Song of the Beast

Chapter 20

I am a warrior born. My father was a Dragon Rider, seventh wingrider of the First Family of the Ridemark, and the Riders of our line had been no less than a tenth flanker for nine generations. In Gondar, in Eskonia and Florin, in the farthest provinces of Elyria, never did the line of Govin reap anything but honor and victory for the clan. From the first days of my memory I believed that the blood of the Ridemark flowed true within my veins and that I was destined to follow in the footsteps of my ancestors.

We did not live as the soft races did. My family—mother, brother, two grandmothers, two uncles, one aunt, and three cousins—slept in a tent twelve paces square. We owned only what we could carry on our backs as we followed the legion from one encampment of mud and beast-filth to another. Warriors cannot afford comfort; it brings weakness. I could not understand how anyone who slept under wood or stone held up his head without shame.

My father lived with his dragon. We were sure to see him once a year when he came to mate with my mother to keep her his wife. And he would always return if he heard any report of disrespect or disobedience from Desmond or me. Whenever a dragon flew above our tent, I imagined it was his, and I held my head high.

My fighting skills came early. I stood still for no insult from my older brother or any Ridemark child. I did not lower myself to fight children of other races, but frightened them with my whip and did as I pleased. In the strip of mud between our tent and the next, I played at strategy and tactics with bits of wood and stone, choosing wild dogs and prowling cats as my enemies if I could find no one willing to stand up to me.

And on the day that Desmond began his training to prepare him for our family’s rightful place as a Dragon Rider, I stepped forward, too. I told the Ridemaster that I was also ready, though I was only six instead of eight. I knew the Rider’s oath and the Twelve Laws. I could hook my whip and climb anything. I could recite the names of our heroes to the tenth generation and the names of our enemies from the beginning of time, and I could argue the long grievances that festered in our hearts. But on that same day I learned the hard truth no one had bothered to tell me before: that females could render any service the Twelve Families required except ride to war on the back of a dragon.

For three days I raged and wept every time I saw Desmond take his whip from its hook and leave for his training in the lair. “Quit your mewling,” my father told me, “or I’ll marry you into the Twelfth Family, where men take multiple wives. You’ll not be allowed to speak save with your husband’s leave or show your shameful face without a veil.” My mother slapped me and said, “What worthy warrior requires a beast to shed our enemies’ blood? The swordwomen of your clan fight alongside the men who are not Riders born. That is enough.” By the time I was eight I was resigned to the belief that unyielding honor was the only true glory of a clansman. Though I was not happy with it, it would have to do.

Then Aidan MacAllister, “beloved of the gods,” came to our camp. His music—his glorious music that my clansmen swore came from the fire god Vanir himself—turned my head inside out. I lived in the visions he made that night. I felt my hair streaming behind me as I soared through a world of wind and clouds and stars, and from that time forward I could think of nothing but flying. No warrior can be at peace when his master denies him the weapon he was born to wield. I resolved to ride upon a dragon, even if my clansmen cut out my heart for it. Because of Aidan MacAllister I forsook my oaths and betrayed my honor. I lied to my commander. I hid. I plotted. I stole. And for the span of two heartbeats I owned the wind and clouds and stars. Then came the terror and the screaming and the fire.

Aidan MacAllister had cursed my life, and when I saw him in Cor Talaith, I relived every moment of the horror he had brought down on me—the day I fell from the sky burning and knew it was just retribution for my sins. Is it any wonder I hated him?

Narim told me the Senai had been a prisoner of the Ridemark all those years since my fall, but I would not believe it. No Senai singer, so weak, so soft, so cowardly, could survive seventeen years in a Ridemark prison. “He’s been hiding,” I said, “while I’m forced to live forever with what he’s done.” The everlasting ugliness I wore on my face. A lifetime of exile from my clan. There was no going back to the Ridemark. I had done the unforgivable, and the price on my head was almost as high as that on MacAllister’s. I would not be killed or imprisoned, but have one hand cut off so I could not steal and one foot cut off so I could not run. I would live in servitude baser than any slave. I was sure that the despicable Senai was using the Elhim, weaving tales with his lying tongue to win their sympathy, making them believe he was their savior so they would protect him from our justice. “He was a spy,” I claimed in my unending arguments with Narim. “He was sent into Ridemark camps by Senai nobles to corrupt our honor.”

