hibernating warmth and Pak stretching himself out a bit more. Hunter dragons need to run even in wintertime. I'd hopes of another alinak find in the seisgraphs.
Another winter had come to Ikiaq.
I moved closer to the fire. The drozhemoss burned long; it set up a stink in the cave, but you knew it was edible and did good rather than ill. Take the warmth while it was there. Word said that in Ikiaq proper, more folk than usual took that too hard this winter. My fingers tested the bowstring: taut and ready. I put it away and lay back against Pak's warm scales: waiting out the winter with my hold around me, the same as every year.
Last year, we'd all had the use of both our legs.
Then came the tumult at the tuktural hide, and I knew the quiet couldn't have lasted.
The slender dark figure at the door was flanked by a dragon coloured red and black. "Greetings, Sedna, Inge, Cel. Greetings, Aardal. I come to beg favour." Cat bowed stupidly, formally as a lowlander. "Sangyi's house is no more. It was burned. No. Someone burned it. Someone burned it just as they have burned other dwellings in Ikiaq, until all the town fears fire."
"Glad you got out alive," I said sourly. Cat's coat and some of her stuff on the dragonback were smokestained enough for it.
"Sangyi's young daughter was burned black arm to neck. Her mother-in-law was injured by a fallen beam. There have been so far seven deaths of human and dragon and above a score of injuries in fire. Boss Turuk's thugs brutalise people to find the incendiary. People suffer." I knew about old Grandfather Issukan: died in one of the scrimming blazes, known to my mother's mother once, but he'd been over seventy.
"We heard," Inge said. "Saw parts of it." Nothing in this part of Ikiaq had caught alight—but we were the ones who lived in rock. "What says it's not accidents? It's happened in winters and summers before and it'll happen again."
"Sangyi and her family are always careful with fires. There are too many. Somebody does this on purpose. Or for a purpose," Cat said, a strange glitter coming to her eyes. "In the old days true dragons breathed flame...
"And you must help to find the guilty before more die and Boss Turuk's bullies harm more innocents."
"No. Go away," I said.
"Kangka," Aardal said. "Kangka and Orvar and Umma-Hublu and all my friends from Sivi alleyway. That's where most of the fires were, weren't they, Cat?" She nodded. "So it would help them," he concluded, and looked to us.
Cel ran a hand through his hair. "We aren't investigators," he said. "We know nothing. Not how to understand the mind of someone who does this, not how to find a nithing, if it is someone who wants to set fires and not more than a series of accidents."
"Sedna and Inge are trackers," Cat said, and advanced a step further into our home. "Anyway, Sangyi and the living ones of her family have split among her sisters. I have nowhere else to stay and I will pay you the same as I paid her—for as long as my coin lasts.
"I told my superiors of Draveed's death," she narrated. "They were displeased and will send someone to investigate when winter is over. I petitioned them to send medical equipment or at least drakkals to donate to Kesuk, for you showed me that Ikiaq has many needs to which I have been blind. But they refused me and laid a sentence of banishment from all I have ever known. I am alone and I ask you for shelter." It was true Cat looked thinner and drawn and less confident, isolated and in trouble. Trouble she'd caused. I'd have thrown her out easily if not for the looks directed my way by Aardal and Cel.
"Stay as long as you can pay. Look out for jobs you can do," I said. "You're healthy and there's no reason you can't do a grown woman's work. It'll be crowded, but we can have Mauja and Hemlock dig a bit further at the back. How much of your things did you save from the fire?"
"Viviane and I can learn anything you want us to learn. Thank you," Cat said, and smiled with happy relief as if no grudge had ever come between us.
"Don't thank me until you've done your chores list," I said, and made sure digging out the dragon privy was on it.
We ate together that night on blubber, and Cat still wouldn't drop it. I saw her hands were already marked with the unfamiliar labour, where she was light pink on the underside of her palms rather than the usual dark of her skin. "It is a chance to help the people of Ikiaq. Your people. We can examine the evidence ourselves and find the perpetrator before they harm any more, and satisfy Boss Turuk.
