Song of the Beast

Chapter 13

Steady ... pull ... don’t jerk ... roll up the strip of scented pine ... longer than the last. Ignore the burning of muscles too long unused ... too damaged . . . too tired from long days’ labor. Ten more planks to smooth, each with two edges and two faces, leaving flat, white surfaces ready to drill and peg and join to make tables or benches or doors or walls ... no matter what ... The end is the work itself. Bend your aching fingers around the wooden handles, darkened with the touch of countless useful hands ... not yours. These knotted, ugly appendages that once danced over sweet-singing strings ... will them to grip and draw the knife along the grain ... steady ... half the length ... three-quarters ... make the curling strip longer than the last. Endless planks from endless trees. Endless curls of resinous pine to throw in the fire which snaps its smoky pleasure at the tidbit. Over and over. Don’t think. Just do. Again and again until your arms are molten lead and your eyelids sag. Only then stagger into the corner where the straw mat and wool blanket will enfold you in oblivion for one more night. Steady ... pull ...

“So what does old Vanka plan to do with this mountain of lumber?”

I straightened up and squinted at the Elhim who stood in the woodshop doorway, trying to discern the subtle features that would distinguish this one from five others who could be his twin. But for once, even in the wavering light from the woodshop hearth, I had no difficulty. The broader-than-usual shoulders, the shadowed cleft in the chin, the lock of hair fallen over his left eye. “Davyn?”

“Right. Safely home.”

I nodded as I set the knife for another pass. “I’m glad. Truly.” There was nothing else to say. Too bad that he had risked his neck to save me when I couldn’t do what they wanted me to do. To sing again. Heaven and earth ... they wanted me to sing to the beasts of fire and death and set them free.

“Have you eaten?” he said. “I’m heading over to see what I can glean from supper. I’ve not had anything since I got in this afternoon.”

I always had to review the day to decide whether I had eaten. I seemed forever hungry, though eating was never very appealing. On most days I would rise at dawn when no one but Yura, the morose cook, was awake. He would give me a packet of bread and cheese or cold turnips, and I would carry it with me, eating as I drove the cart to the southern end of the valley to begin loading more stones for the bridge. The Elhim gathered morning and evening to eat in the refectory in the large cavern, chattering, visiting, and enjoying each other’s society. They extended me a kindly welcome, but I knew better than to imagine I was good company. My presence could be nothing but a dismal reminder of their disappointment. Even Narim avoided me. So I stayed away. When the early darkness fell I would retreat to the woodshop that the stubby Vanka had turned over to me while he was building a storehouse at the southern end of the valley. There I would eat the rest of my rations and work until I dropped. A straw pallet and two blankets in the corner of the woodshop saved me the long trudge to the cavern.

“I don’t—”

“I smelled Yura’s sausage pie earlier. If you’ve never tasted it, it’s well worth the walk over there. Everyone else is already done with eating and off to other business. I’d like the company. We ought to know each other better, since we own each other’s life.”

I must have looked puzzled, for he laughed, and his gray eyes crinkled into the fine lines that proclaimed it was his habit to laugh a great deal. “It’s an Elhim custom. When you save a person’s life, that life belongs in part to you. You can delight in its pleasures and grieve at its sorrows—and you are obligated to participate in its future course. Since you have saved my life, and I, by virtue of my sturdy friend Acorn, have saved yours, we had best get on with our delighting and grieving and participating, had we not?”

“I don’t think you’ve made a good bargain. My future prospects are somewhat limited.”

“Most Senai would not think an Elhim life worth saving, so we won’t make any judgments yet as to who gets the better of our trade.” Davyn had a winning way about him.

I began to stack the finished planks against the wall, and without saying anything more, the Elhim took up a broom and began sweeping up the curls and slivers of pine and tossing them on the fire.

“Your mount is well taught,” I said. “I felt a right fool venturing into that storm with nothing but a cloak and a horse.”

“I wondered if it was your curses I heard on the wind that night. Fortunately Acorn and his kind have no need for teaching. Have you been out among the herd? They’re a marvel—even in such a marvelous place as Cor Talaith.”

While we finished tidying up the woodshop and banking the fire, Davyn told me of the small, sturdy horses that roamed the valley, and how they allowed themselves to be haltered and ridden, but maintained a streak of independence. “If they get the yen to graze the south meadows, don’t bother trying to lure them north to hunt or haul wood. Might as well try to get a Florin to eat fish.” He propped his broom back in its corner. “So do we eat now?”

“I’ll confess—when I was ten, sausage pie was my favorite,” I said.

“You won’t look back after eating Yura’s.”

We walked slowly across the end of the valley through the moon shadows cast by rocks and trees and outbuildings scattered across the meadow. A number of sheds and workshops were clustered in a broad, grassy pocket created by the sheltering cliff walls. A bend in the valley hid the place from view until you were right on it. An orange glow flared from the forge as we walked past and the clang of ironwork rang out—Bertrand the smith often worked late—but the noise soon faded away as we passed through a dense grove of tall, thin firs. A stream burbled through the trees into the meadow, sparkling in the silvery light. Davyn inhaled deeply of the bracing air—air just cold enough to make my long-sleeved wool shirt welcome, along with the gloves I’d put on by habit. “I do dearly love coming home,” he said. “I stay away too much.”

“It’s a beautiful place,” I said. “Quiet.” Indeed I could not bear the thought of returning to a city—the noise and crowds and unending fear. Earth’s bones, how I hated being such a coward. “It’s kind of your people to let me stay awhile.”

“You can stay as long as you like. No one knows of this place. Even the rare Dragon Rider who takes his mount so far into the god-forbidden mountains overlooks such a small green blot in the middle of the snow as Cor Talaith.”

“But surely—”

“You are only the second gallim—non-Elhim—ever to come here. We are very different from other races, as you know. We have to earn our way in the world, for we’re too few to be self-sufficient, but since we’re neither physically powerful nor warlike, it’s good to have a sanctuary. Our roots are here, no matter where we vines go wandering. And it’s important that we have a place ... secure ... private ... especially at certain times in our lives. ...”

His words left the subject hanging. There were questions I should ask, things no human had ever known about the Elhim—why they were so different, how was it possible for them to have children, or did they—and I had the sense that Davyn was ready to answer if I asked. But I was so tired I couldn’t think—the very state I did my best to achieve every day, and I was doing well to force my feet to move one in front of the other. I should have stayed in the woodshop.

Davyn seemed comfortable with silence, and we entered the lighted mouth of the great cavern without further conversation. He rummaged about the deserted kitchen and came up with two mugs of cold cider and two plates of savory sausage and vegetables in a rich brown crust still warm from the embers of the supper fire. We ate our meal, and then he offered to clean up the plates and mugs if I would unroll two pallets from the stack kept for those who had no specific quarters in the warren. I never saw Davyn join me, for as soon as I had rolled out the thin mat, I was asleep, dreaming of murderous dragons who caught me up in their sharp talons and deposited me torn and bleeding into the dark heart of Mazadine.

When I awoke, sweating as usual with my night terrors, Davyn’s mat was rolled up again, though the two other Elhim who had been sleeping when I arrived were still snoring quietly. I put away my mat, then sat beside the hot spring that welled up in a basin at one end of the room and went through my daily ritual of shaving. It always took me a number of tries, dropping the knife or fumbling it enough to nick the skin, but I refused to let my beard grow. I hated wearing a beard. It was a measure of my life’s condition that getting my face scraped every morning without slitting my throat had been for so long the highlight of my days. Though it was too small a change to be called progress, the activity had become a little easier—on that morning only three fumbles and no blood.

I padded quietly between the sleeping Elhim toward the refectory, stopping short at the doorway. Davyn was sitting at the far end of a long refectory table, drinking tea with Narim, the two of them talking with a woman. She sat cross-legged on the floor next to the hearth, her chin propped on one hand. Her long brown hair was caught in a braid that fell over one shoulder, leaving a few unruly wisps to obscure the features of her narrow face. She wore a dark green tunic belted with flat metal links, brown breeches and vest, and tall boots that covered her slender legs up to her knees. She was arguing in low, intense tones with the two Elhim while with her right hand she absentmindedly poked a chunk of sausage skewered on a fork into the flames.

“... don’t know why you insist you need him. I can do everything you want. I know the ritual, and—”

“Hush, girl. Others will be about soon,” said Narim. “You can’t do it alone.”

“I don’t need any bloody weakling Senai to share what is mine by right.”

“Live through what he’s endured before you call him weakling,” said Davyn. “Your skills and knowledge are indisputable, but his heart must guide our enterprise.”

I cursed myself for a fool. They had not believed me. They still thought that by wheedling and plotting they could get me to do what they wanted. Davyn was no different from the rest. It was time to leave Cor Talaith. My own griefs were hard enough to deal with; I didn’t need those of an entire race. As facing hypocrisy so early was unpalatable, I turned to walk away, but was too clumsy to escape unnoticed. Returning to the narrow passage, I bumped into the hanging bell used to call the Elhim to supper. I wasn’t able to muffle it fast enough, and Davyn called out to me cheerfully. “MacAllister! Good morrow. Sorry our passages aren’t designed for Senai height. Come join us.”

“Not today,” I said. “I really need to be on my way.”

“It’s scarcely light enough to see your own feet,” said Davyn, smiling in his friendly way. “Surely your labors can wait a half hour more. We’d like to have a word with you while the place is quiet. We have someone—”

“I mean I need to leave Cor Talaith. I’ve taken up space here for too long.”

Narim said nothing, and the woman concentrated on her sizzling sausage, though she was either pretending or she liked it well charred on the outside. It was a frowning Davyn who tried to dissuade me. “The hunt was still furious when I left, even after more than a month. They’re patrolling every road in Catania, examining every traveler. You’ll never get through.”

“Are there no other ways out of here?”

“Only north into the wastelands or a very long trek down to Raggai—and neither one until the snows melt.”

“Then I’ll have to risk Catania. I need to get on with my life and let your people get on with theirs.”

“You must do as you think best. But Tarwyl is due in next week. He can tell us how things go in Catania. If there’s a chance—and you still want to go—I’ll take you out myself.”

A startled Narim cast him a sharp look, and Davyn answered it without ever taking his eyes from my face. “It is your choice to go or stay. That will not change. But no matter what hopes we’ve had or given up, we’d not want you taken again by the Ridemark. Will you wait for Tarwyl’s word?”

I had no grounds to argue. My discomfort at their plotting was no reason to be a fool. “It seems reasonable. Thank you—again. If I’m to stay awhile longer, then I’ll feel better if I get back to work and pull a bit of my weight at least.” I nodded to the three of them. Davyn did not smile, but only relaxed his concern. Narim sat expressionless, tapping his thumb on the scrubbed table. The woman glanced up as I took my leave, brushing the wisps of hair from hostile blue eyes with the back of her hand. I carried the image of her—a disturbing image—as I left the refectory and made my way to the stables, where I hitched the mule to the wagon in the dawn light.

The left side of the woman’s face had been severely burned at some time in the past. Her light brown skin, so smooth over her fine bones on the right side of her face, was crumpled into a scaly pink disaster on the left. The intrusive ugliness halfway across her cheek and brow distorted the outer edge of her eyelid to give a permanent droop to the left of her blue eyes. But more disturbing than the remnants of painful injury to features otherwise pleasing was the flash of red from her left wrist—not a burn, but a red dragon scribed on her skin. A woman of the Ridemark. Her presence made no sense at all. The Elhim had rescued me from the Riders. Their goal was the ruin of the Ridemark, to free the dragons that made the clan powerful enough to manipulate kings.

A creeping unease prickled my skin as I drove the sluggish mule across the dewy fields. If I could not trust the Elhim and their account of events, then I was once again left with no idea of what had happened to me. I reviewed every event of the weeks since I had gone to Cor Neuill, but by the time I began to lift the stones from the towering rockfall into the wagon, I had come no nearer a conclusion. Only one thing kept intruding on my thinking: If they had lied about their relationship with the Riders, then perhaps they had lied about other things, more fundamental things.

“Good Keldar, show me the way.” For the first time in six weeks the familiar plea came to my lips without a surge of disgust following it. But as I crammed my fingers under a skull-sized knob of granite and bent my elbows, scooping the stone onto my wrists and forearms and hefting it high enough to dump it in the wagon, I called myself every name for a fool. There were no gods.

Furiously I crouched and lifted another, and another. Then a larger one than I had before. It was getting easier. My shoulders protested but I managed it, distracted as I was by thoughts and memories, making no more sense of them than at any other time.

Work. Forget. I hammered at myself in the rhythm of the stones. I knew truth when I heard it. The story Tarwyl had told on the night of my arrival was truth. It just wasn’t everything.

When I had loaded all the mule could haul, I drove across the valley floor to the bridge site by the gaping fissure. Steams and smokes hung over the fissure as always, but the breeze cleared them enough to see that the Elhim builders were not yet working. Only one figure sat atop a stack of lumber in the angled sun, watching me pull up.

“Good morrow, Senai.” Nyura, old Iskendar’s constant companion, was a nervous, fidgety sort of person who looked as though someone had shoved all his features into the center of his face, neglecting the broad expanse of pale blandness around the edges. Iskendar and Nyura had spoken to me fairly often in my first days in Cor Talaith. Iskendar, the leader of the Elhim community, would ask if I needed anything, and would I not consider sharing their table. I could feel his unspoken hope: Perhaps if I took part in friendly society, learned more of the Elhim and their sin, felt enough compassion for their five hundred years of penitence, perhaps then I could find it in myself to sing again. Would it were so easy. I thought I’d made it clear that there was no substance to his hopes, considering it a measure of their acceptance that they sought me out so rarely anymore. But of course the morning’s events had proven me wrong. And here was the fluttery Elhim hovering about again.

“How fare you, Aidan MacAllister? Iskendar sends his greetings and asks how we may serve you.”

“Nothing has changed. Thanks to the kindness of the Elhim, I’m well. But I’ve trespassed on your hospitality too long. I need to be on my way.”

He didn’t seem too surprised. “We’ll regret losing your company.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be all you wish me to be.”

“Rest easy. We’ll find another way.”

As I began to unload the cart, the Elhim watched, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, as if deciding how to proceed with a conversation doomed to go nowhere.

“Tell me,” I said, “if it is not too private a question ... I understood there were no women among the Elhim.”

I don’t know what he expected from me, but it clearly wasn’t that. He gaped for a moment, but he soon gathered his wits and answered smoothly, dismissing the topic as if to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. “No. We do not possess the duality of your species. We are of only one kind, neither male nor female. If you have other questions about such matters ... well, we do consider these things private, but not secret, if you understand me. If you were to develop a close friendship with one of us—of longer study than a passing acquaintance such as I am privileged to have with you—I’m sure that friend would be happy to discuss it further. You understand. ...”

“Of course. I was just curious because I heard a woman’s voice in the great cavern this morning. Talking with Narim.”

“Ah. Now I understand. It was surely Lara you heard. A sad story that. You saw her scars? She was brought to Cor Talaith as a young girl—some eighteen or twenty years ago now. Frightfully burned. The fool of a child sneaked into the lair at Cor Neuill and tried to ride a dragon. An astonishing feat to get the beast away at all, but it turned on her. We allowed her to stay here. Did our best to heal her injuries.”

“So she is of the Ridemark?”

“Well, yes. But her own people wouldn’t have her back after she trespassed their laws.”

“And she still lives here?”

“No. No. She lives on her own. Wanders the mountains and the northlands. Narim says she hires out to guide caravans through the northern passes. It was Narim who found her and cared for her. She comes back here from time to time to see him. You could say we’re the only family she has.”

