Elegy for a Lost Star

17

Achmed’s suspicious nature was an entrenched part of the culture he had established in Ylorc, and occasionally it made for unusual protocols that would be unrecognizable in most courts on the continent. His leavetaking was generally a closely guarded secret; whenever the king vacated the mountain, it was done not with the pomp and ceremony favored by many monarchs, but under cover of darkness, with as little folderol as possible, to minimize the number of people who even knew he was gone. The only instance that caused a deviation from this custom was when it suited Achmed’s purposes for his known enemies, as well as his unknown ones, to be aware that he was away.

The Sergeant-Major participated in the charade willingly, knowing that it served to quiet Achmed’s raging paranoia to a small degree. He did not waste his time or breath explaining to the Bolg king that every beating heart within Achmed’s kingdom was more than aware when he left, primarily because they could feel the tension break palpably. Within a few hours of Achmed’s departure, virtually every one of his subjects that lived in the tunnels of the mountains before the Blasted Heath had felt his absence, and had breathed a little easier because of it.

Achmed himself was beginning to pick up the threads of this paradox—that the only thing his subjects feared more than his absence was his presence—and it served to make him even more irritable, even more anxious. Secretly he was looking forward to seeing Rhapsody for reasons other than the ones he had stated to Grunthor. Her natural music, the vibration she emitted into the air around her, was the one sensation he had found in his lifetime that soothed the angry nerves and exposed veins in his skin, that quieted the natural prickliness of his odd physiology. For all that his journey was one of self-interest and holding people to their promises, he was almost eager to get under way so that for a short time he might find a little bit of physical peace while extracting favors owed him.

So it was with more than a little annoyance that he found himself delayed in his own throne room, a satchel in one hand, the glass calipers in the other, by the arrival of Kubila, the Archon of Trade and Diplomacy, who nervously hovered at the entranceway to the Great Hall, awaiting permission to come in.

“What is it?” the king said crossly, gesturing for the young man to enter.

The Archon cleared his throat. “There is an ambassador here to see you, sire.”

“An ambassador?” Achmed demanded incredulously. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Yes, sire,” Kubila replied uncomfortably. He, like the other Archons, was not in particular fear of the king; Achmed treated them with enough respect to prevent that. But he was also aware of the import hovering in the air, and it chilled him.

“Idiot,” the king muttered, switching the satchel to his other hand. “Send him away.”

The Bolg diplomat cleared his throat again. “Sire, this man has come from very far off. It might be wise to entertain his request; he claims he needs but a moment of your time.”

“I don’t care if he sailed from the Lost Island of Serendair,” Achmed retorted. He inclined his head toward the door behind the throne; Grunthor nodded and started for it.

“Sire, this ambassador is from the Nain,” Kubila stuttered.

The sound went out of the vast room. Achmed froze in his tracks, then turned slowly to eye the trembling Archon. He inhaled deeply, and exhaled deliberately. Then he handed the satchel to Grunthor.

“I will meet you there,” he said, giving him the glass calipers. The Sergeant nodded.

Achmed waited until the giant had left the room, then turned to Kubila.

“Send him in,” he said curtly.

Kubila nodded, then returned to the main doorway. He pulled open one of the two enormous doors that had been carved and gilt with pure gold in Gwylliam’s time, then stepped out of the way.

A moment later a man strode into the room. He was broad of neck and shoulder, with a chest shaped like a wine barrel and strong, sturdy legs. His height was less than Achmed’s own by half a head, but his bearing was straight and proud enough to give the illusion that he was as tall as the king. His beard, which hung to the center of his chest, was brown at the chin, silver in the middle, and white at the curling tips. His skin was tawny with a sallow undertone, the sign of a life lived within the mountains away from the sun, yet exposed to the intense heat of forge fire. As he entered the room Achmed saw the light of the wall torches catch his face, causing the blue-yellow tapetum at the back of the man’s eyes to glow in the dim hall like those of a feral animal.

“Well met, sire.” The man saluted Achmed briskly. “I am Garson ben Sardonyx, sent as an emissary of His Majesty, Faedryth, Lord of the Distant Mountains.”

“I know who you are,” Achmed said snidely. “I suffered your presence, and that of many of your kind, during my investiture, and later at the Cymrian Council four years ago. Your contingent consumed ten times the victuals and spirits as all the other delegations combined, and left an unholy mess that has only recently been scoured clean. What do you want?”

The veneer of politeness vanished in a twinkling from the Nain’s eyes. He reached unconsciously for the end of his beard and angrily smoothed it into place.

“I can see you are in a pleasant mood, as always, Your Majesty,” he said testily. “As am I. Receiving a visit at midnight in Ylorc can only be slightly less foul than having to make one. I needed to catch you before you left for the winter carnival in Navarne, to which I know you have been invited. I will be brief; I have come with a direct message from His Majesty, King Faedryth.”

“And what is it?” demanded Achmed impatiently.

The Nain ambassador’s gaze met the Bolg king’s and did not waver.

“He knows that you are attempting to reconstruct the Lightforge,” he said, his voice heavy with import. “He bids me to tell you that you must not.”

For a full score of heartbeats the Bolg king and the Nain ambassador locked eyes in silence. Then the mismatched pair belonging to Achmed narrowed behind his veils.

“You traveled all the way from your lands to dare to instruct me in such a manner? You’re a brave man with too much time on his hands.”

Garson did not blink. “My king commanded it.”

“Well, I am puzzled, then,” said Achmed, sitting down on the chair of ancient marble scored with channels of blue and gold giltwork. “I know of no Lightforge. And yet Faedryth has risked my ire, which as you know is considerable, by sending you to barge into my rooms in the middle of the night to issue me an order regarding it? Even I, who places less stock in diplomacy and matters of etiquette than anyone I know, find that offensive.”

“Perhaps you do not call it by the same name,” said Garson evenly, ignoring the king’s objections. “But I suspect you know to what I refer. The Lightforge is an instrumentality that the Nain built for Lord Gwylliam the Visionary eleven centuries ago, a machine formed of metal and colored glass embedded into a mountain peak, which manipulated light to various ends. It was destroyed in the Great War, as it should have been, because it tapped power that was unstable, unpredictable. It poses a great threat not only to your allies and enemies, but to your own kingdom as well. You are attempting to rebuild something you do not fully understand; your foolishness will lead to your destruction, and very possibly that of those around you. You have already seen the effects of this. The tainted glass from your first attempt still litters the countryside. This is folly of unspeakable rashness. King Faedryth commands that you cease at once, for the good of the Alliance, and for your own as well.”

The Bolg king’s hands went to his lips, where they folded in a contemplative gesture. He stared at the Nain diplomat, who remained rooted to his spot on the polished marble of the Great Hall floor. Then a crooked smile crossed the lower half of his hidden face, visible in his eyes.

“And how precisely do you know of all this?” he asked casually. “Your hidden kingdom is so distant that it cannot be reached even by extended mail caravans; the Nain are all but invisible in the sight of the world. If the ocean separated us we could not be more isolated from one another; how is it that you are so aware of my undertakings?”

“King Faedryth makes it his business to monitor events that could have a disastrous impact on the world, sire,” Garson said haughtily. “Information finds its way to him when it is important that it do so.”

Achmed’s amusement dissipated, and he rose from his seat slowly, deliberately, like a snake preparing to strike.

“Liar,” he said contemptuously. “The Nain turned their backs on the world four centuries ago; you have no interest in the day-to-day goings-on of the world outside your own, and no means of hearing of them, even if you did have the interest. And yet here you are, telling me the details of the most secret of my projects, at the command of a king who believes he has the domain to tell me what to do about it?”

He walked down the aisle and stood directly in front of the Nain ambassador, looking down into his smoldering eyes.

“You have one yourself,” Achmed said levelly. “You have built your own instrumentality, and you make use of its scrying ability to spy on my lands. It’s the only way you could have known.”

Garson glared at him in stony silence.

Achmed turned his back on the ambassador and returned to his seat. “Get out of my kingdom at once,” he ordered, gesturing to Kubila, who had remained in a shadow at the back of the Great Hall. “Return to your king and tell him this from me: I once had respect for him and the way he conducts his reign; he has as low an opinion of the Cymrians as I do, and is a reticent member of the Alliance, just as I am. He keeps to himself within his mountains, as do I. But if he continues to spy into my lands, or send emissaries who tell me what to do, when my own version of your so-called Lightforge is operational, I will be testing out its offensive capabilities on distant targets. I will leave it to you to guess which ones.”

“I doubt very much that you wish me to convey that message to Faedryth,” said the ambassador.

“Doubt it not, Garson. Now leave.”

Achmed waited until the Nain diplomat had stalked out of the Great Hall, then turned to Kubila.

“Have Krinsel waiting here for me when I return.”

Grunthor was putting the calipers back in their leather case when Achmed appeared at the summit of the mound of gravel and ash that served as the final barrier in the Earthchild’s sepulcher.

The giant said nothing as the Bolg king approached, but Achmed could see, even at a distance, the quiet despair in his eyes. When he finally reached the catafalque on which the Child lay, he could see the shadowy outline of where she had lain the last time they had been in this dark place, her body smaller within it.

“The withering continues,” he said aloud. He spoke the words just to give voice to them; before that they were hanging painfully in the air, heavy above his head.

Grunthor merely nodded and laced the caliper case shut.

Achmed brushed his gloved hand delicately over the Earthchild’s hair, parched golden brown now as the dry wheat chaff on the steppes beyond the mountains. Then he followed Grunthor back up the passageway to the Cauldron again.

Krinsel was waiting in the Great Hall, as he had commanded. She appeared slightly haggard, her dusky face grim but expressionless, having passed most of the night on her feet at attention, awaiting his return. In her hands she bore the list of casualties, the victims of the Sickness that still lingered in their torment, their conditions detailed in notes carefully documented by the midwives and their aides who had been tending to them.

“Any new deaths?” Achmed asked as he came to a halt before her.

The head midwife shook her head.

The Bolg king nodded. “I believe we’ve come to the end of the main wave of casualties,” he said, nodding his readiness to leave to Grunthor. “Those that survived the picric exposure and are still alive will probably make it. Gurgus has been scoured of all traces of it, as have the hillsides on which the dust from the explosion fell. All that is left now is to try and make those who are recovering comfortable, and to attempt to return to normal as quickly as possible. Do you agree?” The midwife nodded again. “Good. Then I will be on my way. I will be traveling a route parallel to the guarded caravan, so if you need to reach me, have Trug send out a hawk.”

“Tell ’Er Ladyship Oi said hullo,” Grunthor said dryly as Achmed made his way to the doorway that would lead him through the exit tunnels of the Cauldron, out through the breastworks and onto the open steppes beyond. “An’ don’t forget my sugared almonds. If we’re gonna put the kingdom at risk, we might as well ’ave somethin’ nice to eat. On second thought, bring back any Lirin ya might see at the carnival. Especially the dark-’aired variety; they ’ave the best flavor.”

“I’ll be back in a fortnight,” the Bolg king said. “And when I return, nothing had better have exploded, imploded, or shattered—unless it’s the head of that ambassador from the Nain.”

Traveling through the earth was a mixed blessing, the dragon found.

There was a power around her now that had been missing in the frozen wasteland of her lair, a warmth and vibrancy she could feel in the strata of the crust of the world. The earth welcomed her, though it was a somewhat cold welcome still. The return of her name had brought back only fragments of memories; still lost were the ones that tied her to the element from which her mother’s line had sprung.

Below the ground, the song that had echoed her call was harder to hear, muffled, though still ringing somewhere in the distance. The dragon was never completely certain of its bearings, and in her singlemindedness she often found herself doubling back, confused by the echo of it. Her mind, once as brilliantly honed as a gleaming blade, was still thick, confused easily, and frequently she found, to her dismay bordering on rage, that she had circled back, or lost the path, or taken a route through the darkness that had misdirected her.

Still, the wail in the distance remained, guiding her southward, returning her to the path when she lost her way.

It may take time to get there, she thought after one particularly disappointing diversion. But when I do, what I find will be worth it.

The bloodlust within her heart burned brighter in the darkness of the earth.

18

At midnight that night Talquist pounded on Lasarys’s door.

It took the sexton of Terreanfor a few minutes to answer, hurrying to the door of the manse set in a rocky grotto outside Night Mountain, halfdressed, opening it in between outbreaks of violent knocking. As soon as the latch was lifted and the door open a crack, the Emperor Presumptive pushed his way inside.

“My—m’lord,” Lasarys gasped, clutching at his nightshirt, the candle in his elderly hand trembling so that wax dripped onto his forearm, “what—what’s wrong?”

“Is it done?” Talquist demanded, shutting the manse door quickly. “The soldier—is it felled?”

The sexton hung his head and sighed. “Yes,” he said dispiritedly. “And wrapped in linen soaked in holy water. But it has not been transported to the altar yet.”

“Good—belay that and bring it instead to the square of Jierna’sid.”

“Now?” The sexton looked horrified.

“Yes, now. Summon your acolytes; wake them.”

“They—they are exhausted, m’lord. It was a very emotional and difficult day.”

The Emperor Presumptive’s face hardened in the candlelight. “It will be a difficult night as well, but then they can rest. Go get them, Lasarys.”

“Yes, m’lord.” The sexton disappeared into the darkness of the manse.

It took every acolyte in the temple’s monastery to drag the dray sled containing the giant statue of Living Stone to the square in front of the palace of Jierna Tal.

Talquist had ordered his guard, the mountain regiment dedicated to protecting Jierna Tal, and thereby the emperor, to ring the pathway between Night Mountain and the square where the Scales stood, to keep the peasantry away. They had maintained the evening’s peace with little difficulty; no one lived in the square around the Scales except the occupant of the palace, and so it was possible to have a large wagon pull into the square in the middle of the night without notice.

Lasarys, who had been silent and pale throughout the journey, watched in trepidation as the acolytes slowly unloaded the wagon, carefully bearing the wrapped figure between a score of them by bracing it with heavy timbers and carrying them, two men to a beam, slowly up the steps to the weighing platform on which the Scales stood. As the priests placed the huge statue onto the easternmost of the two weighing plates he finally turned to Talquist, anguish in his voice.

“What are you doing, m’lord?” he whispered desperately. “Please tell me that this desecration has some meaning, some higher reason. I feel as if I have perpetuated an atrocity for which the Earth Mother will never forgive me.”

Talquist turned and watched the suffering priest with eyes that a moment before had been shining with excitement, now dimmed into the soft light of compassion.

“Lasarys, take heart. What we do here is not destruction, or desecration—it’s a rebirth.” He patted the sexton’s arm comfortingly. “Do you remember, all those years ago when I was your acolyte, how you would tell me the tales of the formation of Terreanfor? How it was believed that the ancient peoples planted seeds of the flowers and leaves from the trees, and that the Living Stone, still alive and full of the power of creation, grew those glorious statues that still grace the basilica? That the animals and birds were carved in the same way, by the earth itself, from some piece of those selfsame animals?” Lasarys nodded distantly. “Then, Lasarys, if that be the case, where do you think those statues of soldiers came from?”

The sexton blanched. “I—I have no idea,” he stammered.

“Is it possible, Lasarys, that they are, in fact, buried heroes from early days, interred in the warmth of the living earth, grown into statues to honor them as great warriors?”

“Yes, it is possible, m’lord, but whatever—whatever is given into the Earth Mother’s arms should be left there,” said Lasarys haltingly. “It is folly to try and take it back, to raise the dead. It is against nature.”

Talquist’s brows drew together in displeasure. “I am not trying to raise the dead, Lasarys,” he said sharply, watching the acolytes remove the beams from beneath the statue, now lying on the weighing plate. “I am merely trying to tap life that is unused—to transfer it, so to speak.” He nodded benevolently to the acolytes who were wiping their brows and who had signaled that their task was complete. “Well done, gentlemen. Thank you.” He turned to the captain of his guards and spoke loudly enough for the acolytes to hear him.

“Take these holy men into the palace, where a repast has been prepared for them. After they’ve supped, lead them to the wagons, return them to their beds at the monastery, and withdraw, that they might rest themselves after such a difficult task—all but two.” The weary acolytes bowed and followed the captain of the guard into the palace.

Talquist gestured to the soldiers as the two priests, Dominicus and Lester, came to Lasarys’s side and stood, exchanging questioning glances but otherwise still.

“Bring out the creature’s tank,” the regent ordered.

Slowly a dray cart was wheeled out from the royal stables, wrapped in canvas. The priests continued to watch as the tank was unwrapped, then shattered. From the detritus a creature was lifted, pale and sickly in shape, its flesh hanging limply from bones that appeared to be little more than cartilage.

“Sweet All-God, what is that?” Dominicus whispered to Lasarys, but the sexton silenced him by raising a hand.

The creature in the soldiers’ grasp hissed and flailed weakly, but was no match for the men in armor. They bore their struggling burden up the steps to the Scales and deposited it into the empty western weighing plate, then stretched its curved arms out and weighed them down with bags of sand. Finally, when it stopped struggling, the soldiers withdrew as well, leaving Lasarys, the two acolytes, and Talquist alone in the square, their footsteps echoing away into the emptiness. A moment later they could hear the distant clattering of cartwheels, as the wagon bearing the acolytes made its way from the cobbled streets of the city to the hillside monastery next to the sexton’s manse where they lived.