"And besides Iluq's crew was assigned to solve it," she added. I knew well what she was doing.
"We look out for our neighbours—our close neighbours—and we don't get involved in what we can't help," I said, though the notion of the toxic trio prickled my spine.
"We do only what we can," Inge echoed calmly, laying aside her bowl neatly. "Wyrd shapes itself." It was only an old proverb, but Cat nodded at the sentiment as if it were deep and profound.
It was two days later that we spotted smoke below us once more, strong enough that it was just-born. "Sivi-district!" Aardal shouted out: and so we brought our dragons down the cliff to fight the blaze, as if it was truly some dark fate for us. It wasn't the first time we'd done such a thing.
I worked with a pickaxe to melt ice for dragons to turn it to water. Inge and Cat carried water on their dragons. Cel and Aardal helped to bandage the burned. This fire took five households in its wake including Umma-Hublu's, and it was long hard labour to quell. My back ached by the end of it and the others were black with smoke. Mauja's eyes were the only pale thing about her now. I met Kesuk there, smoke-blackened, busy with Cel over burned people. Without the fire it was all in winter's dark, the only lights pale flickers of sparse maglight. A magtorch shone a beam over Cel's face, where he swayed on the crutch for his leg. I saw Cel tense and disturbed; he never liked fires that grew.
"They're becoming worse," Kesuk said. "Someone is doing this to us. Someone with enough hatred to..." He squeezed his shoulder, moving out some bruise. I smelled roast flesh in the air and knew it wasn't animal. Then a high-ridden dragon walked past and flicked its spiked tail between Kesuk's legs. He fell and I stepped back, raising my hands ready to fight.
The rider was the girl Iluq. Tall, arrogant, tattooed and pierced, her rough furs wrapped all around her and no trace she'd helped the firefighting. Her familiar ice-pale dragon brought out his claws; he knew I'd shot him last time we met. "You! Healer!" she snapped. "You were early on the scene. Very early. Tell us now what you saw!"
"Leave him alone." I glared at her. For one single moment she drew back, even on dragon's seat above me.
"Mind your own business, cliffscrim. Asdis, Kivi!" she cried to her friends. "Round up everyone near and ask them all where they were at the start of the fire!"
The chain-girl whipped out her weapon and on her flank the smaller girl flew here and there. Our group had come too late to be considered. Kesuk was among the first released. Iluq rode up and down the line of exhausted wounded people who only wanted their homes, making them answer. Umma-Hublu was awful to see in that line, looking shrunken and far older than I remembered her: her home and shelter were gone, her household lost and her great crockpot lying on its side in the ruins, broken in half. Aardal stood with his friend Kangka. That urchin and his small ratlike dragon wouldn't be the only ones out of a shelter tonight. The dragon was coal-black as the last time I'd seen him, sootstained and dirtstained or maybe burned. Bigger dragons mingled and scattered idly in the road.
"I'm taking all I can into my dwellings," Kesuk said. He was the closest we had to a town hospital. Privately I decided to donate some meat from our stores: it didn't do to let folk openly know you had so much as to give it away, but Umma-Hublu would need some kind of new start on her soups. Aardal's friend stood near us; we wouldn't have the space to take him into our own dwelling, or the twenty more like him.
Cat paced over the ruins. Woven stuff burned to fragments, ash and black scorchmarks covering the ground, wooden walls burned three-quarters down, roofs collapsed. I stepped over a broken, black Skylady pendant in walga ivory after her.
"What the scrim do you think you're doing now?"
"Investigating," she said calmly, and picked her way through the ruins. "This is probably where the fire started." She led me to what had been a corner of Hublu's hold. "Here it burnt deepest, by the kitchen pit. You can sometimes find traces of accelerants: the materials to start it. Those signs are not here, though." There was nothing but a layer of ash over deep black marks that charred the stone once below the walls. The snow had melted behind it, over the road. Pak bounded up beside me. "From here you can see that it spread this way—the burn marks are deeper to the front of this chair—and then encompassed both sides. Some powerful fuel must have started it and accomplished this quickly. Can your dragon track it?"