So why did I not kill him? If will alone could shed blood, MacAllister’s veins would have been emptied at my first glance. But I was bound to Narim’s wishes, a sacred debt because he had saved my life. It was enough to drive me crazy, so sure was I of my hate.

But then the singer came to live with me, and all my beliefs were confounded. I scorned him for huddling by the fire, and he offered to share his tea. I reviled him for his cowardice at the kai’s lair, and he made me soup. I ridiculed his noble ancestry, and he laughed at himself and cleaned my hearth. I drove him unmercifully in his schooling, and he devoured it as if I’d gifted him with jewels. No matter how I goaded him, he would not get angry and free my revenge from Narim’s bond. I had never known a man of such gentle ways and teasing humor, and I could only chalk it up to weakness, because I had no other way to explain it. I counted him pitiful ... until the night I first saw his mangled hands.

I remembered well the long, slender fingers that had touched the strings of his harp and drawn forth his cursed visions—everything about the tall Senai youth who had corrupted my soul was imprinted on my memory—and I knew no accident and no disease could have transformed them so precisely into that hideous ruin. It made me think Narim’s story might be true, and where I had seen only a hated enemy, I began to see a man.

I despised my weakness and redoubled my effort to prove him a fraud. But I found steel beneath his soft-spoken manner. I could not break him. Despite his struggles with the tasks I set him, he lived with everything of gentleness and grace. So I decided that, though I could not trust him and could not forgive him, I could not let him be sent back to those who had done him so ill.

Then came the night by the kai’s lair, the night he poured out all of himself in his fear and in his longing, and I was at last convinced that everything I had seen of him was truth. I tried to persuade myself that I still hated him. To give it up was to forswear vengeance for everything that had happened to me, and to lay open my own actions ... oh, curse the world forever ... like cutting through ripe fruit and finding only black and rotted pulp. But I could not maintain my hatred, though I forced myself to say the words where he could hear them, as if another hearing could make them real. I wanted to make him fear me, as was right and proper. But my truest hope was that he would tell me one more time that he had not meant to do me harm. I wanted him to agree that people could cause the most dreadful horrors with the best of intentions, and that my confession had made him see things in a new light. I wanted him to absolve himself of his crime and thereby absolve me of mine. But he retreated into silence, and I damned myself for a fool.

Narim, my old friend, my only friend, how could you do this to me? You knew what he was. You knew the utter impossibility. You have the wisdom of five hundred years. How could you not guess what would happen? What warrior weeps when she sets out to do battle?

And so came the morning of our venture into the kai’s lair, the moment Aidan stripped off his armor and sat unprotected in the path of the dragon fire. I stood on the rock in the lair of the blind kai, and for the second time that day I raised the kai’cet—the bloodstone—and called out its power. “Awaken, child of fire and wind. ...” The kai bellowed with fury, crazed at being dragged from sleep again.

The fires blazed, reflecting in the still pool until it glowed orange like the lake of its origin, revealing the man who sat beside it, holding his belly as if a warrior had speared him in the gut. His eyes were fixed on the kai’s head. He would have no escape if the beast belched fire. As for the beast, its mindless hatred was aimed at me. For as long as the kai’cet and I held sway, MacAllister was safe. If he was right, then once I moved far enough away and released control, he would be able to speak to the beast. It would not happen. Aidan MacAllister was going to die.

Well and good. What do I care? He is Senai. My enemy. Let this playacting be done with.

But I had given Narim my word to do as the Senai commanded, so I climbed down from my perch and held the kai’cet high. I moved quickly toward the cave mouth, screaming at the monster to keep his attention on me. The kai lashed his tail against the stone, drumming the walls until it sounded as if the doom of the world was come. The round opening high on the western wall, where Narim had first brought MacAllister to see the dragon, disappeared in an avalanche of dirt and rocks, its earthen roof collapsed by the force of the blows.

“Hold your burning!” I screamed, as the nostrils gaped and arrows of orange flame darted from them, blackening the ceiling of the cavern. MacAllister did not move, only watched. I knew he was afraid and in pain, yet he neither cried out, nor begged me to stop it, nor ran, nor hid, nor covered his eyes.

“Drink, beast!” I yelled. “Taste the water of life!”