Silence returned to the streets of Jierna’sid.

The regent of Sorbold slowly mounted the steps to the ancient instrumentality, the Place of Weight, where the golden pans had weighed decisions of life and death, war and peace, the survival of nations, and the overthrow of despots for millennia, in this land and the one before it, now sleeping beneath the sea on the other side of the world.

“Lasarys,” he said softly, “unwrap the statue.”

The sexton remained frozen for a moment, then reluctantly nodded to the two acolytes. Together the three holy men gently removed the wet linen wrappings while Talquist continued to gaze at the Scales as if in a trance.

Beneath its linen coverings the statue was still warm from the heartbeat of the Earth in the Living Stone, its smooth clay flesh pulsing with a static hum. The extreme edges of it, where the shoes were carved, the rough-hewn sword in its right hand, and the tips of the mail gauntlet on its empty left hand had begun to harden into lifeless clay, but otherwise it was still damp, still multicolored clay formed into a tall man with irisless eyes, staring blindly up into the night sky, its heavy features expressionless.

Once the statue was laid bare, Talquist moved silently in front of the priests to gaze down at the enormous piece of Living Stone. He ran his hand over the massive shoulders gently, almost lovingly, his face transfixed in an excitement that bordered on holy ecstasy.

“Imagine, Lasarys,” he whispered, “imagine all that can be done here. I have been planning this since before my ascension—the first time I saw those soldiers, I knew they held the power of an entire army in each one of them! I am the keeper of the scale of the New Beginning—don’t you understand, Lasarys, these things are meant to work together! This is the key to all of the plans I have been crafting since I discovered the power of the violet scale. If the Scales can take the life essence of a useless freak, a barely alive piece of flesh, and put it into this stone soldier? If it can stand watch, alive, over my palace, unmoving but animate, it would be a wonderful guard, a fearsome deterrent to any who might try to enter in malice. And if it can move—if only it can move! It might be the perfect weapon, a stone neolith functioning completely under my command, perhaps able to understand the same primitive commands as the being whose life was sacrificed to animate it? Imagine then an army of them—every statue of Terreanfor harvested and brought to life? Not just the twenty or so in the cathedral, but the hundreds, perhaps thousands down in the City of the Dead in the crypt below? Just imagine—”

“This is heresy, m’lord,” Lasarys whispered in return. “I pray you, you do not know what you are doing. The properties of Living Stone are all but unknown to us. It is a gift of the Creator, a primordial element, a rare treasure—”

“Get out of the way, Lasarys,” Talquist said impatiently, shoving the sexton aside and crossing to the other plate where the pale, limp form of the freak he had purchased that evening was outstretched.

“Good evening, Faron,” he said pleasantly, watching the recognition come into the creature’s eyes. “Can you understand me?”

The fish-boy’s heavily veined eyelids closed over its milky eyeballs, as if it were squinting, but it did not otherwise respond.

As I thought, Talquist noted. Only animal-level intelligence. Like a dog, it can respond to its name, perhaps simple commands. Good.

He examined the heavy layers of skin that made wrinkled folds around the creature’s stomach. Tucked within them were three tips of hard, multicolored material, dried with blood from the creature.

“This must be painful,” he said soothingly to the freak on the plate in front of him, gently running a finger over the top of the skinfold. “Allow me to hold on to them for you.”

He carefully lifted the flap of skin and slid out the first tip; as he expected, it was a scale much like his own, the same gray hue but with a flash of yellow as it slid forth from the creature’s belly. Faron moaned in agony, but Talquist was not deterred; he continued to remove both of the other scales, all part of the same original set, ignoring the trembling of the creature from which they had come. He held them up to the light of the torches in the square.

The tattered ovals were of the same multihued gray that his prized scale was, scored with tiny, geometric patterns like the hide of a reptile. When they caught the firelight they gleamed prismatically, as if all the colors of the spectrum were contained within them, yet each had a dominant hue; one yellow, one red, and one a dark blue the color of indigo blossoms. Each bore a crude etching on it, runes in a language, like his own scale, that he could not read.

Years before he had translated the writing on the violet scale by finding a key to the language, the tongue of the Ancient Seren race, in the dusty museum of Haguefort, the ancestral home of Stephen Navarne, the Cymrian historian. He had also found a sketch of his own scale. It was in an old relic, the fragment of a tome entitled The Book of All Human Knowledge that had been rescued from the sea. Most of the book had been destroyed by the salt water, but in the few pages that remained intact, he had read of a deck of cards owned by a Seren seer named Sharra, and had come to believe that his scale was part of the deck. It was said that, in the hands of someone possessed of Firstborn blood, blood of a race that had descended from one of the primordial elements, the scales had power, power to see things the eye could not see, to heal wounds that could not otherwise be healed, to bring about change that otherwise would never happen.

Power unimaginable.

This is the deck, he thought, his hands sweating in excitement. These scales must be part of Sharra’s deck.

The creature in the plate hissed at him angrily.

“Where did you get these, Faron?” Talquist asked, almost to himself. He reached into the folds of his robe and drew forth the violet scale, then held it up with the others to the flickering light.

The milky eyes of the creature widened.

All the scales matched.

Talquist’s hands grew warm. At first he was unaware of the sensation, believing it was merely the result of his excitement, perspiration, and the ferocious beating of his heart. A moment later he realized that the scales themselves were generating the heat, as if together they were unlocking some distant cache of heat, of fire.

They recognize each other.

“Lasarys,” Talquist said softly, “give me your ceremonial dagger.”

“M’lord—”

The regent’s hand shot out with finality, its palm open.

Lasarys sighed, drew forth his dagger made of polished obsidian, and placed it regretfully in Talquist’s hand.

“You may leave now,” the emperor presumptive said, finality in his voice. “Go sup, and return to the monastery with your fellow clerics. You have served me well.”

Lasarys and the acolytes exchanged a glance, then hurried away from the Place of Weight. Dominicus and Lester started for the door where the other acolytes had been led, but Lasarys raised a hand and silently stopped them. He glanced back over his shoulder and, seeing that they were unobserved, led them to a sheltered spot near the palace wall where they could continue to watch the atrocity unfold.

The regent placed the three scales atop the creature’s belly, returning his own to the folds of his garment. He took the knife and held it up before his eyes, then lowered it to Faron’s heart.

In the shadows, the acolytes and the sexton stood, transfixed in horror, as Talquist carefully scored the freak’s skin with the sharp stone blade, then dipped it into the line of black blood. He walked back to the plate where the stone soldier lay and stood above it, knife in hand. Then he deposited black drops, one by one, onto the plate of the Scales, ignoring the whimpers of pain issuing forth from the grotesque mouth of the creature in the other plate.

Each drop fell with a ringing sound.

In the darkness, the Scale plates began to gleam, the chains that hung from the arm of the instrumentality taking on their light.

Slowly, the plate with the heavy stone statue began to rise, balancing against the plate with the helpless creature.

Through their tears, the Earth priests watched, their faces pale and gray with the sweat of revulsion, as the Living Stone soldier and the twisted body of the creature began to shine with a painful radiance. The light grew brighter, more intense with each passing second, until the radiance became too agonizing to bear. Lasarys, Lester, and Dominicus shielded their eyes, just as the misshapen form on the one plate burst into dark flames, black fire that stank with rancid fumes, and withered to ash.

The Scales balanced.

Then the eastern plate thudded to the ground. The western plate rocketed aloft at the change in weight, the cinders that had once been the body of the creature exploding into the air with the sudden blast of force, then catching the night breeze and wafting away.

The light vanished, plunging the square of Jierna’sid into lantern-lit darkness again.

At first there was no sign of life at all.

Talquist stood, rooted to the spot at the foot of the Scales, his eyes darting from the immobile statue in the eastern plate to the empty western plate, now devoid even of ash.

Then, after a moment, the giant soldier let out an enormous shudder and exhalation of breath.

The vibrant striations of color deepened as the statue took its first gulp of air, the multicolored strand of purple and vermilion, green and rust took on the gleam of life and breath.

The eyes, without irises to break the stone-colored sclera, blinked.

“Praise be the Earth Mother,” whispered Talquist.

The statue’s limbs flexed awkwardly. Slowly the arm without the sword moved; the soldier raised its empty hand up before its rough-hewn face. The fingers curled inward, then stretched arthritically.

“Rise,” Talquist commanded.

The statue turned its head in the regent’s direction.

“I said rise,” Talquist repeated, his tone harsher. A thought occurred to him, and though he felt foolish doing so, he spoke the name of the creature whose life had been sacrificed to animate the statue. “Faron.”

The soldier’s head jerked in Talquist’s direction.

The regent exhaled in disappointment. Not having any true understanding of the power of the Scales as regarded Living Stone, he had hoped that the blood sacrifice of the creature would form the living incarnation of whatever ancient warrior of the indigenous people of the old continent had been buried in the Living Stone of Terreanfor. Instead it appeared that the entity was actually the embodiment of the freak itself he had purchased from the Monstrosity, mindless as a fish. But his dismay fled quickly upon seeing the statue flex its arms again. Next time I will be certain to sacrifice a human with a good and capable mind, he thought, still pleased with the sight of the ten-foot soldier, formed of clay, breathing and moving on its own.

The statue rolled suddenly to one side and fell heavily out of the weighing plate, thudding loudly on the boards of the stand on which the Scales stood. It curled up at first like a baby in the womb, scratching the hand that held the rough sword against the wooden boards, as if trying to rub it off.

Talquist started to step forward but stopped quickly as the enormous soldier brought its right hand violently on the Scale platform, slapping the sword repeatedly against the planks. It scratched at the stone weapon with an urgency that made panic start to rise in Talquist’s throat.

“No, Faron, that’s a sword. It’s all right—do not try to disarm yourself—”

In response, the giant figure began to peel the sword from its left hand with the other.

“Faron—”

With a brutal wrench, the statue tore the stone sword from its hand and heaved it across the platform at Talquist. The regent dodged out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed by it. Then slowly the Living Stone soldier pushed itself awkwardly to its knees.

Talquist watched with mounting concern as the giant struggled to stand, as if believing its limbs were flexible, soft. It remembers its old form, he thought as the statue dragged itself to its feet. It reached down to the ground around it and hurriedly and clumsily gathered its scales, dropping them several times in the process.

“Faron, I command you, stop!” Talquist shouted.

The living statue stared for a moment, its irisless eyes fixed on the scales in its hands. Then it lurched forward, awkwardly locomoting toward the steps of the platform, clutching the three scales.

Talquist raised his own hands for Faron to stop, then, seeing that the moving titan was thundering toward him without any sign of halting, dove out of the way just in time to avoid being trod beneath its feet. The titan stumbled down the stairs and out into the cobbled streets of the square of Jierna’sid, where it fell heavily to the ground. Again it curled, as if unsure of its legs, then slowly, deliberately rose, casting an enormous shadow in the faint light of the torches.

“Faron!” Talquist called again, but weakly; having seen the stone musculature flex, his voice was strangled by the rictus of fear.

The thud of boots could be heard coming up one of the feeder streets to the square.

A squad of four soldiers approached, running, shouting to each other. They stopped dead in the shadow of the towering statue.

“No!” Talquist shouted, but Faron had already begun to move, lurching down the feeder street toward the guards. “Get out of the way!” he screamed.

Two of the soldiers obeyed blindly, dashing toward the palace walls. Another hesitated a moment, then threw himself behind a cart for cover. The fourth was frozen to the spot; he raised his halberd in defense, the polearm shaking.

The titan of Living Stone slammed him into the palace wall as if he were no more than a pile of rags. A sickening crack resounded through the streets as his body hit the wall, the reverberation of bones shattering.

The animated statue did not pause; it gained speed along with its footing, quick strides blending into a running gait. It hurried down the streets toward the battlements, melting into the darkness, heading for the open ledges of sandy mountain crags that ringed the city of Jierna’sid.

Numb, Talquist rose to a stand and stared into the shadows, trying to find some sign of the titan, but seeing nothing but night and torches that had burned down to the stalk-joints. He continued gazing into the distance until the leader of the squad knelt before him, the two surviving soldiers behind him, bearing the shattered corpse of the fourth.

“M’lord?”

“Yes?” Talquist answered distantly.

“What was that?”

“A bad idea,” the emperor presumptive murmured, running the toe of his boot along the edge of the great earthen sword that had been ripped from the statue’s hand. The clay rim cracked and tumbled like sand onto the stones of the street.

He continued to watch the empty street. “And a terrible waste. A harvest of living earth that is about to crumble to dust, unused.” Finally he turned, as if shaking off sleep, and looked down at the body at his feet.

“You,” he said to the two soldiers who carried their dead compatriot, “take him to the monastery at Terreanfor. Leave him on the steps.” He looked directly at the leader. “Are all the holy men back in the monastery and the manse?”

“Yes, m’lord.”

“Good. Once you have left the body, return to the barracks. The acolytes will attend to his burial. Speak to no one of what you saw, on pain of execution. Tell the others as well. If word returns to me on this matter, I will know from whence it came.”

“Yes, m’lord.” The soldier bowed and hurried to catch up to the other two.

As soon as the soldiers were out of sight, Talquist went to the gates of Jierna Tal and summoned his captain of the guard.

“Have the monastery and the manse been prepared with oil and magnesium?”

The captain nodded silently.

“Good. There are three soldiers headed there now with the body of a fourth. As soon as the soldiers have deposited the body on the steps of the monastery, light the oil.”

The captain swallowed, but showed no other reaction. “If they somehow dodge the explosion?”

“Drive them back inside with arrow fire.”

The captain, accustomed to such orders, merely nodded. “The holy men as well? Should they survive the flames, that is.”

Talquist shook his head. “They are dead already. The poison from their meal has no doubt taken effect by now. I just want there to be no witnesses, and no trace. There will not be; magnesium burns hotter than the flames of the Underworld. A tragic fire; the benison will doubtless be greatly aggrieved. Perhaps he will take pains to make certain his followers have safer lodgings hereafter.”

The captain of the guard bowed and withdrew.

Talquist continued to stand in the square of Jierna’sid throughout the night until morning came. He scanned the rising mountain peaks for any sign of the titan, but saw nothing more than the pink rays of dawn spilling light onto the vast desert below, heard nothing but the autumn breeze whistle through, no words of wisdom hidden in its whine.

When the square at the Place of Weight was at last truly empty, when the light in the regent’s tower in Jierna Tal finally was extinguished, and nothing remained but the tiniest glow from the streetlamps that had burned down to the wick bases, the sexton of Terreanfor and his two surviving acolytes crept cautiously from the shadows, trembling as they had been for the last few hours.

They stood in silence and watched the flames light the distant sides of Night Mountain, knowing that it was their manse burning. Finally Lester touched the sexton’s arm with a hand that shook.

“What do we do now, Father?” he whispered. His voice sounded far younger than his years.

Lasarys stared at the leaping flames, lost in thought. Finally his eyes met those of the young priests-in-training.

“We must go to Sepulvarta, to the holy city,” he said softly, glancing about to be certain they were not seen. “The benison is there; we must find Nielash Mousa and tell him of the terrible sights we have witnessed. But we must go carefully; Talquist has spies everywhere.”

“Sepulvarta is a week by horseback,” Dominicus said in a low voice. “How will we make it there, crossing the desert without supplies, without aid? We will surely die, or worse, be discovered.”

“Not if we are discreet and careful,” answered Lasarys. “Talquist believes we are dead. In the eyes of the world, we must be—at least until we can speak to the Blesser of Sorbold and inform him of what happened this hideous night.”

He pulled up the hood of his cassock in the bitter sand wind; a moment later the others followed his example, and his lead, out through the dark alleys of Jierna’sid, into the vast desert beyond.

19

In younger days Gwydion Navarne had loved the winter carnival.

The feast was a tradition begun by his grandfather and continued by his father for the dual purposes of celebrating a secular holiday with the people of his province and gathering with the leaders of the two religious factions, the Filidic nature priests of Gwynwood and the adherents to the faith of the Patriarch of Sepulvarta, to observe their common rites at the time of the winter solstice. The fact that the event had traditionally fallen on or around Gwydion’s birthday had counted among his reasons for considering it special, at least when he was a young child. When he was somewhat older, especially after his mother’s murder when he was eight, he began to realize that even a party of tremendous merriment could be more of an obligation than a chance for enjoyment, at least where the host was concerned.

His father, Stephen Navarne, had loved the carnival even more than he had. There was something about the arrival of First Snow that made Stephen’s already jolly nature even more cheerful. Gwydion recalled fondly the sound of the traditional trumpet volley on the morning when the first cold flakes appeared, signaling that winter had begun. The thrill in Stephen’s aspect was infectious, even to habitually grumpy household servants, who preferred a few more moments of sleep to the joy of being blasted out of bed by the duke’s horn at something that could not be avoided, like the coming of snow. On the morning of First Snow they could be seen bustling around with a new energy, smiling at each other, laughing even as they went about their tasks.

