Dragon Wing

44

Iridal stood at the casement, gazing out the crystal window. The beauty of the sight before her was incomparable. The opal walls of her castle glistened in the sunlight, adding to the shimmering colors of the magical dome that was the High Realm’s sky. Below the walls, the castle’s parks and forests, carefully sculptured and tended, were traversed by pathways whose crushed marble was pricked by glittering gems. Its beauty could stop the heart. But it was long since Iridal had seen beauty in anything. Her name itself, meaning “of the rainbow,” mocked her. All in her world was gray. As for her heart, it seemed to have stopped beating a long time ago.

“Wife.” The voice came from behind her.

Iridal shivered. She had supposed she was alone in her room. She had not heard the silent padding of slippered feet or the rustling of silken robes that invariably announced the presence of her husband. He had not entered her room for many years and she felt the chill of his presence grip her heart and squeeze it tightly. Fearfully she turned around and faced him.

“What do you want?” Her hand clutched her gown tightly around her, as if the frail fabric might armor her against him. “Why do you come here to my private quarters?”

Sinistrad glanced at the bed with its flowing curtains and tasseled hangings, its silken sheets, smelling faintly of the lavender leaves scattered on them every morning and carefully brushed away each night.

“Since when is a husband forbidden his wife’s bedchamber?”

“Leave me alone!” The chill in her heart seemed to have spread to her lips. She could barely move them.

“Do not worry, wife. For ten cycles I have not come here for the purpose you fear, and I do not intend to resume. Such doings are as repugnant to me as they are you; we might as well all be beasts, rutting in dark and stinking caves. However, it does bring me around to the subject I came to discuss. Our son is coming at last.”

“Our son!” Iridal cried. “Your son. He is none of mine!”

“Let us rejoice,” said Sinistrad with a pale, dry smile. “I am glad you take this view of the matter, my dear. I trust you will remember it when the boy arrives and that you will not interfere with our work.”

“What could I possibly do?”

“Bitterness does not become you, wife. Remember, I know your tricks. Tears, pouting, little hugs for the child that you think I will not see. I warn you, Iridal, I will see. My eyes are everywhere, even in the back of my head. The boy is mine. You have pronounced it. Never forget it.”

“Tears! Don’t fear my tears, husband. They dried up long ago.”

“Fear? I’m not afraid of anything, least of all you, wife,” returned Sinistrad with some amusement. “But you could be an annoyance, confuse the boy’s mind. I don’t have time to fool with you.”

“Why not just lock me up in the dungeon? I am already your prisoner in all but name.”

“I had considered it, but the boy would take an undue interest in a mother he is forbidden to see. No, it will be far better if you appear and smile prettily at him, allow him to see that you are weak and spineless.”

“You want me to teach him to despise me.”

Sinistrad shrugged. “I do not aspire to that much, my dear. It will be far better for my plans if he thinks nothing of you at all. And, by good fortune, we have something that will ensure your proper behavior. Hostages. Three humans and a Geg are his traveling companions. How important it must make you feel, Iridal, to know that you hold so many lives in your hands!” The woman’s face went livid. Her knees gave way, and she sank into a chair.

“You have sunk low, Sinistrad, but you have never committed murder! I don’t believe your threat!”

“Let us rephrase that statement, wife. You have never known me to commit murder. But then, let us both admit that you have never known me—period. Good day to you, wife. I will give you notice when you are to appear to greet our son.”

Bowing, hand over his heart in the time-honored custom of husband and wife, turning even this gesture to one of disdain and mockery, Sinistrad left Iridal’s chambers.

Shivering uncontrollably, the woman crouched in her chair and stared out the window with dry, burning eyes. . . .

“. . . My father says you are an evil man.”

The girl, Iridal, gazed out of a window in her father’s dwelling. Standing quite near her, almost touching her, but never coming that close, was a young mysteriarch. He was the handsome, wicked hero of Iridal’s nurse’s romantic tales—smooth, pallid skin; liquid brown eyes that always seemed to be the repository of fascinating secrets; a smile that promised to share these secrets, if someone could only draw close enough to him. The black, gilt-edged skullcap that marked his standing as a master of discipline of the Seventh House—the highest rank attainable by wizards—dipped to a sharp point that came to the bridge of his thin nose. Sweeping upward between the eyes, the cap gave him an appearance of wisdom and added expression to his face that might otherwise be lacking—he had no eyebrows or eyelashes. His entire body was hairless, a defect of birth.

“Your father is right, Iridal,” said Sinistrad softly. Reaching out his hand, he toyed with a strand of her hair, the nearest move to intimacy he ever made.

“I am evil. I do not deny it.” There was a touch of melancholy in his voice that melted Iridal’s heart as his touch melted her flesh.

Turning to face him, she held out her hands, clasped his, and smiled at him.

“No, beloved! The world may call you that, but it is because they don’t know you! Not as I know you.”

“But I am, Iridal.” His voice was gentle and in earnest. “I tell you the truth now because I don’t want you to reproach me with it later. Marry me, and you marry darkness.”