The head came down as if jerked by an invisible tether, yielding to my will, hiding the man in a cloud of steam as its snout dipped into the water.

Now. It has to be now.

I blew softly on the bloodstone until it glowed so brightly my gauntlet looked drenched with blood. Then I whispered the words it had taken me two years to wrest from my clan: sneaking, spying, creeping about like a lair rat until I learned the secrets denied me because I was not a man. “Ze vra deshai, kai.” I release you from my command, slave.

Halfway between the cave mouth and the boulder pile was a deep crack in the floor with a wide ledge just below its rim. One could stand on the ledge and duck below the level of the floor to hide or peek over the edge to watch the dragon from safety. The stinking smoke venting from the depths of the crevice would mask my smell. While the kai bellowed, I dropped onto the hidden ledge, then raised my head to peer across the floor of the cave.

It was perhaps a hundred paces from my hiding place to the pool. Though I could see only MacAllister’s back and a bit of his right side, I had a clear view of the kai towering over him. It stretched its neck and tossed its head, spewing short, hard bursts of red-orange fire and smoke. The man stretched his right arm upward.

Be still, fool. But I had no gemstone to command men. Beneath the constant muted roar of menacing breath and fire, of hissing scales and moving air that never ceased when the kai was awake, I heard the man’s soft words as clearly as if we were sitting at my own hearth. “Teng zha nav wyvyr . . .”

The dragon stopped in midstretch, and began to move its head from side to side on its long neck like some huge, ugly flower swaying with the wind. Left to right and back again ... searching ... searching ...

Holy gods, Aidan . . . be silent ... don’t move. But my will was not enough to stop him.

“Hear me, noble Keldar.”

The red snout opened wide, and the neck curled downward. I could not bear to watch, yet I could not hide. The monstrous head shifted right, then left. Hunting.

“I crave speech with thee, wind treader, cloud splitter, lover of your earthbound brothers who fly on four hooved legs through the lower airs.”

The words of the ancient speech took life from the singer’s tongue, somehow grown wider and deeper than the dry syllables we of the Ridemark use. He believed the music of his heart was dead, but he was wrong. I heard it in that hour as clearly as I had heard it when I was eight.

I held my breath as the dragon tossed its head again, spit a geyser of fire upward so that sparks rained down from the cavern roof, then roared until the earth shook. But I did not close my eyes.

MacAllister, his face still turned upward, held his hands over his ears and, when the cry subsided, spoke again, his clear voice strained, but unwavering. “My hearing bursts with thy call, mighty Keldar, until I am drowned with it. Softly, wind treader. A youngling am I in my weakness. As the whispered air of the burning season enter my heart, lest I be crushed by the power of thy voice.”

The kai dipped its head sharply toward the man; the red slits in the snout gaped, pouring out yellow smoke. But instead of belching fire, the beast lowered its massive chest and its barrel-shaped neck until they rested on the rocks and bones. It might have been returning to sleep, but its blind, wild eyes remained open, and its head was angled away from the man, as if turning an ear his way or ensuring that no escaping thread of fire singed the one to whom it listened. Impossible.

After a pause, the soft, deep voice began again. “I am the human servant of thy brother Roelan, graced in my youth with the gentle breath of his spirit. ...”

MacAllister’s voice dropped out of hearing as the dragon grew quiet and still. I dared not creep closer and risk distracting the beast, for even the tiniest spurts of flame could sear the singer’s flesh from his bones if the dragon moved its head. A hiss of steaming breath spewed from the beast, and in the midst of it a low, wavering noise, a grating sound that made my teeth hurt and my gorge rise. Never had I heard such sounds from a dragon, but they were not speech—not even the “pleasant variety of sounds” Narim had described in his journal. How long would MacAllister remain in such danger before he could admit that he had failed?

It was over very quickly. The kai’s three sets of eyelids—the transparent ones, the soft green ones, and the hard copper-colored ones—slid over its diseased eyes, and the hissing breath took on the low rumble of dragon sleep. The grating noise was gone, and so, I supposed, were the hopes of the Elhim. The success of the day was survival. Yet moments passed, and then more. MacAllister did not move. He needed to get away. Oftimes the beast would shift in its sleep, and if he was in its path ...