The winter carnival in Stephen’s time was the event of greatest goodwill in the year, when religious acrimony, land disputes, and other matters of contention were put aside for the sake of harmony, friendly competition, and good fun. On the day of First Snow, the year’s official contest was announced, revels of differing sorts—a treasure quest, an ice-sculpture challenge, a poetry competition, a footrace with a unique handicap—along with traditional sport and games of chance, awards for best singing, which Lord Stephen insisted upon judging himself, comedic recitation and performance dance, as well as folk reels, man-powered sleigh races, snow sculpting, and performances by magicians, capped finally by a great bonfire. It was an enormous undertaking, an expensive endeavor, a revel without peer, and a source of renewal for the spirits of the people of the central continent.

Until the year of the bloodshed.

Gwydion, standing now on the balcony of the library overlooking his ancestral lands, breathed in the air in which the tiny drops of frozen moisture were finally falling; First Snow had come late that year, only a day before the winter carnival was scheduled to begin, known as Gathering Day. He watched in relief as the snow began to blanket the ground, the large feathery flakes wafting down on a brisk wind. The carnival games and revels were generally better after a few weeks of accumulation, the drier the better, but Gwydion was not in the mood to be particular about the kind of snow.

Mostly because until the moment it started to fall, he was wondering if its absence was a sign, a portent that tragedy would strike again.

It had been three years since the last winter carnival, the first one that had been celebrated within the boundaries of the high wall his father had built around the lands nearest the keep, to protect his populace from the horrific and random violence that had been a scourge across the continent. The wall had been a saving grace when a cohort of mounted soldiers from Sorbold, under the demonic thrall of a F’dor spirit, had attacked the carnival and the merrymakers who had just finished witnessing the penultimate event of the festival, a sledge race that took place beyond the barrier in an open field. The mayhem that ensued had been ghastly; before Stephen and his cousin, Tristan Steward, the Lord Roland, had shepherded the terrified festivalgoers back inside the walls, more than five hundred of them were dead. Gwydion would never be able to expunge from his memory the look of controlled terror on his father’s face as he hoisted Gwydion and Melisande over the wall into the care of the defenders, and the relief he saw in Stephen’s eyes once they were out of harm’s way, as he turned and went into battle.

Why are we doing this again? Gwydion wondered; he had asked himself the question repeatedly since the day two months prior when Rhapsody and Ashe had declared their intent to resume the carnival. The magic of it all is broken now. How can there be a winter carnival without my father? His spirit was the winter carnival.

Ashe’s hand came to rest on his shoulder; Gwydion looked up at his godfather, now taller than himself by only a hand’s measure. The Lord Cymrian’s cerulean blue eyes, considered a sign of Cymrian royalty, were fixed on the fields of revel, where scores of workers now scrambled to erect stages, tents, bonfire pits, and reviewing stands. The vertical pupils in those eyes contracted in the brightness of the rising sun.

“Looks as if the weather is favoring us after all,” Ashe said. “I was afraid we might have to beseech Gavin the Invoker to summon the snow if the warm winter continued.”

Gwydion nodded but said nothing. Ashe’s father, Llauron, had been the previous Invoker, the leader of the Filidic order of nature priests that tended the holy forest of Gwynwood. In that last, terrible carnival, Llauron had broken the charge of the demonically compelled regiment by summoning winter wolves from the snow itself, spooking the horses of the Sorbold cavalry and buying the fleeing populace time to get inside the gates. Llauron had given up his human body for the elemental form of a dragon, the blood he inherited from his mother, Anwyn, daughter of the wyrm Elynsynos, and now was off communing with those elements, hovering near but never seen. Ashe rarely spoke of his father; Gwydion once told his godfather that he understood his loss, but the Lord Cymrian had looked away and merely said that the situations were very different.

“The guests began arriving yesterday,” Gwydion said as the falling snow began to thicken. “No problems thus far.”

Ashe turned to him and took him by the shoulders.

“There will be no problems, Gwydion. I’ve taken every possible measure to prevent them.” He gave the young man’s arm a comforting squeeze. “I know you are worried, but try not to let it overshadow the import of these days. This is a special moment for you, and for Navarne. There is good reason for revelry and merrymaking; the future is being well assured with your ascension.” He smiled reassuringly, the corners of his draconic eyes crinkling with fondness. “Besides, rather than worrying, you should be saving your strength for the tug-of-war. My team intends to drag yours mercilessly through the mud, and there is a considerable amount of it this year. You best pray that the ground freezes quickly.”

A smile finally came to the corners of the young man’s mouth.

Ashe saw the change, and patted his ward’s shoulder. “That’s better. Now, I understand that Gerald Owen has taken it upon himself to convince the cooks to make an early batch of Sugar Snow, just for you, Melly, and me, as soon as there is enough accumulation to cool the boiling syrup.” He shielded his eyes and glanced at the back of the buttery, where the falling snow had covered the bricks with a thick layer of pocketed white, coating the graceful limbs of the silver-trunked trees with frosting. “I think it may almost be ready.”

Gwydion laughed halfheartedly and turned to leave the balcony. Just before he reached the door, he heard his godfather call his name quietly again.

“Gwydion?”

“Yes?”

Ashe did not turn, but continued to stare off over the now-white fields of Navarne as the carnival came to life below him.

“I miss him, too.”

Faron did not understand what had happened to him.

Initially after he had awoken on the plate of the Scales he thought, in his limited capacity to reason and understand, that he had died. The blinding light and the intense heat had scorched his withered flesh in agonizing purity; Faron was no stranger to pain, but this suffering was so overwhelming that he imagined it could only be the death he longed for. So when the light vanished, and the sky above him cleared, he was despondent.

The father he had been waiting to reunite with was not there.

He did not remember breaking away, did not have any concept of the obstacles that had attempted futilely to rein him in, to thwart his escape. He had merely run as fast as he could, once the concept of running had come to him, away from the pain and into the warmth of the desert he could feel beyond the Place of Weight.

Now he wandered that desert alone, passing over, and sometimes through, the sand and dry scrub as naturally as if it had been air. The Living Stone body that encased his spirit was born of the earth, and it had no weight to him while he was touching the ground. If anything, every step he took, every moment he felt the sunbaked ground beneath his feet, brought him new strength.

He no longer unconsciously thought of himself as neuter; something nascent in the stone warrior’s spirit had instilled in him a gender, though it was not something he realized other than innately. It had imbued him with memories as well, fragments of images that flashed through his primitive mind which were beyond his understanding. There were scenes of battle, of endless marches, that came and went with the speed of a half-formed thought, leaving him confused. There were other images that came to his mind as well, human memories and scenes that were decidedly not from the mind of a man, but from the Earth itself; instinctive thoughts that whispered to him on the most elemental of levels.

Winter comes, it said. The fallow time. The sleeping time.

But for now the sun was high. The earth was warm beneath his stone feet.

Giving him strength.

In the distance he could feel the scales as surely as he had felt them in his glowing pool of green water. Each called to him with a vibration unique in all the world, vibrations that had been an integral part of his makeup before the awakening. He could not see them yet, but he could sense the directions from which they called. Thinking about them both soothed his tortured mind and agitated him as the missing vibrations nagged at his consciousness.

And there was something more, something even more distant. In the back recesses of his conscious mind, fragmentary and shrouded in the darkness of ambiguity, was the memory of fire.

Dark fire.

20

“This is mortifying,” Rhapsody said.

Ashe sighed. “So you’ve indicated three times already in the last hour,” he said indulgently, watching his wife wriggle uncomfortably in her thick cape beneath an even thicker blanket. She was ensconced on a large padded chair with a high back in the center of the reviewing stand, her feet propped on a tufted ottoman, her distended belly elevated to a point that she could barely see over it. Ashe leaned over and kissed her cheek, rosy from the wind, and brushed a strand of golden hair out of her eyes.

“I can stand,” she insisted.

“Well, that makes one of us,” Anborn chimed in humorously. He was seated to her left, watching the parade of festivalgoers from the reviewing platform as well. “Now you know how I feel.”

“She can’t stand, either,” Ashe retorted. “When she stands she vomits or gets light-headed.”

“I vomit and get light-headed when I sit as well,” Rhapsody said crankily. “At least if I’m going to be sick, it would be nice to be able to see who I am going to be sick on.”

“Oh, m’lady, by all means, don’t aim at the peasantry,” said Anborn, nudging her playfully. “Turn your lovely head clockwise toward your husband. He is, after all, responsible for your woes—or at least he thinks he is.”

Rhapsody glared at Anborn, then settled back down beneath the blanket, attempting to maintain a pleasant official expression. The crowd of merrymakers was a blur to her, a sea of jumbled faces and clothing passing beneath the flapping banners of colored silk that hung from Haguefort’s towers and guardposts and the reviewing stand on which they were seated.

Melisande hovered nearby, her face shining with excitement, rimmed in a fur hat that matched the muff that encased her hands. Her black eyes were sparkling in the wind, her nose and cheeks red with the bite of it.

“Look at the puppets!” she said gleefully to Rhapsody as a line of giant articulated harlequins paraded past the reviewing stand, their limbs controlled by the large sticks of their puppetmasters, who walked behind them, dwarfed by their size.

Rhapsody smiled at her in return. “Are you going to compete in the Snow Snakes competition this year?” she asked the young girl.

“Yes, definitely,” said Melisande with a knowing glance at Gwydion. “I have to defend the family honor; last time Gwydion lost in the final round.”

“That’s right,” Gwydion murmured to himself. He had forgotten that aspect of the carnival; the thought opened a floodgate in his mind and the memories poured back in, the good-spirited competition, the comic races where Melisande and the other little children had to race with a sled tied to their waists on which a fat sheep had been placed, the excitement of the sledge races, the humorous dunking of the winning teams by the losing ones. Such good memories that had been overshadowed by what came later. Over it all he could hear the pealing of Stephen’s merry laughter. I have to hold on to these, he thought. That was my father’s last carnival. I need to remember him that way.

He turned to Anborn, beside whom he was sitting, and motioned into the crowd.

“Isn’t that Trevalt, the swordmaster?” he asked, indicating a black-mustached man, tall and rapier-thin, accompanied by a small retinue, making his way from the line of carriages outside Haguefort’s wall to the central festival grounds.

Anborn’s lip curled in disdain. “I would never call him by such a lofty title, but yes, that’s Trevalt.”

Gwydion leaned forward in his seat and addressed his godfather.

“Third-generation Cymrian?”

“Fourth,” Ashe corrected.

“But a First Generation damfool,” said Anborn scornfully. “A simpleton dressed in the robes of a scholar, a thespian who wraps himself in the titles of soldiers because he lived through a war in which even children and blind beggars fought.”

Gwydion blinked at the acid in his mentor’s voice, and looked questioningly at Ashe. His godfather motioned to Gwydion, who rose and walked over to him. Ashe leaned closer so as not to be overheard.

“Anborn loathes Trevalt because he once claimed, for personal gain, to have been invested as a Kinsman,” he said quietly. He needed to say nothing more; the look of horror on Gwydion’s face indicated clearly that he understood the severity of the offense. Kinsmen like Anborn were members of a secret brotherhood of warriors, masters of the craft of fighting, sworn to the service of soldiering for life. They were accepted into the brotherhood for two things: incredible skill forged over a lifetime of soldiering, or a selfless act of service to others, protecting an innocent at the threat of one’s own life. It was a sacred trust to be one, the ultimate honor coupled with the ultimate selflessness, and with the membership came the unspoken understanding of its secrecy, and its honor. Anyone who was boasting about being one was clearly lying. And that was considered an affront almost too egregious to be borne.

He looked back at Anborn, whose face was still flushed with purple rage, sitting impotently on his litter, his useless legs motionless beneath the massive barrel of his chest. Gwydion’s heart went out to him, but a moment later he saw Anborn glance at Rhapsody, a Kinsman herself, and the anger drained out of his face as she smiled at him. They both sighed, then returned to watching the assemblage of the crowd and the festivities.

“Become accustomed to this torture, Gwydion,” Anborn said as the line of dignitaries passed the reviewing stand. “Alas, this is the sort of useless nonsense that takes up one’s days when one is saddled with a title.”

Rhapsody slapped the Lord Marshal playfully. “Stop that. Your title never stopped you from distancing yourself from court obligations.”

“Ah, but you forget, m’lady, my titles have only been military,” said Anborn. “I was the youngest of three. No one ever had any illusions about me being to the manor born, I am relieved to say.”

“Well, except for the Third Fleet, who nominated you for my title, I remind you,” joked Ashe. “Had you not refused it, you might have a lot more ‘useless nonsense’ to attend to today.”

Anborn snorted and returned to his mug of hot spiced mead. Trevalt and his retinue stopped before the reviewing stand, per custom, and bowed deeply with flourishes to the Lord and Lady Cymrian. Rhapsody’s hand shot out and covered Anborn’s mouth in time to prevent him from spitting his libation at the swordmaster. She smiled pleasantly at Trevalt; he blinked, confused, smiled wanly in return, and moved on.

“Now, now, Uncle, this is Gwydion’s last day before his investiture tomorrow,” Ashe said, trying to contain his amusement. “Let us not christen his ascension to duke with a brawl, shall we?”

“You will be lucky if that’s all that comes to pass,” muttered Anborn into his mug.

Rhapsody, Ashe, and Gwydion exchanged a somber glance and returned their attention to the opening of the festival.

“I believe I see Tristan Steward arriving,” said Gwydion.

“Oh joy,” said Rhapsody and Anborn in unison under their breath.

Gwydion sighed and returned to his seat. It appeared it was going to be a long day.

Later, after the Gathering Day’s festivities had come to an end, and the First Night feast had begun, he had to admit to himself that he was enjoying the carnival in spite of it all.

Ashe had wisely limited the attendance to the citizens of Navarne and a few invited dignitaries from across the Cymrian Alliance, rather than holding it open to the entire population of the western continent, as Stephen always had. Since the tents required to accommodate a very much smaller attendance were able to be spread out and more carefully managed, the settling in took only a few hours, rather than the whole of Gathering Day; Ashe had anticipated this as well, and had arranged for the afternoon to hold several highly favored events, as well as a remarkable performance by the Orlandan orchestra that Rhapsody had patronized. The result was a jolly populace, fresh with the excitement of the sporting events and music, ready to sup heartily at the First Night feast. The wine and ale were flowing freely, courtesy of Cedric Canderre, duke of the province that bore his name. Gwydion was quietly amazed that the elderly man had even been willing to attend, let alone provide such a generous donation of his highly valued potables; his beloved only son, Andrew, had died a hero’s death at the battle of the last winter carnival.

As Gwydion stood talking to Ashe while the roasted oxen were being carved and the ale being passed, Tristan Steward, the Lord Roland and his cousin once removed, sidled up to them both and greeted them pleasantly, his auburn hair gleaming in the light of the open fire.

“A splendid beginning, young Navarne,” Tristan said, saluting Gwydion with his glass. “I confess at first when I heard of your godfather’s intention to hold the carnival again, I thought it in poor taste at best, and foolhardy at worst. But it seems to have worked out well, so far at least.”

Gwydion felt the air around him go dry, no doubt the dragon in Ashe’s blood bristling in ire at the insult, but the Lord Cymrian merely took another sip from his tankard and said nothing.

“And where is Rhapsody this evening?” the Lord Roland asked, oblivious of Ashe’s annoyance.

“To bed,” Ashe replied. “Tired from the day’s revels, as we all are. I intend to join her shortly.”

Tristan’s cheeks glowed red in the light of the bonfires. “Glad to hear it. I do have a gift of sorts for you—though it is on loan.” He signaled to his retinue, and three women came forward, clad in the attire of the house servants of Bethany, Tristan’s seat of power as regent of Roland. One of the women was elderly, the second of middling youth, and the last of tender years, perhaps twenty.

Ashe’s brows knit together. “I don’t understand.”

Tristan smiled and put out his hand to the eldest of the women, who came to his side immediately.

“Renalla was my wife’s nanny, and a very much beloved member of the household of her father, Cedric Canderre. Madeleine sent for her when our son Malcolm was expected, and she has served as nanny for him as well. She is without peer as a governess, and wonderful with children. I have brought her to you so that you might make use of her skills when Rhapsody delivers your child.” He pointed to the next oldest woman. “Amity is a wet nurse, and as you’ve seen, Malcolm has grown healthy and strong on her supply.” He glanced over his shoulder at the last, the youngest woman. “And Portia is a chambermaid.”

Ashe looked uncomfortably at the three women. “Ladies, please sup; the ox is carved, and you have traveled a long way today,” he said, dismissing them to the feast. Once they were out of earshot, he turned back to the Lord Roland. “I thank you, Tristan, but I can’t imagine that we will need any of their services. Rhapsody plans to nurse the baby herself, especially given the rareness of its bloodline—we don’t know what to expect of a wyrmkin child born of a Lirin and human mother. I’m certain if she needs any help with caring for the baby, she will want to select the nanny herself as well. And we have no end to chambermaids at Haguefort.”

“Undeniably,” said Tristan idly, watching a magician who was mixing colorful powders into the enormous bonfire and setting off brightly hued explosions that formed pictures that hovered in the night air, to the delight of the crowd. “But you will be moving to Highmeadow soon, and I thought, perhaps foolishly, that you might appreciate experienced servants to help ease the tremendous load of Rhapsody’s transition there. My mistake.”

