Wings of Fire, page 1
Wings of Fire
Alma Alexander
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Edition
July 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61138-671-4
Copyright © 2017 by Alma Alexander
Also By Alma Alexander
From Book View Café:
Empress
Abducticon
Other books:
The Secrets of Jin-Shei
Embers of Heaven
The Hidden Queen
Changer of Days
Midnight at Spanish Gardens
SERIES
Worldweavers
Gift of the Unmage
Spellspam
Cybermage
Dawn of Magic
The Were Chronicles
Random
Wolf
Shifter
Dedication
For Maggie, with respect and love and gratitude and friendship – without you and the taniwha whom you originally brought to life, this book would never have existed. Thank you for your creator’s touch, and for the grace of releasing Jack so that this story could be shared with a wider world…
*1*
“When they originally brought deer out here, they unloaded them from ships across planking so that they wouldn’t get their feet wet, and then released them into one of the wettest climates known to man...”
Sabrina looked up at the steep, thickly-wooded mountain-sides where the purported deer had been deposited, and smiled. She had been doing a pretty good job of ignoring the tour guide’s patter up until now, but she had a healthy sense of the ridiculous and that last snippet of information had tickled it, especially given the fact that it was being confirmed even as it had been spoken by the arrival of a light drizzle throwing itself against the window of the boat’s cabin.
Perhaps it was just the unsettled weather, but all the ferry’s passengers were crowded into the cabin, none of them choosing to brave the elements on the deck outside. That meant rather more potential social interaction that Sabrina had cared to enter into. She had fielded friendly interrogations from two complete strangers wanting to make conversation; herded one small tow-haired toddler, abandoned to his own devices, back to his mother, away from the door to the outside and the dangers of the open deck; shied away from another small child’s spilled Coke as the little girl stumbled in pursuit of her older sibling across the crowded cabin; and, last but not least, twice rebuffed the advances of an ardent young admirer who wanted against all odds to get to know her better. She had finally slipped into a vacated seat as someone shuffled their position in the cabin and tried to ignore everybody—and was then comprehensively barricaded into her window seat by the advent of a broad-beamed Polynesian woman who wedged herself into the seat between Sabrina and the aisle. The woman, as a rather welcome change from the rest of the loquacious passengers, had proved to be the taciturn sort, barely even returning the half-smile that Sabrina offered when she had sat down. She had since curled her plump arms on the table in front of her and, pillowing her head on them, had gone to sleep, snoring gently.
Sabrina hadn’t had to make inconsequential small talk or fend off unwelcome pick-up lines from young local Romeos for some time, but the press of people in the relatively small cabin was beginning to get to her. The drizzle outside was intermittent, coming and going, and as Sabrina glanced out of the window again it was to catch a glimpse of returning sunshine, making the raindrops on the windowpane glitter like jewels. Outside, the air would be freshly washed and clean…
She needed air.
Using the opportunity of the seat across the table being temporarily vacated, she hauled herself out of her window seat and ducked under the table to get past her sleeping seat-companion, who did not stir. Straightening up, she turned and found herself face to face again with the harassed mother of the young child she had already retrieved once. The mother’s anxious face told its own story.
“Has he gone AWOL again?” Sabrina asked, glancing around for the errant little boy.
“All I have to do is take my eyes off him for two minutes and he disappears,” the young mother said in an aggrieved voice. “I’m thinking of tying a leash on to him. I have the baby to mind, and I can’t… you haven’t seen him, have you…?”
“Not since the last time,” Sabrina said. “But I’m going outside. I’m sure he hasn’t slipped out by himself, but I’ll…”
“Is it this little monster you’re looking for?” a fresh-faced granny from the seat across the aisle smiled, holding onto a child by the scruff of his neck. “He seems to have taken a dangerously proprietary interest in my knitting…”
Smiling despite herself at the image of the little boy clutching the ball of russet-coloured wool in one determined little fist, Sabrina left them trying to disentangle the two and wandered out onto the damp deck, hands stuffed into the pockets of her anorak. The deck was empty except for herself and a young man leaning on the railing in the aft with his back to her. He glanced at her briefly before turning his head back to the view.
The waters of Lake Manapouri were black around her. Black. There was just sufficient wind to turn the perfect reflecting surface into a confused jumble of shards of images, shattered glimpses of reflections of the glacially-scoured steep green slopes surrounding the lake like battlements. They kept on going straight down below the surface of the water. Most of these glacial lakes were like that, with their unfathomable bottoms often well below sea-level—and Sabrina thought she had heard the chatty tour guide say something about Manapouri being the deepest lake in New Zealand. The broken reflections jostled one another, sharp and edged as if the little tourist boat were chugging complacently across a lake of broken black glass. Somewhere ahead, in the weird light produced by a patch of full sunlight on greenery backed by a threatening bank of dark-grey cloud, a swarm of tiny, perfect rainbows clustered randomly around the top reaches of the lake. Sabrina counted them—seven. Chaotic, seemingly thrown there like discarded Christmas tinsel. But perfect order, nonetheless.