“Ah. I see.” I let the matter drop while I finished unloading the cart. It didn’t explain what she had to do with me, but I didn’t think Nyura was going to tell me that anyway. No wonder she sounded so bitter. Family and clan, tradition and honor were the very sum of existence to those of the Ridemark.

The Elhim kept watching from his perch, only a persistent tapping of his foot on the ground indicating he was not yet finished with our conversation. Though the air was pleasantly cool, the breeze had died away, so nothing mitigated the rays of the sun as I worked. I was almost done with the load. When I stopped to wipe the sweat from my face, Nyura took the opportunity to speak again, glancing at me with his close-together eyes. “I’ve a bit of news I thought might interest you, though I’ve wondered ... after hearing of your terrible imprisonment ... Well, perhaps you have no concern, as you have every right to despise the lot of them.”

His speech was hesitating, yet in every pause he would watch me, casting his pale eyes on me and then away again. I kept working and let him spin it out. “Your cousin, King Devlin, has a son ...”

In that pause he did indeed see my interest sparked. I could never forget Donal, the infant who had shown me the truths of innocence, purity, and undemanding love to weave into my music.

“... nineteen now. A fine youth by all accounts. Leading troops in the Gondari war.”

No surprise. I’d heard as much in Camarthan.

“... but no one understood why the king and the prince did not smite the Gondari, as their forces are superior. We’ve learned that the Gondari have taken the young prince hostage.”

Hostage! Donal ... my cousin’s child and so my cousin, too ... the infant grown to fair youth, held in squalor and bitter cold, murderous heat and unending terror, surrounded by savage bellowing and the vomit of fire, day and night. Absolutely without hope. If his father attacked the Gondari, the youth would be chained to a post and seared with dragon’s fire—not charred to ash in an instant, but left to die slowly in agony as long as they could make it last. And if Devlin held back, his son would languish in his prison forever until he died coughing up blood, or shivering with untended fever, or banging his head in madness against the stone walls while the dragons screamed their triumph. Stalemate. Forever.

In that instant I understood what was the “favor” that Devlin was going to ask of me on the night of Callia’s murder. He believed I could free his son. He thought I could sing and make the dragons let Donal go, as had been done in Aberthain. No wonder he claimed he didn’t know what had been done to me. No wonder. He had been so agitated, so tentative. He was going to go ahead and ask ... until I said I didn’t know what I’d done. At that point he couldn’t ask without revealing what he’d been determined to destroy. To keep his dangerous secret, he’d had to sacrifice his son. Fires of heaven, Devlin ...

Until that moment I had not actually believed what the Elhim told me I had done, that my music had somehow made the dragons grow restless and disobey the commands of the bloodstones. I had been sure it was all a mistake, a devastating, life-destroying misunderstanding. But now ...

I looked upon Nyura’s pale face, not thinking of him at all, but of my cousin’s child in a prison more hopeless than Mazadine. I could not hate Devlin enough to rejoice in such devastation. I closed my eyes and envisioned the trusting, helpless infant I had known in an hour of purest joy. “Would that I could sing for you,” I whispered. “If there were a god to hear me, I would beg his grace to sing you free.”

The sound of horses brought me back to the present. Nyura was riding away toward the caverns, no doubt insulted by my long distraction. The bridge builders were arriving with a team of horses dragging a load of huge timbers down the road. I greeted them, and then drove slowly back to the rockfall to get another load. After working until sunset, I moved to the woodshop and smoothed rough timbers into usable planks until I could not lift the drawknife one more stroke.

Though the work drove me to exhaustion as I wished, never could I rid myself of the image of Donal trapped in horror. Uninterested in Elhim society, I did not return to the cavern, but bedded down in the woodshop, as had been my custom for the past weeks. Deep in my dreams that night I heard the bellowing dragons, no music in their cries, only wild and savage murder to the ears of a youth standing at the threshold of manhood without hope. The dragons screamed, haunting and dreadful, until I woke shaking in the dark corner of the woodshop and glimpsed a slender figure outlined against the dim glow of the banked fire. The figure had an arm upraised, and glittering in the light of a flaring ember was the deadly blade of a knife on a course for my back.

Chapter 14

I launched myself at the lower half of the slender silhouette, shooting up one hand to hold the dagger-wielding arm at bay. We toppled onto the sawdust-covered floor, but my assailant writhed and struggled and squirmed out from under me. I hadn’t enough hands to hold him still, yet keep the knife a safe distance from my vital parts. Fortunately my legs were longer than my attacker’s arms, and I was able to plant a foot firmly in his gut. A pained grunt followed and a massive expulsion of air, debilitating enough to relax the hand holding the knife and allow me to back away crabwise from the cloaked and hooded figure. My arms felt like water.

Not sanguine about any further combat, I pulled myself up to get away. But I was desperately curious and reached out to flip the hood from my opponent’s face. At the same moment he raised the knife again with a furious growl. The better part of wisdom commanded me to depart, even in ignorance, so I ran.

My morning excursions in Camarthan served me well as I streaked through the moonlit meadows and wood-land. By the time I reached the great cavern, I had left pursuit behind and given a bit of thought as to what I was going to do next. On consideration, waking my hosts to say one of their number was trying to murder me seemed unproductive and unwise. Instead I sank to the ground in the shadows, flattening myself to the cliff wall just beside the mouth of the cavern, thinking I might see who would come slinking through the doorway while honest people slept. With surprise on my side, I could drag the villain before his own people and have evidence of my accusation.

But as the hard, brittle stone dug uncomfortably into my back, the damp grass soaked my breeches, and my blood lost the heat generated by midnight attacks, I began to laugh. I rolled onto all fours, a position that stretched and eased my wretched back, and I laughed until tears dripped from my face onto the soggy ground. Anyone who came on me in that time would have thought me mad.

You can’t let go, can you? I said to myself. Was there ever such a cowardly fool as you, Aidan MacAllister? To run away from a shadow who offered you nothing but what you have already? What dead man fears a knife? And what idiot thinks a villain will come walking through this door when there are undoubtedly fifty other entrances hidden in these cliffs? Why do you hold on? Let it go, fool.

If my midnight visitor had renewed his assault at that moment, I would have bared my breast and guided his blade with my grotesque fingers. But no one came, and at some time I collapsed into a sodden heap and slept until first light, when fingers began poking at me.

“MacAllister! Aidan! Dear god, are you all right?” A hand clamped my wrist and probed about my head—seeking a pulse or an injury, no doubt—then rolled me onto my back before I was awake enough to prevent it. My inadvertent groan at that painful posture only intensified his efforts to locate a wound, so he pulled open my shirt and would have ripped it right off of me if I’d not gathered my foggy wits.

“I’m all right. Please don’t.” I pushed the hands away and sat up to greet Davyn, whose wide-eyed fright was yielding to a flush rosier than the dawn light.

“I thought ... seeing you out here like this ...”

“It’s a long story,” I said, “and not one I care to publish. Not very flattering to my Senai warrior heritage.”

“But—”

“I’m all right. I’d rather talk about breakfast. I don’t think I ate anything at all yesterday, and as it seems I’m inescapably attached to living for today, at least, I might as well get on with it.”

“Of course. Yura was just lighting the fires when I came out.”

We ate Yura’s breakfast porridge, thick, hot, and satisfying. Then, leaving Davyn still mystified, I took myself to the stables and the rock pile and the bridge and the woodshop. I worked hard enough that I could not entertain a single thought except how to persuade my body to do what I demanded of it. And when I buried my face in the straw-filled mat in the corner of the woodshop late that night, I held the faint hope that I might never wake again.

I did, of course, to another dark figure lurking in the shadows, but this time instead of using a knife, my visitor beckoned me with his voice. “Wake up, slugabed, and come with me. We need to talk.”

“Don’t want to talk,” I mumbled into my pallet. “Use the knife. I shouldn’t have stopped you last night.”

“It doesn’t matter what you want, Aidan MacAllister.”

At last someone was being honest with me. But as I recognized the voice as Narim’s, I decided that such a judgment was premature.

“So talk,” I said. “Tell me something that is absolute truth.”

“You are not dead.”

I bleated in disbelief. “You’re a fool,” I said, and pulled my blanket over my head.

“That is certainly truth. But not because of what I just said. One could as easily say that you are the fool, mourning the loss of your gods. The gods are still there. You just don’t know their names, and for a Senai to admit such a thing is beyond the capability of the species.”

“I’ve seen no evidence to contradict my belief,” I said. “Not in a very long while.”

“Ah, my friend, you are still lost in the darkness. How much more wondrous are gods who can create such beings as humans and dragons and Elhim, than your paltry deities who speak with borrowed voices.”

“I do not deny that I am and have been a fool.”

“But a live fool. Come with me and let me prove my contention.”

“Why should I?”

“For Callia. She deserves a reason for her death.”

I stared at the pale-eyed Elhim who crouched in the darkness like a wolf waiting for the last embers of the watchfire to die away. “Bastard.”

“If that’s the worst you have to say of me before we’re done, I’ll count myself fortunate ...”

Silent and furious and wide-awake, I pulled on my boots.

“... but then, of course, it is impossible for an Elhim to be a bastard. Our young have only one parent, so we know nothing of marriage or nonmarriage, thus nothing of bastardy. We’ve never really understood the insult intended.”

The moon hung low in the west as we hiked for two hours across the valley, following an obscure track that wound its way between slabs of layered rock until breaking out onto a desolate hillside. Somewhere in the dark expanse of scrub and grass, sparse, stunted trees, and broken bits of reddish rock shone a faint, steady light. We headed for it as directly as one could without being a goat, and it soon resolved itself into a lantern, held aloft by none other than Davyn.

“So you’ve agreed to try this?” he said anxiously. “We’ll be with you the whole—”

“Well, he didn’t exactly,” said Narim. “I bullied him into it a bit.”

“Bullied? Ah, by the One, Narim. What have you done?”

“He wanted only truth. Complete truth. I told him he wasn’t dead. That was about as complete as I could get. Telling, bullying, truth ... He’s not going to believe anything until we show him.”

“But Narim—”

Davyn was interrupted again, this time by a muted rumbling as of a distant storm or a blustering wind heard from inside a thick-walled fortress. But the stars shone cold and still, growing in brilliance as the moon sank below the western peaks. Our cloaks and hair lay unmoving in the quiet chill of midnight.

“Is the woman already in place?” asked Narim uneasily.

“Yes. But we’ve time. You must prepare him.”

I stood still, arms folded, determined to go no step farther until I heard an explanation. Narim screwed up his face at Davyn, then motioned for me to sit down. I found a convenient rock that put my face at a level with his.

“Someone tried to kill you last night,” he began.

“Was it you?”

He looked startled at my question, and if the light had been better I would have said he turned red. But Davyn had taken the lamp up the hillside and was scrabbling about a pile of crumbling rock. “No. No, it was not ...” An edge to the way he said it told me that he was quite capable of killing, and would have no qualms if he believed such an action necessary. I listened more attentively after that. “... but I know who it was, and the attempt has made us change our plans. Move before we’re ready. We weren’t going to do this for a few weeks yet.”

“Who was it?” I didn’t want to lose the critical answer.

“I’ll not tell you that. It’s of no importance. There are those of us—some, not all—so blinded by fear that they can no longer see possibility. To them, safety dictates that the world remain as it is. They believe you represent the extinction of the Elhim.”

“But why? I’ve told you—”

“That is, of course, the most important part. The why. Something has given them pause, a reason to disbelieve your saying. They know you’re the only one capable. They’ve only to think back to the first time you heard a dragon’s cry in your uncle’s garden.”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. “How in heaven and earth do you know of that?”

Impatiently Narim cut me off. “We know everything about you from the day of your birth until the day of your arrest. Elhim have sources of information everywhere, and we used every one of them to learn of you. We know what you told your singing masters that first night, and what you told your mother, and how you lived the next three years and every year thereafter. Don’t you see? We’d been waiting for centuries for someone with your gift. In the days when we were friends, the dragons told us there were a few—a very few—people who could touch their minds. ‘Nandithari’ they called them—Dragon Speakers—who could understand their speech even when they were in their wildest state at year’s end. They told us that those rare beings had an open and quiet heart, ones who could listen so well they could distinguish the sound of one bird’s flight from another. When we heard you sing, we knew you were such a one.”

Why wouldn’t they listen? Narim of all of them should know. He said he understood what it meant to me to discover that my life had been a lie. One more time I tried to convince him. “I cannot help you,” I said. “Even if there was a time when I could, even if I wanted to more than life itself, I cannot. No amount of wishing, no amount of words or storytelling, threats or pleading or plotting can put back what is gone.” I held out my scarred, knotted fingers. “Inside me the damage is worse than this. Far worse. What heart I possessed is dead. My music is dead. Why won’t you believe me? If I could make it not so ... heaven and earth, Narim, don’t you think I would?”

The Elhim said nothing, only shook his head and took my arm, silently demanding that I should follow him. I let him pull me off the rock and lead me up the hill to where Davyn stood before a dark, round hole about a hand’s breadth taller than I. A pile of brush lay to the side of the yawning emptiness. Another rumbling. This time I felt it in my feet, as if a storm lay beneath the earth.

“What is this place?” I found myself whispering as if standing at the entrance of a tomb, my neck prickling with the unreasoning dread that the tomb was my own.

Narim still said nothing, but followed Davyn and his lantern into the dark hole, dragging me along behind him. The passage was nothing like the airy warrens of the Elhim caverns, but only a cramped dirt chute through the side of the hill, a giant rabbit hole or worm’s den, bored smooth by an inhabitant the diameter of a man’s height. Downward. Ever sloping, gently, inexorably down. It was warm, very different from the cool caverns of stone, and quite dry. Only a few side passages, and the place smelled of dirt and roots. We might have been burrowing straight to the center of the earth.

We had been descending for at least half an hour when I caught the first trace of brimstone in the still air. Unwittingly I slowed my steps, but Narim pulled me onward, still saying nothing. My friend Gerald Adair had been deathly afraid of dark, enclosed spaces, abandoning me when I would sing in the coal mines of Boskar or the hovels of the poorest of the poor. He would have gone mad in that long tunnel. I had teased him unmercifully about it, but I was beginning to understand his fear.

Another quarter of an hour and a faint gleam ahead of us turned out to be another lantern like ours, abandoned alongside a large, empty leather sack at the opening of a wide side passage. Davyn set our lantern beside the other, trimmed it to a soft glow, then motioned us forward. Narim whispered in my ear, “Fifty paces from the crossing.” I couldn’t help but count the steps in my head. The silence was as palpable as the warm air, more heavily tainted with the rotten, sweet smell of brimstone. Mixed with the stink was a thick, ripe, animal smell ... musky ... dragon.

“Where in the name of all sense are we?” I said with scarcely more than an outward breath.

Neither Elhim spoke, but I got my answer soon enough. A faint smudge of light in the heavy darkness marked the end of our journey, and when I saw what was beyond, I was transfixed with wonder and terror and astonishment.

We stood in our tiny dark hole high on the wall of a vast cavern, not one polished and furnished and home-like, as was the Elhim refuge, but crude and rough in its gigantic dimensions, blasted from the roots of the earth and lit by burning heaps of rubble. The cavern floor was pitted with boiling pools of luminous green and milky white, cracks and fissures that vented steam and smoke enough to make the walls drip and the hot air heavy and oppressive. In between the pits and pools were half-rotted carcasses and bones of every imaginable size. When I was forced loose from my paralysis enough to take a breath, I gagged at the stench of brimstone and carrion and the musky, decaying foulness of a beast too long confined.