Ashe held out his tankard to the waitservant who had offered a pitcher.

“That is very kind of you,” he said awkwardly. “I apologize if I seemed ungrateful. I will consult with Rhapsody in the morning and see what she thinks.”

“Why don’t I just leave them in the custody of your household until the baby arrives?” Tristan suggested. “It’s impossible to know right now just how truly demanding and all-consuming an infant—even a royal infant—can be. Wait and see if you need any or all of them then, and if not, send them back to Bethany with the guarded caravan. Otherwise keep them as long as you like.”

“Thank you,” Ashe said, draining the glass and putting it back on the servant’s tray. “I appreciate your kindness. Now, I bid you good night. Enjoy the feast.”

“Indeed,” remarked Tristan as the Lord Cymrian hurried away from the festivities toward his wife’s bedchambers. “You enjoy the feast as well.”

Contrary to Ashe’s beliefs, Rhapsody was not asleep, but was in fact sharing her bedchamber with another man.

Young master Cedric Andrew Montmorcery Canderre, known to his family as Bobo, the three-year-old grandson of Cedric Canderre, was gleefully tearing through her rooms, playing in her closets, pulling all the pillows from the chairs, hiding amid the bedcurtains, and giving spirited chase to the panicked tabby cat, causing his widowed young mother, Lady Jecelyn Canderre, supreme embarrassment and the Lady Cymrian great amusement.

“I’m terribly sorry, m’lady,” Jecelyn said, struggling to catch up with the energetic tyke. She grasped him in midstride and swung him up over her shoulder, amid howls of angry protest. “He slept in the carriage all the way from Canderre, and now has enough energy to run all the way home. He was keeping all the rest of the guests in your quarters awake.”

“I am delighted to see him,” Rhapsody said, reaching for the struggling toddler. “I’ve missed him terribly. And besides, if there are that many guests sleeping already, we surely are not putting on a very good carnival.” She reached into a box on the bedside table as Jecelyn set the child on the bed beside her, pulled forth a ginger biscuit, and held it up for his mother’s approval. Jecelyn nodded, and Bobo immediately came into her lap, seized the biscuit, and consumed it forthwith, scattering crumbs over the bedsheets.

Rhapsody ran a hand over his glossy black curls, the same curls his father Andrew had sported, and quietly hummed a song of calming as he sat in her lap and ate. She patted the bed next to her for Jecelyn to sit down; the weary young mother sighed and dropped onto the mattress in relief.

“There will be many fun things for you to do tomorrow,” Rhapsody said to Bobo, who nodded and dove for the biscuit box. The two women laughed, and Rhapsody handed it to him, restraining him from falling head-first off the bed. “These are really quite wonderful concoctions,” she said, filching two of the biscuits and handing one to Jecelyn. “They make them in Tyrian; ginger is an herb that offsets nausea. They are the only thing that I can eat first thing in the morning.”

“I remember those days,” said Jecelyn wistfully. Her eyes darkened, and Rhapsody took her hand. Her husband Andrew had died when she was early in her pregnancy; he had never seen his son. After a moment Jecelyn rose and went to the tower window, where the gleaming torchlight from the two carillon towers that stood before Haguefort’s front gate could be seen, lighting the dark night and the silvery snow that still fell in gentle sheets on the wind. “Are those the towers where he fell?”

“Yes,” Rhapsody said, running her fingers through Bobo’s hair. “Rebuilt now.”

Jecelyn turned to her. “Which one was it?”

“The rightmost, I believe,” the Lady Cymrian said gently. “I’m not certain—I was not here during that last carnival.”

“Yes, it was the rightmost,” said Ashe, who had just entered the room. He crossed to the bed, bent and kissed his wife’s cheek, then snatched the munching youngster from her lap and lifted him high in the air. He tilted him upside down, eliciting squeals of glee from the boy and glances of consternation from the women. He held Bobo by his feet and swung him between his own legs, brushing the silk carpet with the child’s inverted curls, then pulled him back up onto his hip and came to the tower window with Jecelyn.

“I was not here at the time, either, but I have read the reports carefully. He and Dunstin Baldasarre saw the attack coming—they were past the gate—and they each ran for a tower, knowing if they could sound the bells of the carillon they could warn Stephen and the others on the fields beyond. Dunstin took the left tower, Andrew the right. Dunstin’s tower was felled by fire from a catapult just as he reached it, but Andrew was faster, and managed to ring the alarm before—before he, too, fell.” Ashe took Jecelyn’s hand and looked into her face; he understood the need to have the questions answered, the pieces of the puzzle filled in.

Lady Jecelyn nodded, then took her son into her arms. “Thank you,” she said. “It helps to see, to understand a little. Well, we have disrupted your evening enough. Thank you, Rhapsody, for the biscuits and for your patience. We’ll see you in the morning.”

“Good night, Jecelyn. Good night, Bobo,” Rhapsody called as they disappeared into the hallway, Bobo’s wails of protest echoing off the rosy stone walls of Haguefort.

As the shrieks died down in the distance, the lord and lady burst into laughter.

“See what we have to look forward to?” Rhapsody said as Ashe unlaced his shirt, still chuckling.

“It’s a joyful noise,” he replied, sliding out of his clothing and into the bed beside her. “It’s been good to hear such noise around here today; the place is filled with the sort of music Stephen loved, the music of laughter and merriment and good-natured argument. I know he is watching from wherever he is. I hope the ceremony tomorrow makes him proud.”

“He was always proud of Gwydion and Melisande, Sam,” Rhapsody said, opening her arms and welcoming him into the warmth of the bedsheets, running her hands over his shoulders to loosen the muscles. “I hope tomorrow is sufficient to make Gwydion proud of himself.”

“It should. The ceremony will be dignified, modest, and, above all, brief, both for his comfort and for yours. Then we will get back to the festivities.” Ashe put out the candle and pulled the covers up around them, settling down in the darkness, exhaling as he took his wife into his arms. For a moment there was only the sound of rustling blankets in the darkness. Then a shudder rose in the night, audible over the snowy wind and the distant noise of revelry below.

“What?” Rhapsody asked.

From the depth of the blankets came two words.

“Biscuit crumbs.”

The fire on the hearth in the royal guest chamber crackled and leapt in time with the whine of the winter wind outside the tall panes of glass in the windows overlooking the festival grounds, where the revelry had died down into sleep and calm celebration among the most hearty of merrymakers.

Tristan Steward heard the door open quietly. He smiled, and took another sip from the heavy crystal glass into which some excellent Canderian brandy had been decanted.

“About time you arrived,” he said without looking behind him. “I was wondering how long you could maintain your demure demeanor.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” The woman’s voice behind him had a throaty chuckle in it.

That chuckle never failed to inspire a rush of warmth through Tristan. He set the glass down on the table before him and stood, turning around slowly to let the fire warm his back.

Backlit by the lanternlight of the hallway, the woman’s form was half obscured in the shadow that stretched forward toward him. She turned and closed the guest-chamber door behind her, then ambled over to where the Lord Roland stood and stopped before him, smiling up insolently at him.

“Are you enjoying the revels, Portia?” Tristan inquired, stroking the porcelain cheek of the chambermaid.

The young woman shrugged. “It’s very different from what I expected.”

“Oh? How so?”

The woman’s dark brown eyes sparkled wickedly. “From what you had described, I was looking forward to wild drunkenness and public debauchery. It’s all very much more tame than I had hoped.”

“It’s early yet,” said Tristan, pulling the white chambermaid’s kerchief from her head and dropping it to the floor. “This is still First Night; most years this day was more for settling in than anything else. The real revelry begins tomorrow. But you are correct; there is a rather dull pall over this festival, no doubt owing to the horror that it sustained the last time a few years back. The Lord Cymrian has clamped down on the size and scope of the festival; I imagine we will have to settle for debauching in private.”

Portia’s lovely face contorted in a mock pout. “Now, what fun is that?” she said humorously. “We could have stayed in Bethany if that is all there is to be had.”

“Now, you know better,” said Tristan, unlacing the stays of her sedate bodice and untying the ribbons of her apron. “You have work to do here after I leave—and it’s very important to me that you accomplish your task well.”

Portia brushed his hands away from her breasts. “Don’t I always?” she said, her eyes flashing with amusement. “M’lord?”

Tristan inhaled deeply. Portia’s impudence was what he liked best about her, the ability to appear as demure and proper as any peasant chambermaid in his household’s employ in public, while rising to a dominance and brashness of spirit behind closed doors. Doubtless her fiery nature would not have been appreciated by a lesser man, but Tristan had a weakness for strong women.

Her rude teasing and domineering sexual proclivities reminded him of an old paramour, now dead, whom he had loved more than he had realized while she was still alive. Prudence and he had been born in the same castle on the same day, minutes apart, he the oldest son of Lord Malcolm Steward, she the daughter of his father’s favorite concubine and serving wench. They had been inseparable friends; she was his first lover and tireless confidant, willing to call him on his bad behavior and failings while never ceasing to love him unquestioningly. Her death had devastated him, but he had moved on, grimacing through a loveless marriage to Madeleine, the Beast of Canderre, as well as countless trysts with female servants.

And an unrequited obsession with the wife of his childhood friend, Gwydion of Manosse, the Lord Cymrian.

Portia had been his favorite bed partner for a while. Her wild spirit and willingness to fornicate on a moment’s notice, barely hidden in public places where the possibility of detection added fuel to their passion, had gone a long way to sating the emptiness he had felt in recent years. It was, at its best, stimulating and emotionless sexual satisfaction. At its worst, it was better than nothing.

And anything was better than Madeleine’s cold and formal submission to wifely duties.

“Stand still,” he ordered, turning her around again. Portia’s eyebrow arched in surprise, but she allowed the Lord Roland to pull her back to him.

“Now, tell me, Portia, how you plan to accomplish what I’ve asked of you,” he said, untying the laces from the back of her skirts, then pulling her free of them with an impatient tug which implied an intensity that had not been in his eyes the moment before.

Portia shrugged as his hands slid over her breasts again, unrebuffed this time, pulling her completely free of the last remnants of clothing.

“The same way I accomplished it when you were the prize,” she said nonchalantly, though the unexpected fire in her lord’s voice was beginning to excite her. “One must first be an unobtrusive and extremely useful servant, so as not to attract the notice or ire of the house’s lady. After that, it’s only a matter of time. When the wife is bloated with child, it makes it all the more simple.”

“You have not seen his wife,” said Tristan Steward, his hands moving lower. “Even on her worst day, she is a hundred times more beautiful than you ever dreamt to be on your best day. There is a magic to her that is indescribable; I wonder how you will compete with that.”

Portia turned suddenly, her eyes blazing violently.

“Tell me about her scent,” she said hoarsely, struggling to keep the ire from her voice and losing.

Tristan thought for a moment, oblivious of the gleaming naked woman standing before him.

“Like vanilla, and spiced soap,” he said finally. “The faintest scent of flowers. And the sharp odor of sandalwood smoke.”

Portia smiled. She leaned against the Lord Roland and pressed her lips to his, sliding her arms around his neck. Suddenly, in his nostrils was the scent of vanilla and clean, sweet spice, with an undertone of fire in it. Though not exactly the same as Rhapsody’s, it was close enough to make his hands shake. He pushed away in surprise.

“How—how did you do that?” he asked haltingly.

The black eyes danced with laughter.

“There is much you do not know about me, m’lord,” she said, her voice silky with an undertone of threat. “I have not even seen her yet. But mark my words; you will not be disappointed.” She pushed him back, and set about undoing the laces of his trousers while he stood still in shock. “Have you ever been?”

Numbly Tristan shook his head. There was something suddenly terrifying in Portia’s aspect, something cruel and dark and deeper than he could fathom that he had never seen before. He did not recognize it at first, aroused as he was, but later, when he was alone in his bed, he realized that what he felt in the presence of this woman, this servant he had had his way with countless times, was fear.

She pushed him to the floor, covering his mouth, and then his body, with her own, his fully clothed, hers utterly naked; sliding him inside of her, riding him ruthlessly. He began to tremble, wondering what it was he had set in motion.

And as the tall windows mirrored the writhing dance of their bodies commingling on the floor of the guest chamber, he realized that, even in the traditional role of master and servant, he was helpless to stop it now.

The dragon was growing impatient.

All around her the earth was cooling, falling into dormancy, cold beneath a blanket of snow that she could sense above, even in the southlands through which she traveled. As the world fell asleep, the ground became thicker, harder to pass through, deadening the sound of her name that she was following.

Let me pass, she thought angrily, struggling through the clay of the Earth’s crust. Do not hinder me.

The beating heart of the Earth was slowing; it flickered at her ire, but then settled down again. She felt its answer in her mind, or at least imagined she did.

This cycle is older than you are old, the Earth seemed to say. Take your time; it is unending.

No, the dragon insisted, flailing about in the clay and the layers of rock. Help me!

But the earth merely settled back, thickening, making the way more difficult.

In the darkness of the crust of the world, the dragon’s gleaming blue eyes narrowed, shining like lanterns in the blackness.

I may be waylaid, she thought in slowly building fury, but I will not be denied.

And when I finally arrive, even the Earth will suffer.

21

When she entered Haguefort’s garden in the gray light of foredawn the following morning to prepare for her aubades, Rhapsody thought she caught sight of a thin shadow at the edges of her vision. She turned as quickly as she could without losing her balance, but saw nothing except the gray haze that was thinning in the advent of sunrise.

Then she felt it again, a vibration she recognized, and she broke into a wide smile.

“Achmed! Where are you?”

“Here,” a voice behind her said, closer than her own shadow. “As I told you I would always be.”

She turned and threw her arms around the Bolg king, laughing with delight.

“I’m so happy you are here,” she said, clinging to her oldest friend in excitement. “Where have you been?”

“I arrived this morning,” Achmed said, extricating himself after a quick return of her embrace, gently pulling her away, mindful of her belly. “You didn’t really expect that I would come for First Night and have to endure all the nonsense of the arrivals and the pomp that goes with it, did you?”

“No, I suppose not,” Rhapsody chuckled, taking his arm and walking with him through the gardens. “But I have been waiting so long to see you that I just suppose I hoped you would arrive sooner. It doesn’t matter; you’re here now. How are you? How is Grunthor? And everyone in the Bolglands?”

“Grunthor is well, but the Bolglands have been suffering,” the king said bluntly. “If you are truly concerned, you can be of great help.”

“Of course,” Rhapsody said haltingly, her good cheer fading away like water running down a drain as her nausea returned. “What’s wrong? Why are the Bolglands suffering?”

“We can go into that at greater lengths later,” Achmed replied hastily, noting the change in the color of the horizon. “You have not sung your morning devotions yet, I take it?”

“No,” Rhapsody admitted. “I had just entered the garden when I felt your presence.”

“Well, don’t let me interrupt. I have to see Gwydion Navarne before he becomes too wrapped up in the preparations for his investiture. Which window is his?”

“That one,” Rhapsody said, pointing to a balcony above the Great Hall. “But spare yourself the climb and the arrest. Ashe is taking no chances; there are guards everywhere, and soldiers at all points around the province perimeter.”

“I noticed,” Achmed said dryly. “Good for him; he’s finally learning. Perhaps your kidnapping had some lasting value after all.”

“Gwydion is probably in the burying ground,” Rhapsody said coolly, ignoring the slight. “That is usually where he begins his day. I expect he is there already this morning. Give him a moment alone before you seek him out, please.”

Achmed nodded. “I will be back afterward, and then we will talk. I need your focused attention, so be prepared to send away anyone who comes nattering at you about minutiae.”

“Gladly,” said Rhapsody as his arm slid out of hers. He had just vanished from the edge of her blurry sight when she became aware of another presence, felt another vibration in the garden, an older, more musical sound.

“Good morning, Jal’asee,” she said without turning.

“Good morning, m’lady.” The sonorous voice drifted toward her on the warm wind, light as ether. A moment later, the Sea Mage seemed to appear out of the morning light, although Rhapsody was certain he had been standing just beyond her vision.

Rhapsody inhaled deeply. The Sea Mage and his retinue had been away from Haguefort since the morning after Ashe’s announcement of Gwydion’s investiture, visiting the Lirin kingdom of Tyrian with her viceroy, Rial. She had hoped he would return earlier, so that he might spend some time instructing her in the science of magic that the Sea Mages practiced, as he had promised, but his absence meant the secrets of the Isle of Gaematria were still a mystery. She suspected that his timing was intentional. He smiled disarmingly and shielded his eyes, looking into the sky.

“Have you greeted the daystar yet?”

“Not yet,” Rhapsody said. She turned toward the east, where the star was setting; a thin line of pink had cracked the gray vault of the horizon, and was pulsing with impending light.

“I am sorry I am so late in arriving; I know I had offered some instruction in lore you had not yet been made aware of. If it pleases you, m’lady, I would be happy to teach you the elegy for Seren, the aubade that the ancients composed upon leaving the old world. It is a song of praise to the Creator for the wonder of that star. We find it helps to maintain the connection we had when we sang our hymns beneath her light in Serendair.”

Rhapsody considered for a moment. “I’d be honored,” she said finally.