You must go to the Fiords.
The voice of the man whom she knew as “Uncle Bob” was startlingly clear in her mind, as if he’d whispered those words into her ear—and she was instantly back on the steps of the Arrowtown museum, where her thoughts had returned again and again since she had first looked into those hypnotic dark eyes.
It had been a strange, fuzzy day—could it really have been only yesterday? Sabrina felt as though centuries had passed between that first meeting and this moment on the lake…
<<>>
The light had been thick around her, with a waterlogged kind of sun peering intermittently through heavy clouds just waiting for an opportunity to burst.
Sabrina had just emerged from the museum. She had paused on the top step of the front porch to peer up at the sky and decide whether the weather warranted further indoor activities when the step suddenly slid from under her heel. She lost her balance, toppling forward and grabbing at the handrail—and found herself clutching, instead, at a sinewy arm while she felt another snake around her waist and gently set her back on her feet again.
“Thank you,” she said politely, wondering where the man who had come to her aid had materialised from—the steps had been empty but for her a moment before. He was the size of a small bear, and yet he moved with a dancer’s precision and grace. His age was unguessable, with his white hair (worn in a snappy ponytail) at war with a twinkle in his eyes which made him seem an eternal child.
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
“I’ll be fine now... ow!”
He’d let go of her, but now reached out to steady her again as she tried to put her full weight onto her right ankle and winced at the shooting pain that exploded upwards into her leg.
He’d dropped onto one knee beside her, and was examining her foot. “It isn’t serious,” he said, “I think it’s just a twist... still, it would do it good not to be walked on for a short while. All it needs is a bit of rest, and Bob’s your uncle. May I interest you in a cup of tea while you recuperate?”
“Tea?” Sabrina repeated owlishly.
“My house,” he said, “is just up the street there, one of those cottages. I would be honoured if you would do me the pleasure of being my guest.”
“I don’t even know your name,” said Sabrina, and then found herself wondering if that was really the best excuse she could come up with against accepting an invitation to tea from a stranger in a place she did not know.
“Just call me Uncle Bob,” he’d said, as though that was justification for trusting him. “Everyone does. The people who are on speaking terms with me, that is.”
He offered his arm, smiling at her, and she reached out and hooked hers through it as if in a dream. Sabrina found herself fascinated by him. He’d tucked her arm into the crook of his own, and when he started moving she followed, limping along in a state of defiant bravado.
“I must ask that you excuse the state of the place,” he said, “I wasn’t exactly expecting visitors, and it hasn’t had the benefit of a good tidy.”
“That’s all right,” Sabrina heard herself saying.
They passed a woman who turned to give them a surprised look. Uncle Bob smiled and nodded at her, and she turned abruptly and hurried away. “My neighbour,” he said easily. “I’m afraid I have odd hobbies. If I were a woman I would probably have been called a witch.”
The house to which he led her had a front door which was not locked and opened to his h
Sabrina gasped. “They can’t be!”
“I collect many things—and not for gain. Through here. Make yourself at home.”
A strange old coot wanting a young woman to call him Uncle Bob and spiriting her away to his lair after what was not so much a first meeting as a stumbling upon one another—anywhere, anytime else Sabrina would have fled. But the centre of her brain which was concerned with sensing danger was on holiday. Perhaps it was something almost comfortingly familiar about him. She allowed him to park her in one of the armchairs and then watched him disappear into some kitchen fastness in order to get the tea, and took advantage of his absence to look around the room.
There was a fire flickering in the small brick fireplace. The rest of the room, at first glance, appeared to have been built of books because there wasn’t an inch of available wall that wasn’t covered with bulging bookcases. Sabrina got up and hobbled to one at random. A quick exploration revealed that the bookshelves contained volumes in at least four different languages and in various stages of repair, from still-shrink- wrapped volumes advertising a free compact disk inside (Uncle Bob did not appear to own either a computer or a CD player – at least there was nothing of that sort in evidence in this room) to ancient first editions, the kind bound in dry, peeling leather and with dangerously loose pages that came in apparently random order. Some of the shelves were adorned with interesting ornaments, like the skulls of small animals, perhaps ferrets or cats, and daggers with dark blades which had an oddly utilitarian air about them, looking as though they had been used, and by someone who knew how.
When her host returned, with the tea things on a silver tray, Sabrina started guiltily as he caught her pulling a volume out of one of his fascinating shelves for a closer inspection.
“Tea, with lemon, sweetened with my own honey—I have hives out back,” Uncle Bob said, and then chuckled as she tried to push the book back with incoherent apologies at her prying. “Bring it over here, it’s all right,” he said, sweeping a convenient table clear of papers and books and depositing the tea tray on it.
“Have you read any of this stuff?” Sabrina asked, eyeing a couple of books that looked like they had just come out of the printer’s office. The spines were pristine, showing no signs of bending—no sign that the books had ever been opened.