I scrambled out of my hiding place and slipped cautiously between a rotting carcass of a herd beast and a slime-filled pit toward the singer and the dragon and the pool. “MacAllister!” I called softly. Not a twitch or a shiver.

Soon I was running, jumping across jagged cracks in the stone, yet keeping my footsteps light. “Aidan. Are you all right?” Only when I dropped to my knees beside him and felt the beat of blood in his scarred wrist did I know he was alive. Though I wanted to scream at him, I forced my voice low. “Get up, fool. Do you want to die here? It shifts its head while it sleeps.” I gripped his arm and shook him until his head came up. His dark eyes that knew so much of horror and despair were pools of grief.

“Move your sorry bones away or the kai will fry you like bacon,” I said. Imaginary flames crawled up my back.

The singer shook his head and whispered, “He won’t.”

Damned stubborn, cursed man. “Just because you were lucky while it was awake doesn’t mean—”

“He’s dying. He won’t move anymore.”

“Of course it’s not dying. Not any time soon, at least. Narim told you. The kai go to ground after an injury to die or heal. We think—”

“He can’t heal. He’s broken inside, diseased beyond help. That’s what I felt from him the first time when Narim brought me through the tunnel. I wasn’t dying; he was. The only thing that’s kept him alive is yearning for his brothers and sisters to sing him on his way. If only I could do it.” MacAllister stood up slowly, rubbing his hands along his upper arms as if he were cold and gazing on the sleeping dragon like a drunkard gazes on his wine-skin. “I tried to comfort him.”

“Are you saying the kai told you this?” Without thought I moved away from him, and his eyes shifted from the dragon to me.

“You think I’m mad.”

“I heard no speech from the kai.”

MacAllister shook his head. “Hearing? No, I suppose not. I’ve never ...” He rubbed his brow with the back of one hand. “It was very ... subtle. I got only part of it. But I’m not mad. Or at least no more so than I’ve been since I was eleven.” He smiled then, a sweet, sad smile that wiped away the lines pain had written on his handsome face. “I’m just a bit more tired.”

The kai lay still, but the bursts of fire and smoke from its nostrils told me it was no nearer death than in any hour in the past three years.

“I’m leaving,” I said. “If you can bear to part from your charming friend, you can come, too. Then you can tell me what else it said.” And I would weigh it well, for it would either be lies or lunacy. But I would not look into Aidan MacAllister’s eyes while I judged him.

It had been early morning when we entered the lair, and I was sure that no more than two hours had passed, but the sky was dark when we stepped out of the cave. Though the rain was only a dismal drizzle, the clouds boiled purple and black, and from the direction of Cor Talaith orange lightning flickered unceasingly. Deafening thunder pealed through the mountains, caught by the jagged ridges and bounced from one to the other. The stench of burning set us both to coughing.

“We’d best find a cave of our own, or we’ll have to take shelter with Keldar,” said MacAllister. “The storm will be on us in moments.”

But as he hoisted the pack he’d dropped just inside the cavern, I watched the sky to the east. I listened to the thunder and the roar of the wind beyond the ridge, the wind that moved no tree limb within our sight. “It’s no storm,” I said, the truth hammering home with the power of a dragon’s tail. “It’s Desmond.” The clan had come.

Chapter 21

The sun hung between the lower edge of the clouds and the dark horizon, casting long, angular shadows as MacAllister and I walked down into the hellish ruin that had been the Elhim’s sanctuary for more than eight hundred years. Heavy rain had left the valley floor a sea of hot, black mud, and the air was clogged with choking steam from charred rocks quickly cooled. Nothing within our sight lived—no blade of grass, no tree, no bird or insect. Not the least sign remained that any creature had ever lived in Cor Talaith. The end of the vale, where the granaries, the smithy, and the woodshop had stood, was barren. We slogged through the ankle-deep mud, thinking only to get to the warrens to see if any Elhim yet lived.

During the assault we had sheltered in a rocky cleft half a league from the kai’s lair, not daring to stay too close to the lair, lest the attacking dragons discover their kin and draw the Riders to him. The Senai had spent the next four hours with his head buried in his arms. We could not escape the constant screaming of the kai wheeling overhead, and if a single dragon’s cry opened him to madness, then the sounds of a dragon legion in full assault must surely drive him there. But no sooner had the skies fallen silent than Aidan jumped to his feet, ready to search for survivors.