For the cavern was occupied by a copper-scaled monster five times the height of a man and twice that in length even with the spiked tail curled beneath it—a sleeping dragon. The patterned wings of green and copper were folded into bony ridges on the massive flanks, and the monstrous head was lowered to the ground, the gaping nostrils spewing only weak and intermittent spurts of flame in rhythm with the harsh blast of its breathing. The horny brow ridges were as thick as logs, as were the coverings that encased razor-sharp talons that could rip the hide of an elephant as if it were paper. The armored flesh was crusted with stony parasites like the hull of a ship long docked, and the folds where the head joined the long, muscular neck were deep. This dragon was unthinkably old.

From behind me Narim made some movement, and it took me a moment to judge what it was he did, but when I saw the tiny figure far below us standing on a jutting outcrop of red rock, I shook my head in disbelief. The woman Lara stood almost in the beast’s face, just at the level of its eyes. She wore leather breeches and tunic, elbow-length gauntlets, and a stiffened-wool helmet—Rider’s armor. At Narim’s second signal, she raised her hand and shouted so that her words echoed through the thick foulness of the air and bounced from the moss-slick walls of the cavern. She spoke in the ancient tongue of the Ridemark, her voice stern and commanding, unyielding in the force of her will. “Arrit, teng zha nav wyvyr ...” Wake, child of fire and wind. Wake from the sleep of dying and heed my command.

There was a pause as the echoes died away, as if the very orb of the world stopped its spinning dance about the sun, holding time in abeyance. My soul cried out in dread, commanding me to hide before time took up its path again. Thrumming, insistent panic begged my feet to run. But instead I sank to my knees, Narim and Davyn at my shoulders, their thin, strong fingers digging into my flesh as if to hold me together. When the beast began to move it was too late.

“Speak your name, beast,” commanded the woman.

The huge body shifted uneasily, the battering ram of a tail slamming into the cavern wall, the very movement causing the rumble that shook the ground. Rough breath and a snort of fire as its head lifted up slowly, and then the eyes came open. Glaring red eyes, swirling pools of scarlet flame glazed with films of ghastly white, filled with wild, unreasoning hatred—the gaze that could transfix a victim in horror while the furnace within was readied to release volcanic breath that would flay a man and cause his blood to boil right through the veins. The woman was sure to be incinerated.

“Speak your name; then return to your winter’s death. The snow still lies deep upon the hunting grounds, and your brothers and sisters will not heed your call.” She held her hand in the air, and in the short, fiery bursts from the waking beast’s nostrils, I saw the flash of dark red in her fingers. A bloodstone—a kai’cet, the Riders called it. Heaven and earth! But every speculation as to how she had gotten away from her clan with one of its treasures, or how she had learned to use it, a woman—one who would never have been considered for training in the secrets of the Riders—all of that was lost when the dragon gaped its jaws and belched out a garish rainbow of fire that arced over Lara’s head. The thin trailer of water cascading down the wall behind her erupted in steam, and then the beast released a roar that shook the foundations of the world.

The tide of sound broke over my head as if the ocean itself had reared up in a single mighty wave and commenced to drown the history of humankind, only it was not an ocean of water, but an ocean of fire. I believed in that moment that my life had come to its ending, that my flesh had been scorched away, that my entrails had turned to bloody vapor just as the waterfall had vanished in steam, and that my bones lay burning on the hard-packed earth of our hiding place. Despair and grief and memory were erased, wonder and curiosity dismissed in a torrent of pain. I could not scream, could not pray, could not weep, for every part and fiber of my flesh quivered in the agony of burning. And yet it was only an instant—less time than the swinging of a pendulum—and I could look upon myself huddled on the now quiet ground, my spasms held in the steady grip of the two frightened Elhim, and I could read the word that had been seared into my soul with pain and fire.

For that single instant I hung suspended out of my life, and I formed that same word, whether only in my mind or on my tongue I did not know, and I reflected it upon the sender with my spirit’s whisper. Keldar.

And in that same instant outside of time, I heard his answer, so faint as to be unnoticed by any who had not lived in silence for seven endless years: Beloved.

Chapter 15

What words can describe that instant of contact? Lightning is too cold, majesty too weak, glory too dim, salvation too imprecise, devotion too impersonal. Whatever soul it was that spoke to me in that breathless moment, whether god or dragon, pulled me from the brink of disintegration, and I clung to its word as a drowning child to a father’s outstretched hand. So much grief and regret and tender concern was wrapped in it that I did not believe I could encompass all of it in a year of remembering. He knew me, called me by the name Roelan had given me when I was young, the name my god had sung when filling the world with music. All the horror and disgust I’d felt upon learning that the voice of my music was a murderous monster was swept away in the flood of this creature’s care for me. A being with such capacity for love was no beast. My soul was touched with the remembrance of joy, and my companions had no idea of it, for I could not tell them, could not move or speak without letting go of the fragile moment.

“In the name of the One, what have we done?” said Davyn, lifting my drooping head and raking his worried gray eyes over my face.

“Only what was required. If he cannot bear it, then best to learn it now.”

“Narim”—even as their faces flickered orange and gold in the reflection of dragon flames, Davyn stared at his friend with scandalized disbelief—“you’ve not told him any of it, have you?”

“We need to get him out of here.”

“Narim, my oldest friend, his life is not ours to use as we will. By the One, his very eyes bleed.”

“By the time he was in our hands, there was no way to tell him. A man in despair cannot choose rationally. And somehow in the past two days, for some damnable reason I cannot see, the others have guessed what we already know. They’ve tried to kill him once and will not give up now they’ve judged him a danger.”

“That doesn’t make this right.”

“Ordinary estimates of fairness or justice have no relevance when the survival of an entire race is at stake. As of this moment, Aidan MacAllister is either on his way back to life or he is truly dead. I cannot think he would prefer to be where he was. Now let’s get him out of here so we can judge which way he’s gone.”

All this was gibberish to me. They raised me to my feet, led me up the long tunnel, and sat me on the rocky hillside facing the rose-streaked silver of the dawn, letting the quickening breeze of morning sweep away the lingering stench of brimstone and decay. Though I struggled to hold on, the last echoes of Keldar’s voice began to slip from my grasp. Helplessly I felt it go, reaching after it with such aching misery and grief that I must have groaned quite audibly. Only then did the words of the two Elhim begin to filter into my head, and I began to wonder again who it was who wanted me dead and what in the universe I was going to do about what had happened.

“Dragon’s teeth, did he fall off the ledge?” Someone else had come up behind me, someone my mind told me ought to be dead.

“No,” said Davyn. “He’s not spoken since the dragon’s cry, and we don’t know but what we’ve killed him with it. Some of us are a bit more concerned than others.”

“Is he so afraid of a stupid bellow? Every child in Elyria has heard worse, though perhaps not in such close quarters and lived to think about it.” It was the woman Lara. Though I did not look up, I could smell the charred, stinking leather of her armor. Her blackened gauntlets dropped to the ground five paces away, next to the pack from the tunnel. “I told you it was a waste of time. If the beast is ever going to ‘speak,’ it won’t be when we wake it up from winter sleep. How do you know it even has a name or can remember it after so long?”

“Keldar,” I said softly, pricked to unwilling response by her casual dismissal. “His name is Keldar.”

“By the One! Keldar. We suspected as much.” Davyn rolled over on his back and chortled at the sunrise in un-muted glee. “Who could imagine it?”

“You heard him? He spoke the name?” Narim crouched in front of me, peering into my face, less ready to be excited than Davyn. “Was there anything else? Was it in the sound or in your mind?”

“He guessed it couldn’t see,” said the woman scornfully. “He saw the growths on its eyes and called it by the blind god’s name. He heard nothing but the bellowing of a beast, as we all did.”

“I’d never seen a dragon’s eyes before,” I said. “Is he truly blind?”

She snorted and did not deign to answer.

Narim ignored her. “Was it the same as when you would hear Roelan?”

I shook my head. “Very different. Just as clear, but it’s never been so ... painful ... so hard ... so intense. Narim, I ...” My voice was much calmer than I felt. My whole being was in chaos. My mind was a jumble of exquisitely sharp images, the sensations coming and going in flickering bursts: the eye-searing brilliance of the fiery rainbow, the feel of the warm dirt beneath my hands, the shattering cacophony of the bellowing, the choking fetor of dragon. Half a moment of breathtaking clarity—no more—and then the image would evaporate. But no sooner had I adjusted to the silence of the morning than it burst upon me yet again. It was as if someone repeatedly stabbed a stiletto into my head and yanked it out again. I had to force my attention to every word being said—even my own—or I would have heard or spoken only half of them.

I had things I needed to say, but Davyn interrupted my hesitating speech, rolling onto his side and propping his face on his hand. “It was inevitable that it be more difficult,” he said eagerly, his eyes flashing in the winter sunrise. “Part of it is you, of course. The vileness done to you. The injuries you’ve suffered. But most of it is the dragons themselves. They’ve been captive for so long, held in this wild state, that we weren’t sure it would be possible to reach them ... even for you. Even at the height of your power, right before your arrest, Narim worried that you’d not be able to reach them in the way that’s necessary. Roelan, perhaps, but, of course, we can’t know which one is Roelan.”

Roelan. My “god.” A dragon. Unbelievable. “But you said that I ... affected ... more than one.”

“That’s true. Never all of them. Perhaps only Roelan and the other six eldest were changed by your music. We don’t know. For a few years after you disappeared, certain dragons still showed the changes you had wrought, and so we had hopes that you were with them in some way, but over time ...”

“Ten years,” I said. “Roelan’s voice grew fainter from the first day, and after a while there came a time when I couldn’t—After ten years he didn’t answer anymore.” I was only an instant’s separation from that desolation; only the single word shimmering in my memory kept it away. Davyn gazed on me with sympathy, while Narim walked away, sat himself on the weedy hillside, and stared expressionlessly into the morning.

“We came to believe you were dead,” said Davyn softly. “We had no idea where they’d taken you. The One who guides us surely led Narim to Lepan.”

I needed answers. Clarity. “What of this dragon ... Keldar?” Even as I spoke the name, my intellect tried to convince me it was impossible. Denial would put me back in the prison of my despair, yet acceptance was surely the madness I’d fought so hard to hold at bay.

Davyn glanced at the woman who had shed her reeking leather armor and was packing it carefully in her bag, studiously ignoring us. “Ah, yes. Well, some eighteen years ago, not long before you were arrested, this dragon flew out of Cor Neuill, ridden by a brave and enterprising young girl of thirteen. She’d been determined to ride for many years, even following the legion into battle, where she managed to get herself a bloodstone from a fallen Rider. It was not this dragon’s—Keldar’s—stone, its dekai’cet, as they call it. The dragon linked to her stone had been wounded when its Rider fell. The clan had destroyed the beast, of course; they’ve never learned to link a new stone to a dragon. But Lara was convinced that with a bloodstone of her own, she could ride any dragon—as indeed she proved. Her courage and skill were indisputable. But the mistake she made was assuming that only the bloodstone enabled her to get the dragon out of the lair. In truth we believe that you made it possible. You’d been to Cor Neuill only two nights before. The lair was in chaos: dragons disobeying their Riders, threatening them, breaking through the Riders’ Ring, when she decided to make her attempt.”

Lara stuffed the gauntlets into her pack quite savagely, and it struck me that she didn’t particularly like this part of Davyn’s story.

“She planned to take the dragon back to the camp to prove to her clan that she could control the beast, but the dragon refused her command to turn. To command a dragon with a bloodstone that is not the one bound to it from the beginning—the dekai’cet that its own Rider carries—is extremely difficult, which is why dragons without linked stones must be destroyed. And this dragon had another destination.”

“The lake?”

“We don’t know. But he brought her into the Carag Huim, and she tried very hard to get control. The beast flew straight into a cliff. ...”

I could envision the drama played out before me: the child goading the dragon to madness with the hated jewel ... the struggle ... the disaster ... and the agonizing fire.

“Well,” said Davyn, seeing in my expression that I understood enough. “They both survived. Narim found Lara and brought her to Cor Talaith. Until about five years ago we didn’t know what had become of the dragon. Lara searched through the mountains and eventually found him in this cavern, where he had gone to heal or to die. Since then she’s—”

“Enough,” said Lara, hefting the heavy pack onto her slender shoulder. “I won’t be talked of as if I were an ignorant beast like the one down below us. Hear this, Senai.” Her blue eyes flamed, and the terrible scars on her left cheek quivered red as she tossed her long braid over her shoulder. “I am a daughter of the Ridemark, and no matter what my people say of me, I’ve not betrayed them, only taken a kai’cet, as is my right. I do not believe dragons have minds. I do not believe they can speak. I do not believe that some cowardly Senai harp player ever has or ever will make them something they are not. All I want to do is ride one of them without burning, and since my own people won’t allow it, this is the only hope I’ve got. Now, Davyn, I’ll thank you to stop talking about me.”

Lara marched furiously past Davyn and me without so much as another glance, but to my surprise, when she strode past the bemused Narim sitting on the hillside, the Elhim reached out a hand to her, and she clasped it firmly before continuing on her way. Narim put his chin back on his knees and went back to his meditation.

“He nursed her for over a year,” said Davyn softly. “Made her move her limbs so they would not be left unusable, every hour of every day, when she could not do it without screaming. He scoured the hills and the cities for remedies to ease her and heal her, and prevent as much scarring and deformity as he could. She cursed him for it, but now there is no bond deeper than theirs. She is torn apart by her longing to be accepted again by her clan, and her love for Narim, and her fear that he is right about the dragons and she is wrong. And she does dearly want to fly.”

The sun baked away the dew on the gray-green scrub, and we watched Lara’s straight, slim figure dwindle as she descended into the valley. Then I saw no alternative but to get back to the truth of what had happened in the night. I had to accept it, and the Elhim had to know.

“I thank you for this,” I said. “What happened here was something marvelous, something unexpected. I’ll never forget it. But now”—my conclusion had been reaffirmed as I had listened to Davyn and Lara, feeling Narim’s expectant gaze on my back—“if you believe that I can speak to him again or regain ... anything else ... Davyn, I was dying. When I heard him and spoke his name and heard ... what I heard ... I was already leaving my body behind. If it had been more than a single word, even a heartbeat longer, I’d never have gotten back. I’m sorry. I still can’t help you.” A crippling irony. They had given me something to live for, and I couldn’t claim it without dying. Not a satisfactory conclusion, but perhaps enough to keep me going awhile longer.

Davyn sighed and gazed ruefully at Narim. “We should have warned you.”

“Narim was right,” I said, trying to ease his distress. “I wouldn’t go back. I’m sorry—you’ll never know how sorry—that I can do no more.”

“But that’s the whole point,” said Narim, popping up from his reverie at last and standing over me. His gray eyes drilled into my soul. “You’ve shown us you can survive this kind of raw contact, however difficult it might be. The connection—your gift—is still there. And so we can try the next step. You see, I have a plan. All we have to do is keep you alive.”

My head was beginning to hurt. “Keep me alive?”

“I had hoped you could stay in Cor Talaith while you were made ready, but that’s impossible. And we can’t send you out where the Riders or your cousin might find you. Everyone seems to want you dead or captive.”

“I’m sure he’s noticed,” said Davyn.

“So there’s only one place I can send you. It won’t be easy, but I’ll convince her.”

Davyn rolled back onto the ground and groaned dramatically. “You can’t be thinking it. She hates him more than Garn MacEachern does, and her temper is worse!”

“Wait,” I said, their words running together in a muddle. “Tell me what you’re talking about. What plan?”

Narim crouched down in front of me. “This dragon you’ve named Keldar is injured. Fortunately an injured dragon keeps himself in winter sleep until his injuries can heal or he dies. But Lara has learned to rouse him, as you saw, and command him with her stone. She has driven beasts into the cave to feed and strengthen him, so we hope that when spring comes he might awaken on his own. Now that we’ve found you, we can give him the next gift we’ve prepared. We’ve built a sluiceway to his cave to send in water from Cir Nakai.”