The tall golden man smiled, took her hand in his own, and closed his eyes. She followed his example, and a moment later felt the breeze whisper over her; it was in pitch with ela, her Naming note, the vibration on the musical scale to which she was attuned.

Behind her eyes she saw, or perhaps felt, a shimmering light appear, singing in the darkness of the universe. The star she had long welcomed with music was returning the laud that Jal’asee was chanting, but it was a different response than Rhapsody was used to. It seemed present, not on the other side of the world; inadvertently she opened her eyes and blinked in shock. Her aubade faltered to a halt as she dropped Jal’asee’s hand.

An ethereal light was emanating directly from the head of the Sea Mage, shining brilliantly from his eyes.

He finished the song, then turned to her.

“When one is baptized in ethereal light, he carries it with him wherever he goes,” he said. “It is really not necessary to wait for evening or morning to chant the praise, because it is always with me.”

“Well, thank you for the instruction,” Rhapsody said, observing the preparations with a wary eye.

“And now, has the Bolg king arrived yet?” Jal’asee inquired politely, though Rhapsody could detect a modicum of impatience in his eyes; otherwise, his ambassadorial countenance was perfectly serene.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, he has,” Rhapsody said, watching with consternation as a bevy of cooks marched by in the snow, each carrying a towering array of trays of sweetmeats, winter fruits, and pastries. “He should be back in a moment. I didn’t get a chance to tell him you wanted to see him.”

“Good, that’s just as well,” Jal’asee said smoothly. “Well, I believe I will leave you to your preparations, and have a walk about in the snow. Gaematria is tropical, thus we do not see much snow unless we manufacture it ourselves.”

The Lady Cymrian shook her head. “I hope someday before I die I will be invited to see your island, Jal’asee,” she said, putting her hand on her belly as the baby began kicking ferociously, causing her stomach to turn. “It certainly sounds like an interesting place.”

“It’s the place you must come if you are interested in learning magic as a science, m’lady,” said Jal’asee mildly, “which is very similar to your Naming studies now, but with additional areas of expertise and a maritime focus. As an academic, I am a firm believer that one should seek out the best teacher, or physician, or mentor that one could possibly have, and place oneself utterly in his or her care. Those people at least know all the missteps, and everything that can go wrong in their area of expertise; it’s probably something they’ve had to solve before.”

Rhapsody smiled. “Actually, I was thinking something very much along those lines, Jal’asee. Now, if only my husband will agree.”

Fond as he had been of Lord Stephen Navarne, Achmed had never been to his grave. Such visits were not in his makeup; he had dispensed enough death in his career as an assassin and king to understand the finality of it, to recognize the separation of soul from earthly substance, and so did not make a practice of observing anniversaries or tending to cemetery plots. If he ever had need of remembrance, he combed the wind and his own memory, rather than planting flowers on burial ground.

So it took him a few moments to find Gwydion Navarne in the quiet garden behind Haguefort, gated in wrought iron and evergreen bushes.

He had thought perhaps that one of the taller monuments that gleamed in various shades of aged marble might have stood to mark the resting place of Haguefort’s beloved master and caretaker; no one could have done more to renovate and tend to the rosy-brown stone keep than Stephen had. Stephen had also built the Cymrian museum that stood within its gates, a squat marble shelter for the artifacts of the enlightened age that had been born, had its heyday, and ended in war while he, Grunthor, and Rhapsody were still in the course of their travels through the Earth. If anyone deserved one of the foolishly ornate headstones pointing toward the winter sky in this place, it was Stephen.

And yet, to Achmed’s gratification, Stephen was not buried in a mausoleum guarded by a towering obelisk of stone, but rather was entombed in snow-covered earth beneath two slender trees, along with his wife, Lydia. A simple bench and a small piece of inscribed marble were all that marked the place; he would never have even seen it were it not for the presence of Stephen’s son, who sat quietly on the bench in reflection, attired in silver-blue court brocade and a grim expression.

“Your grandmother wore the exact same look on her face the night before the Lirin invested her as queen,” Achmed said wryly.

The young man turned around and smiled slightly. “Well, I suppose I am in good company, then.” He stood and offered his hand. “Welcome, Your Majesty. I didn’t see you yesterday; did you just arrive?”

“Yes,” the Bolg king said, shaking Gwydion’s hand with his gloved one, a practice he participated in rarely. “I brought you something.”

“Oh?”

From within his robes Achmed produced something wrapped in oilcloth and handed it to Gwydion. The duke-to-be took it questioningly, but when Achmed said nothing, he slowly untied the bindings and unwound the wrapping. As he peeled the last layer back, Gwydion’s hair was suddenly touseled by a stiff breeze, cold and stingingly clear, that seemed to rise up from the layers of the package.

Within the cloth lay a sword hilt of polished black metal the likes of which he had not seen. It was carved in ornate runes, its crosspiece curled in opposite directions. It had no blade.

“This is an ancient weapon, the elemental sword of air known as Tysterisk,” Achmed said quietly. “Though you cannot see its tang or shaft, be well advised that the blade is there, comprised of pure and unforgiving wind. It is as sharp as any forged of metal, and far more deadly. Its strength flows through its bearer; until a short time ago it was in the hands of the creature that took Rhapsody hostage, part man, part demon, now dead, or so it seems at least. In that time it was tainted with the dark fire of the F’dor, but now it has been cleansed in the wind at the top of Grivven Peak, the tallest of the western Teeth. I claimed it after the battle that ended the life of its former bearer, but that was only because I wanted to give it to you myself. Both Ashe and I agree that you should have it—probably the only thing we have ever agreed on, come to think of it.”

Gwydion stared at the hilt. He could see within the swirls of its carvings movement, but it was evanescent, fleeting; he blinked, trying to follow the motion, but lost it. A shiver of excitement mixed with dread rose up inside him; the sword handle was heavy, humming with power.

“I—I don’t know that I am ready for such a weighty gift,” he said haltingly, though his hands were beginning to shake from the vibration as well as his own exhilaration. “I haven’t done anything to be worthy of such a weapon.”

Achmed snorted. “That’s a fallacy long perpetuated by self-important fools,” he said scornfully. “You cannot be ‘worthy’ of a weapon before you begin to use it. It’s in the use of it that your worthiness is assessed. It is an elemental sword—no one is worthy of it.”

“Don’t—don’t you want it?” Gwydion asked nervously, his eyes beginning to gleam.

Achmed shook his head. “No. Despite what I just said about worthiness, in truth weapons of this kind of ancient power do choose their bearers, and make them, in a way. I prefer to choose my own weapon, and make it.”

“Like your cwellan?”

The Bolg king nodded. “That is of my own design,” he said, shrugging slightly to bring forth from behind his shoulder the machine shaped like an asymmetrical crossbow, with a curved firing arm. “I made it to heighten my strengths and accommodate my weaknesses, but mostly it is tailored to the sort of prey I once hunted.” He indicated a spool on which whisper-thin disks were housed. “It fires three at a time, each one driving the previous ones deeper in. And it can be adapted as I have need—this one I developed to be able to pierce the hide of a dragon.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the reviewing stand. “Ashe is around here somewhere, no doubt. Perhaps I can test its efficiency later.”

Gwydion chuckled. “How did you adapt it to dragons specifically?”

“This one has an especially heavy recoil,” Achmed replied. “Dragon hide is as thick as stone. The disks are specially made as well; they are of rysin-steel, a metal that is extremely malleable when heated, which has been shrunk to a compact size by cold manufacture. Once inside the body and exposed to heat they swell in vast proportion with jagged edges, expanding the original damage many times over.” He turned the cwellan over lovingly. “I got many of the ideas from a weapon Gwylliam was working on before his death; I suppose he had his own problems with the dragon he was married to. The properties of fire and earth make the disks expand—that’s mostly what a dragon is inside, despite all the other elemental lore they possess.”

“You know it won’t work on Ashe,” Gwydion said humorously, trying to break his attention away from the humming sword hilt in his hands and failing. “He’s mostly water.”

Achmed stared down at the weapon in his hands.

“Hmmmm,” he said finally. “Back to the drawing board.”

Gwydion laughed. “You don’t need it against Ashe, anyway,” he said. “Even though you may argue, I know you are really allies. But I have seen your weapon in successful use—it was this cwellan that took Anwyn from the sky in the battle at the Moot, was it not?”

Achmed slung the cwellan again. “I hit her, and took off a claw or two, but the credit for that kill goes to Rhapsody,” he said, securing the cover beneath his robes. “She was in the dragon’s clutches; she carved her way out with Daystar Clarion. Once free, she called starfire down on Anwyn, then sealed her in her grave. But I suppose you could say I assisted—as did Anborn, at the cost of his legs.” He looked over his shoulder as trumpets blared, sudden and loud, in the distance. The Bolg king winced. “I assume that is your godfather’s subtle way of indicating your presence is needed.”

Gwydion nodded. “What should I do with this?” he asked anxiously, nodding toward Tysterisk.

Achmed shrugged. “It’s yours to use, to bear, to live with,” he said nonchalantly. “It should be with you upon your ascension to duke, assuming you wish to accept it. Remember, if you are going to take on the responsibility of such a sword, you will be expected to use it when needed, even at the cost of your duchy. But somehow I doubt that will be a problem for you. Get Anborn to instruct you in its use.” He turned to leave, then paused and looked back at the nervous young man. “It’s best to be ready. This is what I came to tell you, why I wanted to give the sword to you myself. The world in which you are about to claim a part is an uncertain place, but one thing can be predicted without fail—sooner or later, you will need to fight. You may as well have the best blade in your hand when you do. Just remember that you wield it; do not let the weapon wield you.”

Gwydion nodded and looked down at the hilt once more. As he stared at it, he thought he could see the blue-black outline of the blade against the brown oilcloth, gleaming dully, with tiny currents of wind swirling randomly within it. He continued to watch it in fascination until the trumpets blared again. Then he shook off his reverie and looked up.

“Thank you—” he said, but Achmed was already gone.

As Faron moved west, the winter was catching up with him.

Day into day his body became more melded to his mind; his hands and feet, once totally foreign and unwieldy, now served him with the same unconscious direction with which anyone else moved. His mind was still cloudy, still roiling in a sea of confused thoughts and the combined memories of an ancient soldier, an even more ancient demonic father, and the asexual creature he had once been.

The uninhabitable desert eventually had given way to steppes and dry grasslands, where only nomads and caravans passed. Faron had taken to hiding when such things came into view; his sun-deprived eyes were slowly gaining strength, and now he put them to use scanning the horizon for anything that moved. As he followed the sun across the sky he found that winter had hold of the places into which he was now coming. He had a vague recollection from his time as a soldier of snow, which stung the edges of his earth-hewn legs, but otherwise did not bother him. It gave him little hindrance, except that its presence added difficulty to his ability to hide.

Across the frost-blanched plains of upper Sorbold and into the southern province of Navarne he traveled, deeper and deeper into winter’s grasp.

His fragmented mind seething, bent on destruction.

22

When Achmed returned from visiting Gwydion Navarne, he came directly into the garden where he had left Rhapsody. As luck would have it, she was inside the buttery, preparing to return to the festival, so instead he was alone when he met up with the ambassador from the Sea Mages.

He stopped in his tracks, and stared over his veils at Jal’asee, his mismatched eyes sighting on the man as if he were leveling a cwellan at him.

“You lived,” he said accusatorily.

Jal’asee sighed and tucked his hands into his outer cloak.

“Yes,” he replied. “I am sorry about that.”

Achmed glanced around the garden for Rhapsody. “Well, at last you and I agree on something, Jal’asee,” he said shortly. He turned to leave, only to be stopped when the Sea Mage raised his hand.

“I have been waiting to see you for almost three months, Your Majesty,” he said in his interesting voice. “I beg you do me the honor of favoring me with your attention for a few moments, and then I will withdraw and allow you to enjoy the festivities.”

Achmed snorted. “Do be serious.”

Jal’asee’s face lost its natural expression of serenity. “Believe me, Your Majesty, what I have to say to you is very serious.”

“Then get on with it. I have more pressing matters to attend to, such as informing Rhapsody that should she ever invite us to the same event again I shall burn down her almost-completed house.”

“Did I hear my name being bantered about in disrespect?” the Lady Cymrian asked humorously upon entering the garden. “It must be that Achmed has returned.”

“Had I known you planned to ambush me with this academic, I would have gone directly home from my meeting with Gwydion Navarne,” Achmed said, the hostility in his voice unmistakable. “There are three types of people I despise, Rhapsody—Cymrians, priests, and academics. You should certainly know this by now.”

“I see no need to be rude to an ambassador from a sovereign nation who is also my guest,” said the Lady Cymrian tartly. “Perhaps you can at least hear the gentleman out, Achmed.”

“No need to defend my honor, m’lady,” said Jal’asee, a twinkle in his eye. “I have been fielding the Bolg king’s insults for millennia now.” He walked a few steps closer and tucked his hands into his sleeves, crossing his arms. “It is our understanding that you are seeking to rebuild the instrumentality in Gurgus Peak,” he said seriously.

Achmed sighed. “Perhaps I should just have sent a royal notice to be posted in every port of call, every judiciary, and every brothel from here to Argaut,” he said angrily. “Do yourself the favor of making a wise choice, Jal’asee; I didn’t seek your counsel about this originally because I do not care what your thoughts are on the matter. Please do me the favor, therefore, of not sharing them with me.”

“I have no choice in that matter, Your Majesty,” Jal’asee retorted. “That is the precise reason I was sent from Gaematria. The Supreme Council of the Sea Magistrate respectfully asks that you suspend all work on this project until such a time when—”

“Tell them by all means, I will do that,” sneered the Bolg king. “Their opinions are even more edifying to me than yours are.”

Jal’asee’s patience seemed to run suddenly thinner.

“You must heed this advice, Your Majesty.”

“Why?”

The ambassador glanced around the garden.

“Shall I leave?” Rhapsody asked, pointing to the gate. “I truly don’t mind.”

Both men shook their heads.

“I’m really not at liberty to go into the specifics, Your Majesty, but I believe you know the reason, or at least should be able to surmise it.”

Achmed stepped up to the ambassador and stared up into the tall man’s golden eyes.

“Tell me why, or go away.”

Jal’asee stared down at him seriously.

“Just remember the greatest gifts the earth holds, sire.”

Silence fell in the garden. Then Achmed turned and walked past Rhapsody.

“When you have time to speak to me alone, seek me out,” he said, heading for the garden entrance.

Jal’asee coughed politely. “You know, it’s a shame you chose to leave the study of healing behind for another profession. Your mentor had great faith in your abilities. You would have been a credit to Quieth Keep, perhaps one of the best ever to school there.”

Achmed spun angrily on his heel.

“Then I would be as dead as the rest of the innocents you lured to that place,” he said harshly. “You and I do not have the same definition of what constitutes ‘a shame.’ ”

He stalked out of the garden, glaring at Rhapsody as he left.

She stared after him as the gate slammed shut.

“Do you mind telling me what that was all about?” she asked Jal’asee incredulously. In all the time she had known him, she had never seen Achmed become so engaged in a conversation he had stated up front was of no interest to him. Achmed was quite talented at ignoring subjects, discussions, or people in whom he had no interest.

The Sea Mage sighed. “Many years ago, when he was a fairly young man, a terrible tragedy occurred at Quieth Keep, the place of scholarship I mentioned to you several months ago, where I taught,” he said solemnly. “Someone he apparently cared a great deal for—perhaps several such someones—did not survive the mishap. I take it he has never forgiven me.”

“So it would seem,” said Rhapsody. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to be, m’lady,” Jal’asee said. “Just because someone is rude and unreasonable does not mean that he is wrong.”

Gerald Owen stirred the boiling syrup in the large cauldron of black iron, ignoring the rising noise of the children and some excited adults who were anxiously awaiting the pouring of the next batch of Sugar Snow. He had been conveniently deaf to such noise for many years; Lord Stephen’s father had introduced the custom of drizzling hot liquid sugar onto clean snow that had been harvested on large trays to cool the caramel syrup into crisp, hard squiggles of sweetness that had come to be hallmarks of the winter carnival. Lord Stephen had added the extra sin of dipping the hard candy in chocolate and almond cream; Gerald Owen was the festival’s traditional candy cook, as well as the guardian of the secret recipes.

The elderly chamberlain of Haguefort finally signaled the readiness of the syrup to be poured; he stepped back out of the way, allowing the assistant cooks to position the pot as the snow boards were brought forward. He wiped his sugary hands on his heavy linen apron and crossed his arms, allowing himself a small smile of satisfaction.

The solstice festival, despite his misgivings, seemed to be going well. Owen had served the family for two generations, and it gave him great satisfaction to see the traditions Lord Stephen had cherished being carried on by his son, whom Owen had cared for since his birth.

He was secretly glad that Gwydion was about to take on his title in full; the presence of the Lord and Lady Cymrian, however consoling it had been in the aftermath of the loss of the duke, was an uncomfortable fit in the small keep of Haguefort. The heads of the overarching Alliance belonged in a more central, grander estate; from what he had heard of it, Highmeadow was at least central, if not particularly grand. But Haguefort had been built originally as a stronghold for the families who had settled the wilds of the province of Navarne early in the Cymrian Age, and had always been a modest keep, not a palace or even a castle. Once it went back to being the seat of a duke, not the home of imperial rulers, life would be closer to normal.