His finger wound the strand of hair tighter and tighter, drawing her nearer and nearer. His words and the serious tone in which he spoke them made her heart falter painfully, but the pain was sweet and exciting. The darkness that hung over him—dark rumors, dark words spoken about him among the community of mysteriarchs—was exciting too. Her life, all its sixteen years, had been dull and prosaic. Living with a father who doted on her following her mother’s death, Iridal had been raised by a grandmotherly nanny. Her father could not bear life’s rough winds to blow too harshly against his daughter’s tender cheek and he had kept her sheltered and cloistered, wrapped in a smothering cocoon of love.

The butterfly that emerged from that cocoon was bright and shining; its feeble wings carried it straight into Sinistrad’s web.

“If you are evil,” she said, twining her hands around his arm, “it is the world that has made you so, by refusing to listen to your plans and thwarting your genius at every turn. When I am walking by your side, I will bring you to the sunlight.”

“Then you will be my wife? You will go against your father’s wishes?”

“I am of age. I can make my own choice. And, beloved, I choose you.” Sinistrad said nothing, but, smiling his secret-promising smile, he kissed the strand of hair wound tightly around his finger. . . .

. . . Iridal lay in her bed, weak from the travails of birth. Her nurse had finished bathing the tiny infant and, wrapping him in a blanket, carried him to his mother. The occasion should have been one of joy, but the old nurse, who had been Iridal’s own, wept when she laid the child in his mother’s arms. The door to the bedchamber opened. Iridal made a low moaning sound and clutched the baby so tightly he squalled. The nurse, looking up, smoothed back the woman’s sweat-damp curls with gentle hands. A look of defiance hardened the wrinkled face.

“Leave us,” said Sinistrad, speaking to the nurse, his gaze fixed upon his wife.

“I will not leave my lamb!”

The eyes of the mysteriarch shifted. The nurse held her ground, though the hand touching Iridal’s fair hair trembled. Grabbing hold of the nurse’s fingers, Iridal kissed them and bade her leave in a low and tremulous voice.

“I cannot, child!” The nurse began to weep. “It’s cruel, what he means to do! Cruel and unnatural!”

“Get out,” Sinistrad snarled, “or I will burn you to ashes where you stand!” The nurse cast him a look of malice, but she withdrew from the room. She knew who would suffer if she did not.

“Now that this is over, she must go, wife,” said Sinistrad, coming to stand beside the bed. “I will not be defied in my own house.”

“Please, no, husband. She is the only company I have.” Iridal’s arms clung to her baby. She looked up at her husband pleadingly, one hand plucking at the blanket. “And I will need her help with our son! See!” She drew the blanket aside, exhibiting a red, wrinkled face, eyes squinched shut, small fists bunched lightly together. “Isn’t he beautiful, husband?” She hoped desperately, despairingly, that a glimpse of his own flesh and blood would change his mind.

“He suits my purpose,” said Sinistrad, reaching out his hands.

“No!” Iridal shrank away from him. “Not my child! Please, don’t!”

“I told you my intentions the day you announced your pregnancy. I told you then that I had married you for this purpose and this alone, that I had bedded you for the same reason, and no other. Give me the child!” Iridal huddled over her baby, her head bowed, her long hair covering the boy in a shining curtain. She refused to look at her husband, as if looking at him gave him power. By shutting her eyes to him, she might make him vanish. But it didn’t work, because with her eyes closed, she saw him as he had been that terrible day when her bright illusions of love were completely and irrevocably shattered. The day she had told him her joyous news, that she carried his child within her. That day he had told her, in cold and passionless tones, what he intended to do with the babe.

Iridal should have known he was plotting something. She did know, but wouldn’t admit it. On her bridal night, her life had changed from rainbow dreams to gray emptiness. His love-making was without love, without passion. He was brisk, businesslike, keeping his eyes open, staring at her intently, willing her to something that she could not understand. Night after night he came to her. During the day, he rarely saw her, rarely spoke to her. She grew to dread the night visits and had once ventured to refuse him, begging that he treat her with love. He had taken her that night with violence and pain and she had never dared refuse him again. Perhaps that very night their child had been conceived. A month later she knew she was pregnant.

From the day she told him, Sinistrad never came to her bedroom again. The child in her arms wailed. Strong hands grabbed Iridal by the hair and jerked her head back. Strong hands wrenched her child from her grasp. Pleading, the mother crawled from her bed and stumbled after her husband as he walked away, their crying infant in his arms. But she was too weak. Tangled in the bloodstained bedclothes, Iridal fell to the floor. One hand caught hold of his robes, dragging him back.

“My baby! Don’t take my baby!”

He regarded her coldly, with disgust. “I told you the day I asked you to be my wife what I was. I have never lied to you. You chose not to believe me, and that is your own fault. You have brought this upon yourself.” Reaching down, he grasped the fabric of his robe and jerked it from her feeble, clutching fingers. Turning, he left the room.

When he came back later that night, he brought another baby—the true child born to the wretched king and queen of Volkaran and Uylandia. Sinistrad handed it to Iridal as one might hand over a puppy found abandoned on the road.

