Master of Dragons

Chapter Two

Imladrik sat loosely in the saddle, no longer giving directions to his mount but letting him find his way amid the paths of the skies. Draukhain headed south-west, gliding languidly. The destruction of the druchii squadron had been a trivial task for one of his breeding and his enormous lungs worked as rhythmically as ever, untroubled by the diversion, drawing in the chill wind and transmuting it into fiery exhalations.

The work may have been easy but the orders had been an insult. Dragons were rare and perilous creatures; to turn them into celebratory attendants of Caledor’s homecoming was an ignorant misuse of power.

You are angry.

Draukhain’s mind-song echoed in Imladrik’s head like one of his own thoughts.

Not angry, Imladrik returned. Weary.

Weary? I have borne you aloft a hundred leagues. Draukhain snorted, sending flecks of smouldering ash cascading over his immense shoulders. I am weary; you are angry. You rage against your brother who commands you.

Ah. You read my thoughts now.

I do not need to. This anger is a waste — it serves no purpose.

Imladrik shifted in the saddle. After hours of flight his limbs were tight and his muscles raw. The ocean glittered below him, a shallow curve extending in all directions, glossy with reflected sunlight. Soon the sun would begin to dip, descending in golds and reds towards the western horizon, but for the moment the world looked pristine, awash with light, just as it must have done in the dawn following creation.

My brother shows disrespect, mind-sang Imladrik. To you, great one. He does not understand you.

How many are left who truly understand, kalamn-talaen? Do not judge him for that.

Kalamn-talaen: the little lord. A whimsical title, one the dragons used to distinguish between Imladrik and the great-grandsire of his bloodline, Caledor Dragontamer, whom they called kalamn-kavannaen, the great lord. Imladrik had heard their minds burst into joyous celebration at the very mention of the Dragontamer — perhaps he had been the only mortal other than Aenarion to command their total respect. The rest of the asur, Imladrik included, were merely indulged, as if in homage to that one undying example of greatness.

It is not like you, Imladrik returned, to be so magnanimous.

No, it is not. Draukhain snorted again, producing a gout of glutinous smoke that rolled across his sapphire-scaled skin. But I am in a good temper this night.

For the ending of so many druchii?

Maybe so. Or maybe the golden sun on the sea, or maybe your company. Who can tell?

That brought a smile to Imladrik’s stern face. I am glad one of us is, whatever the cause.

They flew further west. The first cliffs of Ulthuan became visible as a blurred line of dark grey against the horizon. The rock-ramparts grew in size, steadily accumulating detail and definition. Soon the eastern curve of the Annulii could be made out, vast and gold-glittered and crowned with ice.

Where shall I bear you, then? sang Draukhain, dipping his head and sweeping closer towards the scudding wave-tops.

Do you have to ask? returned Imladrik. His mind-voice, unguarded for a moment, was a mix of yearning and resignation. He didn’t mind giving that away — Draukhain was hard to deceive, even for one with his command of dragonsong.

A deep, grinding sound rumbled up from Draukhain’s belly. Imladrik knew how to interpret the sound, for he understood the great dragon’s soul nearly as well Draukhain knew his own: the creature approved, was reassured, understood his reasons and wished him well for much earned repose and restoration. All these things could be divined from a single harmonic. Dragons were creatures of music and instinct, more eloquent in gestures than they were in words.

Draukhain banked over to the left, pulling fractionally to the south, aiming towards the high peaks, to the realm of Cothique.

We shall be there before the sun sets, sang Draukhain.

Do not hurry, returned Imladrik, watching the last of the light on the water as it flickered beneath him. Enjoy the remains of this day. You have earned it, even if none but I will ever know it.

She was not waiting for him. She never lingered on the balcony, staring up into the skies for his return, pining like a maiden for her lover in the poetic romances of Avelorn. Her work was too important, too all-consuming for that.

When he found her at last, after slipping through the gates of Tor Vael and up the echoing stairways, she was doing what she always did, so absorbed in it that the rest of the world might have been a fiction spun in the minds of others.

Imladrik paused at the entrance to her chamber. She was bathed in the light of dusk from the open window, framed against a darkening vista of high mountain-slopes. She was seated, her shoulders stooped over an angled caelwood writing table.

