Free The First Collier by Kathryn Lasky Page B

off in flight. I leaned closer to the fire. Was that wing black? Was it brown with spots? There was too much blood to tell, and then the images began to dissolve. They simply melted away. I blinked once, twice. I was often exhausted after seeking visions in the flames of a fire, but I had never before felt so weakened. I knew that I must return to the other hollow. My duty was to the egg, guarding it and nurturing the chick who would break from it. I must put Siv out of my mind. It tore at my gizzard to think of her dead, murdered by those hagsfiends, but it was the life within the egg that counted now. Siv trusted me. Whether she was dead or alive, that trust must never be broken. But I knew that those feathers drenched in blood would haunt my dreams forthe rest of my life. My one great love, Siv of the Hrath’ghar, was gone.
    It would be a long time before I dared build another Telling Fire. My concentration had to be on the egg. And it was. I plucked down from my breast feathers every day. I burrowed in the snow for old leaves that had dropped from the trees, then dried them and tucked them into the nest. I poked at rotting logs to find where the plumpest grubs might be for the chick’s first food after it had hatched.
    The forest itself had a different kind of silence from the rest of the N’yrthghar. There was not the groan of grinding ice, but the trees creaked in the wind. There were many land creatures but none of air. And that was fine with me. It was a strangely peaceful place, and I felt far away from the wars and the hagsfiends, away from the chaos and the blood—except the blood that haunted my dreams, the blood of Siv. But I had sworn not to build a fire and look into those telling flames, at least until the chick had hatched.
    Of course, I could not resist. I made another fire. But again I made the mistake of hunting for visions ratherthan letting them come to me. The odd thing was that I did see something in those flames that possibly could have been coming toward this lonely tree-clad island in the Bitter Sea, but I paid it no heed. It appeared to me as a small smudge in the most unstable region of the flame. You must understand that when I was in the Beyond, and Fengo and I were experimenting with fire, we isolated four distinct regions within a flame. Fengo, of course, could not read the flames as I could and he was only interested in them for their utilitarian value—how we could coax metal from rock, or change sand into glossen. But I found that the clearest images always came to me from what we called the pale fire region, which is usually at the vortex of the flame.
    I knew it was useless searching the flames for Siv. Her image would appear when it did. But at least building this fire revived my interest in my previous study of flames and the various effects of fire on different materials. I especially wanted to explore the possibilities of using fire and ice in some combination to improve our weapons. Could, for example, the edge of an ice scimitar made with issen blaue be honed to a new sharpness by exposing it to that peculiar region in the flame that Fengo and I called the “yellow curved plane”?
    These activities would help pass the time until thehatching of the chick. The egg did not have to be sat upon constantly. I had found enough moss in this beautiful forest to tuck in and around the schneddenfyrr and make it all warm and cozy. And this brings me to a point that I have never thought of before: Caring for an egg was no easy task. When my siblings were eggs and then hatchlings, my parents spelled each other in the nest. One would hunt while the other sat on the egg or tended the new chicks. Sitting on an egg constantly is about as boring as watching ice melt. And then, of course, after it hatches, nothing is boring. Those little beaks always wide open, begging for food, squeaking away, whining, crying. At least I would only have one to tend and, prince or not, I knew he would be