“The lake water,” I said dumbly. “You think you’ll be able to speak to him.”

“No. We think that you will be able to speak to him.”

Speak to a dragon. Not in the way I had thought of as speaking to my god, but as one natural creature to another. As in the tale from Elhim legend. I could not imagine it.

“The one who attempts it cannot be an Elhim,” Narim said, a forced patience in his voice. “We are anathema to the dragons and likely would not live past his first glimpse of us. Nor can it be Lara. She carries a bloodstone, and besides, she—”

“She doesn’t believe,” I said.

“Exactly. How could she possibly reach him? You are the only person in the world who can get us the answer.”

“The answer for what?” I was numb. Uncomprehending.

“You must make Keldar tell you how we can release his brothers and sisters from their binding to the bloodstones. Then we can bring the dragons back to the lake so they can take their rightful place in the world once again.”

Davyn had been watching and listening, letting Narim’s intensity carry the burden of revelation, but as I struggled to comprehend what they wanted of me, he broke in, the stray lock of hair falling inevitably over his soft gray eyes. “You must understand the risks, Aidan. We don’t understand how you were able to reach them before or if it’s possible for you to do it again after all that’s happened. We don’t know if it’s even possible to speak to a dragon. It’s been so long—five hundred years since the dragons have tasted the water of the lake of fire. There may be nothing left in them to be awakened by it. They are so wild, lost in their blood frenzy and hatred.”

Slowly I shook my head. My experience of the night told me that there was a mind and a soul in the being that was Keldar—buried impossibly deep—but I had touched it and I knew.

But Davyn would not let go. “You will have to walk into that cavern, stand helpless before a creature who has slain ten thousand humans without regret. If he does not wake with the change of season, then he will have been roused with the very device that drives him into madness. The chance of success is so small as to make me begin writing your epitaph the moment you agree.”

What choice was there to be made? Beloved. The echo of the word made me tremble with awe and wonder and the last hope of life.

“So where is it you want to put me?” I said.

A corona of satisfaction illuminated the pale Narim, while a tired Davyn rubbed his forehead, smiled wryly, and answered. “He wants to send you into a dragon’s mouth even before your confrontation with Keldar. He thinks to have you live with Lara.”

Chapter 16

“Have the Senai harp plucker stay here? You’re out of your mind!” A red-faced Lara stood in front of a low, thick-walled stone hut half-buried in the sparkling snow-drifts of a mountain meadow. From the position of her hands on her slender hips, Narim had made a singularly grave error in his carefully wrought calculations. The sharp-edged breeze that so belied the brilliant sunshine of the morning pulled curling wisps of brown hair from her taut braid and flicked them at the scarred left side of her face. But the chill of the wind was as nothing to the frost of Lara’s tongue. “I’ll not have it. I’ve few enough supplies laid in, not a single feather bed, no silk draperies or cushions, and no food fit for refined tastes. When I said I’d help you in this madness, I never, ever agreed to nursemaid any Senai popinjay.”

“Ah, Lara, was ever a woman so passionate in her loyalties as you?” said the slender Elhim, pale as snow next to Lara’s angry flush. “Davyn laid me a wager that Aidan and I would be creeping into the back caverns of Cor Talaith this night with your boot print on our backsides ...”

Lara nodded as if Davyn were the only intelligent creature she’d known in a lifetime.

“... but I told him that, being the sensible person you are, you would agree that there is no rational alternative.”

“Not on—” Lara tried to interject, but Narim had a way of pouring out his words in a tide that swept all other conversation out of the way.

“If we send Aidan back to civilized lands, either your people or his own will take his head or his freedom, and if he stays in Cor Talaith, the Elhim will do the deed. For a man beloved of the gods, he is sorely in need of protection from those of us of lesser state, and nowhere is he less likely to be set upon than behind the security of your sword.”

Lara rolled her eyes. “Why do you believe anything he says? Thousands can witness to his lies. Ask those who’ve fled before the Gondari dragon fires. He once sang to them of peace and beauty, but have they ever witnessed anything like that? He gets only what he deserves.”

But Narim did not relent. “And, of course, my friend is not exactly accustomed of late to the privileges and comforts of his noble relations. Lest you’ve forgotten, your own clan has hosted him for seventeen years. And for the past two months he’s had to put up with the poor hospitality of Cor Talaith. I think he’ll be less of a burden than you believe.”

Narim’s gray eyes were the portrait of ingenuous innocence, but his words had me squirming. I wanted nothing more than to stuff my cloak in his mouth. I hoped Lara would send us away so that I could deal with him as I so sincerely desired, but instead she turned her rigid back to us and slammed her palm into the heavy pine door of the hut. It swung inward, and she disappeared inside. The door remained open.

“I do believe I heard a welcome,” said Narim, tugging on my arm. “Best get inside before she changes her mind.”

“Perhaps we’d better rethink this,” I said, standing my ground. “I can hide in Camarthan. It’s a big place and I know it well. Or Cor Talaith. You’ve said it’s only a few who want things to remain as they are. I’ll just stay out of their way.”

“You and Lara must come to an accommodation. Your lives will depend on one another. It’s only five weeks until the time of the dragon’s waking, and we must be as prepared as we can be. The dragons should be flying over the lake of fire, not enslaved to the Twelve Families of the Ridemark. If you and Lara cannot do what is required, we might have to wait another whole year, a year in which thousands may die, in which your life and our enterprise will be at risk every moment. ...”

A year in which Donal, my cousin’s child, would remain captive in the dragon camps of Gondar. Donal was the only human being yet walking the earth to whom I could claim any tie of affection—a fragile wisp of a connection that would most likely be dissolved in an instant if we were ever to meet in person. But if anything in the realm of possibility could prevent it, I would not let him suffer the fate to which his father and the wretched state of the world had condemned him. I took a deep breath and followed Narim into Lara’s hut.

If I’d not been wary of the woman already, I would have burst out laughing when I stepped inside. Everything I had expected of a Rider’s lair and had not found in Zengal’s den in Cor Neuill was laid out before me in Lara’s domain: greasy food bags and empty wineskins, worn-out sharpening stones, woolen leggings, battered pots, and old boots strewn from one end of the straw-covered stone floor to the other. The hearth was streaked with fifty years’ soot, and a month’s worth of ashes was packed into its corners, scarcely leaving any space for the yellow, gasping fire. A trail of dropped kindling and dried mud clots led from the door to the half-filled wood box, and the battered trestle table that served with three rickety stools as the only furnishing was littered with dirty cups, inkpots, wood shavings, half a loaf of bread so dry it had developed cracks, and ten shriveled apple cores. A jumble of leather scraps and the bag of Rider’s armor were tossed in a corner beside an untidy pile of blankets.

Her weapons would not be in the mess. I glanced about casually. Sure enough, hanging in a place of honor beside the door were a bow of polished yew and a well-oiled scabbard with an immaculately gleaming sword hilt sticking out of it. Beside them was the inevitable—a carefully coiled dragon whip. I was sorely tempted to run away as far as I could go.

Cursing under her breath, Lara kicked a bag of onions out of the corner farthest from the hearth. The bag split and dusty brown orbs began rolling about the floor. “You can sleep there,” she said, pointing at the space she had emptied. “I hope you brought your own blanket. I’ve none to spare.”

“I’ll manage,” I said. “Even without feathers.”

I shouldn’t have said it, but the words burst unbidden from my tongue. After so long alone ... to willingly share lodgings with a daughter of the Ridemark ... If there was indeed a god watching, I wanted him or her to know that I appreciated the joke.

Narim kept his face grave and discreetly angled away from my own, while stepping quite viciously on my foot. Nothing of jest was manifest in his words, however. “We’ve five weeks to get him ready, Lara. I’m trusting you to teach him well. We’ve brought the materials you specified, and I’m leaving you the journal.”

Lara seemed on the verge of throwing her errant vegetables at me until Narim’s words brought her up short. “Your journal!”

Narim shrugged as he pulled from his pack a small, thick leather volume in a condition so fragile I thought it might disintegrate in his hand. “If it’s ever to have any use beyond historical oddity, it will be now with the two of you.” He placed the book in Lara’s hand and tapped his fingers on it fondly, removing them with clear reluctance. “You’ll have a care with it?”

Lara clutched it to her chest. “Every care. I promise.”

“Good enough.” Narim clapped me on the arm. “Behave yourself, Aidan, lad. The girl has a wicked way with a dagger. I’ll stop by in a few days to see how you’re getting on. For now I’d best get back to the warrens. Our doubters may believe you’ve gone back to Camarthan with Tarwyl, but they expect me to be at our meeting tonight with a new plan to redeem our souls—one they can be sure will change nothing.”

Lara and I both followed Narim outside. Hard to guess which one of us most regretted his leaving. As he passed beyond the edge of the trees that bordered the open meadow, he turned and waved, and I would have sworn a huge grin crossed his face. Two voices mumbled curses as we turned back to the hut without looking at each other.

Lara did her best to ignore me, jabbing at her fire and throwing a few sticks on it, shoving aside the litter on her table to make a place to—very purposefully and vigorously—sharpen her dagger. I unloaded the bags I’d carried the three leagues uphill from Cor Talaith: two bulky rolls of leather, a cloth bundle of leatherworking tools, a flat tin of thick, foul-smelling grease, a heavy round of cheese, a bag of dried beans, and a few other supplies to augment Lara’s stores. I pulled out my blanket, and after a few moments’ consideration that included a sideways glance at Lara honing her blade that was likely sharp enough to dissect a flea, I left the hut. It was perhaps five hundred paces to the edge of the trees, and I made the trip three times, hauling back soft pine branches to use for a bed. By the time I was finished, the sun was already low, and my stomach was reminding me of how long it had been since Yura’s oatcakes and my farewell to Cor Talaith.

Even if Lara had given me reason to think she was interested, I was not yet ready to break bread with a member of the Twelve Families, so I merely set the supplies on her table, cut myself a piece of cheese, and retreated to my corner. I would have dearly loved to heat a cup of water over her fire and drop in a few of the chamomile leaves I’d brought, but before I got up the courage, Lara hung one of her battered pots over the sputtering flame and threw in a few bits of onion and smoked meat. It smelled unspeakably delicious. My cold cheese sat heavy and unsatisfying in my stomach ... at least until the onion started to burn. Lara yanked the pan from the grate, stabbing her spoon at the mess as if it were an annoying insect and scattering ashes and sparks all over the hearth. Darkness fell quickly and the cold crept through the thick stone, so that I wrapped up in my blanket and my cloak before Lara had eaten her concoction. I fell asleep wondering how on earth we were ever going to get beyond this silliness and do whatever it was Narim had in mind; assuming, of course, that I didn’t end the night with a knife between my ribs.

Familiar nightmare shoved me beyond the threshold of sleep while the light seeping around the edges of the shutters was still gray. The morning was bitterly cold, and as I struggled to lace up frozen boots with nonworking fingers, I wondered sluggishly how it could be only five weeks until spring. Perhaps the dragons could tolerate more cold than I. If I had the choice of it, I’d sleep until the heart of summer.

Lara was still a shapeless roll of gray in the corner of the room farthest from mine. I knew she was there from the soft puffs of breath frost that drifted upward from the direction of her head. It was the only softness about her that I had seen. I pulled on my heavy wool shirt and my cloak and my thickest gloves, then quietly opened the door and slipped outside. The crags of the Carag Huim were just beginning to take shape in the predawn stillness, and the rolling snowfield of the meadow was taking on a life separate from the dark line of trees to the south and west and the rocky heights to the north and east.

I needed to be moving, so I tramped around the hut, finding what I was looking for on the west side of the house: a neat, knee-high pile of split wood, an ax with its head buried in a thick stump, and a wooden sledge with snow runners under it and a rope tied to one end. The ax would be of no use unless two good hands came with it. I could scarcely manage the knife I shaved with; anything heavier was impossible to grip securely.

So I hitched the rope over one shoulder and hauled the sledge across the meadow into the trees. Making sure to keep my bearings, I searched until I found a downed tree large enough to be worth the bother of stripping its branches and dry enough to make it possible for me to do so. Using my boots and my forearms to break off the branches, I managed to fill the sledge, and then began the long trek back.

The meadow was flushed with fiery pink when I emerged from the trees, and a thin trail of blue smoke rose straight up from the hut’s chimney. She was awake. Only the prospect of a fire and something hot in my belly convinced me to go inside rather than find something else—anything else—to do. But she hadn’t murdered me in the night, so I unloaded my broken branches next to the cleanly hewn and split logs, then carried an armload of my gatherings into the hut.

She was hacking at the loaf of dried bread with her well-honed dagger, making more crumbs than edible portions. From her glare as I dumped the branches in the wood box, I guessed that the night hadn’t warmed her feelings about a Senai houseguest. The dragon whip was still on the wall, so I couldn’t say my feelings had changed either. How had I let myself get talked into this?

“I’ve brought some herbs—chamomile, meadowsweet, wintergreen—for tea,” I said, all plans of clever conversation sunk into mundanity in an instant of her hostile attention. “Would you care for some?”

“I’ve got what I like,” she said.

I nodded and dug my tin cup from my pack, stepped outside to fill it with snow, then set it beside the tiny fire. Opening the packet of herbs came next. Her scorn scorched my back as I fumbled at it in my heavy gloves. Finally I got a pinch of the finely crumbled leaves and dropped them in my cup that was only a quarter full of water once the snow had melted—scarcely two mouthfuls. Sighing at the delay, I retrieved another handful of snow and slipped it into the cup.

“I won’t cook for you,” said Lara, her pointed chin stuck out defiantly. “You’ll have to do for yourself, even if you have to get your hands dirty.”

“I would never expect you to,” I said. “I’ll do my share of whatever’s needed and try not to get too much in your way.”

She snorted as she threw one of my sticks on the fire. “These will burn for exactly no time. Do you understand what an ax is for?”

“I have a vague notion.”

Things didn’t seem to be going well. At least she didn’t complain about my using the fire. For a little while, every time she turned her back I’d throw on another branch until the fire was big enough to put out a little heat and get my precious cup steaming. The tea was pungent, and I felt it settle pleasantly into my cold extremities. It made me slightly less inclined to abandon the whole enterprise and take my chances in Camarthan.

Lara soaked her dry bread in warmed honey. I munched on a cold oatcake and used my cup to melt more snow. While she spread the rolls of dark leather out on the floor, I cleaned my knife and took my cup of warm water outside. Time for my daily ritual, and I wasn’t about to do it where the woman could gawk. A careful half hour and no nicks later, I had my gloves back on and no beard, and I was huddled by the hearth trying to decide if Lara would be any more hostile if I burned up all the wood in one day. Better think about something else.

“So what is it Narim wants you to teach me?” I said.

“The whole business is idiocy.” She was kneeling on the floor beside her materials and she raked me with a scornful eye. “I’m to instruct you in the lore of dragons. He wants you to learn the words, ritual words that should never be used by anyone outside the Twelve, and other words he’s got written in his book. And we’re supposed to fit you out with Riders’ armor.” Her hatred for this idea had her hands clenched so tight, I thought she might cut her flesh with her fingernails.

“Riders’ armor?”

“He thinks it’s going to protect you when you walk into that cavern and the kai tries to burn you. I told him it’s a waste of time. Why would you need it, if you’re so friendly with the beast?”

“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.”

I think she was astonished that I would agree with her about anything. I certainly was.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve given my word, so there’s no getting out of it until you realize this is slightly more dangerous than playacting and decide your noble skin is too precious to risk.” She dragged her bag into the middle of the floor and pulled out stiff, charred leather greaves that stank of the same grease I’d hauled up the mountain—something like rotted hay and lamp oil. “Hold these up to your legs so we’ll know how much bigger we’ll have to make them.”