Imladrik leaned against the doorframe, his movements silent, his breath shallow. He watched her trace the shape of runes against parchment, working the quill deftly. He saw her grey eyes latched on to her work: twin vices of concentration. He saw her hands moving. He saw her slender frame crouching over the desk, and regretted the tight curve of her spine. He had warned her about it often, offering to have a new chair made, pleading with her not to work for so long without rest.

His lips twitched into a smile. She never listened. She had always been stubborn — not angry, never irritable or shrewish, just stubborn — like the hard, dark rock of his homeland.

‘My lady,’ he said softly.

Yethanial’s head jerked up. She glared at him, startled as if roused from a deep sleep.

Then she leapt up, her grey robe rustling around her. Her pale face brightened and the grip of exertion fell away from her features.

‘My lord!’ she cried, her voice ringing with joy.

Imladrik laughed, pushing himself away from the door to meet her. They embraced, clasping one another tight.

As he pressed against her, Imladrik drew in her familiar aromas of homecoming: coarse woollen fabric, inks that stained her fingers, crushed petals of the seaflower he had placed in her hair before he’d left. He guessed that he would smell of sweat, brine and dragon. Yethanial professed never to mind that; he doubted whether he believed her.

‘I was not expecting you,’ she said, nestling her face into his shoulder.

‘I told you I would return before nightfall.’

‘Then I did not listen.’

‘You never do.’

He pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length to get a better look at her.

He thought then, not for the first time, how different they were. Imladrik knew well enough how he looked: tall, broad-shouldered, his body tempered into hardness by the demands of riding the great drakes. He knew how severe his features were, hewn roughly, so he’d been told, like the white cliffs of Tiranoc. He knew his long hair, a dull bronze like his mother’s, hung heavily around his shoulders, pressed flat by the dragon-helms he wore in battle.

Yethanial, by contrast, was like a dusk-shadow: slight, her limbs as lean as mages’ wands, her glance quick and her smile quicker. In every movement she made, the sharpness of her scholar’s mind spilled out. In her eyes it was most unavoidable — those steady grey eyes that seemed to look within him and prise out his innermost thoughts.

It was her eyes that had snared Imladrik long ago. He had gazed into them on the windswept cliffs of Cothique during their long formal courtship and revelled in their elusive, darting intelligence. Now, after so many years together, they still had the power to captivate.

‘The flower I gave you,’ he said.

Yethanial’s hands flew to her head, searching for what remained of it. ‘It was lovely. I cherished it. But, somehow-’

‘Somehow, during the day, you forgot it was there,’ smiled Imladrik, taking her hands back and pressing them gently into his own. ‘Your work consumed you. What are you doing? May I see it?’

Yethanial looked apologetic. ‘Not finished, of course.’

She led him to the desk. A battered leather-bound book rested, clamped open, on the left-hand edge. Next to it was a pinned leaf of heavy vellum, fresh-scraped and as white as bone. She had been working on it, transcribing text from the flaking pages of the book. Only a part of one page had been completed, but Imladrik could see the emerging pattern of it. She had traced out runes carefully, leaving spaces where gold leaf and coloured inks would be applied. The text had been painstakingly drawn in black ink, and several discarded quills littered the floor around the writing desk.

‘These books were not well-made,’ she said, glancing at the open volume. ‘But their contents are precious. When I am done I will take this to Hoeth to be bound. They can create books that will last for as long as the world endures.’

Imladrik looked at the script. It wasn’t in Eltharin, even though the characters were familiar. ‘I cannot read it,’ he said.

‘Few can. It was written before the time of Aenarion — we only have copies of copies. The speech is called Filuan. These are poems. I find them beautiful.’

Imladrik tried to decipher something of them, but made no progress. He was not a gifted loremaster — only the language of swords and of dragons had ever come easily to him. ‘What do they speak of?’ he asked.

‘The same things our poets speak of,’ she said, running a finger lightly down the edge of the vellum. ‘Love, fear, the shape of the world. They must have been very like us. I would hate their words to be lost forever.’