“All of it, of course,” he said easily.
“But these...”
He chuckled. “I don’t have to open a book to have read it,” he said. “What is it that you have there?”
Sabrina looked down at the book she had just extracted from the bookshelf. It was bound in red morocco leather, with gold-leaf embossed writing—a glorious first edition of Milton’s poetry. “I was just looking for ‘my’ poem,” she said.
“Ah. Sabrina fair/ listen where thou art sitting/ under the glassy, cool, translucent wave/ in twisted braids of lilies knitting/ the loose train of thy amber-coloured hair?”
Sabrina looked up, startled. “You know it.” It did not occur to her to question how he knew her name, or how he knew precisely which poem she had been seeking. Not until much later.
“I told you I’d read all of those books,” he said, raising a bushy white eyebrow. “Why ‘your’ poem?”
It might have been a strange question—after all, he had just quoted the poem at her, without any prompting or any source of credible background information—but this was the sort of house which held as ordinary any one thing which might have been incredible somewhere else. “I was named for it,” Sabrina said without pausing to think about the question at all, tucking the beautiful book back into place, feeling her fingers regret its loss. “My mum was a delicate blonde, and I was very fair when I was born, and my dad took one look at me and started quoting Milton. There was no naming me anything else after that—but I’m afraid that it’s just one of those things in which I turned out to be a grievous disappointment to him.” She pulled forward a lock of her hair, a brown so dark as to be almost black, and surveyed it dismally.
“The eyes, though,” Uncle Bob said consolingly.
That was true, Sabrina’s eyes had stayed a startling shade of blue. Her colouring had always been strange, with those pale eyes, the dark hair, and the white skin of an ice princess.
“My mother,” she said, for no apparent reason, “died when I was seven.”
Uncle Bob nodded. “Yes,” he said. It seemed as though he had already been acquainted with this fact. “Tea?”
It had started to rain outside, quite heavily. Two cats, one of them waterlogged and bad-tempered with it, made their way into the living room and festooned themselves on available chairs. The damp one, black with one white paw and a ragged greyish patch over one eye, spat at Sabrina as she reached out a hand towards it, and she snatched her fingers back.
“Now, now, Dushka,” said Uncle Bob, and smiled at the cat.
Sabrina watched the cat bare its fangs at him, but the effect was rather like it was grinning back. The cats were as strange as their owner.
“So, what brings you out here?” Uncle Bob had asked conversationally.
Sabrina thought she should be offended, but she could hardly count the man in whose house she was sitting having a cup of tea as a complete stranger. In some ways, the tea had bought him a right to know.
But what to say? What was there to say? After seven years...
Seven years. Could it really have been that long ago? And barely a year ago Marco had been everything to her. Now...
“I split up with my partner,” she said abruptly, putting down her cup rather too emphatically—hard enough to slop tea over into the saucer, and for a wince and quick check to see if she had done damage to crockery. Uncle Bob said nothing, merely sat there and looked at her with an enigmatic smile. It was that, perversely, that made her carry on.
“He split up with me, actually...”
<<>>
She had turned twenty-one that summer, nearly eight years ago now. She had been young and vivid, and it had been her first year alone in London. Cornwall, the draughty old house in Cornwall where she’d grown up, where her mother had died, where her father now lived nursing a weak heart and pampering a new young wife—it was all far away, the whole width of the country, and many painful years ago. Sabrina was holding down two jobs—enduring menial typing work and endless filing for the privilege of working at a publisher’s plush offices during the week, and pulling pints at a tourist-trap, faux-Tudor pub in the West End over the weekends. The income from both jobs barely kept her solvent, but she was happy, happier than she believed she could ever be.
Until she came into the cheap little Italian place round the corner from her apartment, laughing with her friends, and heard her flatmate’s boyfriend say in his flat Australian accent, “Hey, Mark! Where you been? We haven’t seen much of ya around lately!”
And she’d looked up and met a pair of smiling dark eyes.
“Hey, Graham,” the young man whom Graham had hailed as Mark said easily, sitting sideways in the booth with his long legs out in the aisle, ankles crossed. “I was back in Kiwiland for a while. Family stuff.”
“Ya back now?” Graham asked redundantly.
“Yah,” Mark said, gathering his feet under him and making room in the booth. “Join me, why don’t you? I’ve only just ordered.”
“Sure,” Graham said, without asking anyone else, and sat down.
“Who are your friends, then?” asked Mark laconically.
“Oh, sorry, mate. This is my Cordy, my bit o’fluff.” Cordelia Molloy, RADA student and aspiring Shakespearean thespian, sniffed a little at the description, but melted at Mark’s smile. Graham did the rounds as everyone piled into the booth. “Will… and Emma… and Roy… and Cordy’s roommate, Sabrina.”
Sabrina had thought she was happy. Now, suddenly, she had found herself seriously wondering if she could ever be entirely happy again should the easy smile that was turned in her direction disappear from her life.
