Free The Song of Andiene by Elisa Blaisdell

gray stone. Since her fingers and toes were small, they found notches and ledges where a man would have found none. Still, she did not dare look up or down. She lost all knowledge of time.
    What seemed hours later, she put both arms over the edge of the cliff and dragged herself up, lying quietly as her breath and heartbeat slowed, before she opened her eyes to look around her in wonder.
    She could see the bright ocean, and the cliff’s edge that overlooked it; the tableland stretched inland half a league, perhaps, and as far south as eye could see.
    The air had grown suddenly chill. Thin gray clouds hid the sun and sky, and as she watched, fog rose from the sea and hid the waves. She had found a cold gray world, like an island floating on the mist. No flowers bloomed in the gray-green meadow, not even sweet-snow which grows in all places. She was perhaps a few hundred paces from where the tufted grass met the forest’s edge.
    Andiene looked at that forest with dread. She had listened to the traveler’s tales told in the great hall, the stories of the ones who run in the forest. She knew of the red grievers that weep as though they bore all the sorrow of the world, and drink men’s blood. She knew of the simas, that wear the guise of a friend to lure travelers to a lonely death. She had heard the stories of the rissan, the waylayers, all the hunters and trappers of men.
    No wise one would enter a forest without a good reason, and a map, and the certainty that a safehold could be found before nightfall.
    And this that lay before her was a true forest. Andiene had seen trees in the city, small ones, friendly ones, lanara and spicewood that grow where people live. These trees were a different breed. Even to her untrained eyes, they bore the look of ancient days.
    She tilted her head up, and up. Surely the sky rested on their strong branches. If they measured their lives in years, they had been sturdy and tall before the Rejiseja, her people, entered the land.
    Now they were so huge that their hollow trunks would have served for houses. The trunks were gray, and the leaves were blue-gray, huge five-fingered leaves, like clumsy swollen hands. Great strands of pale moss hung from the branches like hair. Tendrils of mist rose up from the earth between their trunks. No man had ever given these trees a name.
    Andiene looked down at her hands, almost expecting to see them gray and bleached of color, but her skin was still brown, darkened from golden by the sun. Shivering in the cold, she wondered if she would ever see the sun again.
    In the meadow, there were fallen tree-trunks, as high as houses, not quite so long as a day’s journey. She gave them only a passing glance. There was a feeling of emptiness in her. The calling had come from this place, or from the forest beyond. She had expected to be challenged when she reached it, but there was nothing. Or almost nothing. There was a feeling of something, some purpose watching her. The wind was rising and beating the grass sideways, driving the fog inland. It seemed to whisper at her: “Look again, blindling, look again.”
    The tree trunk lying nearest her was gnarled and almost branchless, only a few twisted stubs remaining, its bark rough and scaly, overgrown with gray and green mosses. As she looked at it, she saw a certain strangeness, then two green slits widened and became eyes, eyes with great weariness, knowingness, cruelness.
    “Dragon,” she whispered in awe, as the tree-trunk’s shape became unmistakable; the huge body narrow compared to its length, the legs like stubs of branches, the furled ribbed wings like shattered branches, the gray moss covering the bark-like scales. The dragon’s jaws opened and white flames flickered out.
    He was not one of the red dragons of the south that guard their hoard of gold and jewels and dead men’s bones. They were mindless lizards compared to him. Though he seemed colder, the white-hot flame that burned in him would have turned