CHAPTER 28

Latitude 63° 26’ 00” N

Longitude 130° 19’ 53” W

Altitude 4325 ft.

Cassie peeked over the edge. Fall?

On the mountainside, the rocks looked like rows of serrated knives. Automatically, her hands cradled her stomach. She’d already tumbled down a cliff once. “It’s not a vertical drop,” Cassie protested. “I’d roll down the mountain, not fall through the air. It won’t work.”

“I can fix that,” the dragon said. He shifted his weight. Beneath her ledge, the mountain crumbled. Avalanche! She clung to the dragon’s claw and screamed. The grinding stopped. Irritably, he said, “Please don’t scream.”

She inched to the edge and peered over. Wind whipped her hair against her cheek. Below her, the slope was gone. The mountain went straight down for a quarter mile. Cassie scrambled back against his claw. Her heart pounded fast. She was aware of how thin her skin felt and how breakable her bones were.

What’s wrong with me? she asked herself. Only a few months ago, she had dived into the Arctic Ocean. How was this any different? Looking over the edge again, she swallowed hard. The dragon’s tail, a string of granite, curled in the air. It was different. She wrapped her arms tighter around her stomach. Everything was different.

How far would she go for Bear? Where was the limit? Was there a limit? She wasn’t risking just herself anymore.

The baby kicked against her hands, and she felt her skin roll like an ocean wave. “Are you up for this?” she asked her stomach. Another kick. It felt as if the baby were urging her onward. Cassie smiled. How far would she go to give her baby its daddy? East of the sun and west of the moon, of course. “C’mon, kiddo,” she said. “Let’s go find your daddy.”

Cassie placed her toes on the lip of the ledge and looked out across the boreal forest. Wind whipped her hair so that it slapped her cheeks and forehead. She brushed it back. Her baby wouldn’t grow up like she had, missing a parent she’d never known. “Can you call the wind munaqsri?” she asked the dragon.

“You truly intend to do this?” For once, he did not sound condescending. He sounded curious. “What possible reason could you have for hurling your soft, tiny body from me?”

She had a hundred reasons: because Bear had carved a statue of her in the center of the topiary garden, because she could always make him laugh, because he’d let her return to the station, because he won at chess and lost at hockey, because he ran as fast as he could to polar bear births, because he had seal breath even as a human, because his hands were soft, because he was her Bear. “Because I want my husband back,” Cassie said. And, she added silently, because my baby deserves to know him.

“Please call the winds.”

“Very well,” he said.

And then the dragon roared to the sky. Wind whipped faster and faster around the mountain. Dust and rocks tumbled down the slope. Cassie shielded her face.

“Now!” the dragon cried.

Holding her stomach, Cassie jumped. Sound tore from her throat. “Grandfather! North Wind!” She plummeted down, spiraling through the sky. The green and gold swath of forest rushed toward her. “Wind munaqsri!” Air rushed past her as loud as a scream.

Suddenly, wind slammed into her from two directions. Squeezed, Cassie spurted up in the air. She arched over the dragon’s mountain and spun like a stray leaf, tossed by wind. Snowcapped mountains spiraled below her. Oh, she was going to vomit. “North Wind!” she cried.

“Poor child. She doesn’t know her north from her south.” A voice swirled around her, sweeping under her and beside her. It seemed to be coming from everywhere.

Streaks of cloud whipped past her. One of Gail’s uncles? “South Wind?” Cassie called.

“Let her fall.” A second voice rushed past Cassie’s ears. “She is nothing to us.”

Suddenly, she sank. She tried to scramble, to grab anything solid. Clouds slipped through her fingers as cool mist on her skin. “I’m your niece! I’m Gail’s daughter!” Below her, the Yukon River wound like a blue ribbon through the mountains—so tiny, so far down. “Please don’t drop me!” A gust rolled her, and she screamed as she tumbled through the air. Wind rushed past her ears as loud as her own scream.

“We must keep her, East,” the first voice—the South Wind—said.

Wind swept under her, and she was tossed up, up, up. “You can’t keep me!” she shouted. “You have to help me!”

“We cannot keep her,” the East Wind said, echoing her. “It was not right before; it is not right now.” The air began to blacken. Rain splattered on Cassie’s arm.

“But I want her!” the South Wind wailed like wind on the sea.

Cassie heard a crackle and saw a spark of white light jump from cloud to cloud. If they didn’t stop, she could be electrocuted. “Please!” Cassie shouted. “Uncles!”

“See!” the South Wind said. “Listen to her. She’s already family!”

“Yes, yes, I’m family! Gail’s daughter!” Cassie cried into the rising storm. “Stop it! Don’t storm! Please, stop!”

Instantly, the gray dispersed, and the breeze calmed to a whistle. “Did we hurt you?” the South Wind asked. “We don’t wish to hurt you. Your mother was our favorite child. We adored her.”

“She was a mistake,” the East Wind said.

Cassie bristled. “Excuse me?”

The South Wind said soothingly, “It’s an old argument. My brother did not approve of North’s adopting your mother.”

The East Wind growled like a rumble of thunder. “It was kidnapping.”

“Adoption,” the South Wind said.

“Kidnapping.”

In a reasonable tone, the South Wind said, “If Abigail did not love us, she would not have sent her daughter to live with us.”

Twisting in the air, Cassie tried to see the source of the voices. “I’m not here to live with you! I’m here to ask you to take me east of the sun and west of the moon!”

The air shuddered around her. “Oh, no, kitten. You cannot go there,” the South Wind said. “It is not a nice place. Not a nice place at all.”

“Not for living things,” the East Wind agreed.

“Besides,” the South Wind added, “it is too far. Much too far for us.” He sounded pleased. Streaks of cloud zipped past Cassie like silver minnows in a river.

“But you’re wind,” Cassie said. “Wind goes everywhere.”

“It’s beyond the ends of the world,” the East Wind said, and the sky darkened as he spoke. Deep gray stained the white clouds and spread.

Cassie felt a fat drop of rain hit her cheek. “The world is round. It doesn’t have ends,” she said. “Besides, Grandfather made it there. Can you take me to him?”

“Oh, kitten, you do not want to see him.”

“He has a temper,” the East Wind explained.

“Once, he was so angry he scattered us into hundreds of pieces all across the globe.” The air trembled. “It took us weeks to reassemble.”

He scattered his own brothers? She shivered. And these were the creatures that her mother had grown up with, that Gail had called family. “Just take me to him.”

“Absolutely not,” the South Wind said firmly. “He’ll tear you to bits.”

Cassie opened her mouth to argue, and her stomach squeezed. She clutched her stomach. Her baby! Not yet! She was so close to Bear! “For Gail’s sake, take me to him!”

“But…”

Her stomach loosened, and she sucked in air. “Please! If you cared about Gail at all, take me to the North Wind!”

In answer, wind rushed around her. Her skirt whipped and twisted around her legs. As she went spinning through clouds, she cradled her stomach.

“You may want to close your eyes,” the South Wind said to Cassie. “Some find this… distressing to their worldview.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Cassie said. “I married a talking bear.”

Enveloping her in empty air, the winds swept over the forest. She felt her stomach contract again as the two winds sandwiched her. She spun through the air like a pinwheel.