"Not with the smoke stink!" Pak ran his nose over the black ground then ambled away. I saw him nosing around Hublu's skirt; often she kept a twist or two for a dragon in there, but not today. Hublu slowly petted him.
Iluq's pale white reared over Cat.
"Dragon witch! Out of there." The frost scrimmer drew her javelin. "Back out! You were in Sangyi's when it burned—and now you dare show yourself here. Where were you when the blaze began?"
Cat hesitated. "I was outside Sedna's cave scraping lichen from the east face."
"Ha! Back off, scrimshaw. You've powers. Did you set the fire and race back up there for the sake of pretence?"
"I did not. Cease your useless accusations and search for the true incendiary," Cat ordered in her way of preening herself like a wattle-drooping redbird in mating season, imagining everyone would see the light of obedience if just she spoke loud enough. "The intensity of the flashpoint makes me think—"
The dragon's tail knocked her back. She fell against the other side of the road with a shallow cut on her arm. Viviane ran to her. Iluq glared at me. It might have gone bad even with Pak coming to my side: but then the ground trembled and Iluq stared across, eyes poking out of her head like boiled eggs.
Boss Turuk rode up the narrow street, her great dragon Murak setting his giant feet down one by one. Her furs were heavy and rich and carelessly wrapped around her bulk, flying away in all directions.
"People! Don't lay around gawking, clean it up!" she snapped out. "Town needs rebuilding—you, you, you, and you're volunteers. Stop round to my paymaster for scrip. My guards'll let you in the factory for craving warmth—much as Muruak eats freeloaders and arsonists. Iluq!" Her dog sprang to attention. "What the bloody scrim do you think you're doing, mother-dropped brat! What happened in your dense skull? The dragon witch and the huntress beat you and your fool gang once. Let them find the incendiary if they like. And you'll leave the healer alone. You must know it wasn't him." For one moment Kesuk stared at her, but Boss Turuk was already moving on. Iluq's shoulders drooped. "Out of my way," Turuk said.
Cat smiled. "You see?" she said softly, to me. "Mayor Turuk requests us to investigate."
"Just don't get in my way, milk-feeders, and my Crew won't have to mess you up," Iluq hissed the moment Boss Turuk was out of earshot. She wheeled her dragon aboutface. "Asdis, Kivi! Let's go do some talking."
Pak stuck his snout down on the black ground; Cat kept poking through the rubble. "Of late I misplaced certain possessions of mine," she said. "A tome of the ancient ways of the dragon and an old magsculpt amulet. Or at least a portion of an ancient amulet. If someone has deciphered the runes; placed together certain knowledge... I wonder if someone seeks to call back the Dragon through fire," she said in a whisper.
I liked not at all the thought of someone sacrificing our folk for some weird claw-loose idea. "That's stupid," I said. "You're building a forest out of a tiny stick you broke off in the first place."
"Is it? Do you know of an accelerant that can scorch stone this deep?" Cat pointed to the stone where she said the fire had started. Pak broke his inspection off and trod out of the way. "It is some ancient mystery. The effect of touchwood treated with other herbs I know not—no doubt some in the way of your people, who have always valued fire. Summon the Dragon through fire."
I saw Pak nosing through Umma-Hublu's skirt in the crowd. Absent-minded and still blank-faced she patted him on the skull.
"Then you're accusing Hublu," I said, angry at the outsider once again. "She's the best herb lorist—well, Kesuk knows his healing, and our Cel too—and if you dare say she roasted her own house—"
"I do not say it. I am only starting my investigation," Cat said, and tripped away with a put-upon air of purpose.
I shouldn't have gone and asked Cel about fire-starting. Like anyone else I kept my touchwood in my pouches. He talked about blubber fires and oil fires and moss fires and motion fires, big dragons marching like they did in the old factory to keep it going. Inge chatted about electrofires with sparks from her comms.