“Not yet,” I told him. “If there’s to be a third wave, it will begin in less than half an hour. And even if they’re done, we can’t go in until it cools down. The rock would melt our boots right now.”

“They don’t understand it,” he said, leaning his head against the split cliff wall that formed our haven. “All these years we’ve used them to kill our own kind, and they don’t understand why we don’t eat each other, too.”

“Did the kai tell you that today?” Sometimes he had me fooled into thinking him sane; then he would start talking about dragons.

“No. Roelan told me long ago. I just didn’t have the words to understand.” He pulled his cloak tight around himself. “The battle’s over; I can’t hear them anymore. The rain will have the ground passable by the time we get there.”

In truth I had no desire to wait.

The Riders had found the Elhim’s cavern. The cliffs around its mouth were black and scarred, monstrous boulders, burned and shattered by dragons’ tails, blocking three-quarters of the entrance. As MacAllister had surmised, by the time we hiked into the valley the rain had cooled the rocks enough to touch. We scrambled over the rubble, our boots slipping on rain-slick soot, until we could wriggle through the narrow opening and drop from the boulder pile into the cave.

We had no need for a torch. Fires still raged in several tunnels. Careful to avoid the smoldering ash piles, we covered our faces with our wet cloaks and picked our way across the charred hollow that had been the refectory and gathering hall. No use to look for anyone there. On the far side of the great room we saw the first blackened bones. At the same moment we both yelled out, “Hello! Is anyone here?” No answer.

We took separate routes through the warren, turning back only when heat or flames blocked our way. I found five or six more corpses, all burned in varying amounts. I had no great affection for most Elhim, but they had sheltered me and allowed Narim to care for me. They did not deserve this. Neither Narim nor Davyn were recognizable among the dead. I straightened the charred bodies, crossing their hands upon their breasts as was the Elhim custom and left them where they lay.

Returning from one blocked corridor, I heard voices and hurried down the passage that led to the lake of fire. The Senai was kneeling by two corpses ... no, only one was a corpse. The other gripped the singer’s cloak with a blackened hand, croaking out the last words of his hateful life.

“... told him ... told him ... best to leave it be. They’ll never remember. They’ll kill us all. But he won’t let it rest. He’s mad, and all of us are servants of his scheme. His plan is not what you think. He calls you Dragon Speaker”—Iskendar spewed his bile in death even as he had in life—“but he makes you Death Bringer. You trust him, but he will betray you again, as he betrayed us all. The girl knows his schemes ... his plans ... You will destroy us all.” The old man wheezed and struggled for breath. “Ask him why there is an Elhim named for every dragon. Ask him what he found in Nien’hak. Ask him how the Twelve knew ...”

“What betrayal?” said MacAllister when Iskendar stopped. “How the Twelve knew what? Iskendar, tell me. ...”

The old crow, ignoring the Senai’s pleading, gave his death shudder and lay still. The second corpse would be Nyura. The two bitter old fools had rarely been more than two steps apart.

The Senai loosened the blackened claw from his cloak and laid it and its fellow gently across Iskendar’s breast. He began to speak, so softly I could scarcely hear him. “Across the ages walks the race of One, the Single, the Children of the Whole, never alone, but joined since the dawning. ...” The words of the Elhim death hymn. He probably knew the death hymns of every race. The words should be sung, of course, and on the second discourse he tried. “Across the valley of time walks the race of One. ...” Ten, fifteen tones of unmatched purity, such beauty in his voice that I could almost glimpse the welcoming vale for myself. But he faltered. His voice cracked and the music fell sour in the hot, stinking air. Bowing his head, he cupped his terrible hands at his shoulders in apology. “I’m sorry ... so sorry.”

I stood silently, waiting for him, trying to think what I was to tell him. He would want to know of Narim’s plotting. Perhaps at last he would be a proper man and figure out the truth of the world. How you could trust no one. How kindness and care were but the pretty face on scarred ugliness.

But when he got to his feet and noticed me standing by the wall, he had only one question. “What was he talking about ... Death Bringer?” From the look of him you’d have thought he had torched the old Elhim himself and was asking me to mete out his punishment.

“He was a mad old man,” I said. “He was dying. You can’t endure a dragon’s fire and speak anything of sense.”

