The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

Even thinking this, she could not move her feet to walk on into this new life. Her heart weighed like a stone.

A low tone rumbled through the span beneath her feet. Words thrummed up into her flesh, not quite spoken, not quite heard.

“What is it you seek, sister?”

“I wanted to see the mountains,” she whispered.

“And you will, if you wish it.”

“Must I stop here?” she asked.

“This is not the end of the journey. Just a way station as you gather strength.”

“Can I not travel on right now?”

The dragon’s laughter was a rumble like the earth shaking. “Very well.”

A sonorous sound rang in the air, its complicated resonance vibrating in her flesh as if the dragon itself were a bell giving warning. The women at the end of the span shepherded the new arrivals away from the edge. Asvi’s companions were guided toward the village down a wide avenue lined by double-branched dragon horns twice the height of the tallest of the women. They called to her, but she did not answer.

The dragon spilled life back into its stony span. Its tail unhooked from the far shore. Its head lifted toward the sky. Asvi felt herself trapped deep in the hot, sulfuric gullet, airless, suffocating. Just as her life had been before.

Then the dragon turned itself inside out, or outside in, and abruptly Asvi found herself braced on the back of its mighty neck as it flew east toward the mountains. She grasped for the whiplike ends of its horns to hold herself steady. The wind stung her face, and her hands hurt from gripping so hard, and yet exhilaration thrilled through her heart.

They passed over the town. Its neat brick buildings were laced with star-crown vines. Gardens blazed with summer blossoms and ripening vegetables. A central plaza ringed a fountain in the shape of a dragon’s skull pouring water from its orifices. People waved without alarm, as if they saw dragons fly close overhead every day and welcomed their presence. In the watchtower, women stood guard as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for women to do. If only Danis were here to see it. But of course Danis would never be forced out onto the long walk, would she? She was protected; she was safe, if living that life could be called safety.

A white stone path led eastward. Soon it split into three paths, each of which led to another village, and then three more each after that, splitting again like the delta fan of a river spreading wide. These villages were smaller clusters of houses, work sheds, and gardens set around a central plaza. Each was ringed by fences built of giant bones—​dragon bones—​and moats filled with what looked like heaps of glittering crystal sand gleaming hotly under the sun. A draft rose from the mounds, thick with a drowsy scent of glorious summer solitude amid the rocky pastures of her youth. One of the mounds looked recently dug out. Its pit was streaked with the remains of a slick, torn membrane withering to dryness under the sun.

As they cleared the last of the villages, they flew onward, eastward, upward, over the tufted grass and stunted woodland of the plateau. Gnarled juniper was overtaken by scrub thorn-gast tangling in elongated veins across the land. Grass gave way to spiny, fernlike plants and blooms whose petals undulated in the wind like tongues licking the air.

A ripple of movement caught her eye. The dragon shifted course until they flew over a group of eight hunters running as in pursuit of prey.

Hunters! How had hunters crossed the chasm?

Farther ahead, an unseen creature thrashed a trail through the tall grass, accompanied by puffs of glimmering mist that she recognized as the exhalation of a demon. When she looked back, amazed at the boldness of the hunters, she realized they were women, armed with spears, bows, courage, and resolve. Where had these women come from? They were manifestly not the weary, discarded widows and servants sent on the long walk. They were hale and strong, fleet of foot and tireless. Delicate two-pronged horns not much more than a finger’s height grew out of their temples. Their skin, as dark as Asvi’s own, had an uncanny sheen, as if they did not precisely have skin as she did but something more like soft scales.

When they looked up, they hailed the dragon with a whistling keen that dug into her flesh and throbbed in her bones as if it were meant to cut her open.

“Who are they?” she asked, even as the rumbling of the wind swallowed her words.

“Our sisters,” said the dragon, and kept flying, leaving the hunters behind.

Up they rose, as the peaks slashed into the sky ahead, growing larger, impassable. Asvi became dizzy, gulping in thin air, shivering as the temperature dropped until she felt packed in ice. But the dragon’s heat rose to keep her heart warm and her courage kindled.

They flew along avalanche-strewn slopes, across blinding ice fields, and past the peaks with their jagged teeth. Beyond lay a rugged plateau cut into pinnacles and canyons and flat-topped mountains. This massive upland ended in a stark escarpment, like the edge of the world. Spinning its way down on a thread of bronze light, the dragon came to rest on a flat prominence of bare rock where the mountain massif came to its abrupt end. With a turning, inside out or outside in, the dragon curled in on itself, shrinking into a denser shape.