He sat down wearily on a cloth-covered barrel, suddenly winded, and watched the mad tussle of children vying for the fragile sweets. Gerald Owen, like the duke he served, was of Cymrian lineage, long diluted, and had lived many years more than the human friends with whom he had been raised and schooled, now long dead. He had watched many of the parents and grandparents of the children competing for his candy do the same thing in festivals past; there was a cyclical harmony to it all, this sense that life was passing by for others faster than it was for him, that left him occasionally melancholy.

The grip of a hand on his shoulder brought him out of his reverie. He looked up, squinting in the sunlight above him, to see the face of Haguefort’s soon-to-be master smiling down at him.

“Is it almost time, Gerald?” Gwydion Navarne asked.

Owen rose quickly, the spring back in his step.

“Yes, indeed, sir, if you are ready to begin.”

“I will be, once you have checked me over to make certain I haven’t missed anything. Once I pass muster with you, I will feel ready.”

Gerald Owen took the young duke by the arm and led him back into the Great Hall, where a table had been laid with the tools for his final preparations.

“Not to worry for a moment, young sir,” he said fondly. “We will have you turned out in a manner that will make you and everyone who loves you proud this day.”

Ashe, true to his word, kept the ceremony by which Gwydion was invested brief and elegant. Rhapsody watched as the boy she had claimed as her first honorary grandson four years before, bowing at her feet, raised his eyes with a new wisdom in them, the wisdom of a young man now bearing the mantle of his birthright squarely on his shoulders. Her heart swelled with pride at his calm mien, the prudent and respectful words of acceptance he spoke. After Ashe handed him the ceremonial keys to Haguefort and Stephen’s prized signet ring engraved with the crest of the Navarne duchy, Gwydion had turned and thanked the assemblage, then bade them to return to the festival, citing the sledge race trials that were about to begin.

As the crowd began milling back to the tents and the fields of competition, she felt a strong, bony hand clamp down on her elbow.

“If you are ready now,” Achmed’s sandy voice said quietly in her ear, “we have something important to discuss.”

Without turning around, Rhapsody nodded, allowing Achmed to maneuver her out of the crowd of excited people shouting congratulatory salutes, to a quiet enclave inside of the keep.

“Tell me,” she said tersely as soon as they were out of earshot of Haguefort’s servants. “And tell me why it was necessary for you to be so ungodly unpleasant to one of our most distinguished guests.”

“It was necessary to be unpleasant to him because I don’t have any other temperament,” Achmed replied irritably. “You of all people should know that by now. He’s an arse-rag, and I have very little patience with arse-rags. Now, as for what I need from you, and how you can help the Bolglands, do you remember this?”

He handed her a thin locked box fashioned in steel and sealed around the edges with beeswax.

Rhapsody’s brows drew together. “Yes; wasn’t this the container for an ancient schematic of Gwylliam’s?”

“Indeed. And I need it translated, completely and accurately.”

“I believe I did this for you once before,” Rhapsody said, her own ire rising. She opened the box, and carefully moved the top document, written in Old Cymrian, aside from the sheaf of even more ancient parchment below it, graphed carefully in musical script. “Oh, yes, I remember this poem now:

Achmed nodded impatiently.

“I understand the poem,” he said. “It’s the schematic and all the corresponding documents I need translated, and carefully.”

“When?”

The Bolg king considered. “What are you doing until supper?”

“I was actually planning to attend the sledge races,” Rhapsody replied archly. “And after that I thought I might attend the rest of the winter carnival, thank you. What sort of time do you think this kind of thing takes, Achmed? I can assure you, there are many days’, if not weeks’, worth of translation time here. This is more than just musical script; it requires the composition to be played, and to be referenced in later parts of the piece. It’s not something I can sit down and do after noonmeal.”

“I am willing to wait until teatime,” Achmed said wryly.

“You will have to wait until teatime next year,” Rhapsody answered. “Additionally, didn’t I tell you at the time you last showed me this that I worry about your rash experimentation with ancient lore?”

“You did, which is why I have decided not to experiment, but rather to get a careful and accurate translation, then assess for myself what to do with the information. Surely you can’t object to that?”

She thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose not.”

“Good. Then perhaps when this folderol is finished, you can turn your attention to this. As I’ve explained, if it works the way the one I knew of in the old world worked, it might be precisely what we need to keep the Bolglands, and consequently the Alliance, free from subversion or attack. Your ward, the Sleeping Child, all your Bolg grandchildren, and the ‘people’ of Ylorc are certainly worth that, aren’t they?”

“Of course,” said Rhapsody uncertainly.

“Well, just in case you still think this is ill advised, know this: While I was off pulling your charming arse out of a sea cave, my kingdom was being infiltrated by the mistress of the assassin’s guild of Yarim, the very same folks you talked me into helping by having the Bolg drill them a new wellspring for Entudenin, for which we have not received payment in full, by the way. Consequently, said guildmistress not only destroyed Gurgus Peak, but also poisoned a good deal of the kingdom with picric acid.”

“Oh, gods!” Rhapsody exclaimed in horror.

Achmed considered. “No, I don’t believe she got them, but it may have only been by accident if she didn’t. Suffice to say that at least a thousand of the Bolg have died or been terribly ill with symptoms like dysentery, bleeding out the eyes, bleeding internally—”

“All right, that’s enough,” Rhapsody said, fighting back nausea and losing. She ran to the nearest potted plant and retched.

Achmed waited smugly until she returned.

“So I trust I can count on your help in this matter?”

Rhapsody sighed, still pale and woozy.

“I will do what I can, Achmed, though I can’t promise that I will be able to give you the information that you seek,” she said, leaning against the enclave wall. “But if it is of any encouragement, know that I expect to have some time to work on it very shortly.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I need to consult with Ashe and see if he agrees first, but it’s my hope to leave and spend some time with Elynsynos shortly.”

Achmed’s eyes widened. “You are going to a dragon’s lair while pregnant?”

“Yes, actually. She is the only one I can think of who truly knows what it is like to be carrying a wyrmkin child. So I will make you an offer: If Ashe agrees I will take the manuscript with me and work on it when the nausea allows. I will do what I can with it, though again I make you no guarantees. You, in turn, will bring Krinsel to me at Thaw, so that I can keep her with me until my baby is delivered.”

She could tell that the Bolg king was smiling behind his veils.

“So you trust yourself to a Bolg midwife before all the vaunted healers of Roland?”

“In a heartbeat. Do we have an agreement?”

“We do,” Achmed said. “Just make certain you hold up your end of the bargain.”

Faron stared down in silence at the merriment below him.

His awareness did not include the concept of holidays; having been kept in the dark basement of the Judiciary all of his life in Argaut, he was confused and upset by the noise and celebration taking place just beyond the hill on which he was standing.

23

“A good solstice to ya, Brookins.”

The burly fisherman broke into a gap-toothed smile but did not pause from tying his lines.

“Glad to see you’re feelin’ better, and a good solstice to you as well, Quayle,” he said, watching the snow in the distance whip about in the wind that rippled the water below the docks. The warmth of the ocean kept the air clear here, on the point of the jetty south of town. He winched the last of the ropes, then pulled his hat down over his red ears. “You up to helping me and Stark haul the traps in?”

Quayle wiped the mucus from the tip of his red nose with the back of his worsted sleeve, then dried his similarly red eyes with it as well.

“Let the lobsters wait another day,” he muttered grumpily as Stark, another dockmate, approached, dragging the crates for the catch. “A storm’s brewin’; you can tell by the sky it’s gonna be a cracker.”

Stark spat into the ocean and shook his head.

“Been two days since baitin’ already,” he said, his voice scratchy from the wind and disuse. Stark rarely spoke; when out in the harbor with both him and Quayle, Brookins occasionally forgot Stark was even in the boat. “An’ a whole village waitin’ to eat ’em tonight.”

“He’s right,” Brookins said to Quayle. “You go home and get yourself a grog; we’ll haul in.”

“You’re daft to go out now; it’s almost sunset.” Quayle jammed his hands inside his sleeves, as if they were a lady’s muff. “Don’t want to be spending the holidays consoling your widows.”

Stark scowled and climbed into the boat.

“Go back to bed,” he said. “Come on, Brookins. My supper’s waiting.”

Brookins looked from Quayle to Stark, then back to Quayle again.

“He’s right,” he said finally. “Get some rest. Stark and me will split the take from this catch with you; you baited, after all. We’ll celebrate the holiday tomorrow, then have a whole lovely catch to pull in the next day. I’ll drop you by a few for your pot on the way home.” Quayle nodded gloomily. Brookins lit the oil lantern that lighted their prow, then set out into the harbor with Stark.

For a long time Quayle stood, watching the bobbing light on the waves as his friends emptied the traps of their catch. The breeze whipped off the waves and stung, sending sand and salt spray into his eyes. Finally, when the boat’s light was too far out to see anymore he turned his attention north to the twinkling candles that shone in the windows of Jeremy’s Landing, and the bonfires that were beginning to light the village square in anticipation of the solstice.

Merry music began to drift toward him on gusts of the icy wind. Quayle’s bitterness at the thought of lost profit drifted away with it, and his humor began to rise in the anticipation of the celebration at hand. He was too far away to catch the aroma of the stewpots yet, but if he hurried, he could be there in time to sample each of the entries in the village’s contest. And, as on every solstice night, there would be bread and ale and singing, with the promise of other pleasures of the flesh later, in warm brothels or cold stables. The season’s excitement seeped into his nostrils along with the cold salty wind, chasing his malady away. He unhooded his lantern, turned away from the dock, and started across the salty marsh dunes at the edge of the bay, dark as pitch in the winter night.

The dunes seem higher tonight, he thought; the tiny beams from the distant candles vanished as he stepped into a swale in the marsh. He pulled his hat brim lower to shield his eyes from the wind, then cupped his hand around the battered lantern, trying to keep the wind from snuffing it.

Before him in the blackness the frost-bleached ground seemed to heave, then rise until it towered into the sky.

Quayle stopped, night blind. His lungs seemed suddenly full and heavy, as if the chill he had caught a few days before had returned, stealing his breath. Shakily he held up the lantern.

In front of him the dune shifted again, sand and marsh grass raining from it as if it were a waterfall. The dim light of his lamp flashed on what appeared to be a giant statue, taller than himself by more than half, a primitive-looking man clad in armor, shedding sand in great wispy waves. Its blind eyes seemed to be fixed on him.

“God’s drawers,” Quayle whispered. “What is this?”

The statue in the sand did not move.

Quayle swallowed hard, his throat sore and suddenly without spit. He tried to imagine, with a mind clouded by shock and illness and anticipation of frolic, how this statue could have come to wash up on the beach, and especially how it could have happened without his hearing of it. Jeremy’s Landing was a tiny community, many generations of families who plied the sea for a living, selling their catch in nearby towns, all interdependent upon one another. Each event, no matter how insignificant, was reported breathlessly from hut to hut; how he could have missed this news was incomprehensible to him.

He shook his head, then turned northward, and took a step toward the village.

The statue’s head moved in unison with his.

Quayle gasped, the lantern in his hand shaking violently.

He held the lantern up higher in the wind. There was something malevolent in the statue’s stance, as if seething anger had been sculpted into it by the artisan who carved it. Quayle did not know how he knew this, but the tension, the fury was palpable. He leaned forward and stared at the figure’s eyes.

Then reared back in horror as those eyes stared back, gleaming with hatred behind milky cataracts.

The lantern fell from his hand onto the sandy marsh and went out. Blackness swallowed Quayle.

In that blackness, he felt certain that the titanic figure before him was breathing.

Or moving.

Blind, Quayle turned and dashed to his left, running hell-bent for the lights of the village. He had gone a half-dozen steps before he was lifted from the slippery ground up into the air with a force that stripped the breath from him.

A sickening crack resonated in his ears; dully Quayle realized it was his pelvis shattering under the crushing weight that had clamped around him. He tried to scream, but no air would come into his lungs. All he would do was open and close his mouth silently in terror as he was dragged forward in the air, until he was a hairsbreadth away from the terrible eyes, black with a milky sheen, staring at him in the darkness.

Quayle’s mind, never the keenest in the world, disconnected from his body. The unreality of what was happening was too much to comprehend; instead he decided that he must still be in the throes of the fever that had gripped him with the onset of his chill. I’m still in bed, having nightmares, he thought as the titan turned him onto his back, until the stone fingers gouged through his underbelly and began digging around in his viscera. Then the agony and the spinning lack of air hit him at once, and he began to shudder, the only bodily function he was capable of.

The statue ripped through his intestines, searching, then pulled its bloody fingers out of his abdomen and pushed aside the folds of his tunic. It seized the tattered scale that Quayle kept tucked inside his shirt, dropping the fisherman as it raised the object up to the light of the moon, the beams dancing off its ridges in rainbow ripples.

As the darkness started to close in, Quayle had only the momentary sight of the titanic being above him, an expression of almost piteous joy evident on its rough-featured face, before the statue turned and brought its foot down on his face, splitting his skull like the husk of a soft-shelled crab.

The pieces of him were found in the morning, first by the ptarmigans and gulls, then by Brookins, who stained the sand with all the liquid his body held at the sight.

For the first time in as long as his cloudy mind could remember, Faron felt joy.

No longer a formless creature trapped inside a statue, he felt the pieces of his divergent identity start to fall into place; he was a man now, a titan formed of living earth and fire, the son of a demon, blessed and cursed with the memories of ancient battles and conquests that he did not understand.

The green scale hummed in his hand, the light of the moon rippling off it like seawater flowing over the edge of the world. Reverently he pressed his treasure against his face, feeling once again the vibration that had resonated deep within him for so long. He had mourned its absence by becoming weaker, withering; now the strength of spirit came flowing back, sparking inside him. He slid it into place with the other three, forming a gleaming fan of color in his stone hand; the warmth they emitted coursed through him, filling him with something akin to bliss.

But he was still missing something.

Distantly he heard the roar of the sea; it was a sound that had struck great fear into Faron from the time his father had brought him forth from the quiet darkness of the cavernous tunnels in which he had lived to sail across the world to this place. His father had been chasing a woman, a woman whose hair he had saved and carried with him, tied with a moldering ribbon. Faron had scryed for her with the scales, and had found her. They had come to this new, frightening land, only to have his father die and their ship scuttled in the ocean.

He stared at that ocean now, shrinking from the might of it. Slowly he walked to the beach, where the foaming waves were chasing up on the sand. He stood, staring at the glittering green scale until those waves touched his bare stone feet; the sensation nauseated him, filling him with fear, and he shrank away, back to the dry land, where he could feel the warmth of the earth once more.

Then, his treasure returned to him, he turned slowly in the night and walked away from the pounding sea, leaving the noise of Jeremy’s Landing and the solstice celebration behind him.

24

The closing banquet of the winter carnival started out festively, and ended even more so.

With the final races complete, the last of the competitions’ prizes awarded, and the final round of choral singing ended with enthusiastic participation, such that the white fields of Navarne had rung with the sound of it, all without any noticeable mishap, the Lord and Lady Cymrian, the two Navarne children, Anborn, and the household staff had wearily sat down to a late supper, reviewing the final arrangements and determining the festival’s success.

“Two drunken fights leading to fisticuffs; otherwise, all in all, a fairly peaceful event, I would say,” Ashe commented, running his thumb over his wife’s hand. Rhapsody smiled in response, assenting. “And Navarne has a new duke now, with full participation in the council of Roland, which bodes well for the province. I think we can cautiously term this carnival a success.” Gerald Owen, the last of the servants to leave the table, smiled tiredly and nodded, gathering the plates and withdrawing from the room, followed by Melisande, who was on her way to bed.

Anborn belched loudly, deadening all sound in the room.

“Indeed. Any party where no one of significance gets killed can certainly be seen as a good one,” he said. “I’d like to offer my thanks to the Lady for her kind hospitality, and make known that I will be taking my leave shortly.” Those around the table nodded in assent; such an announcement was never unexpected, as Anborn rarely remained in one place very long.

“This time, however, I would like to issue an invitation to the new duke of Navarne to accompany me in my travels.”

“Where are you going?” Ashe asked, taking a sip from his glass of spiced cider.

The Lord Marshal waited until the door had closed behind Gerald Owen to answer.

“Sorbold. I am still troubled by things I have heard on the wind from there; I suspect it is worth investigating.”

Ashe nodded in agreement. “I’m sure whatever information you gather will be highly useful, Uncle. I have been concerned about some of the reports from the shipping trade there; we’ve been watching the actions of the new regent emperor since his selection by the Scales, but thus far, at least on the surface, he seems to be conducting a measured regent year. I have had some doubt expressed about him from people I trust, so whatever you can determine will be valuable.”

“Only if you choose to act on what I tell you, Gwydion,” Anborn said darkly. “I’ve been warning you for some time that war is coming, and while you’ve taken some of my suggestions to heart, I would like to see you moving more aggressively to reinforce both the infantry and the navy.”