My words hung weakly in the air. MacAllister stared at me unblinking until I had to turn away.

“Come on,” I said, starting down the passage toward the lake. “ Let’s find a place to spend the night. I’ll tell you more of Iskendar and his plots and his hatred of Narim, and you can tell me what you think you learned from the kai.” He followed without argument. How could anyone be so naive?

We had counted no more than fifteen bodies in the ruin. No way to tell how many more Elhim had been completely consumed in the attack, but the tracks on the lakeshore told us that many—most of them, perhaps—had escaped. Narim had escaped, I had no doubt.

We made camp in a sheltered cove a quarter of the way around the lake, where there was a broad stretch of sand. MacAllister fell onto the sand without speaking and was asleep before I could get my pack off my back. I made a fire, cooked barley soup, and sat leaning against the rocks, wondering what in the name of Vanir the fire-tamer I was doing.

Glaring sunlight scorched my eyes, forcing me awake. My back ached. I was still sitting up, and flies were gorging themselves on my untouched soup that had spilled into the sand. MacAllister was kneeling by the lake bathing his face and head. I considered pretending I was still asleep—perhaps for an entire day or until the Senai tired of waiting and took his inconvenient questions away. I had no reason to stay with a madman who believed he spoke to beasts.

As I watched him through the slits of my eyes, he removed his shirt and dipped it in the lake, then squeezed it out and spread it on a rock in the sun. In all the weeks of our sharing my hut, even on the night we left him hanging for the wolves, I had never gotten a good look at his back. When I saw my clansmen’s work, it was as well I had eaten none of my soup the night before. MacAllister came away from the lake, dried his face and hair with the hem of his cloak, and stretched out on the sand on his stomach.

Only after an hour, when he had put his shirt back on and poked up the fire, did I let my eyes come open. I felt dirty. Shamed. But to a man or woman of the Ridemark, a life debt is a chain that binds beyond reason, beyond decency. I had no choices.

“I’ve seen more tracks up a gully on the other side of the lake,” he said when he saw me stirring. “I think most of the Elhim got away. They must have heeded your warning beacon. Now, tell me. ...” His face was expectant. His questions had not been washed away with the previous day’s filth. Best to attack, lest I end up in a position with no escape.

“Iskendar and Nyura and their circle had not left Cor Talaith in a hundred fifty years and swore they never would. It’s their own fault they got caught here.”

“I don’t understand what Iskendar was trying to tell me. He spoke of plots ... of destroying everyone. What is Narim hiding?”

“Narim has been trying to protect you from Iskendar and the others. That’s why he had to be so brutal, so secretive, why he had to stand back while you fell into despair. All those weeks he stayed away from you for guilt at not telling you of his hopes. If you didn’t believe you were dead, then Iskendar wouldn’t either. But for some reason, the old crows decided you were still a threat. Something Nyura told you one morning out by the bridge. Narim didn’t know exactly what was said. ...”

At last I had told MacAllister something he didn’t know. “About Donal,” he said. “Nyura told me that my cousin Donal was a prisoner of the Gondari.”

“Well, whatever you said on that day made them believe you were not ... incapable ... as they wanted you to be. They were afraid of you. They had to be sure you wouldn’t try to help, and when they came to believe you would ...”

“... they decided to kill me. I understood that already.”

“Exactly. So Narim sent you to stay with me.”

“So what was Iskendar talking about? What Narim found ... his plan ... betrayal ...”

I picked at a hard lump of bread I’d pulled from my pack, and it crumbled in my hand. “Narim allowed you to go into Cor Neuill even though he knew there was a risk you would be recognized. He had to see what happened when you were near the dragons. And then he brought you to Cor Talaith to save your life. There’s plenty of guilt to go around, and Iskendar wanted to make sure you felt it. It was my fault that Desmond suspected the Elhim. It was your fault that his suspicions were confirmed. As soon as Desmond knew you were here, Cor Talaith was doomed.”

“I shouldn’t have come.”

“Narim knew you would never agree to stay here if you suspected what might happen. That’s why he hid it from you. That was his secret. So in a way Iskendar was right. Narim betrayed you by letting you go into such danger. By lying to you. He betrayed the Elhim by allowing you to come here when he knew the likely consequences.”