All that morning, while I found a dented pail by the woodpile and proceeded to clean out her firepit, Lara cursed and measured and cut. I tried on every piece of her armor so she could see where she needed to make changes to fit me. But when she thrust her gauntlets at me and said to take my own gloves off and put hers on, I gave her my spare pair of gloves instead, saying they would do as a pattern.

“You must be a tender flower indeed who can’t take off his gloves inside. Or is it you’re afraid of dirtying yourself with a Rider’s touch?”

“Modesty,” I said, then scraped another shovelful of ashes from her hearth into the pail and swore to myself that the next time I saw Narim I would shake him until all his secrets fell out of his head. It was going to be a long five weeks.

By the time darkness fell I had a healthy fire and a fine bed of coals, and Lara had a good-sized stack of shaped leather pieces. Her floor was littered with scraps. I had thrown some of my beans into a pot of hot water, and they had simmered enough to make decent soup. Only as a concession to habit drilled into me by my lovely and gracious mother did I offer Lara some of my soup. The woman grimaced, pulled out a strip of dried meat, and began chewing on it. I took that as a refusal.

“I suppose you’ve never worn real armor, being protected from fighting as you were,” she said.

“No.”

“Probably don’t even know how to hold a sword.”

“I was taught.”

“Ah, yes. Senai think of themselves as warriors and play at it when they’re children. I suppose even you did that.”

“Yes.”

“Will you spar with me? I need practice. Elhim are too small.”

“No.”

She nodded knowingly, as if she had expected nothing else, then leaned her back against the legs of the table and stuck her boots near the fire.

“I heard you sing, you know. People fought to get closer to you. To touch you. To give you rings and letters and locks of hair to take to their families and lovers. They begged you to sing again and again until dawn came. I never understood it.”

I finished eating and kept my eyes on the fire. “What words are you supposed to teach me?”

“Narim says you know the true language.” She had switched to the tongue of the Ridemark, the odd inflections and slurred endings blunting the harsh edge of her speech.

“There was a time when I was fluent. I’ve forgotten a great number of words, but not the sounds of it.” I, too, used the old speech and did not pretend to fumble with it as I’d done in Cor Neuill. Sometimes you have to enjoy what petty triumphs you can scrape together.

“Hmmph.” I had the feeling she was disappointed that I’d said it right. “Well, first lesson then. You are to address the dragon as ‘teng zha nav wyvyr.’ ”

“Child of fire and wind.”

“You know it already?”

“I know the words. You said them when you woke Keldar.”

“Right. So I did.” Absentmindedly she brushed the wisps of hair back from her face, exposing the ugly remnants of disaster. “So you understood all of what I said that night?”

I repeated the commands she’d used in the old speech and also in common speech. Remembering words was as much a part of me as breathing.

“I’m surprised you remember it so exactly. You were a puling mess that night.”

I decided then that it was not the scars or the drooping eye that marred Lara’s face, but her ever-present sneer—the curling lip and the acid tongue so ready to wound with the greatest possible pain. Or perhaps she bore scars that were worse than the ones I could see. Of all men I should know how the damage inside could distort the face one showed to the world. I wanted to be angry with her and wipe her sneer away. But like the fool I was, I sat there feeling inordinately guilty that my existence could cause such hatred as to twist a well-proportioned face into meanness. No point in getting angry at her digging. She had no reason to understand. “That was after,” I said.

She opened a small tin box that sat on the floor next to her pallet and pulled out Narim’s worn leather book. The light was long gone, but she refused to move closer to the fire. Likely trying to stay as far from me as possible. The flames cast an angry red glow on her terrible scars and gleamed on the shining, dark brown braid that fell over her shoulder.

“What is the book?” I said as she leafed through the pages, looking for what she wanted, running her finger over the words as I had seen many do who came late to reading. The Twelve Families were not known for scholarly leanings, especially for their women.

“Narim’s dragon journal. Everything he’s learned that has anything to do with the beasts. Drawings, notes, lists. Pages and pages of words he says were used by dragons. Impossible stupidity.” She looked up sharply. “You’re not to touch it. Not ever.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.”

She returned her attention to the book. “Here.” She pointed to a page. “This is where he said we had to start. Test your memory now, Senai. Here are the fifty words for wind. ...”

Not since I was a child had so much information been forcibly thrust into my head. Lara took her bargain with Narim very seriously, but she seemed determined to see me stumble. I, of course, was not about to allow it. She would speed through the lists of words and the guessed-at meanings, like the fifty for wind: wyvyrri, the fine, light airs of autumn, perfect for soaring high; wyvyar, the heavy, damp gusts of spring; the variants for storm gales and hurricanes and whirlwinds, for dangerous downdrafts that would threaten youngling fliers, and for the heated rising airs of summer.... Then came fifty for the texture of the air, and for the taste and smell of it a hundred more. Lara would give me each of them once as rapidly as possible, then quiz me on them randomly, mixing them with the groups that had come before.

Some of the words I already knew, not the syllables themselves but the thing they described, for they were exactly what Roelan had spoken to me when I was young and living, when I wove them into my music and believed I had discovered the heart of the universe. That made my night’s work easier, though after three hours and three hundred words, I began to think my head would burst. But I refused to be the one to call a halt, and we continued on through midnight. We finished the eighty-seven words that described lights in the heavens: stars, moon, and twenty variants of sun, lightning, and the colored veils of northern climes. Then, as if by mutual agreement, Lara shut the book, and I began to bank the fire. Though Lara could not have known it, it had been the most delightful evening I had spent since the night before I was arrested. Though it seemed such a foolish and impossible purpose, it was good to know my mind could still work, and it allowed me to touch the past in a way other than grief, regret, and longing.

All that week during the daylight hours Lara cut and prepared the leather for my armor, variously soaking and shaping the pieces over wooden forms, heating them, and rubbing them with the stinking grease Narim had obtained for her and other substances she had already. She would not let me help or even watch what it was she did, saying it was the lore of the Ridemark and not to be shared. And I was forbidden to touch the journal, which she kept locked in a tin box with the key around her neck. So I was left to occupy myself. I resumed my morning runs, continued my awkward wood gathering, and gradually took over preparing our meals. Lara had set a trap in the woods to catch an occasional rabbit or squirrel. I checked hers and built a few more well out of her sight. She would have scorned my clumsy creations as crude and ill made—indeed, any child could have done better—but she didn’t criticize the meat I brought in with them.

With childish eagerness I anticipated the evenings when we would work on the words from Narim’s journal. When I had mastered them, Lara began to guide me through the meticulous drawings from the fragile pages. Narim had insisted that part of communicating with a dragon was interpreting its movements. So Lara taught me the physical characteristics of dragons: how the wings were shaped, how the eyes had multiple lids and, in the daytime, changed color according to the color of the sky, how the head moved when the beast was angry or pleased or listening. When we had reviewed all the drawings, she said we needed to work using something more substantial. That was when I balked.

A huge boulder pile lay on the north side of the meadow. Lara had hacked out crude steps in a massive chunk of granite to match the stepped scales on the dragon’s haunch that allowed a Rider to climb on. In the top of an adjacent rock she hammered steel spikes to match the barbed protrusions on the beast’s shoulder. She then demonstrated the Rider’s mount, running lightly up the narrow steps, arcing the steel hook on her whip handle up to the shoulder barbs in a perfect throw and catch, and shinnying up to the top. Jumping down lightly, she offered me the whip. “Your turn. Narim says you have to learn, in case something happens to me and you have to ride. To bring the beasts to the lake if things should ever get so far.” The very words were gall in her mouth.

I could not touch the thing. Even if I’d not had the deep-rooted horror of dragon whips, they were of no use to me. To haul yourself up, you had to be able to grip. “If I were ever to ride, I’d have to use another way,” I said.

“There is no other way. You can’t mount from the front, because you’d be dead from the poisoned barbs on the edge of the wings. From the haunch to the shoulder can be half again the highest distance you can reach—even with your height. You can’t climb in between. The scales protrude enough to hold on to, but the first attempt would slice off your fingers even with the gauntlets. The scales of the neck are sharp, but nothing like those on the flanks.”

“A good thing I won’t need to ride, then.” I tried to pass it off lightly, for I didn’t want her goading me about it. “You don’t want me to do it anyway. Teach me something else.”

She made a great deal of fuss, calling me a weakling and a coward, settling on the explanation that I was too ashamed to fail in front of one who was not Senai. That was near enough the truth that I kept my mouth shut until she tired of hearing herself.

The part that still had me confused was what Narim actually expected of me. That night as I melted snow for tea and she worked the damp pieces of my gauntlets to soften and shape the leather, I asked her the question that still had me doubting. “Even if I can learn how to free the dragons from the control of the bloodstones, what’s to prevent the clan from taking them right back? As long as they possess the stones, won’t the Riders just go through their rituals again?”

Lara squirmed, as she always did when I referred to Ridemark secrets. “Why would beings with minds sit still for the Riders to imprison them again? Supposedly the only way it happened the first time was that the Elhim poisoned the lake of fire with jenica. Narim thinks the freed kai will be ‘wary.’ ”

“But you don’t believe it.”

She snatched the journal from the table and locked it back in its tin box. “It’s all fairy tales. I believe the moon will be eaten by the Great Wolf in the northern sky before I ever hear the speech of a dragon.”

I couldn’t say that I disagreed with that.

By the end of three weeks I supposed Narim would say we had come to an accommodation, but no one observing her insults and my silence would think we had made any progress at all.

Chapter 17

A few days after the incident at the boulder pile, I woke in the night suffocating, convinced that Goryx had dropped the canvas bag over my head and was stroking my back with his coiled dragon whip, his usual gesture of macabre affection as he prepared for the first lash. I jerked upright bathed in sweat, throwing off the blanket I had inadvertently pulled over my head against the cold. Still shaking, I crept to the hearth and threw on the rest of the scraps from the wood box, trying to stir up the banked coals of the fire. It refused to flame again, so I hurriedly pulled on boots and cloak and went out in search of more kindling. I was desperate for light.

The moon was three-quarters full and bathed the snowfields in cold silver so bright I could see my shadow. As I stood leaning on the weathered rail used for tethering horses, taking deep gulps of the frosty air, trying to banish my terrors with space and freedom and the beauty of the night, I heard a muffled cry from inside the hut. The door flew open, and Lara stood outlined in the doorway, her blanket clutched around her shoulders, her moonlit face dazed and bewildered, pale with panic. No sneer. No curling lip. “The fire,” she mumbled. “Something woke me and it flared up.”

A spare, eloquent moment. No wonder she always stayed so far from the hearth. “I’m sorry,” I said. “The scraps I’d thrown on must have caught. I didn’t think of it waking you.” Didn’t think of the horror flame must raise in her, a necessity for life, yet always a reminder of her agony. “Forgive me. I’ll watch until it’s safely banked again.” Of course she would seek cold darkness to soothe her nightmare, as I sought light to ease my own.

“Why were you messing about with the fire? What are you doing out here?” Suspicion and mistrust followed close on regained composure.

“Summons of nature,” I said, shifting my eyes to the moonlit crags. Her boots crunched across the snow until she was standing so close I could sense her breath on my cloak. I had never been a good liar.

“You’ve been out here too long for that. Too long for one who gets frostbite if he’s more than three steps from the coals.” She stood beside me, her head scarcely reaching my shoulder. “You’re shaking now. Why—”

Her abrupt silence forced me to look at her. She was staring at my hands that rested on the rail. I’d been in such a hurry that I hadn’t put on gloves, and so grateful for the moonlight that I hadn’t noticed the cold. Quickly I snatched my twisted, ugly appendages back into my cloak, then fixed my eyes on the moonlit peaks. Her boots crunched again, and it was a cold hour until I could force myself to go back inside. I couldn’t explain why I hated it so fiercely that she had seen.

Nothing changed after that night. Lara did not mention my hands, which was fine with me. Even if she were capable of it, I did not want her pity, any more than she would want mine. She had more words for sniveling weakling than dragons had for wind. No service I offered was welcome, and no word I spoke was met with anything but derision. The only reference she made to the night’s exposure was three days later, when she threw an awl, two rolls of leather thongs and strong sinew, and a stack of leather pieces down in front of me, telling me to thread the lacings through the edges so my Rider’s breeches wouldn’t fall off. “I don’t have time to do all of it,” she said with an unreadable expression. “Are you capable of doing your part, as you claimed?”

“I can do whatever I need to do,” I said. And so I did. Slowly. Painfully. Mumbling curses as the awl slipped out of my grasp a hundred times for every successful hole. Trying to will the thongs and sinew through the tool and the stiff, oiled leather, when a hundred clumsy attempts had me wanting to beat my head on the table. Such a small endeavor, yet for three days it loomed far larger than anything having to do with sentient dragons or the redemption of a people. I utterly forgot where I was and what I was doing and what were the true measures of accomplishment and failure.

I would have preferred to fight my battles outside of Lara’s view, but she never said anything. Never watched me. Never seemed to take notice of my driving frustration or my seething anger or my sporadic outbursts of satisfaction at my all-too-rare successes. At first I was sure it was purest Ridemark contempt. But when she wordlessly laid a second stack in front of me while I still stared in exhausted triumph at the first, I glanced up quickly in dismay. On her lips was the glimmer of a smile. It was so faint, such a remote and inconceivable grace, that I called myself seven names for a fool. Most likely she was enjoying the sight of a Senai struggling with such mundane labors ... but it hadn’t looked like that sort of smile.

Our work went on, preparing for the equinox, the day the ancients said the eye of the world began to widen with delight at its bride, the earth—the day Elhim lore said the dragons would stir from their winter’s sleep. Lara was quite serious about keeping track of the days. On the wall above her sleeping pallet she had used coal to mark off a crude calendar, and each morning she carefully checked off another square. She had certain days noted with circles and half circles and crescents which I took to be phases of the moon, the equinox with a large X, and other days with marks of no easily discernible shape. One of the latter fell at the beginning of my fifth week with her.

All that day she seemed distracted and nervous, absolutely unlike herself. We worked on my armor, and for once I accomplished more than she. The greaves were done, ready to lace about my legs. The breeches were done, thick and stiff and uncomfortable. I was sitting on the floor wrestling with the first two pieces of the vest and the sinew that would bind them together, the material so much stronger than leather laces, and so much thinner, and far more difficult to grasp.

“I’m going out for a while to ... to check the traps,” Lara announced in late afternoon, tossing aside the stiffened wool she had been shaping into a helm.

“I checked them this morning,” I said. “Only two fox kits not fit to keep.”

“You let go more than you keep,” she said in irritation, throwing on her cloak and shouldering her bow. “And you’d eat the same thing every meal of the year. I’m tired of cheese and oatcakes, so I’m going to find something better. I’ll be out past nightfall.” I knew better than to question the sense of such a venture.

“I would never doubt you can take care of yourself,” I muttered, my frustration at the task she had set me forcing my words louder than I might otherwise have said them. She heard me and turned blazing red, which was another mark of an unusual day. At any other time she wouldn’t have listened, or if she’d listened, she wouldn’t have cared. The door slammed so hard behind her that a pot of oatcakes fell off a shelf, and the flat, dry cakes shattered into crumbs on the floor.

I dropped my work and gazed idly about the hut, puzzling over the strange course of the past weeks. It was then I noted the mark on Lara’s calendar. I examined it more closely than I’d dared before, and the splotch on this day resolved itself into a D.

Dragon? Departure? Discovery? All our work at lists of words prompted a torrent of possibilities.

The sun slid lower in the thin, watery blue of the sky. I salvaged a broken oatcake and melted a slab of cheese on it.

Deviltry? Deception?

An icicle, the last holdout against the afternoon warming, splintered on the stone doorstep, shattering the stillness.

Duplicity? Danger? Death?

