Song of the Beast

Chapter 12

I sat on the high, narrow rim of rock that separated Cor Talaith, the warm, green valley the remnants of my people called home, from the bowl of rock that held Cir Nakai, the lake of fire where we believed the dragons could find their minds again. On that morning, as every time I perched on that dangerous, wind-scoured sliver of crumbling granite, I wondered to which side I would topple if I were to lose my balance. How much was required to remove the stain of terrible error? Was the sacrifice of all purpose save expiation enough? Was the abandonment of all growth and development of our people enough? Would it come to our extinction, as some among us believed, and if so, would that be enough—and would it be worth such a price? And where in such a weighty reckoning was calculated the price of one innocent man’s life?

I should never sit still and think. I knew which way my heart would lead me if I just kept moving, but when I sat still I always ended up on that knife edge and realized I could fall either way.

Far below me in Cor Talaith where the winds were warm and the grass was green, three of my kin and a tall, lean figure—a human male—worked at building a bridge across a steaming fissure that was one source of the warm air that blessed our valley. The bridge would greatly shorten the way from the fertile meadow where we grew our wheat to the caves where we lived and the waterfall where sat our mill and granary. I watched the man struggle to lift a small stone from the cart he had driven from the rockfall on the north side of the valley. He scooped it onto his forearms and bent his knees to get the leverage and strength he could not get from his back, then gathered it to himself and carried it to the growing pile beside the scaffolding at the edge of the fissure.

It had been difficult to persuade the man to stay in Cor Talaith once he had convinced Iskendar and the others that he could offer us no possible hope of redemption. The only way he would accept the refuge we offered was if he had work to do. He had begged me for some hard physical labor that would drown his desolation and fill his emptiness with exhaustion. I owed him that. I had been the instrument that stripped away his last defense against despair. That I had also given him labor that would make him stronger—already after six weeks he could lift stones of ten times the size he could at first—he might or might not thank me as he traveled farther on the terrible road I had laid down for him. Though I cared a great deal for Aidan MacAllister and grieved for the horrors he had endured—and those he had yet to endure—neither love nor sympathy would sway my purpose. Thinking might, if I sat too long on the rim between Cor Talaith and Cir Nakai.

A red-tipped hawk shrieked a cry of triumph and dived toward the wide, barren shingle that bordered the lake as I started down the slope of jumbled rock and hardy, gray-green tuck grass that would take me into Cor Talaith. Preoccupied with my moral dilemmas, I wasn’t looking where I was going, so I almost ran into the tousled figure trudging upward.

“I guessed you’d be up here.”

“Davyn!”

My friend clapped his sturdy arms around me, making dents in my ribs with the greeting. “I finally got loose. There was an ugly uproar in Cor Neuill these past weeks. Thought my legs were going to get run off carrying their messages—but fortunately the fellow I replaced got healed of his wasting fever, so I was able to turn over my duties to a more experienced clerk.”

“Well done. I’ve not rested easy since I saw Acorn come home without you.”

“How is he? I didn’t want to speak to anyone until I’d talked to you. Did all come about as you expected?”

Davyn was not referring to his unflappable horse. I nodded toward the distant group of laborers. “He exists. Nothing more. If anything, I underestimated the impact our story would have on him. By the time we were done with the telling there was so little of him left he might as well have been standing naked before us. He had no difficulty convincing the others that our hopes were irrevocably ruined—and so our leaders are well satisfied.”

“By the One!” My best friend stood perhaps a head taller than me and had shoulders like a young ox—well, at least for an Elhim—so that even in his rumpled weariness he was a formidable presence, especially when his eyes flashed in such righteous indignation. “How can we have fallen so low?”

I clapped him on the shoulder and pointed him back down the hill. “Because few of us have your withering intelligence, your unswerving sense of honor, or your implacable understanding of right. If we were all like you, we’d never have gotten ourselves into this mess.”

Davyn shrugged off my hand and grinned wryly as he headed down the slope. “An odd compliment to one who’s spent the last half year living a lie.”