Imladrik considered asking her to translate some for him, but decided against it. He would pretend to appreciate it, she would see through him, and a small cloud of irritation would come between them. He had long ago resigned himself to their fundamental differences.

‘I wish I could understand it as you do,’ he said softly, pulling her close again. ‘I feel like a barbarian out of the colonies.’

‘You are a barbarian out of the colonies.’

‘I miss you, when alone up there.’

‘Then stay,’ said Yethanial. ‘We can dwell wherever you wish — Kor Evril, Tor Caled, an empty barn in the mountains.’

‘Anywhere but Elthin Arvan.’

‘What is there in Elthin Arvan?’

Imladrik almost replied. He could have said: freedom, open lands as wild as at the dawn of creation, dark woods that stretched from horizon to horizon, untouched by the hand of civilisation and rich in both peril and majesty. Then there was Oeragor, the city he had founded but not seen for over twenty years, a half-finished sanctuary he had hoped to turn into a desert jewel for the two of them to grow old in together.

But he said nothing. They had covered this ground before and he knew when to retreat from a hopeless cause.

‘I am back now,’ was all he said. ‘My duties are here.’

Yethanial rested her head in the crook of his shoulder. It was an almost childlike movement; one of trust, of contentment.

‘That gladdens me,’ she said.

Dawn brought rain, hard and slanted from the east. It drummed against Tor Vael’s lead roofs and gurgled down its granite walls.

Imladrik awoke before Yethanial. He slipped soundlessly from the sheets and opened the shutters of her bedchamber. The view from the window was dove-grey and rain-blurred. In the east he could make out the smudge of the ocean. Nowhere in Cothique was far from the sea.

He breathed deeply, inhaling the salt-tang. He felt rested. He stretched, feeling long-clenched sinews in his back and shoulders unfurl.

‘My lord,’ said Yethanial, sleepily.

Imladrik smiled, turning. ‘My lady.’

She sat amid a pile of linen, looking flushed with slumber. He went over to her, embraced her, kissed her, smoothed her grey-blonde hair from her brow.

‘Hungry?’ he asked.

‘As if starved for a year.’

Imladrik sent for food. In the time it took the servants to prepare it, the two of them rose and dressed. They broke their fast in an east-facing chamber of the old tower. The rain lashed against the glass of the windows and the wind sighed around the walls as they ate, making the fire in the grate gutter and spit.

Imladrik leaned back in his chair. The kitchens at Tor Vael cooked food the way he liked it: plain. He swallowed the last of a round oatcake and reached for a goblet of watered-down wine.

Yethanial had been as good as her word; she ate ravenously, like a scrawny mountain wolf at the end of winter.

‘It troubles me,’ said Imladrik.

‘What troubles you?’

‘That you do not look after yourself when I am away.’

Yethanial shrugged. ‘Too much to do.’

‘You have servants here.’

‘Yes, and I have been cooped up with them for too long. Tell me of the real world.’

Imladrik took a cautious sip of wine. ‘What do you wish to know?’

‘Everything.’ Yethanial crossed her arms, waiting.

‘Well, then. My brother heads back to Ulthuan and Lothern runs with rumour. They tell me he has won his war in the colonies, that the stunted folk are defeated, and that we can at last turn our attentions to ridding the world of druchii.’

‘The stunted folk are defeated? Should I believe that?’

Imladrik leaned forward, his elbows on the table. ‘Have you ever met a dwarf?’

‘I have read accounts.’

‘Scrolls do not tell the truth of it.’ Imladrik felt his mind roving back over the past, the years he had spent in the wilds. ‘Imagine, somehow, if rock were to come to life, growing limbs and a heart. Imagine that every virtue of rock — durability, endurance, hardness — were somehow condensed into a living thing.’

Yethanial smiled affectionately. ‘Language is not your gift, my lord.’

‘It is not. But think of it: a race of stone, as resolute as granite, as unyielding as bedrock. That is the dawi.’

‘Dawi?’

‘What they call themselves.’ Imladrik shook his head. ‘And they are not defeated. Menlaeth has killed one of their princes, but dozens more remain under the mountains. I have seen those places. I have seen halls of stone larger than our greatest palaces. I have seen their warriors gathered around the light of ritual fires, each one wearing a mask of iron and carrying an axe of steel.’