"You can usually see the spark pattern if it's electro," she said. "It's like a signature. If it's lightning then it can look like a tree—you know, like Mountain Heyulik."
I knew all about Heyulik Avakin and her lightning burn scars all down back and arms like a tattoo of a giant tree.
"There's maths in it," Inge said, opening her personal comm and tapping out a diagram. "See, it looks like a fractal at the ends—it divides itself into little versions of itself, the same's you see in snowflakes. So the pattern shows where it comes from." Then she mapped out the same fire marks where Cat said it started, without a trace of shame. It looked almost like one of Pak's footprints to me, like a jagged black oval poured out over the ground. "The deepest bit is a narrow channel. Like the fire started when someone poured heavy fuel in a streaky line and the blaze spread in a fractal around it."
Or like the fire came out of a pipe built for flame instead of ferrdeny slag, I thought; like someone invented a gadget that let them burn people at their will. Kesuk talked about someone who hated enough...
The names of a few nithingen flickered through my mind: killers, thieves, desperate folk with huge prices on their heads I'd heard of rather than met in person. Akkoran the Longaxe, Skull Svanil; Black Frela and Taggarik Tavarok. Boss Turuk posted the prices on their heads and sometimes she made the odd outlaw of her own, though more often her so-called justice was fast in Ikiaq. Only a nithing would set a town on fire by purpose, I'd have thought, even Turuk's thugs above that—but the last caravan before winter had come and gone. The whole town would know of a nithing stranger staying. I looked up and beyond at the white mountains beyond Ikiaq's rocky steppe, snow swirling in winter dark that didn't forgive lone travellers over the cliffs.
Pak and I hefted the meat down quietly under a nice thick cover, riding it to Kesuk's. I hadn't told Cat or Aardal but I'd an idea the boy knew it from the expression on his face last time he'd greeted me. Kesuk's hospital was a long low-lying wood house, chinked with pitch heavy between the planks. Only nithingen would burn others.
Wood and pitch. Danger's scent was in the air as much as I'd walk into a tuktural cave and get a prickle down my shoulders that the horned buck had just turned in. Or the wind blowing an uraluk's fierce scent at me, or the shadow of a seawolf under ice.
Call it hunter's instinct. Pak and I saw Kesuk's hospital the moment it caught afire. I saw a blaze of white and gold and black at one corner. I screamed out the warning.
The drowned-rat gathering of folk stood around after. I lowered my arms, muscles stiff from breaking ice and hauling water. I wiped smoke off Pak's face. Kesuk stood there in his nightclothes with them wet and clinging to his bare legs. Hublu herded the children together, all the children; crying and singed and burned. I heard a sentence, Herid is dead, I'd not known her— Folks were mad with grief.
"It wasn't natural. Look at how deep it scorched. It was one who knows witch's ways. It was one in both places. It was—"
Iluq's dragon reared before Umma-Hublu.
"Your lore. Your mixtures. You're the one."
Hublu wiped her hands on her skirt, shooed the children away from her and the white, and stood calmly waiting. Embers still sparked from the blaze and set red and black lights over her large shape. "No, it wasn't. Iluq Longear, stay that dragon! Make me twenty years younger and I'd clip you over the ear the same as when you were six and hungry—"
A torch flared in the dark. "She's a witch! A burning witch! None let her escape—" Iluq's second cried out, and people glared at Hublu as if they believed the uraluk crap.
"—Or Boss Turuk will use our guts in a coat! Kivi, empty her pockets and bind her!" Iluq ordered, driving her dragon a step back.
"For witches can turn to smoke and fly away by fire! What've we always done with witches?" screamed out Asdis, chain silver in her other hand in torch's light.
"The stones!" some fool dared answer back in the crowd, and then they were gone. I saw Umma-Hublu dragged along by them, her pouches ripped open and trampled. And she took it all. Her children separated and raced through the night.
