The rainy season drew toward its close and often he woke to bright sunlight, but his thoughts remained gray and his routine stayed essentially the same. The child had grown half as big as an ox, ever beating its wings in an effort to fly. It required more food. After killing all the horses, Hota found it necessary to go into the hills and hunt wild boar, jumping from branches onto their backs, stabbing them or, failing that, breaking their necks. He felt debased by the brutality of their death struggles. The animal stench; the squeals; the hot blood gushing onto his hands—these things turned something inside him and he began to see himself as a primitive, an apelike creature inhabiting a ruin and pretending to be a man. At night he stumbled through the town carrying an open bottle, singing in an off-key baritone, howling at the night and serenading the tin-hatted wooden skulls, addressing himself by name, offering himself advice or just generally chatting himself up. He refused to believe this was a sign of deterioration. He knew what he was about. It was an indulgence and nothing more. A means of passing the hours. And yet it might be, he thought, the prelude to deterioration. He was not, however, prepared to give up the practice. The sound of his voice distracted him from thinking and frightened off the townspeople, whose incursions had become more frequent, though none would come near Liar’s House. Day and night they shouted threats from the hills, where many had taken refuge, and he would respond by singing to them and telling them what he had recently learned—that a man’s goals and preoccupations, perhaps his every thought, were the manufacture of a higher power. Whatever agonies they threatened had been promised him since birth.
His dreams acquired a fanciful quality that went contrary to the grain of his waking life, and he came to have a recurring dream that seemed the crystallization of all the rest. He imagined himself running across fields, through woods, tireless and unafraid, in a state of exaltation, running for the joy of it, and when he approached the crest of a hill overlooking a steep drop, instead of halting, he ran faster and faster, leaping from the crest and being borne aloft on a sweep of wind, flying in the zones of the sun, and then seeing Magali, joining her in flight, swooping and curving, together weaving an endless pattern above a mighty green hill, the one from which he had leapt, and the child, too, was flying, albeit lower and less elegantly, testing itself against the air. It must be Griaule’s dream, he thought. Though liberating, there was about it the cold touch of a sending. He recalled what Magali had said—that one day he would know how it felt to fly—and he wondered if the recurring dream was a reminder of that promise, or else the keeping of it. Set against all he had endured, it did not weigh out as a suitable reward. But suitable or not, he enjoyed the dream and sleep became the sole thing in his routine to which he looked forward.
One morning he woke lying in the street down from the inn. His joints stiff, eyelids crusted and stuck together, a foetid taste in his mouth. The brightness of the day pained him. Heat was beginning to cook from the abandoned town a reek compounded of rotting flesh and vegetable spoilage. His vision blurry, he looked toward the inn. Magali, crouched in her nest, emitted a scream. In reflex, Hota took a step toward the hills, thinking that she was demanding food. Then she screamed a second time. He stopped and rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on her. Clinging atop her back, between her wings, its diminutive talons hooked into her crest, was the child. Before Hota could put reason to work and understand what he was seeing, Magali unfurled her obsidian wings—each longer than her body—and beat them once, producing a violent cracking sound and a buffet of wind that knocked him off-balance and caused him to fall. She leaped to the edge of the nest and, using her grip on the shattered boards as a boost, vaulted into the air, paper debris from the street whirling up in her wake. Within seconds she was soaring high above and Hota, stupefied by the abruptness of her departure, felt as empty and abandoned as the town.
Magali disappeared behind Griaule’s back and Hota regained his feet. He stood a while with his hands at his sides, unable to summon a thought; then he walked over to the inn and clambered across the rubble to the inner nest. What he expected to find, he could not have said. Some token, perhaps. An accidental gift. A scale that had worked loose; a scrap from a green dress. But there were only wastes and bloody bones. The images on the boards had receded into the grain. No dragons were visible upon their surfaces, agitated or otherwise. The silence oppressed him. Irrational though it was, he missed Magali’s rumblings, her newborn’s trebly growls. Fool, he thought, and struck himself on the chest. To be mooning over a monstrosity, a twisted union that had been arranged by a still greater monstrosity. He picked up a fragment of board and slung it toward the looming green hill, as if his strength, inflamed by anger, could drive it like a missile through scale and flesh and guts to pierce the enormous heart. The plank splashed down into a puddle and he felt even more the fool. He crawled up out of the nest and went into the street and sat beneath the remaining corner post of the inn. If he stayed much longer, he thought, people would drift back into town and there would be trouble. It would be best to leave now. Forego searching for his money, his gems, and walk away. He would find work somewhere. The notion tugged at him, but it refused to take hold. He clasped his hands, hung his head, and waited for another impulse to strike.
And then, as suddenly as she had departed, Magali returned, swooping low above Liar’s House, the rush of her passage shattering the silence. She arrowed off over the hills behind the town, but returned again, swooping lower yet. Restored by the sight, Hota sprang to his feet. Watching her dive and loop, he soon recognized that she was repeating a pattern, that her flight was a signal, a ritual thing like the pattern she had flown above Griaule so many months ago. An acknowledgement. Or a farewell. Each time after passing above the street, a streaking of bronze scales, a shadowing of wings, she loosed a scream as she ascended. The guttural quality of her voice was inaudible at that distance, and her call had the sound of an eerie whistling music, three plaintive notes that might have been excerpted from a longer song whose melody played out closer to the sun. For an hour and more she flew above him. Like a scarf drawn through the sky. Entranced, he began to understand the meaning of the design her flight wove in the air. It was a knot, eloquent in its graceful twists, a sketch of the circumstance that had bound them. They had met, entwined into a minor theme that served the purpose of a larger music, one whose structure neither could discern, and now they would part. But only for a while. They would always be bound by that knot. All its loops led inward toward Liar’s House. He understood what she had told him on the day he went to gather the herb. He understood the congruence of inevitability and love, fate and desire, and, having accepted this, he was able to take joy in her freedom, to be confident that a like freedom would soon be his.