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.
Even after she had gone, flown beyond the hills, he watched the sky, hoping she would reappear. Yet there was no bitterness or regret in his heart. Though he did not know how it would happen, he believed she would always return to him. They would never be as he might have hoped them to be, but the connection between them was unbreakable. He would go inland, toward Point Horizon, and somewhere he would find a suitable home, a sinecure, and he would await the day of her return. No, he would do more than wait. For the first time in memory, he felt the sap of ambition rising in him. He would soar in his own way. He would not allow himself to settle for mere survival and drudgery.
His mind afire with half-formed plans, with possibility of every sort, Hota turned from the inn, preparing to take a first step along his new road, and saw a group of men approaching along the street. Several dozen men. Filthy and bearded from their exile in the hills. Clad in rags and carrying clubs and knives. A second group, equally proportioned, was approaching from the opposite end of the street. He ducked around the corner of the inn, onto a side street, only to be confronted by a third group. And a fourth group moved toward him from the other end of that street.
They had him boxed.
Hota was frightened, yet fear was not pre-eminent in him. He still brimmed with confidence, with the certainty that the best of life lay ahead, and refused to surrender to panic. The third group, he judged, was the smallest of the four. He drew his boar-killing knife and ran directly at them, hoping to unnerve them with this tactic. The center of the group, toward which he aimed, fell back a step, and, seeing this, Hota let out a hoarse cry and ran harder, slashing the air with his knife. Seconds later, he was among them. Their bearded, hollow-cheeked faces aghast, they clutched at him, tried to stab him, but his momentum was so great, he burst through their ranks without injury, and ran past the last shanties into the palms and bananas and palmettos that fringed the outskirts. Jubilant in the exercise of strength, he zig-zagged through the trees, knocking fronds aside, stumbling now and again over a depression or a bump, yet keeping a good pace, liking the feel of his sweat, his exertions. His muscles felt tireless, as in his recurring dream, and he wondered if the dream had foreshadowed this moment and he would climb the green hill of Griaule’s back—he was, he realized, heading in that very direction—and leap from it and fly. But though strong, Hota was not fleet. Soon he heard men running beside and ahead of him. Heard their shouts. And as he passed a large banana tree with tattered yellow fronds, someone lying hidden in the grass reached out a hand and snagged his ankle, sending him sprawling. His knife flew from his hand. He scrambled to his knees, searching for it. Spotted it in the grass a dozen feet away. Before he could retrieve it, someone jumped onto his back, driving him face first into the ground. And before he could deal with whoever it was, other men piled onto him, pressing the air from his lungs, beating him with fists and sticks. A blow to his temple stunned him. They smelled like beasts, grunted like beasts, like the spirits of the boars he had killed come for their vengeance.