“I’ve placed an order for a dozen new warships, built in Manosse and outfitted in Gaematria, this very week, Uncle,” Ashe said mildly. “And the shipments of horses for the Alliance cavalry have been arriving regularly from Marincaer; training is well under way. I am taking what you have said, and what I have seen, to heart, rest assured.” He squeezed Rhapsody’s hand again; her capture had been sufficient to make him see Anborn’s warnings as timely.

“So we would be going to spy, then?” Gwydion asked, barely able to contain his excitement.

“Gwydion, an invested duke does not spy on a sovereign nation,” Rhapsody said reproachfully.

“No, indeed not,” Anborn agreed. “He makes a visit of state, but without telling anyone, and watches from places where he cannot be seen.”

“Forgive me,” Gwydion grinned. “Is that all right, then, Ashe? May I accompany Anborn?”

“That’s for you to decide,” Ashe said, draining his tankard. “You are fully invested; your decisions are your own now. It probably is a good idea for you to make an official visit of state at the beginning of your reign, anyway—but I think you might wish to limit that visit to Tyrian or the Nonaligned States, which are safer havens for you, it would seem, and travel through Sorbold only as a means to get there.” He ignored Anborn’s withering glance. “I would also caution you about remaining away from Navarne for long; as the duke now, you need to be available to keep the province running.” He saw the young man’s face fall, and hurried to finish his thought. “But you have inherited an elemental sword, and need time to travel with it, to train. There is no better teacher than Anborn. I think it’s a good use of your first weeks as duke—and I will mind Navarne while you are gone. Then you can return and assume your full duties.” He turned to his wife. “What say you, darling?”

Rhapsody folded her hands.

“If you are going to venture forth, those are good reasons to do so—the official and unofficial ones—and you will be in good company,” she said. “To that end, I’d like to note that I desire to leave Navarne for some time as well.”

The three men at the table stared at her.

“I have been feeling ill and weak for some time, and it is disturbing to me,” she continued, her face flushed from the weight of their stares. “Something Jal’asee said before Achmed left made a lot of sense to me—it seems to me that since my situation is unique, and somewhat chancy—it would make sense for me to go and spend some time with Elynsynos, to see if there is something I can learn from her experiences with wyrmkin pregnancy, or just to visit with her. There is something drowsy and comforting about being in her cave, and I have not seen her for quite a long time.”

“How long a visit are you talking about, Aria?” Ashe asked, trying to not allow the reaction he was experiencing internally to become rampant.

Rhapsody shrugged. “I don’t really know. I suppose it depends on how I’m feeling. I have no idea how long my confinement is going to be, given that your own mother carried you for close to three years. I think I might like to stay at least until Thaw. But I am not much good in Haguefort; I cannot even properly look after Melly, being ill so much. I am looking for a way to get better, and I believe that the search for the answer as to how to do that may reside in the dragon’s cave.”

She turned her attention away from the others and to Ashe.

“We have talked about this before; what is your decision, Sam? Is it all right with you?”

Ashe choked back his rising gorge. No, the dragon in his blood whispered. My treasure. Stay.

“If that’s what you want, Aria; if you think you will be safer or more comfortable with Elynsynos, I will gladly take you there.”

“Thank you,” Rhapsody said, her green eyes shining. “You can always come to visit me from time to time.” She looked at Anborn, whose face betrayed his disapproval, and said quickly, “Remember, Lord Marshal, should anything happen to you in Sorbold where you might need assistance, you know the Kinsman call. I’m sure I would hear it, even in the dragon’s cave, and come to your aid, if the wind is willing to carry me as it does other Kinsmen.”

Anborn chuckled in spite of himself. “Now, that’s a pretty thought. The three known Kinsmen on the continent—one is lame, the second is pregnant and sick as a dog, and the third—well, the third is a Bolg.”

“Indeed,” said Gwydion Navarne. “But in my view, if I were ever in need, any of those three Kinsmen, however compromised, would be a great relief to have around.”

“You’re right about that,” said Ashe, rising from the table and helping Rhapsody out of her chair. “And as long as the three of you remember to call for aid should the need arise, I will at least be somewhat comforted until you are home again.”

Two mornings after the festival ended, and the last of the stragglers had made their way out of the grounds and back to their homes, when the last of the debris and detritus had been cleared away, Anborn and Gwydion Navarne saddled their mounts and left on their mission together.

Rhapsody had been fighting back tears all morning, helping Ashe check Gwydion’s provisions and sitting at breakfast with him and Melisande, who felt no need to hold any tears back and instead allowed them to roll down her porcelain cheeks into her clotted cream.

“I think I am finally understanding what you went through all those times when the people you loved left you at home and went off to do things they assured you were important, promising to come back,” she said to her adopted grandson after Melisande had left the table. “You want to believe so badly what they say is true, but your dread prevents it. Additionally, you can’t give voice to that worry, for fear that your doubt will somehow be taken as a lack of faith, or bring bad luck. So you put on a brave smile and tell your loved one to hurry home safely, all the while dreading the moment they leave your sight.”

“That would be correct,” Gwydion said sympathetically. “I’m sorry to have made you experience it.”

“No need to be,” the Lady Cymrian replied. “Do what you need to do, and come home safely. I know that Anborn will guard you with his life.”

“And I will guard him with mine.”

Rhapsody resisted the urge to smile. “I know that as well,” she said.

A slamming sound startled them. The young duke stood as the doors opened and the litter bearers entered, carrying the Cymrian hero, who was snarling at Jal’asee as they came through the door.

“No, I did not try the infernal contraption, bugger it all,” Anborn said, gesturing contemptuously at the Ancient Seren. “And as I have told you over and over again, I have no intention of doing so, unless the bloody thing can be used to hone weapons or ferment ale. I don’t want my brother’s damnable pity, or his largesse. You can tell him that rather than its intended use, I plan to donate it to a whorehouse and suggest that they use it on their guests who find it intriguing.”

Jal’asee consulted his cards, then pulled one out of the sheaf.

“Hmmm, whorehouse, whorehouse, whorehouse. Ah! Here it is. ‘Then at least I know you will be getting some use out of it occasionally.’ ”

“Are you ready yet?” Anborn demanded of Gwydion Navarne, glaring daggers at the Sea Mage.

“I will be in just a few more moments, Lord Marshal,” the new duke said, bending to kiss Rhapsody on the cheek. “I need to say my goodbyes to Gerald Owen and Melly, and then I will be prepared to go.”

“Get on with it, then,” Anborn said gruffly. Gwydion nodded and took his leave.

The Lord Marshal gestured at his bearers. “Withdraw to the edge of the room; I wish to speak privately with the Lady Cymrian.” The servants bowed and walked away. “And you, Jal’asee—tell my miscreant brother that the next time he wants to make something for me, he might want to be certain it is something that would not squash him flat should it drop on him unexpectedly next time he comes to visit.”

“I will relay the message,” said the Sea Mage dryly.

“Good. Now go away.”

Rhapsody and the Seren ambassador exchanged a sympathetic glance; then Jal’asee bowed slightly and withdrew from the room.

“You know, it’s a shame that you chose to go into soldiering,” Rhapsody said, a sour edge mixing with the humor in her voice. “You really would have made a fine diplomat.”

“Indeed, the finest sort of diplomat is the one that is plainspoken about his goals and intentions, and where he stands. I don’t think anyone could seriously accuse me of vacillating on my positions, or obfuscating my statements.”

“Certainly can’t disagree with you there.”

Anborn’s azure eyes twinkled. “Well, to that end, I have to ask you if you are still planning your ill-considered visit to the lair of Elynsynos.”

“Yes,” said Rhapsody, taken a little aback. “Why would you think that I had changed my mind?”

Anborn shrugged. “I have no reason to believe that good sense would suddenly strike you; it has never made an appearance up until now. I had just hoped against hope that it would.”

“What is your objection to my plans?” Rhapsody asked.

“For the life of me I cannot imagine why you would want to go sit in a cave with a vapid beast who might accidentally incinerate you should she get a head cold. Is my wretched nephew’s company even more dull than I had imagined?”

“You have never met Elynsynos,” Rhapsody said tartly, her ire rising. “I don’t appreciate you speaking about her, or Ashe, in that manner.”

The general chuckled. “Elynsynos is my grandmother.”

“So perhaps you should take the time to come to know her. She’s fascinating.”

Anborn shrugged. “Perhaps. Maybe someday when I have nothing better on which to spend my time. It appears I value mine more than you do,” he said, a playful note in his voice, but a serious look in his eyes. “Stay here, Rhapsody, where Gwydion can take care of you. This pregnancy was ill advised; do not make it even more dangerous by hiding away in a dragon’s cave where no one can find you to help if you need it. At least at Haguefort you have access to the very best healers in Roland.”

Rhapsody shook her head. “To my knowledge, none of those healers has ever delivered the child of a Lirin mother and a dragon father,” she said lightly. “It’s a somewhat exclusive experience. There are few in the world who have ever been involved in such a pregnancy, and Elynsynos is one of them. She conceived Manwyn, Rhonwyn, and your mother while in human form, and could not then change back to her wyrm form until they were born, so she has had the experience of carrying babies of different blood in her body and giving birth to them. I hope to learn a great deal from her, and perhaps fare better in the delivery than I would have otherwise.”

“What can she possibly teach you? She was a serpentine beast of ancient race, an egg-layer that took a Seren form, mated with a Seren man, and carried triplets in a body that itself was foreign. That is not your situation.”

“No, it’s not,” Rhapsody admitted. “But as far as I know, there is only one other person who had a closer situation to mine, whose natural form was human, and that was your mother.” She sighed deeply. “I wish that events had worked out differently with Anwyn, that I could have come to know her and learn from her, as my grandmother-in-law. I wish she could come to know her grandchild. If only I had not gained her ire, perhaps—” Her voice broke off in midword.

Anborn’s face was bloodlessly pale, his azure eyes gleaming with wild intensity.

“Do not ever speak those words again,” he choked, his voice raw. “You are a Namer; may the All-God forbid that your wish ever be granted just because you were foolish enough to misuse your power.”

Rhapsody stared at the Lord Marshal in amazement. He was more visibly upset than she ever remembered seeing him, even in the heat of battle.

“Anborn—”

His hand shot out and roughly covered her mouth. “Stop—do not utter another sound.” He glanced around behind him, then above, as if listening for something in the wind. “You do not know what you are saying.” His voice dropped in tone to just above a whisper. “If there is anything in this life that you have to be grateful for, it is that the misbegotten hellkite is dead, rotten into coal in her ash-covered grave, and therefore will never know your child, or that you even have one. She was the absolutely last entity on the face of this earth that you would want to seek maternal advice from; trust me on this.”

His hand trembled as it cupped her lips.

Rhapsody’s emerald eyes, wide with surprise, blinked above his fingers. Then her expression resolved into one of more calm, and she placed her hand over his and pressed his hand to her lips, then gently pulled it from her face.

“All right, Anborn,” she said quietly. “I believe you.”

Her eyes searched his face, trying to ascertain the reason for the intensity of his alarm. She knew that Anborn had led his father’s armies against his mother’s in the Cymrian War, and doubtless that had given him opportunity to see Anwyn’s brutality at close range. But the war had been over for more than four hundred years; the general seemed to have made peace with other old adversaries and buried his enmity in all other matters. The strength of his reaction confounded her.

After a moment’s staring at each other, she still had found nothing tenable, so she smiled, hoping to diffuse his mood. The wildness in the general’s eyes seemed to pass, and he stared at her with a new clarity.

“It’s time I got started,” he said finally, reaching over the side of his chair for his crutches, pulling them into his lap. “Young Gwydion will be waiting; he’s already champing at the bit.” He continued to watch Rhapsody for a moment longer, then leaned forward.

“I have one final thing I want to say to you,” he said, his voice firm but calm again. “Just in the event I don’t return.”

Rhapsody went pale. “Don’t even think that, let alone say it,” she said.

Anborn smiled slightly. “It’s a possibility that occurs every time one leaves another’s presence. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes. But I don’t like the way it comes out of your mouth. When I said it, it was a reminder to tell the people you love how much they matter to you. When you say it, it feels like goodbye.”

“It’s meant to be neither; I just wish to pass along to the only Lirin Namer I know something that I have never said to another person, for the sake of history. Both of my parents were selfish, misguided monarchs that allowed a petty disagreement and their own thirst for power to plunge a continent into war and destroy the civilization their people had built from nothing. There is an element so avaricious, so self-important, about this that it can only be ascribed as evil—both of them.”

He leaned closer, so that his words, spoken softly, could be clearly heard.

“And while there are those who would discount what I say as biased, or self-serving, I swear to you, Rhapsody, that while Gwylliam, my father, may have been a man whose selfishness made him evil, my mother was wicked, malevolent, on a much deeper level. Llauron might disagree, were he to appear from the ether, or whatever elemental state he currently lounges about in, because he always took her part, but despite what my brother might say, I can tell you from firsthand experience that my mother was evil incarnate. She was soulless—she had been cursed with the ability to see only into the Past, for all intents and purposes, and she was reminded constantly of the wrongs that had been done to her, the slights and the betrayals, those injuries which good men and women put behind them and bury in what went before so that they might move on. Perhaps anyone so afflicted would also have turned wicked. But Anwyn had a ruthlessness that came from a deeper place. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was she that allowed the demon that you and your friends vanquished to grow in power, to escape notice for centuries as it sowed the seeds of its destructive plans. But I know more—much more. And I can tell you that there has been nothing in my experience more close to gazing directly into the Vault of the Underworld than looking into my mother’s eyes. May she putrefy in that Vault forever.”

He signaled to his bearers and was carried from the room, leaving Rhapsody watching him go in stunned silence.

25

Elynsynos’s lair was exactly as Rhapsody remembered it.

The journey with Ashe had been much easier than the first one they had made to this place together. Then they did not trust each other; the land was rife with hidden evil, in the grip of an unseen F’dor, causing even those who were allies to be suspicious of one another. Now, as they returned to the hidden cave set in a hollow in the hillside near a small woodland lake, lost in the wonder of love and impending parenthood, the Lord and Lady Cymrian found that sweet memories were all that remained of that first journey, the mistrust and acrimony lost to history.

The lake at the base of the hill was frozen, its crystalline ice reflecting the trees that lined it like a mirror.

From the depths of that cave a voice sounded as they approached, a voice that held the timbres of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass simultaneously.

Hello, Pretty. You’ve brought your husband and your baby. How lovely.

Rhapsody chuckled. “Hello, Elynsynos. May we enter?”

Yes, of course. Come in.

Together Ashe and Rhapsody followed the winding path down into the dragon’s lair.

The great wyrm, matriarch of all that lived on the continent, was waiting in her horde of glittering coins, chests of treasure and jewels, and artifacts recovered from a jealous sea—tridents and masts, figureheads from lost ships, rudders and wheels formed into chandeliers with a thousand candleless flames. As always, Rhapsody struggled not to become entranced by her eyes, prisms of colors and hypnotic light scored with the same vertical pupils that could be seen in Ashe’s eyes. Those enchanting eyes were dancing with the light of excitement.

The great beast lifted herself from the salty water of the lake that filled the bottom of her horde, her gleaming scales and enormous, serpentine body fluid as the wind. Elynsynos had long ago given up her physical form and existed in a purely elemental state, in much the same way that her grandson Llauron, Ashe’s father, had chosen to do.

Have you come to visit, as you promised, Pretty? the wyrm asked, settling down on the cave floor.

“Indeed,” Rhapsody said. “I am hoping to learn about carrying a wyrmkin child from you, and to find a way to feel better while doing it.”

How do you feel now? the great beast asked.

Rhapsody considered; the nausea had vanished from the moment she walked into the cave, lulled by the rhythmic sloshing of the small salt sea. While the darkness and closeness of the place reminded her of the Root, there was something about the love in it that seemed to keep the fear she was sometimes consumed by underground at bay. The sea treasures were signs of the dragon’s love of her lost Seren sailor, Merithyn the Explorer, who had found this place a millennium ago and had inadvertently started the dynasty that would build and destroy the continent.

And was rebuilding it now.

“Better,” she said. “Almost well.”

The wyrm regarded her with an expression of mixed fondness and concern.

“Will you take care of my wife for me for a little while, Great-grandmother?” Ashe asked, helping Rhapsody into a hammock that had been fixed to the stone wall by a trident thrust into the rock of the cave.

Of course, the dragon said, manipulating the wind as its voice. Have you chosen a name for the child?

The expectant parents looked at each other.

“We have discussed one, but we wanted to see what the baby looked and seemed like first,” Rhapsody said.

Very well, said Elynsynos. As long as you understand that the child will need a name in order to be born.

“Er—no, I hadn’t realized that,” Rhapsody said.

A dragon emerges from the egg in an elemental state, said Elynsynos. Because wyrms contain mostly Earth lore, but each of the other elements as well, whatever name is given will largely determine what the child is like. So choose well; many mother dragons are grumpy after egg-laying, and the names they give their offspring when they hatch yield even grumpier wyrm adults.

“Will that be the case for our baby?” Ashe asked, sitting down beside an enormous pile of rysin coins, forged of a blue metal found deep in the mountains. “He or she won’t be full wyrm—I am actually hoping that since his or her blood will be so dilute, it will yield a low draconic tendency.”