“Who better to live a lie than one with such steadfast devotion to truth? You never get confused.”

Davyn broke into the infectious laughter of the terminally good-hearted and stopped just ahead of me, gracing me with an exaggerated bow. “And who is this stranger, this self-proclaimed cynic and prince of devilish conspirators? It cannot be the same Narim who is trying singlehandedly to save a race from its own weaknesses.” He put his hands on his waist. “I happen to believe, good Narim, that you’ve never done a single dishonorable thing in your considerable span of years.”

I laughed and shoved him out of my way, hurrying downhill faster—ahead of my friend so he could not read in my face how wrong he was. “You must make yourself known to MacAllister. He’s asked after you often, afraid you’ve reaped severe consequences for his escape. I think you’ll be good for him. He’s stayed very much apart from the rest of us. Doesn’t speak except for what’s necessary. Asks no questions. Shows no interests except to work until he drops. You could poke a knife in him, and he would not bleed.”

“I would have thought he’d be easier with you or Tarwyl. He doesn’t know me.”

“Tarwyl is back to Camarthan to make sure everything is cleaned up, and I ... I’ve been trying to ease the last of Iskendar’s and Nyura’s concerns, so I haven’t had the time to spend with him. Everyone else is a stranger, and he feels the burden of their ruined expectations—even if they’re imaginary.” And, of course, it was part of my plan to leave the fullness of Aidan MacAllister’s desolation on display. My kin had to be absolutely convinced he could do nothing ... and only then ...

“You’ve not introduced him to Lara, then?”

“No. She’s not come around. Just as well. Less suspicious if it occurs by chance. But it needs to be soon. If we’re to make an attempt this year, we’ve got only six weeks to get him ready, and until we know more, her knowledge is everything we have. She’ll have to judge whether he is capable, whether any of this is worth pursuing.”

“But Narim, after what happened in Cor Neuill ...” Davyn stopped again, blocking my way, looking intently at my face. “Surely he told you of it. I wouldn’t expect him to understand, but you ... I knew you’d read the signs. You did get his story about his visit to the dragon camp?”

I couldn’t tell Davyn about my fence-sitting—that I couldn’t face MacAllister without a tidal wave of guilts getting in the way, that I was too cowardly to face his despair. I couldn’t tell Davyn those things, for then he would ask me why I took it so much to heart, and I would have to tell my dearest friend what I had done. “Not exactly. There wasn’t time. The storm on the night of his escape was so bad, and he hasn’t been much for conversation since then. He is so low.”

Davyn laid his hands on my shoulders, and his eyes were swimming as he spoke, ever so softly. “Narim, he heard them. It almost killed him when they would trumpet—a bellow not anything out of the ordinary way—but he felt it so deeply. I watched him three times over. It’s what caused him to be discovered, because he couldn’t hide what it did to him. The first time was so vivid, he called for Roelan. I had the strangest thought that it might be Roelan himself flying over us.”

I couldn’t believe it. I’d been so convinced of what the singer believed about himself that I’d not even probed for the single bit of information that might have alleviated my own despair. Even yet I wouldn’t let myself believe what I’d heard. “You’re sure?”

Davyn didn’t answer, only raised his eyebrows at me.

“All right, all right.” A prickling began in my chest and flushed my skin, until even the roots of my hair quivered with unaccustomed life. I tried to remain calm ... to check for problems ... to be sure before I let myself feel it. “Could anyone else have seen it?”

“No one was with us the first time. The second came while we were in a Rider’s hut, but the devil was too drunk to notice. The quartermaster and the Udema were close enough to see when the third one came, but they were preoccupied and didn’t know what they were seeing. They would chalk up everything to fear.”

“The link is still there.”

Davyn smiled at me with a radiance no Elhim had seen in five hundred years. “Just as you predicted. It means we can proceed.” He laughed out his joy and as before I was caught up in it. By the One, I felt young again, as if the dragons were beating their wings underneath my heart. I shouted and whooped and tumbled the laughing Davyn to the ground, then ran down the hillside leaping over boulders as if I were sixteen again, not five hundred and sixteen.