“I want my son!” she cried. “Not the child of some other poor woman!”

“Do what you like with it, then,” said Sinistrad. His plan had worked well. He was almost in a good humor. “Suckle it. Drown it. I don’t care.” Iridal took pity on the tiny baby and, hoping that the love she lavished on it would be reciprocated on her child so far away, she nursed him tenderly. But the infant could not adapt to the rarefied atmosphere. He died within days, and something within Iridal died too.

Going to Sinistrad a month later in his laboratory, she told him calmly and quietly that she was leaving, returning to the house of her father. In reality, her plan was to go to the Mid Realm and take back her child.

“No, my dear, I think not,” replied Sinistrad without looking up from the text he was perusing. “My marriage to you lifted the dark cloud from me. The others trust me now. If our plans to escape this realm are to succeed, I’ll need the help of all in our community. They must do my will without question. I cannot afford the scandal of a separation from you.”

He looked up at her then, and she saw that he knew her plans, he knew the secrets of her heart.

“You can’t stop me!” Iridal cried. “The mysteries I weave are powerful, for I am skilled in magic, as skilled as you, husband, who have devoted your life to your overweening ambition. I will proclaim your evil to the world! They will not follow you, but rise up and destroy you!”

“You’re right, my dear. I cannot stop you. But perhaps you’d like to discuss this with your father.”

Keeping a finger on his place in the book, Sinistrad raised his head and made a gesture with his hand. A box of ebony drifted up from the table on which it stood, floated through the air, and came to rest near the wizard’s book. Opening it with one hand, he lifted out a silver locket hanging from a rope of black velvet. He held out the locket to Iridal.

“What is it?” She stared at it suspiciously.

“A gift, my dear. From loving husband to loving wife.” His smile was a knife, twisting in her heart. “Open it.”

Iridal took the locket with fingers so numb and cold she nearly dropped it. Inside was a portrait of her father.

“Take care that you do not drop it or break it,” said Sinistrad casually, returning to his reading.

Iridal saw, in horror, that the portrait was staring back at her, its trapped, living eyes pitying, helpless. . . .

Sounds outside the window roused Iridal from her melancholy reverie. Rising weakly and unsteadily from the chair, she stared out the casement. Sinistrad’s dragon was floating through the clouds, its tail cutting the mist to wispy shreds that trailed away and vanished—like dreams, thought Iridal. The quicksilver dragon had come at Sinistrad’s command and now circled round and round the castle, awaiting its master. The beast was huge, with shining silver skin, a sinuous thin body, and flaring red eyes. It had no wings, but could fly faster without them than could its winged cousins of the Mid Realm. Nervous and unpredictable, the most intelligent of their kind, these quicksilver dragons, as they were known, could be controlled only by the most powerful wizards. Even then, the dragon knew it was enthralled and constantly fought a mental battle with the spell-caster, forcing the magus who enchanted it to be continually on his guard. Iridal watched it out the window. The dragon was always moving—one moment twisting itself into a gigantic coil, rearing its head higher than the tallest castle tower; the next, unwinding itself with lightning speed to wrap its long body around the castle’s mist-shrouded base. Once Iridal had feared the quicksilver. If it slipped its magical leash, it would kill them all. Now she no longer cared. Sinistrad appeared, and Iridal involuntarily drew back away from the window so that he would not see her if he happened to glance up. He did not look up at her chamber, however, being far more concerned with more important matters. The elven ship had been sighted; the ship carrying his son. He and the others in the Council must meet to make final plans and preparations. This was why he was taking the dragon.

As a mysteriarch of the Seventh House, Sinistrad could have transported himself mentally to the guildhall, dissolving his body and reforming it when the mind arrived at its destination. That had been his means of entry into the Mid Realm. Such a feat was taxing, however, and really impressive only if someone was there to see the wizard materialize, supposedly, out of thin air. Elves were much more likely to be terrified by the sight of a gigantic dragon than by the refined and delicate techniques of mental spell-casting. Sinistrad mounted the quicksilver, which he had named Gorgon, and it soared into the air and out of Metal’s sight. Her husband had not once looked back. Why should he? He had no fear that she would escape him. Not anymore. There were no guards posted round the castle. There were no servants posted to watch her and report her doings to their master. He had no need of any, could any have been found. Iridal was her own guard, locked up by her shame, held captive by her terror.

Her hand clasped round the locket. The portrait inside was alive no longer. Her father had died some years ago. His soul trapped by Sinistrad, the body had withered away. But whenever Iridal looked at the image of her father’s face, she could still see the pity in his eyes.

The castle was silent, empty, nearly as silent and empty as her heart. She must dress, she told herself drearily, taking off the nightclothes that she wore almost all the time now; the only escape she had was in sleep. Turning from the window, she saw herself in a mirror opposite. Twenty-six cycles—she looked as if she had lived a hundred. Her hair, that had once been the color of strawberries dipped in golden honey, was now white as the clouds drifting past her window. Lifting a brush, she began to listlessly make some attempt to untangle the matted tresses.

Her son was coming. She must make a good impression. Otherwise, Sinistrad would be displeased.