The great beast shrugged, a gesture that made Rhapsody giggle.

Every beast is different, Elynsynos said. It’s impossible to know what the combinations of blood will produce. When you consider, there really are only a few known examples of wyrmkin in the world, and all that I know of are related to me. My three daughters, Manwyn, Rhonwyn, and Anwyn, are first-generation wyrmkin; of them, only Anwyn reproduced. The only other living wyrmkin I know of are Anwyn’s three sons, Edwyn, Llauron, and Anborn, and, of course, yourself, Pretty’s Husband. All of you are different, though there are some family traits that are consistent. What this child will be like, who can say? He or she will be like himself, or herself.

Ashe smiled at his great-grandmother. “Wise words—and we will cherish our child, whatever he or she is like. I just hope you are willing to help instruct this child in the use of dragon lore; no one did that for me, and I think it would have been useful to help understand this second nature, this nonhuman side.”

The great beast snorted.

Dragon nature is straightforward, Pretty’s Husband, she said with an injured air. It is human blood that makes wyrmkin inconsistent.

Dragons are protective of their land, because they must be. We are the last guardians of the primordial earth; its lore is extant within us as it is within no other creature. We alone understand the stakes of death, the finality of ending, because we do not have souls as other creatures do. No dragon would ever consider killing another dragon, no matter how much he hated the beast, because we understand the need for our race to remain intact. This is a lore that is older than me, is older than all of us. But whether wyrmkin have the sense of it, I do not know. I suspect that Anwyn’s sons had it—they never took the initiative to kill each other, or their mother, when they could have, particularly Llauron. But Anwyn—I do not know if she would have held to the dragon ways if they did not suit her purposes. The dragon eyed Ashe, causing prismatic flashes of light to dance over the coins scattered throughout the cave. And the books of history are not written about you yet, either. We will have to see if you remain faithful to the draconic code, or if the mix in your blood leads you elsewhere.

“I have blood on my hands, it’s true,” Ashe said, his voice melancholy. “As far as I know, I have never killed one of my own kind. But had I been given the chance to take my grandmother from the sky as she strafed the Cymrian Council in dragon form, or when she took my wife into the sky with her, I would have ripped her heart out without a second thought. Blessedly, Rhapsody did it for me, but I cannot say that I mourn her passing. She was a bitter, vicious, bloodthirsty woman, and her death was a good thing for everyone involved.”

Untimely death is never a good thing, said the dragon sadly. You say that because you have not truly come to understand it. I had not either, until Merithyn died. I had never before felt death, tasted its foul burning in my teeth. The creatures I had consumed—stags, harts, and the like—had experienced death in my maw, but with their passing had come life, sustenance, and so it did not have the same bitter taste. But Merithyn’s death was an ending so complete that it took part of my life with it as well.

Rhapsody reached out from the hammock and caressed the dragon’s massive shoulder.

“Merithyn gave his life saving his ship, and much of the First Fleet. Out of his death came life as well, Elynsynos. It was a great sacrifice, for him and for you, but a nation lived because of it. Perhaps it is one of the greatest sacrifices in history.”

The dragon shook her head violently.

No, Pretty. I will tell you of the greatest sacrifice. It is important that you both know it, because it is the heritage of your child, the legacy of his dragon blood. I will tell you of the Ending.

You know the stories of the Before-Time, of the great battles between the five Firstborn races, when the children of air, earth, water, and ether, the Kith, dragons, Mythlin, and Seren, banded together to force the destructive fifth race, the F’dor fire demons, into the center of the world where they could no longer wreak havoc upon the earth. And you doubtless know that the part dragons played was the contribution of the Living Stone to make the Vault in which the F’dor were imprisoned, yes?

“Yes,” said Ashe.

But what you do not know, my great-grandson, Pretty’s Husband, is that the Vault, as it was built, with the vast majority of our treasure of Living Stone, was still not enough to completely contain the F’dor. The Progenitor of all dragons, the first of our race, could see that the cage of Living Stone would not hold them. So he made the greatest sacrifice in history. That sacrifice is known to all dragons as the Ending.

A dragon’s decision to die, to give up its life, is undertaken with the understanding that for us there is no Afterlife, at least not a conscious one. Most often that decision comes at the end of an extremely long life. The dragon is too tired to continue to live; it is in pain and exhausted, and so it merely ceases to try and stay alive. And it ends. That kind of ending leaves some of the dragon’s lore behind—the blood that ran in the beast’s veins turns to gold. And some of what was the dragon remains with it—the avarice, the possessiveness. Why are men so hungry for a soft yellow metal that does nothing to further their ends? They cannot sate their hunger with it, or heal themselves when they are ill or injured. They cannot even forge it into a weapon. And yet they fight wars over it, commit all sorts of atrocities, even lose their souls to it. Much like a dragon would.

“I had never considered that,” Rhapsody said. She was taking notes in her journal.

The Progenitor saw that the F’dor might well escape from the Vault. And after all the death, all the destruction, and all that had been sacrificed in the fight to contain them, he understood the incalculable cost of that happening. So just as the lock of the Vault was being sundered, the Progenitor wrapped his body, more vast than can even be imagined, around the Vault, subsuming it. He had been in an ethereal state; once he had enveloped the Vault with his own being, he slowly let go of each of his elemental lores—the ether, the earth, the water, the air, and the fire. His body dried and hardened to a vast shell that surrounded the Vault inside it, preventing the escape of the F’dor. He just Ended. That is his legacy—and it’s the legacy of your child. Each dragon has the power to End, but none, to my knowledge, ever have done so since, because it is the most complete and final form of death. Not even your lore remains behind in gold or gems that can one day adorn the empty heads of kings, or the breasts of vain women. Dragons have more of a stake in the Earth that shelters all beings, because we have sacrificed more to guard it.

The Lord and Lady Cymrian looked at each other in silence.

So, Elynsynos concluded, her multitoned voice lightening, that is the tale. Now, Pretty’s Husband, eat something, so that you will be sustained on your journey home, and will come back often to visit.

A plate of rolls and jars of jam appeared on the cave floor.

Ashe laughed. “All right, I know a hint when I see one. Very well, Great-grandmother, I will eat and be on my way so that you may begin your visit with my wife. I know when I’m not wanted—and I surely don’t want to get breathed on, so I will comply.”

Don’t be ridiculous, said the wyrm. A dragon has to be solid in order to breathe on someone else. I do not do solid.

Now have some jam! Then be on your way.

After Ashe had left, Rhapsody sat down to examine the documents Achmed had left her, as she promised to do.

“One important thing I forgot to tell you, Elynsynos,” she said, sifting carefully through the papers and graphing the musical code in which the manuscript was written. “At Thaw I have asked my friend Achmed to come to this place.”

The dragon inhaled slowly.

Did you tell him where it was?

“No,” Rhapsody said quickly, “I would never do that without your permission. I told him to go to the Tar’afel, and I would sing him to the place I wanted to meet him. He can follow the sound of his namesong wherever I chant it. But I just wanted to warn you that Achmed and I can argue fairly harshly; it is just our way, not a sign that he is going to harm me. So if we do argue when he comes, please don’t intervene. I would hate to see him roasting on a spit over his own campfire.”

Very well, said the dragon, but she did not sound impressed.

And there they remained in pleasant company, the dragon reveling in her treasure, the Lady Cymrian translating the documents, until she began to tremble with the understanding of what was in them. With shaking hands, she put the manuscript back in the metal box and closed it quickly. The inclination to vomit came over her, but it was not one generated by her pregnancy.

“Oh, sweet One-God,” she whispered.

26

As Ashe neared the far side of the crystalline lake beyond which the lair of the dragon Elynsynos lay, he felt an unwelcome static tingle run the length of his spine, radiating out over his skin to his fingertips. Then, a heartbeat later, it was gone.

He stopped in the crusty snow and turned angrily around, recognizing the vibration and looking for the source, but there was nothing visible in the ancient forest. The deep, rich hues of the evergreen boughs stood in marked contrast to the bare trunks and branches of the deciduous trees, silvery-bare or clothed in a remnant of ragged, dead leaves of brown and russet, waiting to be swept away by stronger winter winds. The breeze that blew through the glade was sharp and cold.

“Where are you, Llauron?” the Lord Cymrian demanded of the air around him.

There was no answer but that of the wind, and the ripples that disturbed the surface of the lake.

Angrily Ashe seized hold of the hilt of his sword and drew it quickly forth from its sheath. Kirsdarke, the blade of elemental water, roared to life in his hand, appearing like the foaming waves of the sea, gleaming with liquid anger matching Ashe’s own. He held it up to his eyes and looked through it.

The world beyond the rippling waves appeared dull and flat, like an old grave marker whose inscription had been worn flatter by time. Like water on such a stone, the rivulets running into the crevasses and depressions, making them visible again, the vision Ashe had through the blade sharpened around the elemental form that was hovering, invisible to the human eye, beyond the treeline of the clearing.

A great draconic shape floated in the air just above the ground, gray and silver as the branches of the maple trees.

“I can see you, Father,” Ashe said, annoyed. “You may as well show yourself.”

A disappointed sigh whistled forth like the breeze. “You never were any fun to play hide-and-seek with,” a sonorous baritone, light and melodious, said. “Your dragon sense was sharp, even as a child. If it took you more than a few seconds to find me, we both knew that you were merely humoring me.”

“I am well past playing games with you,” Ashe said bitterly, returning Kirsdarke to its sheath with a savage snap. “I told you three years ago to stay away from my wife and family. And yet, of all places in the world you could be, hanging about in the ether, communing with the elements, the ability to do so what you chose over that family, here you are outside Elynsynos’s lair. What a coincidence. What do you want?”

“No harm, I assure you,” said the voice, a testy undertone in it. “And there’s no need to be so harsh. I am your father, Gwydion, or at least I was in my human lifetime.”

“Which you happily sacrificed for a hollow immortality,” Ashe said, pulling at his lambskin gloves. “And at the expense of my wife’s peace of mind; she still occasionally has nightmares about burning you to ‘death’ in your false pyre with a blast of starfire from her sword at your insistence. I told you then, and I will tell you again now, I want you to stay away from Rhapsody. She has paid dearly for your elemental wyrmdom, and I mean to make certain she is done with that.”

“Your wife forgave me those wrongs long ago, Gwydion,” said the voice. The air within the trees shifted, gaining shape and heft, thickening until it took the form of an enormous serpent, vaporous, with iridescent scales the color of ashes from a spent fire, flashing with intermittent glitters of silver and gold. Its vast wings were folded next to its sides, minimizing its breadth, leaving only the wyrmlike length of it visible, well over one hundred feet from nostrils to terminal tail spike. “It’s a pity you haven’t learned to follow her example.”

“I care more about her well-being than she does,” Ashe replied tersely, staring at the enormous ethereal dragon in the nearest multifaceted eye scored by a vertical pupil. It was a gaze that few men could hold without being lost to the beast’s will, but Ashe, his own dragon blood strong, returned it without blinking. “And to that end I mean to see her kept free from annoyance, harassment, or manipulation, all of which you have committed against her at one time or another. So be on your way. You have no business here.”

The wind raced through the snowy clearing, lifting the granular blanket of snow from the surface and spinning the crystals into fluttery bands that danced and twisted, then fell to the ground again, skittering along the crust.

Finally the dragon spoke, and its voice held unmistakable sadness, deep as the sea.

“You would keep me from my own grandchild, then?”

Ashe exhaled sharply. “So that’s it, is it? You are looking for the baby. Why? What possible interest could you have in a child? You had one once, if I recall correctly, and it was little more to you than a tool to accomplish your goals. What goals do you still have, Llauron? I thought those things would fall away with the ashes of the mortal human body that you left behind in the coal bed of your pyre when you convinced my wife to transform you, without her knowledge, into your elemental self. Don’t you have better things to do, now that you are wind itself, fire itself, earth itself, water itself, ether itself, and, of course, sheer gall itself?”

“It seems you believe I have always been the last of those,” Llauron said, unfolding his filmy wings and stretching them lazily. They passed without resistance through the tree limbs and bracken of the forest, like mist. “And I suppose I can’t really dispute that. But is it really so hard for you to imagine, Gwydion, that in my old age I might want the same joy that every other grandfather-to-be has—taking delight in his offspring?”

The ugly sound that issued forth from Ashe’s throat was both a gargle and a cough.

“Yes, it is,” he said flatly. “You? You want to be a grandfather?”

“Indeed.” The beast beat the air with its wings, causing many of the last dry leaves to fall. “Grandchildren are a second chance at happiness we might have missed the first time around, Gwydion. Don’t dismiss my desire to come to know the descendants of my blood. If you know anything about our race, you know that there is little, if anything, a dragon prizes above its progeny.”

“Yes, I am well aware of that,” Ashe said, positioning himself closer to the ethereal beast and interposing himself between it and the path back to Elynsynos’s lair. “And as I prize mine above all else, I will do whatever is necessary to keep her or him from ever experiencing the sheer delight of being manipulated mercilessly by a family member, to the point of feeling useless, good for nothing, or damned. Those are feelings I know well, thanks to the tenderness of my upbringing. I have no desire for my son or daughter to ever feel that way. Ever. And I know Rhapsody agrees. So be gone from this place. I do not accept that your protestations are genuine. Like everything else you have ever wanted, I am certain there is an ulterior motive at play here, a hidden reason that benefits you first, at the expense of the others involved. But since those others are my wife and child, I will not brook it. Because, being part dragon myself, there is nothing more important to me. So go away.”

The expression of sadness dissipated in the beast’s prismatic eyes into something more studied; it was a look Ashe recognized, though until now he had only seen it in his father’s human face. Llauron was regrouping, switching from the emotional, an area of admitted weakness, to the logical, which was his strength.

“So you are keeping me away from your child for his benefit?”

The headache behind Ashe’s eyes stabbed sharply, and he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, trying to fight it off.

“And Rhapsody’s,” he said, wincing.

The dragon nodded thoughtfully. “And in your mind, it is better for your child to grow up never knowing his grandfather?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“How shortsighted of you.” The great gray dragon stretched his wings slightly, causing the ice crystals on the snow’s surface to whip into the air, the soft sting of the breeze blowing them into Ashe’s eyes. “Had it occurred to you that your child, conceived when your dragon’s blood is at the peak of its strength in you, will be more draconic than you were? He will have few of the race that is very much a part of his makeup to reach out to, to learn from; dragons as a race are rare enough. But those to whom the child will be related are few and far between—”

“He or she can learn from Elynsynos,” Ashe said tersely, annoyed to still be carrying on the conversation. “She is his great-great-grandmother, a pure wyrm, not wyrmkin like you and I. No one knows as well as she what it is like to be a dragon. I’m sure she will be delighted to tutor my child in draconic ways and elemental lore. And, above all else, she has never betrayed Rhapsody or me. So thank you for your—kind offer, but I believe we have that aspect of the child’s education covered.”

“My grandmother has not walked the world as a human being,” Llauron said smoothly, the silver scales in his hide winking in the dusty light of the glen. “She only took a human form—or, more accurately, a Seren one—to attract the notice of Merithyn. She may have knowledge of the ancient times that I did not have in human form, but since I have come to join the elements, I have learned those stories, too, Gwydion. And I do have much to impart—sure you cannot dismiss all that you learned of the world from me.”

Ashe inhaled sharply, taking the freezing air of the forest into his lungs, where it weighed heavily inside him. His wife’s words, spoken with a Namer’s truth at the council where they were chosen to rule over the Cymrian people, rang in his ears.

If I have one message for you it is this: the Past is gone. Learn from it and let it go. We must forgive each other. We must forgive ourselves. Only then will there be a true peace.

He let his eyes wander over the face of the ethereal beast hanging before him in the air, and on his every word. The dragon’s eyes twinkled with intelligence, but there was something more in them; Ashe could not be certain what it was, but for a moment it looked like longing, or something akin to it.

Involuntarily he thought back to his childhood, the earliest days he could remember, before a piece of Seren had been sewed into his chest, before his draconic nature had emerged, the days of innocence, when he was just a boy alone in the world with a father who loved to walk the forests with him, pointing out every sort of tree and plant, singing him sea chanteys and ancient folksongs, teaching him to sail and swim in the ocean that later in life became a part of him. To his shock, those good memories were still there, not obliterated as he had believed them to be by Llauron’s later selfishness and manipulation, his willingness to use his son, and, worse, Rhapsody, to his ends, however noble his intentions.

“I believe you sincerely want to be part of your grandchild’s life and upbringing, Father,” he said finally, wincing at the hope he could see taking root in the wyrm’s gray-blue eyes. “But, as valuable as the history lessons might be, there are other sorts of lessons that you tend to teach that are very much more dangerous and scarring. I wish things could be different—I’m sorry.”

He turned quickly and made his way through the forest, leaving Llauron’s misty form behind him.

The beast watched him go; Llauron’s dragon sense followed him for more than five miles, making note of the quickness of his son’s step, the flush of blood to his face, the tightness of his throat. Then, when Ashe was finally beyond his reach and his senses, he faded slowly into the wind again and disappeared, leaving only on the dry leaves of the forest the traces of gold that can be seen where dragon tears fall.