I donned my cloak and set out after Lara in the failing light. Though an hour had passed since her departure, it was easy enough to follow her, for though the remaining patches of snow were crusty and brittle, they were better walking than the muddy strips of meadow in between. Interesting that the small, firm boot prints went nowhere near the trees where our traps lay. I trotted at a good pace, first skirting the meadow, then climbing a steep track up the ridge at its eastern end. By the time I reached the top, the first stars had poked through the deepening blue. The bloated bulge of the moon pushed over the eastern horizon beyond a landscape wrinkled like an old man’s face with rocky ridges like the one on which I stood. Lara’s trail led me deep into the narrow valley between one ridge and the next. I bore south around rocky slide areas and stunted pine trees growing out of the rock, their roots scarcely grasping the dry slopes. The going was tricky in the dim light until the moon rose high enough to take up its hotter brother’s duties in the sky.

Some three hours from the hut, I believed I had lost the trail, and I considered going back. I wasn’t at all familiar with the crumpled wasteland, and to stay out all night had its own risks. The first touch of the morning sun would alter the snowy landmarks. As I sat on a rock to rest and take my bearings, I realized that fifty paces beyond my position, behind a cluster of boulder stacks standing sentinel like a giant’s wardens, gleamed a pool of light that was far too yellow and far too unsteady to be moonlight.

I scrambled up the steep side of the ravine and crept forward until I had passed the boulder stacks and could look down on a small, protected grotto where a smoky fire flickered next to a half-frozen pool. Lara stood beside the fire, locked in a fierce embrace with a man.

I was stunned ... and unreasoningly embarrassed. Never in all my considerations had I come within fifty leagues of the idea that Lara might have a lover. Why had I thought that because such a blessing was inconceivable for me, it was equally inconceivable for a young woman so filled with passionate life? Her hatreds were for me and my kind, not for everyone in the world. And her scars, so dreadful on an otherwise pleasing face ... I rarely noticed them anymore. Why shouldn’t some other man develop the same blindness?

But as quickly as my view of the world was set so profoundly askew, it was reversed again. Lara stepped away from her visitor, but left her hands in his, and I looked back and forth between the two figures and gaped at the revelation. He was of exactly her height, with the same pointed chin, fine-boned cheeks, and huge eyes. He wore the same dusting of freckles across his straight nose, the same generous mouth. Only the breadth of shoulders and back, and the chin-length trim of the gold-brown hair distinguished him ... and, of course, the finished perfection of his face. He could be no one but her brother.

“... all arranged,” he was saying in earnest excitement. “We can go this very night. Everyone is waiting to welcome you back, to give you every privilege that is yours by right.”

“I can’t believe it.” Lara bit her lip and wrinkled her brow while examining his face as if to capture every morsel of information left unspoken.

“You were only a child. They’ve finally come to understand it. A strong-willed child with a warrior’s heart and your family’s stubbornness. These are virtues, not crimes. The only crime is that it’s taken them so long to see it.”

“You heard this with your own ears? From the high commander himself?” Tentative. Touching on the very edge of hope.

“He showed me the order of pardon. The moment you’re back, he’ll proclaim it to the Council of Twelve.”

Controlled and wary, Lara pulled back a little, while still clinging to his hands. “But he’ll never let me ride.” She was not accustomed to hope.

Never had I seen anyone show such triumph as Lara’s brother when he produced his gift. “He has promised to consider it. He will hear you. He said to tell you, ‘Riders are born, not chosen. It is a precept to which we’ve not always been faithful.’ Lara, it’s as good as done.”

Lara hung limp as he swung her about joyfully, then pulled her back into his fierce embrace. “By the gods, little sister. You will be the first. A woman will ride for the Mark, and you will show them the true heart of a warrior.”

“To ride for the Mark. Oh, Vanir’s fire, Desmond.”

She could scarcely speak, and, even as I struggled with my dismay at her betrayal, I caught my first unfiltered glimpse of Lara. Everything I had yet seen of her—except perhaps for that first handclasp with Narim and the brief moment of her night terror—everything had been but layer upon layer of armor, the shell she had fashioned from scars and pain, from loneliness and bitterness. All of it fell away in the moment of her brother’s pronouncement, revealing a woman of pride and dignity and lonely strength, whose face shone like a second moon. I had never thought of her as beautiful until that night, never heard the music in her voice, the simple melody laced with her glorious passion. At the same moment I began to be afraid for her. Surely she could sense the danger, the dissonance that marred the harmony of this family reunion.

Lara sank to a fallen tree that had been pulled up to the fire like a garden bench, and her brother crouched on one knee in front of her. I brushed away a clump of stickery jackweed that the wind had lodged under my nose, and edged carefully down the snowy, rock-strewn hillside on my belly, not thinking of danger in my craving to hear more.

“What’s changed then?” she said. “A tradition so long bound. I never thought ... never in the last instance believed they would relent.” Yes, she had seen it. Already her shutters were being drawn again.

“I don’t know. I’ve hammered at it so long with every one of the twelve councilors and they’ve always been deaf to me. Every year for eighteen years another failed petition—”

“You have been my true knight, brother.”

“Then a few weeks ago, MacEachern himself summoned me. He wished me to fetch you right away, but I said our regular meeting was still three weeks hence. He was surprised I didn’t know where you lived.” Long grievance festered beneath Desmond’s devotion, pushing him to his feet to step away from Lara.

“You know why I can’t tell you.”

“Well, now you’re to be a Rider of the Mark, you’ll no longer have to live with these divided loyalties. It will be your own people who claim you now, and your family and your high commander who shape your path.”

The young man began adjusting the fittings of his saddle as if to accommodate two riders, so he couldn’t see Lara’s countenance freeze. I saw it and felt a knot in my gut loosen one notch.

“Desmond, did the high commander say anything about what he wants from me when I return? Surely he expects some payment for this honor he does me.”

Yes, I thought. A good question. Listen well to his answer. Though he is your brother who cares for you, he has but one heart to give. No question where it is lodged.

“Want from you?” Desmond turned to her, puzzled. “Nothing but what you’ve wished to give him all these years—your loyalty and service. Come on. We can be home before dawn.”

Lara kicked at the fire, scattering the coals until a cloud of sparks flew about her like a swarm of fireflies. “I’ve got to think it over.” She flung the words into the air casually, like the sparks from her boot.

Her brother’s jaw dropped in shock and disbelief. “Think it over? Lara! What is there to think about?” Anger hardened his pointed jaw. “You will come with me. The head of your family commands you.”

She chucked him playfully under the chin. “Don’t fret, sweet Desmond. It’s only I’ve got a bit of business to finish, some debts to pay. This is so unexpected. I’ve got to get accustomed to the idea.” She laughed uproariously, but with far too little mirth to my ear. A dangerous laugh. I just wasn’t sure for whom.

Desmond looked confused. I certainly was. Fatally so, for I was oblivious to the brush of the bushes behind me and the soft grit of footsteps in the crusted snow. Only when the leather strap stung my neck and tightened about it and I was flipped backward onto the hard ground did I know there was a fourth member of our little nighttime party. A heavy boot stomped on my wrist, and my hastily drawn knife leaped out of my fingers of its own volition. A vast landscape of wind-coarsened skin, pitted with deep pores and tufted with wiry red hair, exuding a virulent odor of onion, presented itself a hand’s breadth from my nose. That was all I was able to see before he sat his massive bulk on my chest and stomach, making unnatural white stars bloom from the hazy darkness. While I fought to squeeze in a breath, I felt leather straps being wound tightly about my wrists.

“Well, well. What has Vanir set before us? A tasty morsel of a Senai spy? Of a Senai devil?”

The weight was lifted from my chest only to be followed by a powerful jerk on my wrists that insisted I get up on my feet or be dragged down the rocky slope on my face.

“Look here, brother Desmond! Didn’t I tell you that one had to be wary of the wild creatures that inhabit this wasteland? I’ve trapped us a Senai fox.”

Lara snapped her head around as I hobbled into the firelight, only to be pulled up short and collapsed to my knees by the skilled hand of the Rider and his dragon whip. The thong about my throat ensured I could say nothing. Desmond sneered down his straight nose as if I’d crawled out of a dung heap. Before he could speak, Lara shoved him aside. “You!” she said in disgust. “How dare you come creeping after me? Sneaking, nasty beggar.”

“Who is it, Lara? Tell me. And tell me what he’s doing spying on you.”

Unreasonably I wanted to warn Lara of the dangerous undertone in her brother’s cold baritone. But the woman quite effectively undercut both my desire and my ability to speak when she laid her gauntleted hand into my mouth so hard I rocked back on my knees and gagged on the blood that ran down my constricted throat. Clearly the D was not only for Desmond, but also for duplicity and double-dealing, and most certainly for danger.

“He’s beastly Senai filth,” said Lara, fury boiling out of her like molten lava. “He was found wandering in the mountains half-frozen. The same ones who took me in sheltered him, so I couldn’t deal with him as I wished.”

“And what would you suggest we do with him, girl?” asked the red-haired man, addressing Lara with such insolence that a true brother would have bashed him. Desmond only listened.

“Take him with you if you wish,” said the woman. “Or strip him and tie him to a tree for the wolves to find. What do I care for any Senai?”

Lara was not finished unsettling her brother even yet. Now she was done with me, she turned on him with the fullness of her anger. “There are more important matters here than a crippled Senai who cannot even lace his boots. Tell me, Desmond, who is this clan brother? All these years we’ve come together in secret, and I’ve asked but one thing: that for my safety and the peace of those who saved my life you not reveal our meeting place to anyone. Yet clearly this man is here by your leave. How do you explain it? Is this a new betrayal or has he been here at every meeting?”

Desmond stammered like a nervous squire on the eve of his first battle. I, struggling to clear my muddy head, had no little sympathy for him.

“Rueddi is a clan brother of the Fifth Family, a Rider in training. MacEachern suggested I bring him to help protect you. He feared this escaped prisoner might be hiding nearby and that he might try to prevent you taking your rightful place. You know”—he regained a bit of his injured dignity—“surely you understand who this Senai is.”

“He could be MacEachern’s bastard for all I care,” said Lara. “But you had no right to bring anyone here—even a clan brother—for any reason.”

“I did only as our high commander bade me. He will have this Senai, Lara. No king, no god, no man or woman will prevent it. The black-tongued devil should never have been released from Mazadine. It was a terrible mistake. The one who told us that seven years of silence would destroy the singer and break his perverted connection to the kai—that one lied to us. We’re going to take back our prisoner and bury him forever.”

Panic devoured my reason and with it all my subtle listening. Better to be dead. I strained against the sharp-edged leather thongs until my wrists bled, and the whip grew tighter about my throat, smearing the world with red. I rolled and lashed out with my feet, first at my red-haired captor, then at Lara and Desmond, but Riders are very skilled with their whips, and I was pulled away choking and gagging. Then a boot landed in my side, leaving my legs as limp as rags, and I had to spend all my energy to take another breath. Somewhere beyond the pounding of my blood and the rasp of my starved lungs, Lara was speaking calmly and coldly.

“So the promises you’ve made, my pardon, the hope that I would ride ... they were nothing but what? A ruse to draw me out and find out what I knew of the Senai? To snare him if he was nearby? All lies, then? Do the Twelve think I’m in league with this devil?”

“No! I didn’t mean—Of course not. The high commander knew the man had escaped into the mountains. He thought it possible that the same ones who helped you would help him. I was going to ask you if you’d seen him. MacEachern does not trust the Elhim, not after—”

Lara pressed her finger firmly over Desmond’s mouth. “Do not prattle. My trust will not be won by words. If you love me, brother, you must show me that I’m the true prize you seek. Leave this helpless Senai vermin for the wolves and take me home. When I step into Cor Neuill, I will have put my life in your hands, so I require this proof of your saying: Take back the most important prize and abandon the lesser. And if I am not the most important, then I no longer have any clan, any family, or any brother.”

“Lara!”

“I’ll not be used as bait. I’ll not have my honor suspect. And I’ll not be made a fool by lies and treachery. Prove your words by your deeds, Desmond.”

I had never met man, woman, or beast so mystifyingly unpredictable as Lara. If she were to kiss me full on the lips at that moment, I could as easily believe I was poisoned as that she cared one whit for me. If I’d not been so sick and terrified, I might have laughed at Desmond’s dilemma. As it was, I spit blood from my mouth, shifted my cheek that rested on a sharp-edged stone, and watched his face register every conceivable emotion as he gazed from his beloved sister to his despised enemy. She had put him in a wicked fix and me in worse. A wolf’s howl echoed eerily from the rocky heights. I was going to lose either way.

Desmond recovered admirably, though if Lara believed his words honest, she was a fool beyond saving. “There is no question here,” he said, not explaining why his decision had taken so long if there was no question in his mind. “You are my first and most sacred quarry—to retrieve you from exile and restore you to your rightful place. I had thought we could bring the Senai as our triumphal gift to our clan. But if you say it is not a worthy gift, if you believe I see his capture as anything but long-delayed good fortune for our house, then so be it. We will dispose of him as you say. The gods will silence his foul tongue.”

“And what of your friend, brother?”

“Rueddi is in my debt. He will carry out my wishes. Exactly.”

The red-haired man bowed to Desmond and smirked at me, even as he pulled tight on the strap around my neck.

Events moved quickly after that. Scarcely two heartbeats and I was left hanging in the freezing night, my wrists secured to a sturdy pine bough above my head, my feet scarcely touching the ground. Lara had seen to the binding; then Rueddi had ripped the cloak, gloves, shirt, and boots off me. My clothes were now scattered across the clearing and down the gorge after being laced generously with blood from a deep cut on my arm. As he led his horse from the bushes Rueddi gave me a playful lash with his whip, and by the time I won the battle to keep from crying out, Lara leaped up behind Desmond, and the three of them rode into the night.

One by one the scattered coals of Lara’s fire winked out. The rivulets of blood on my back and my arm and my face froze, and one by one my extremities went numb. The wolf’s howl split the night, closer than before. I could hear the change in key as she smelled my blood on the wind.

A race, I thought dully. The wolves were closer, but Rueddi would certainly be back. Desmond had no intention of leaving me to gods or wolves either one, not when his high commander wanted to bury me himself. Forever. My thoughts began to wander as I hung there slowly freezing in the moonlight. Who had told MacEachern that seven years of silence would destroy me?

I had believed for so long that I was dead, that no amount of pretending to breathe and eat and sleep would ever be able to revive my heart. But my betrayer had been wrong and I had been wrong. Life in all its oddity kept nipping at my heels like a playful pup, daring me to give it up when I had loved it so dearly. Just when I was convinced that poor humanity was alone in the universe and that it mattered not a splinter what happened to me, a being that was not a god, but was beyond all human capacities, had spoken to me with love. And just when death had declared itself inevitable, a woman who had no reason to care for me, who had unfailingly asserted her scorn and dislike, had given me a chance to live. Lara had called me a helpless cripple who could not lace his boots. But she had seen me lace up the armor, and she had chosen the mode of my binding and the branch and the tree. Intriguing possibility stirred me to movement.

I decided early on that my surmise must be wrong. The pine branch from which I was suspended was a hand’s breadth in diameter, and the chances of breaking it were depressingly slim. It would be easier to uproot the blasted tree, I thought, as I hung limp and exhausted after the fruitless effort of pulling downward on it. Uproot ... I considered the trees I’d seen on my journey, scarcely grasping the rocky soil with their gnarled roots. My prison tree jutted out from the steep embankment almost horizontally. I slid my feet to my right and pulled on the branch again, this time from the slightly different angle. Moved another handspan to the right and pulled again. Again and again until my arms were covered with blood from my wrists, and my shoulders refused to move again. Then I started the other way. Move the feet; pull. Again; pull.

