The Assassin King

7

The wyrm paused at the bitter river, silver with glacial ice, that separated the southeastern edge of her lands from the northern tip of Roland. Her body was trembling from exhaustion and the cold that clung to the Hintervold long into spring. She had fought to drag herself this far, had battled the wind, the loss of blood, and the confusion that continually took her mind whenever she tried to concentrate for more than a few moments on anything other than the woman she wanted to kill. It seemed to her, poised on the brink of the flowing glacial melt, that she was losing the battle. The river, for all its rushing rapids, was shallow, the dragon knew. The inner sense that she had been gifted with from birth had allowed her the same ability to assess the world around her in intimate detail that all wyrms possessed, even when she had been in human form, though she did not remember that time. Apparent to her in minute specificity was the temperature of the rumbling water—a hairsbreadth above that of solid ice—the speed at which it was traveling—two and a quarter times as fast as an unsaddled stallion could run—the number of fingerling cetrinfish that slept in the mud of the riverbed— seven hundred thirty-six thousand four hundred eighty-eight—and myriad other pieces of information about the height of the clouds above her, the degree of snowmelt on the riverbank, its width, the trees that surrounded it, all the elements of life that were taking place around her. The number of facts to process was clouding her mind. The dragon struggled to clear it, focusing all her attention on the river. The form she had been trapped in, seemingly for the rest of her life, was a cold-blooded one, and so exposure to a great degree of cold might serve to slow her heart to the point of death, she knew. Conversely, the hated thing that was expanding within her, tearing her flesh, causing her agony, was growing from the heat that her body generated, the firegems within her stomach that allowed her to vent her anger in caustic flame were feeding the steel, allowing it to grow. Anwyn quickly calculated that the river’s chill might make it stop, though she knew that the three-chambered heart that beat within her serpentine chest might choose to follow suit. She decided she had no choice but to take the plunge. Steeling herself as she had against the pain of her wound, the beast slowly slid into the frigid waters. Her gnarled feet slipped almost immediately against the slimy rocks at the bottom of the riverbed, causing her bleeding chest to slap the crest of the rapids. The wyrm gasped from the shock, struggling to keep from falling, face first, into the river and being swept away by it. There was something both old and young in the translucent water, the knowledge that it was simultaneously forty thousand years and forty minutes old at the same time, having been glacial ice less than an hour before. In spite of the pain and cold, the beast liked the sense of Past that raced along with the current, like time slipping over her the way water runs down a hole in the ground, returning to where it belongs. I will live, she thought angrily to herself. No matter how much they seek to destroy me, I will always prevail, because my hatred is stronger. The wyrm came to a stop midstream; the water was barely up to the joints in her legs. Once she adjusted to the temperature, she found that the dissolved solids speeding along around her gave her a sense of strength, a tie to the Past, a prehistoric time that only she could see. Even without the spyglass it was coming into focus, a land, far off, of dry desert sands and healing springs, of rocks for basking beneath the moon and temples that lay buried in two millennia of clay beneath the skittering wind. Kurimah Milani, she thought. It was a place lost to the desert long before her birth, a land that had been beyond Elynsynos’s dominion, and thereby she knew almost nothing of it, save for its reputation as a place of almost divine healing that had been swallowed in sand and howling wind five hundred years before her father had set foot on the soil of the Wyrmlands. A place of the past, truly, she mused, struggling for purchase, finally abandoning the struggle and allowing her feet to sink into the muddy earth below the riverbed. As I am a thing of the Past, perhaps it will welcome me. The dragon, her feet anchored in the frozen silt of the riverbed, slowly began to make her way east, fighting the current each step of the way.