Inge jammed her dragon into the mess. "Stop it!" she shouted. "Can't solve it by killing her! Get Turuk, let's keep our heads—" Cel pulled Kesuk out of the way of a trampling, stumbling on his one good leg. You couldn't talk people from this any more than you could yell at a tuktural herd to stop them. I saw Aardal carried along by the mob; I reached out and grabbed him up by the scruff of the neck. Thane kept under Pak's front legs for protection and we rode carefully, the sea of torches and running people and the three harpies front and centre of it all—
Aardal pointed to his friend Kangka trying to slip away down an alley. He called after the kid and I saw the urchin's black eyes flash in torchlight—then he was slipping away, running. Pak caught up in a few short steps and backed him and the little dragon into a wall.
"Kag, it's all right! Come home with us, just for a night," Aardal said to him. "Inge's going to stop them hurting Umma-Hublu—Sedna will help—"
I'd seen and smelt fear as much as on any hunt. The alleyrat clung to the wall with blackened hands like claws. "What did you see, kid?" I said. I jumped off Pak to stand close to him. "Don't worry. Let me know what you saw those nights and we'll protect you from anything. Someone at Hublu's and here. You and your dragon'll be just fine..."
I stooped to pet the black ratlike dragon that I knew should be black-and-white patches below the soot. I got a hand on the soft spot in the shoulderscales most dragons like. Then I snatched back my hand because it was boiling hot. And the black colour hadn't washed off one bit on me. I stepped back the same instant, all in a sudden shock and surprise, and Kangka stared at me and knew it too.
"I was cold," he said suddenly. "It was very cold."
Then he kicked me in the knees, hard, and I reeled back against Pak and he and the dragon were off like a pair of black streaks in the night—
I reached for my wristcomm.
Iluq and her crew rode through the streets for the proper prey this time, crouched over their dragons as if they fled after some speedy, deadly full-horned tuktural instead of a fearing child. Pak and I and Cat and Viviane rode with them.
There were flames all over the city now. Fires that led us here on the hunt.
The incendiary hated enough to set the world on fire.
We caught up to Kangka and his dragon not far from Shaktal's place. It was down a long corner and next to solid rock, and the dragon breathed out flames that charred and melted the stone. There wasn't anywhere else for the kid to go.
I'd overtaken the others a turn ago and Pakak crowded out the other dragons.
"Boss Turuk wants that dragon! Get it alive or she'll feed your liver to Muruak!" Iluq yelled. I heard the rumble of Asdis' chain in the air.
I let Pak keep them blocked back. I got off dragonback. "It's over," I said, and reached out a hand. A blast of fire scorched through the air, and I rolled out of it in the nick of time. It scorched half my parka sleeve off. "It's all over."
Kangka backed himself into the wall again. The little dragon tried to sear out the escape route, but he couldn't get through and far out the border. And the boy could see that.
"They're going to hurt you, Char," he said in a piping high clear voice so much like Aardal's, and drew out a long shard of glass from his sleeve. "It's okay. I'll never let them hurt you."
And before I could reach him he slit the throat of his dragon. Then he stood and let us take him in.
"What will Boss Turuk do with him, Sedna?" Aardal said, and his mittened hand rested tightly in mine. There should not be chains over the hands of a small boy dragged through the streets in place of Umma-Hublu.
I shook my head. "They'll take him into her," I said, which was no answer at all. I knew what they'd do with a grown fire-starter. Aardal shivered.
"He was my friend," the boy said. "He and Char must have been very cold. Nobody helped them until too late." He asked no more questions. The night was dark and cold and in the distance Ikiaq factory rose. Inge stood with tightly folded arms, her clothing torn and a black bruise spreading across her face.
The dragon's small carcass was flung across Iluq's saddle, throat still open and a trail of dark blood running down her dragon's neck. Her companions rode beside her, high-backed, marching in the end of the hunt.
"You found the incendiary, Sedna," Cat said. "You cleared Umma-Hublu's name and saved her. Sometimes flame-setters cannot be fixed or changed from their path, if something grows and twists within them that they cannot help but to kill and kill again."
I'd seen Kangka's eyes. But I was silent.
"Let's go help Kesuk build his shelters," Cel said, and gently guided us away.
—