It was no use. My small reserve of strength gave out. I was too cold. My feet were dead stumps, and I couldn’t move them anymore. I stumbled and hung from my raw wrists, unable to get my lost feet under me again. All I could do was hang there like meat on a hook and pretend I heard a cracking somewhere above me ... until I slumped completely into the dirt and first the branch, and then the tree, fell on top of me.

Quiet rustlings and feral moans drifted from behind the boulder stacks. I sprawled facedown on the cold ground, the tree trunk a deadweight on the backs of my thighs. Perhaps I should have felt lucky the tree hadn’t landed on my head, but that didn’t occur to me as I tried to worm my way out from under it. The branches scraped and stung, leaving an occasional warm rivulet of blood trickling across my skin. The bindings about my ankles became hopelessly tangled in the branches, and my wrists were soon stretched awkwardly to one side of my head, so raw I could not bear to pull on them again. It seemed so ridiculous.

I laid my head on the cold ground to try for more leverage, and not two handspans from my nose I saw a soft orange glow—one of the coals from the fire, a good-sized chunk only half-burned. The coal distracted me from my futile writhings. Softly I blew, over and over, praying the coal to take fire to frighten away the encroaching predators and so that something of me would be warm. Hands and feet, legs and arms were long dead. Soon my face and lips were frozen so that I could not even tell if I was pursing my lips to blow on the reluctant coal. At the end I had to rest, to lay down my head and forget the padding steps in the deepest shadows.

“Come on,” I mumbled thickly as my eyelids closed and froze shut. “Get on with it.”

“No, damn you, don’t go to sleep. Gods of night, what a mess. Was anyone ever so inept as a Senai?” She had come back.

Chapter 18

“Are you going to sit up and drink this or am I going to have to pour it over your head?”

Steam tickled my nose. Meadowsweet and wintergreen. Pungent and soothing. The best remedy in the world for general aches and pains, of which I had an abundance. The blazing bonfire that seared my face so pleasantly was quickly bringing my frozen parts back to uncomfortable life. I would really rather sleep. Lara had interrupted me just as I drifted off, cutting me loose from the tree, dragging me across the ground, and throwing my cloak on top of me while she built up the fire.

I was lying on my side an arm’s reach from the flames, shivering under my cloak, the tin cup just in front of my nose. I didn’t look up, afraid I might provoke Lara into leaving again while still in possession of that steaming container of salvation. But as usual I couldn’t resist a word.

“I thought you weren’t going to cook for me.” My teeth were thawed enough to chatter unmercifully, blunting the careful precision of my wit.

“I decided I would rather cook than dress you. Found your precious herbs in your pocket. If you drink it, then maybe you can take care of yourself.”

Slowly I eased myself to sitting and held out both shaking hands to let her slip the cup between them.

She held back for a moment. “It’s very hot.”

“It doesn’t matter. The sense ... the feeling ... doesn’t work right.”

I clenched my palms about the cup and got it carefully to my mouth, letting the hot liquid begin to quiet my violent shivering and settle into the bruised places.

“I never thought you would uproot the whole tree. The branch was rotten. One good jerk should have broken it.” She sat herself away from the fire where I couldn’t see her face, wrapping her arms about her knees. My skin shrank around my aching bones when I saw the dead wolf just beyond her, an arrow protruding from its side.

“I wanted a big fire.”

She laughed then, a quiet laugh that flowed softly about us like the lowest arpeggio on a fine harp. “Have you no blood in your veins? I don’t understand you at all.”

“I do murder in my dreams,” I said.

She shook her head. “You weep in your dreams. You scream without making a sound.” She stood up, threw a branch onto the bonfire, and wandered away for a bit. When she came back, she tossed my bloodstained shirt and gloves onto the ground in front of me. “We need to move.”

“You think they’ll come back?”

“Desmond will bring the legion. I had to kill Rueddi.”

“Vanir’s fires. Lara ...” There was nothing to be said, of course. No comfort possible for one whose hopes were shattered so irrevocably. Not from me, certainly. And she’d want no thanks from me either. “Do we need to warn the Elhim?”

“When we get to the kai’s lair, I’ll light a watchfire on the peak. Narim will see it and understand. We should have three days’ head start. The clan knows the Elhim sanctuary is in the Carag Huim, but not exactly where. I left Desmond afoot, and it will take him at least that long to get back, gather the legion, and find Cor Talaith. Meanwhile, we’ll have his horses.”

The kai’s lair. Keldar’s lair. In all the minutiae of the past weeks, our great enterprise had grown indistinct. “Are we ready?”

I donned my bloody clothing as quickly as I could, while Lara brought the horses from the far end of the grotto. She didn’t answer my question until she wrapped the reins of Rueddi’s horse about my gloved hands. Then she looked me full in the eye, her own clear blue ones bleak and hopeless. “I don’t believe it matters in the least.”

We rode back to the hut, taking a slightly longer, but less steep, route than we had walked, and collapsed on our blankets just before dawn, knowing we could not proceed without rest. I woke first, sometime near midday, and Lara jumped up soon after, diving right into our preparations as if I might be thinking of leaving her behind. We worked for an hour, saying little except to agree on what we needed to keep with us: a bit of food, our armor, a flask of brandy, the fireproofing supplies, Lara’s weapons.

We left the hut by separate paths just as the light took on its midafternoon slant. Lara led the horses across the open meadow to the northern end of the valley, where she would point them down the trails leading into the wild lands of northern Elyria, hoping to lead any pursuers astray. Then she would set out directly west on a difficult route through steep, rugged terrain where her passing could not be easily tracked, before turning south to our rendezvous. I took the well-trodden path into the nearby forest, where we set our traps and gathered wood, dragging the sledge behind me to muddle the footprints so no one could tell if they were old or new. Once deep in the trees, I buried the sledge in the snow and set off on a southwesterly course, masking the signs of my passing by climbing steep rockfaces and walking in barely thawed streams, soaking my boots miserably. We could not risk being followed.

The stars claimed it was almost midnight by the time I topped a high saddle and saw the jewellike glimmer of Lara’s watchfire blazing on a barren hillside. Half an hour later, I collapsed on the ground beside the fire. I had scarcely begun thawing my fingers enough to give full attention to the fat partridge spitted over it and the onions roasting in the coals, when Lara started instructing me as to our next move. “We’ve got to decide how we’re going to—”

I covered my ears. “Please, no! You can’t mean me to listen until I’ve had a chance to taste this magnificent bird.” I knew we had a thousand things to consider, but my stomach was groaning with delight at the smoky scent. “And I’ve lugged this brandy about with me for at least five hundred leagues, so I want to get rid of it as well. I think this night warrants a little celebration.” I pulled out the stone flask that held our only spirits and waved it in the air. She scowled and started to complain, but I was tired and feeling fey, and didn’t let her. “Call it wanton indulgence stemming from my Senai decadence.”

Under Lara’s ferocious glare, I downed my share of the overblackened fowl and rock-hard onions, and only then did I savor the first sip of brandy. Tossing the flask to her, I settled close to the fire, closed my eyes, and let the smooth liquor trickle down my throat. I peeped out from under my eyelids, and watched her shake her head at me, then swig from the flask in the soldier’s way—no savoring, no settling, only one long pull. Then she threw the flask at my belly so hard I might have lost what I’d already drunk if I’d not been ready for it. I took another mouthful. Only after it had burned its delightful way to my tired knees did I sigh and admit that indulgence had to give way or I would fall asleep. “So now to business.”

“I have to tell you what we’re going to do.”

“An excellent plan. No matter how many words are stuffed in my head, I have no idea how to address them to a dragon. Educate me.”

She pursed her fine lips in prim disapproval. I always seemed to bring out the worst in her. “Narim’s journal says the Elhim would stand on a high rock near the dragon’s head. They would raise one arm high as they spoke their greeting, then let it drop to their side when the dragon acknowledged them, holding their bodies very still. Excessive motion or any gesturing with arms or hands was irritating to the dragons. The Elhim didn’t know why ... whether it was rude or distracting or what. And there’s more.” Lara pulled the tin box from her pack and extracted the journal, moving only close enough to the fire to enable her to read.

“ ‘The dragon doth hold her peace after her saying,’ ” she read, “ ‘and lowers her head if the speaker doth not likewise.’ ” Lara screwed her face into a frown and directed it at me. “So you need to pause as you speak. The last thing you want is for the dragon to lower its head. The nostrils flare and the head is lowered just before it burns.”

“Noted,” I said. “No flared nostrils. No lowered heads. And I must pause between ... words? Sentences? More to the point, how do we get the dragon to remember the rules?”

Lara stared at me without expression, the heat of the fire laying a most charming flush upon the smooth, tanned skin of her unscarred cheek. “There is a cistern just outside the cave. The Elhim have filled it with water from the lake and built a sluiceway from the cistern into the cave. On the day Narim brought you to me, he opened the sluiceway so it would fill the pool inside the cave.”

“The water, yes. And the dragon?”

“Tomorrow I’ll wake the kai, and we’ll see if it will drink the water. Narim’s journal says that the beasts can’t resist the water once they’ve so much as touched it. If it drinks, I’ll unlink the kai’cet. As this stone is not the dekai’cet—the stone bound to the kai in the beginning—I will then have no control over the beast.”

“Then I shall say hello with appropriate pauses and without distracting gestures.”

She nodded.

“And then he’ll most likely roast me.”

Lara clutched the journal fiercely to her breast and spoke through clenched teeth. “The kai do not have minds. They cannot speak. They are wild and dangerous and vicious. Why do you believe otherwise? The Elhim are the only race with these legends. There are no Senai stories of speaking dragons. In all your songs, you never knew one, did you? They are not mentioned in any Udema legends, nor in those from Florin or Aberthain or other kingdoms. And certainly there are no such tales from the Ridemark. You’re a fool! Why will you throw your life away for a myth?”

“Because it cannot be myth. ...” And there in the starry midnight, as the brandy and the fire burned the chill from my soul, and the night wind shifted into the south, a first warm zephyr to blunt the frosty edge of winter, I told Lara of Roelan. I told her things I had never told anyone: of the mystery I had lived, of experiences I had come to believe should not die with me if we should fail, as Lara assumed we would. Someone had to know what had happened to me and find out the truth of it, for whether it was gods or dragons, there was power and magnificence in the world that should not be allowed to vanish. And, inevitably, my tale led to Mazadine, and I told her of that, too.

She listened quietly, resting her chin on her fist that was clenched tightly enough to tell me she was not quiet inside herself. I poured out my life in an unceasing stream of words, whether from the prompting of wine or dread of burning or something else I could not yet name. I spoke more words that night than in the previous eighteen years together, and when I was done, I felt empty and at peace, sure against all reason that I had left my soul’s legacy in hands that would take care of it. I had implicit trust in her honor if not her goodwill, and it seemed to make it easier that she despised me so.

A long time passed before Lara said anything. Perhaps the dragons’ pause was the same—deep, respectful consideration of all that had been said, even when babbled by a lower being. When she spoke at last, she offered no maudlin sympathy, no pity, no bracing words, no advice or shocked avowals of shared retribution that I could not possibly allow. All the pointless, well-meant offerings I had dreaded from the generous souls I had encountered since my release—Callia, Alfrigg, even Davyn—Lara eschewed. She understood, and she accepted, and her questioning was to answer her own purposes, not to seek remedy for me. I wished there were a way to tell her how grateful I was for her quiet listening, but I could think of no words that she would welcome.

“So it is not your hands that prevent you from taking up your music?” she said.

“Even if I could pluck the strings, it would be nothing but noise.”

“And do you hope that by speaking to this kai, you’ll somehow—”

“I have no more hope than you did when you heard your brother’s offer of redemption. Hope was gone long ago. If I could just come to some understanding, gain some bit of knowledge that would tell me it was not all for nothing, that would be enough.”

“So you think to avenge yourself on the king and the clan. Turn the dragons on them.”

“What use is that? My cousin is paying a price far greater than I could ever extract from him. Goryx is not worthy of my honor. And where’s the justice in taking revenge on the entire clan of the Ridemark? They’ll pay enough if we take the dragons away from them.”

She shook her head. “What kind of coward are you?”

“I’ll confess to that crime. Someone told MacEachern that seven years of silence would destroy me. That one is the only target who might be worth my aim. Your brother knows who it was. MacEachern knows. In one moment, I want to strangle them until they tell me, and I can throw the bastard into a dragon’s fire. But in the next, I want nothing more than to find a place to hide and forget that dragons exist. Coward. No doubt of it. But I’m the one who didn’t listen when Devlin warned me, who didn’t question enough. My pride kept my mystery private; my willful blindness kept me ignorant. What if I were to find out that it was all my own fault? How could I live with that?”

Lara was silent for a while, tapping her fingers on her jaw. Then, suddenly, words burst from her like a summer tempest. “You Senai always think you know everything. Listen to me. Every day after I was burned, I prayed that the one responsible would have his throat severed or his tongue cut out. I prayed his soul would rot and that he would live with the knowledge of it every day of his life. So if you believe that heartfelt prayers are answered, then it is I and not yourself or some mysterious betrayer that you must blame for your torment. I fully intended your destruction. And don’t deceive yourself that I’ve given it up.”

I was astounded. “But why? You didn’t know I had anything to do with Keldar ... with your burning. You still don’t believe it. I’m not sure I do.”

Her eyes glittered in the firelight. “Oh, I knew well who to blame. Your crime was committed long before I took the kai from Cor Neuill.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I told you once that I’d heard you sing. Well, it wasn’t only when you came to Cor Neuill before your arrest, but another time long before that. When I was eight years old, you sang in the camp at El’Sagor in Florin. ...”

I remembered it. The first time I had ever sung for the Twelve Families. I was only sixteen. It had been a hot, dismal night, the sultry air pregnant with warning, constant lightning arcing in pink and purple forks across the heavy clouds, exploding in earsplitting thunder. The clansmen were determined to hear me, though, and did not disperse even when the storm broke in wild torrents of rain and turned the plain into a sea of mud. As ever in my years of service, I had no choice but to heed the call, though I had never felt so small as the moment I climbed up to sit on a rock wall in front of a thousand warriors in the midst of a storm from the eye of the world.

But at the very moment I touched my harp strings, the rain and wind ceased, as children called to silence by their mother’s hand. Whispers of awe rippled through the crowd; though to me, a youth living in constant wonder, it was but another manifestation of my master’s care. The clouds, flickering with soft veils of color, hung low and thick, as if the gods had sent them to shelter and protect me. On that night I never had to strain my voice to be heard as I might have in such a wide-open venue, but was able to shade and color it, and entwine it with the soft clarity of the strings to bring to life my vision. And on that night Roelan had graced me with music of such soaring beauty that even after so many desolate years my breath faltered in my chest and my empty soul ached to remember it.

“You sang that night of flying, of soaring on the wings of the wind until the rivers were but threads winding through the green earth, until the sky was black velvet, and the uncountable stars sharp-edged silver. You made such an image in my head. I could feel the power of muscle and sinew beneath me, and the surge as the wings spread to capture the wind. Such wild and glorious freedom you promised that from that night I could think of nothing else. I took an oath on my father’s sword that I would one day fly on the back of a dragon. I swore that I would take that young and handsome Senai singer with me to show him it was as beautiful as he said and that a girl of the Ridemark could make his holy visions come true. I loved you, Aidan MacAllister. I worshiped you. For five years your face and your voice and your images never left my mind. But when I finally got to fly, it was nothing like you said, for I fell out of the sky into the fires of the netherworld. Never has there been such hate in the world as that I’ve borne for you. If I weren’t bound by my debt to Narim, you would already be dead.”

