Changer’s Moon

18

Hern got to his feet, looked down at himself and grinned. “Better fetch me a blanket, love.” He patted the smooth curve of his belly. “If I were as slim and elegant as you, I wouldn’t bother. But there’s a bit too much Hern on view.”

Serroi laughed and went away. He watched her go, for that moment content with himself and the world. He hadn’t forgotten the war, but he was refusing to think about it. Like Serroi, he was taking a rest from the urgencies of the moment and the pressures of his responsibilities. Smiling, eyes half-closed, he listened to the soft scrape of her feet on the stone, heard the sounds fade. When these were gone, he moved cautiously across the ashy, pitted floor and looked out a windowslit, being careful not to touch the stone. He raised his brows at the fires leaping from the vuurvis barrels, at the black sprawl of the dead Nor. The raiders were still busy behind the army, Maiden bless them, and making their efforts count. He watched Nekaz Kole send messengers to stop the catapults along the wall, all but the two in the center that were pounding at the gate. His throat tightened as he remembered the burning and the pain and knew that even with Serroi at his side he couldn’t face that again. Mind or body, neither could endure that… that… he couldn’t find a word for the experience; pain, agony, torment, they were all inadequate for the totality he remembered. He frowned at Nekaz Kole. Bad luck for us you weren’t in your tent. He watched the catapults fling two more clay melons then crossed to the side slit that looked down on the gates, watching the skin of flame eating at them. Yael-mri had warned him about vuurvis, that the Shawar could slow its action but couldn’t quench it. At the rate it was consuming the wood, it’d burn through sometime before dawn. And once the gates were down, the army would come flooding over them.

“Hern?”

He turned. Serroi held out a thin gray blanket. As he wrapped it about himself, he scanned her anxiously, not liking what he saw. The eyespot pulsed through the curls that fell forward over her brow, its green turned almost black. Her flesh glowed, very faintly but visibly in the dim light that filled the blackened room. It seemed to him that if he looked too hard at her she would melt away altogether, dissipating like fog on a warming day. He tied two corners over his shoulder so the blanket hung in folds about his body. “How many did the vuurvis get?”

“Three to five dead at each place the catapults hit.” Seeing him almost trip over the dangling blanket, she handed him a short length of rope. “Better hitch up your skirts, Dom. I don’t know how many were burned and lived. Julia had a brainstorm, packed all of them into the rooms below. Apparently there was a lot of overflow while I was pulling you back, love, seems I sucked in power from everywhere and this tower was pulsing like a mothsprite in heat. Everyone she got here walked out again a while ago, they’re getting food now, which reminds me, my love, I’m hollow from head to toe.” Her strained cheerfulness melted suddenly. She came into his arms, leaned against him, trembling. “So much pain.” Her voice broke and she pressed her face into his shoulder, shaking as if with ague. “So much waste. Lives, time, materials. Gone. And for what? Nothing.” She was afraid, more than that, terrified, and he knew what frightened her and he too was afraid.

“No,” he said. His throat tensed; she was going back to Ser Noris. “No.” He wanted to say more but he couldn’t-no words, no voice, no way to fight against the necessity that gripped both of them. He held her until her shuddering eased.

Serroi sighed. “The waste won’t stop until he’s stopped.”

“How?” It was a challenge, a demand that she justify throwing her life away, He was angry and afraid and wanted her to know it.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking the hair off her brow. “I only know I have to face him and let what comes come.”

“Serroi, I need you.”

“I know. I wish…” She didn’t finish.

He could feel her withdrawing from him though she didn’t move away. “Serroi…”

“You didn’t have to come back here, Dom.”

He started to say it wasn’t the same, but in the end only shook his head, then held her without words until the noises from outside grew so intrusive they could no longer ignore them. He let her go and hitched the blanket up, tied the rope about his middle. Serroi patted the charred rags of her robe into a semblance of order, held out her hand. “Well, come on.”

They saw the glass dragons as soon as they stepped from the emptied tower. Hern put his arm about her and together they watched the dragonsong, working as one mind for a short time as they had on the plateau, sharing that remembered beauty, that remembered closeness.

Then one of the dragons separated from the others, flushed with waves of green and gold, and came curling down to land near the tower, huge and wonderful and more than a little frightening. Hern felt shock ripple through Serroi, echoing his shock of recognition and denial. She pulled away from him and began walking toward the dragon.

No, he thought, not so soon. How can you go so easily, how can you go without a word.

As if she'd heard that, she turned. He waited.

She looked at him a moment but said nothing, then walked on. When she reached the dragon, she put her hand on the cool flesh, flinched as it collapsed into something like steps, turned once more to face him. “You’d hate idleness, Dom,” she said, her voice not quite steady. “Keep busy and live long.”

He wanted to say something, but the only words that came to him were the empty banalities of idle chat. She smiled, that sudden joyous urchin’s grin that had enchanted him from the moment he first saw it, though she wasn’t smiling for him then. She climbed up to settle herself in the saddle the dragon shaped for her. Waves of iridescence shimmered along the serpentine body then the dragon drifted upward and began undulating toward the stone face rising a thousand feet above the wall.