Imladrik looked down at his hands. Speaking of such things took him back. ‘They can never be defeated,’ he said. ‘Not there, not in their own realm. I tried to tell my brother that.’

Yethanial listened carefully. ‘I am sure he took account of that.’

Imladrik’s lip twitched in a wry smile. ‘I met the dwarf prince he is said to have killed. Halfhand, they called him. A brave warrior, though headstrong. The dawi will hold a thousand grudges against us now, and they will never stop.’

‘But they will have to relent soon, no? They cannot fight us forever.’

Imladrik’s smile remained on his lips. ‘Relent? No, I do not think they have a word for that.’ He took another swig of wine. ‘I read the tidings from Elthin Arvan. They tell me that Tor Alessi will soon be attacked again. There are dozens of dawi thanes, all with their own armies. Athel Maraya is exposed too. It is only arrogance that makes us believe these places are invulnerable.’

‘But here we are told-’

‘Here you are told that the war will be over in a year, the colonies will expand and the dawi will soon be suing for peace on their knees.’ Imladrik looked into his goblet sourly. ‘It is lunacy. At Athel Numiel even the infants were butchered, so they say. Menlaeth has set the fire running; I hope he understands the inferno that will come of it.’

Imladrik put the goblet down. ‘I love my brother,’ he said, his jaw tight. ‘Or I try to. He is the mightiest of all of us, the crown is his by right, but…’

Yethanial rose from her chair and hastened to his side. She knelt beside him, catching his hands in hers and pulling them to her lap. ‘You do not have to pretend, not with me.’

‘I never pretend.’ Imladrik shot her a bitter smile. ‘The dragons see through it, so I lost the knack. Believe me, I do not envy him. He has our glorious father to live up to, and I would not wish that on anyone.’

‘You both have that to bear.’

‘My name will not be in the annals. When I remember to, I pity him. I wish to help him, but he takes no counsel.’

Yethanial’s mouth twitched into a smile. ‘Remind you of anyone?’

Imladrik gave a hollow laugh. ‘I am surrounded by the stubborn. Why is that? Do I attract them?’

‘Some of them.’ Yethanial stroked his hands. The touch was soothing. ‘I have made you melancholy. I did not mean to.’

Imladrik slipped his hands free and reached for her, pulling her towards him. ‘No, it is me — I have let the past intrude. I was over there for a long time.’

Yethanial nodded, looking up at him with sad knowledge written in her features. ‘It has been over twenty years. How much longer will you need before you let it go?’

Imladrik didn’t reply. He knew that his face would give away his answer if he spoke.

I will never let it go.

Yethanial reached up to press her hand against his heart. ‘I am not a fool, my lord. I know enough, but it is over now. You came back, and the gods know we have enemies enough in Ulthuan to keep you busy.’

Imladrik nodded. They were the words he needed to hear.

‘Whatever you left behind,’ she said, ‘whatever part of you that remains there, think of it no more. Think of me. Think of the realm you are charged with defending, for you are loved here on Ulthuan. Your troops would march beyond the gates of madness if you led them there. Remember that.’

Imladrik lowered his forehead against hers. ‘And you are loved more than life itself,’ he said. ‘You remember that.’

‘Always.’

They remained like that for many heartbeats, their limbs entwined. They said nothing as the rain ran down the glass and the gusts shook the stonework. For all the world outside cared, they might have been an image of Isha and Kurnous, frozen outside time.

But they remained mortal. Time passed, and the clatter of servants coming to retrieve the silverware broke their communion. Yethanial extricated herself before they entered, smiling bashfully, kissing Imladrik on the cheek and taking her place at the table.

Imladrik retrieved his wine, swilling it in the goblet before taking a draught. He felt unsettled. Duties would call for him soon — orders relayed from Lothern and Tor Caled, demands on his time, requests for aid. Part of him wearied of the burden of it, but part of him wished for nothing more. His duty would take him away from Tor Vael, away from Yethanial, but also from the emotions that preyed on him whenever he was forced to confront them.

Whatever you left behind, he told himself, looking up at her and wishing his smile could be more carefree, whatever part of you that remains there, think of it no more.