Dreamfisher Read Free

wanted the dragon to give them or give back to them. She sweated with fear but she had to do it, because she, the girl who said “looks like,” was the only one who could. She went in…
    “Water eyes,” she murmured. “The dragon had water eyes.”
    “Go back to sleep,” said a man’s gruff voice. “It was just a dream.” As usual, she did not understand.
    Odd. It was night, and she lay by a campfire, that was all, wrapped in something warm. Sleepy…
    Her mother wept, her mother was a greatness the size of the mountain, her mother’s tears ran down over crags like snowmelt falling in cataracts ever greater until tears filled the world like water in the palm of a god’s hand. In the face of the water—no, it was her mother’s face, eyes red from weeping, eyes like bunchberries. They were big red berries awash in tears. The girl flew, she could fly in water, she had winged hands, she flew to the surface and gulped her mother’s red berry eyes. They filled her and made her content.
    She woke up. The hero old man crouched over the fire, feeding twigs to the embers. The sky glowed all fire colors. It was morning.
    * * *
    “Because I am evil,” the girl explained.
    Sitting beside her on the lowest crag overlooking muchwater, the old man eyed her with his shaggy white eyebrows raised. “They gave you those bruises because you are evil?”
    “Yes.”
    “And in what way, pray tell, are you evil?”
    “I—there are wrong things in me.”
    “Such as?” As he questioned her, the hero pulled out of his pack a stick around which was wrapped the thinnest sinew the girl had ever seen.
    “There are oddnesses in my mind and they leap from my mouth. I say wrong things. I said the sun was like a cake.”
    “Well, so it is, sometimes.” He flipped a rock, plucked a grub from under it, and skewered it upon a feathered device at the end of the sinew.
    “I said the man they wanted me to mate was like a turd.”
    The hero laughed and unwound sinew from his stick.
    “I said he was a turd. That was evil.”
    “It was rude, perhaps, but true?” The hero tossed the grub-feather thing to settle on the top of the muchwater. Like a serpent made of cloud wisp the sinew followed. “What is your name, little one?”
    To name a thing meant to say what it was—an enormity. But perhaps a god was allowed to ask. The girl pointed at the deep-tree-sky-gleaming wonderwater.
    “Your name is Pool? Lake? Tarn?”
    Instead of answering—if she could have answered—the girl gasped, for the selfwater roiled and she saw the dark-moon eyes, the maw, the moongleam jaws seizing. The old man shouted and yanked his end of the sinew, pulling the shining mystery clear out of the water.
    With a scream the girl leaped up, standing rigid. It flapped like a wing, but it was not a wing. It shone like running water, but it was not water. It writhed like a serpent—
    “It’s just a fish!” the hero yelled at her. “Big one! Dinner!”
    He hauled it in. On the rock it thrashed wildly, and behind its eyes, red slits opened like wounds. It suffered from being brought out of the wonderwater, the girl saw. But the hero quickly put an end to its suffering with a stone. It lay still.
    “I have never seen such huge trout as are in this tarn,” he said.
    The girl took two cautious steps forward and crouched by the dead—thought?
    “Fish?” she whispered.
    “Yes. Trout. Big one.”
    With one tentative finger she touched its gleaming flank, all the colors of a wet dawn.
    “Do not touch the fins. Or the gills. They’re sharp.”
    Fins? Gills? She pulled her finger away.
    The old man said, “It’s a pity when they flop so. The one you caught didn’t struggle. Not at all.”
    Her mind thrashed like the hooked trout, then leaped free and flew. She whispered, “You gave me a—a one like this to eat?”
    “Yes. Why?”
    “Because—because it is a thing from out of my mind.”
    For once he was the one who did not understand. He raised his