I sat mute as the storm of Lara’s bitterness broke over me. What else was there to do? To tell her I was sorry would be to trivialize what had happened to her, as if a few meaningless words from hated lips could cleanse the pain from her memory or the scars from her body. I wanted to tell her how I admired her strength and her honesty, and how I grieved for all she had lost, but she would think it mockery. And unless I could be sure that what I offered had nothing to do with pity or some clumsy, selfish attempt at absolution, I could offer her nothing else. I would not serve up the very dish that I despised.

But something else held me motionless and dumb as we sat beside the dying fire, an awakening of such desire ... unreasoning, unexpected, laughable had it not been so terrifying in its magnitude that it left me trembling at the edge of control. I was thirty-eight years old, and since I’d left the nursery, I had scarcely touched a woman other than my mother. For twenty-one years I had been consumed by mystery, and though I sang of human love and physical desire, in my mind and body they were always transformed into my single passion. My music had been the sum of everything I knew, everything I felt, everything I wanted. I was never lonely until it was far too late to do anything about it. But on that night on the hillside above Cor Talaith, when Lara told me that she had once loved me—even with the affection of a mesmerized child—only then did I begin to understand how much I had missed.

I had no idea how to offer love or how to recognize it when it was offered to me, though I was fairly certain it did not come from those who told you in the same breath that they wanted to slit your throat. Neither our “accommodation” in pursuit of Narim’s plan nor our evening of soul baring gave me any leave to offer comfort with my arms or any reason to think she would view such an attempt with anything but scorn and revulsion. Lara had set me into absolute confusion, and I could not sort it out. So I sat by the fire, and she sat in the darkness, each of us alone behind barricades of silence, waiting for the dawn.

The morning came dull and mournful, the world swaddled in thick wads of cloud holding in the damp. Lara was up before me, scattering the ashes of our fire with her boot as ferociously as if they were enemy soldiers. If I was confused, Lara seemed very comfortable with her anger and hatred. I called myself the hundredth name for a fool when I remembered the longings of the past night. No matter that they seemed to resurface with equal ferocity at my mind’s touch. It was easier to bury such things in the light.

Lara struck out across the barren, rolling hillsides without a word, as if she didn’t care whether I came with her or not. Indeed, I considered standing my ground and refusing to go until we got a few things settled between us, but I had the distinct sense that her straight back would have disappeared just as quickly over the next ridge. I sighed and trudged after her, pulling up the hood of my cloak against the cold rain that began, inevitably, to drip from the sky.

It was only an hour’s wet and dreary walk to the bulge in the earth where Keldar lay. I tried to give some thought to our coming endeavor, but the immediate misery of wet boots and the visible enigma of Lara made such absurdities as conversations with dragons retreat into fantasy. Even when we descended a rocky stair into a broad, barren valley littered with scorched rock and skeletal trees, then dropped our gear beside a jagged, gaping maw in the face of a sheer cliff—even then I had trouble believing what we were about to attempt.

I tried again with my question of two days before. “Are we ready for this?”

Lara, clearly feeling no need for further discussion on any matter, pointed at the bag of my unfinished leather armor and began to don her own.

I dragged out the breeches and pulled them on, clumsily knotting the laces. “What’s this stuff that makes it smell so vile?”

“Vigar helps fireproof the leather. The secret of its making belongs to the Twelve.”

“As long as it works.”

I had no helm or mask. They’d not been finished when we took flight. Lara pulled hers from her bag, glanced at me, and then threw them on the ground and walked into the cave. Her back dared me to say anything. As she couldn’t see me do it, I smiled after her and wished fervently for more time. The soft rain pattered on her discarded gear and into my face as I looked upward and imagined the sun and blue sky that were hiding behind the heavy clouds. Though the peaks and high valleys still wore their smooth mantles of white, spring was lurking in the Carag Huim. I could feel it in the soft edge of the air, and hear it in the trickle of water beneath the skim of ice at my feet, and smell it in the scent of the rain as it stirred the damp earth to life. The world sat poised, waiting, and with all of my being I embraced it. Then I followed Lara into the darkness.

Chapter 19

“Be ready.” Her quiet command from above my head was clear and steady. She might have saved herself the trouble of saying anything so useless. How could one prepare for what was to come? The last time I’d visited that vast, stinking cavern, I’d come a gnat’s breath from dying. And on that day I wasn’t even trying to listen.

I pressed my forehead against the cool stone and fought to quiet my sudden panic, to ignore the sighing rumble of dragon breath that came from beyond our rocky niche like the gusting precursors of a thunderstorm.

Put it all away ... lingering regrets, awakened desires, hunger for justice and revelation. You must listen. Everything depends on your listening . . . on hearing what it has been given you to hear, even if it is the sound of your own death.

Beyond the monstrous breathing there was ... what? The bubbling of steaming mud pits, the trickling of the cascade on the cavern wall behind my puny shelter, the faint, harsh cry of a hawk from where the world lay beyond the cave entrance far to my right, the sharp echo of hoof on stone. Across the pitted floor from the pile of red rocks, two of the small, sturdy Carag Huim horses sipped peacefully from a pool of black water not twenty paces from the monster’s head. They paid no heed to the bony jaws that could gape and breathe fire upon them or snatch them up, a tasty tidbit to soothe the hunger of dragon dreams. And of course there was the sound of Lara’s stiff leather, creaking as she moved, the scuff of her boots as she climbed the rocky steps to stand upon the topmost boulder of our pile, the rampart of our little fortress so ominously streaked with black.

Then her clear voice sang out to rouse the monster. “Awaken, child of fire and wind. Wake from the sleep of dying and heed my command.” The hot, humid air moved uneasily. “Wake from winter’s death and take your place among the mighty of the world. I command you drink your fill of the water of fire and life.”

Open your ears, Aidan MacAllister, and listen. It is the gift you have been given. ...

I felt his breathing change from nature’s rhythm to the tempo colored by waking will—a mighty will, pulsing through the cave. An ominous growl vibrated the stone at my head and beneath my feet. The cry would come at any moment like the blast of a thousand hellish trumpets. I had to be ready, but what preparation can mute the scream of a thousand tormented souls, the rolling thunder of a thousand hurricanes? I raised my arms to cover my head just as he bellowed. The sound reverberated through my very bones until I was sure they must be shattered to dust; searing pain tore through my chest like a hot knife used to carve out my heart. My knees gave way as I fought to keep from crying out. Through my closed eyelids, even sheltered as I was by the rocks, I could see the brilliance of fire. A shower of hot droplets fell from the air, but I forced myself still. If Lara was a victim of the dragon’s waking, I could do nothing for her, but if she was not, then she would tell me when to come, and I had to be able to hear it.

The first bellow subsided into a series of horrific growlings and snortings, accompanied by rock-shattering blows that could be nothing but the beast’s mighty tail, slamming into the cave walls. Astonishingly, in the midst of it all, I heard the soft whickering of horses and an unconcerned clopping of hooves.

“MacAllister!” The quiet call pushed its way through the throbbing of my head, and I let out the breath I’d held since her last word. I hauled myself up three boulders until my eyes were on a level with Lara’s boots. Her leather-clad hand held the bloodstone like a pulsing heart. She called down to me softly. “The kai drinks. Come quickly, but stay low.”

I scrambled up to the top of the flat red rock, crouching as low as the bulky leather armor would allow, and looked out over a poet’s vision of the netherworld: steaming mud pits, brimstone-laden smoke obscuring the view of burning rubble heaps, rotting carcasses. And the beast itself, repulsive, horrid, its head not fifty paces from me, the white-filmed eyes of scarlet flame, open and fixed in malevolent, unseeing madness on the bloodstone, even as it poked its snout into the black pool. Bursts of steam shot upward as gouts of flame streamed from its nostrils.

Ludicrous. Lara was right. Intelligence and sentience were far more likely present in the wild horses that shared the pool or in the very rocks of the cave than behind those devil’s eyes.

“I’ll move to the mouth of the cave,” said Lara, keeping her arm stretched high and her eyes fixed on the dragon. “We must put distance between you and the kai’cet. Count fifty; then I’ll say the words that release my command. I can reclaim control if you don’t wait too long to tell me. Do you understand? At the first sign of trouble, call my name.”

“Thank you” was all I managed to say, my wit completely abandoning me as I looked up at the worry on her face and yearned—foolishly—that it was for me. “Fifty, forty-nine ...”

Slowly she eased down from the rock, keeping herself and—more important—the bloodstone exposed to the wakened monster, calling to him, “Hear me, kai! Drink your fill and open the doors of your mind.”

The dragon raised its head from the water to follow the movement of the stone, and it rumbled ominously, rippling the muscles of its towering shoulders and the long copper barrel of its throat, flexing its wings so that I caught glimpses of swirling green and gold gossamer. It could not stretch its wings fully, of course. No cavern in my knowledge was so large it could hold a dragon’s wings unfurled.

“... forty-one, forty ...”

Lara disappeared into the gloom, and I was alone with the restless monster.

“... thirty-four, thirty-three ...”

One of the wild horses nipped at another who had pushed him away from the water. The dragon shifted its head toward them and the rumbling grew louder. The smoke from the corners of its mouth shot upward.

“... twenty-three, twenty-two ...”

The rumbling took on an edge of brass, tearing at my head until my vision began to blur. I would have sworn that the dragon’s red, leathery nostrils moved.

“... fourteen, thirteen ...”

Frantically I blinked my eyes and willed the throbbing aside. I had to be able to see. The horses cantered one after the other about the pool. What were the words? The nostrils flared wide. Gods. I stepped backward, ready to dive off my platform, but it was almost time.

“... five, four, three ...”

Crusted with jibari, the barnaclelike parasites that grew unchecked until blasted with dragon’s fire, the monster’s head rose up. The long, scaled neck twisted, the mouth gaped wide, revealing the brown leathery tongue. Another deafening bellow sounded, threatening to rob me of my reason. Every particle of my being was on fire. If the dragon spoke in its roaring, I would never be able to hear it. All my skill at listening would be of no use if I was deafened by the pounding of my blood. I could hear only the roar, different this time, a soaring note. Triumphant. Wild. He was free of Lara’s bloodstone. I hadn’t needed to count to know it.

The horses seemed disturbed at last and trotted across the floor of the cave. The dragon’s head moved to follow them, and the nostrils flared again, spewing thin trailers of flame, but despite the sweat that broke out beneath my stiff and stinking leathers, there was no full blast of fire. The horses left the cave, and the dragon shifted its head back to the water and drank again.

Now. The time has come. Take the words and weave into them your memories ... of Roelan and mystery ... of joy and faith . . . of the years of dedication to one who was as a god to you. ...

I raised my right arm. “Teng zha nav wyvyr, child of fire and wind, hear me.” He heard me, though I could scarcely force my voice above a whisper. The head turned toward me, and the cruel, slavering mouth. As I opened my mouth to say the next words, the nostrils flared wide, once, then twice, and the low-pitched rumble changed to hatred ... bestial fury ... death. ... I heard it even before the massive head began to dip.

“Lara!”

As my shout was annihilated by the blast, I turned and leaped from the rock. My hair burst into flame as I sailed downward beneath the arc of fire. Stumbling over the rocks as I landed, I smothered the back of my head with my gauntleted hands, then dropped to my back to ensure no untended spark found a path through the leather vest. A flash of red, boots narrowly missing my head; then Lara was screaming commands from above me. Flame lit the ceiling of the cavern, and the unending screech of the damned threatened to burst my brain from my head. I rolled to the side with my hands over my face and hot drops streamed from my eyes like tears, but they were dark as they soaked into my gauntlets. When silence fell, I struggled to all fours, then straightened and climbed slowly up the rocks.

She sat with her arms wrapped about her knees, beads of sweat running down her scarred cheek, the bloodstone gleaming in her hand. The dragon’s eyes were closed, though remnants of his fury burned everywhere in the cavern.

“What happened?” she said, craning to see the back of my singed hair and charred vest while grinding out a spark with her boot. She wasn’t even out of breath. “I couldn’t see.”

I told her.

“Fool! Why didn’t you call sooner? I told you if the nostrils flared—”

“He didn’t burn the horses. The nostrils flared, but his head never went down. Not until he was facing me.”

“Are you saying the fire was aimed only at you? That the kai knew the difference between you and the horses? Impossible.”

I flopped down on the rock beside her. “That’s the way it seemed.”

“This kai cannot see. It burns what moves, what disturbs it. Even after drinking the water.”

“Except the horses.”

“The horses were quiet. It didn’t know they were there. It aimed at you because you spoke. I’ve brought every manner of deer and mountain sheep, wild pig and goat in here. They squeak and grunt and bleat, and it burns them all. Every one. Every time. The water made no difference.”

“Horses are sacred to Keldar.”

“Nonsense.”

“Bring in the horses again. Wake him again and you’ll see. He knows what’s food and what’s not.”

She glared at me in angry disbelief. “And so it thinks you are food?”

“No. He tried to burn me because he hated me.” Even as I said it, I was more convinced.

“You can’t have it both ways, Senai. Four weeks ago you said it spoke to you ‘with love.’ Today it hates you. What’s the difference?”

That, of course, was the essential question. “I don’t know. The words. The weather. Today he was free of your stone.” My head ached miserably. I was nauseous with the stink of dragon and carrion and the fireproof grease on the leather. The stink ...

“He smells us.” I wanted to shout it out, but my head hurt too fiercely.

“What?”

“That’s the difference. Stupid of me not to think of it. He can smell the difference: horses, deer, pigs ... Riders.”

“We’ve never seen evidence they can smell anything. They burn and kill whatever moves unless it holds a bloodstone.”

“And any Rider who wields a bloodstone—the thing that drives it mad—wears armor like this.” I drew off my gauntlets. “They all smell alike. Who’s to say dragons would kill any human if they weren’t commanded so by their Riders?”

“You’ve no proof. You know nothing of dragons.”

“We’ve no time for proof.” I stripped off my vest and the breeches, the boots, and the greaves. “Wake him again.”

“You can’t mean this.”

“Give me time to wash off the smell.” I jumped down again and dodged a pile of burning bones to find my way to the waterfall. Standing in the shallow pool at its base, I scrubbed my skin and my clothes with handfuls of sand. Lara stood beside the pool watching my antics with angry astonishment.

“You’re mad. Absolutely mad. If it weren’t for the armor your bones would still be burning. They’d hear your screams down in Cor Talaith.”

“If it weren’t for the armor, I’d be talking with Keldar.”

“I won’t do it.”

“Lara”—I stepped out of the pool dripping and shivering though the cavern was not at all cold—“it’s the third day. Your brother will have the legion at our door anytime now. If this is going to happen, if the gods—whoever they are—wish the dragons to be free, then we’ve got to find the way right now. Help me.”

She hadn’t moved, and I was closer to her than I had ever been, close enough to know that beneath her leather vest she was quivering, strung tight as an archer’s drawn bowstring. Her face was carved from rose-colored granite, but her brown hair was shining and I wanted nothing more than to bury my face in it and forget about everything else in the world.

Lara, of course, brought me quickly back to my senses. She shrugged with a muttered curse and turned her back, climbing the red rock tower once more. I watched her go; then I set off an entirely different way, circling the steam pits and jumping cracks in the stone until I reached the edge of the dark pool, twenty paces from the dragon’s head. The water trickled into it from Narim’s stone trough, water stolen from the fiery lake of my visions. I settled myself on the stone and looked up at the copper-scaled head so close I could feel the hot breath from the raw, red nostrils. I did not look over my shoulder. No need. I just raised one hand briefly, then rested it in my lap again and held myself ready.

As I knew it would, her voice rang out soon after. “Awaken, child of fire and wind. Drink of the water of fire and live. Be troubled no more by the stone that galls you so sorely ... and harm not the fools who put themselves at your mercy.”

I smiled to myself and awaited the onslaught.