“Death Bringer ... Why did he say that I would destroy us all?”

“What do you think would happen if the dragons were taken away—freed? Wars of vengeance. Invasion—barbarians pouring over the mountains. Iskendar believed a human wouldn’t think of the consequences. But mainly Iskendar hated Narim. He held Narim responsible for this attack, and even as he died he wanted revenge. There’s no surer way to defeat Narim’s purpose than to make you mistrust him.”

“How can I trust him?” He ran his fingers through his dark hair. “Lies, secrets, deception ... you’ve not given me much to work with.”

That was certainly true. I wasn’t good at this word twisting. “You can either believe the one who tried to kill you or believe the ones who saved your life. Narim wishes you no ill. He and Davyn and Tarwyl and the others have risked everything to protect you. I’ll swear it on whatever you choose. By my honor as a daughter of the Ridemark, I’ll swear it.”

I did not look away as the Senai stared at me, weighing my truth. Everything I’d said was truth. Just not all of the truth. But I was no Udema shopkeeper who could not meet the tax collector’s eyes as I fingered my skimmed-off tally in my pocket. I didn’t know whether he believed me or just decided there was no purpose in asking me any more, for he gathered up his meager provisions and jerked his head toward the track that led up the ridge beyond the lake of fire. I stuffed my food bag back into my pack and took out after him.

After half an hour of hard climbing, MacAllister broke his silence. “How old is Narim?”

I was surprised at the question, so surprised I couldn’t think of a convenient lie. So I revealed what Narim would rather have kept secret. “Older than you can imagine.”

“It was Narim who poisoned the lake and enslaved the dragons, wasn’t it? All those years ago. He had studied the dragons, and he was clever, and he figured out how to do it, thinking he was saving his people.”

“He was only sixteen. An infant by Elhim standards. They were desperate. He never meant it to be forever.”

I was ready to bring out all the arguments Narim had concocted over the years to explain what he had done, but I didn’t need them. MacAllister nodded his head and kept walking. “Whatever Narim’s guilt, it doesn’t matter. We all have our guilts. You can tell him I’ll do whatever I can.”

One more time I named him a weakling fool. But only in the front of my mind.

The day seared our eyes with its brightness, the drifts of dirty, ice-crusted snow scattered across the lower slopes of the Carag Huim receding even as we passed.

MacAllister was quiet as we walked. His face was hard, his shoulders tight, and I had to double-step to keep up with him. What was he thinking? He replied to my inane comments about the path and the terrain and the weather with the fewest possible words.

We stopped at midday to eat and rest, and I decided we’d best get clear on our plans before we came to settled lands. “Since this kai didn’t tell you what to do next, we’ll have to find Narim.”

MacAllister looked up in surprise. “Oh, but he did tell me.”

“The dragon? It spoke to you?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“The journal said they formed words—a variety of sounds that made a language—like men and Elhim do. I heard nothing like that.”

MacAllister frowned thoughtfully. “It’s hard to describe. You’re right; it was nothing like the journal said. I spoke as we practiced ... I asked what I had to do to set the others free, but his answer ... it was certainly not words as we think of them.” His wonder at his own telling erased the dour expression he had worn since Cor Talaith. “It’s just been so long ... he’s so wild ... his words have become mere patterns of tone and inflection. Only slight resemblance to speech. More like music. I had to shape the sounds into words myself, so I missed a great deal, I think.”

Easy to guess that his madness would take the form of music. He was so calm and sure of himself ... and it was all so stupid. I jabbed my knife into a slab of hard cheese and almost sliced off my finger. “What did he answer, then? Did he tell you a magic spell? Or perhaps he says you must ask each dragon politely what’s needed to set it free?”

“No.” His gloved fingers fumbled idly with a dried apple while his mind went back to that fetid cavern. “He knew all about what happened when I was in prison, as I grew ... weak ... and Roelan grew wild. He seemed to know I couldn’t sing again, though that part was confusing, and he kept saying something like ‘let the desert loose the wind.’ He said I must ‘find my own’—that I must hunt down his ‘brother bent with the sadness of the world.’ I think he means me to find Roelan.”

“It would make sense, would it not? Since you were such close friends.”

MacAllister laughed, an exasperated, hopeless laugh, but filled with good humor. “It might make sense to a dragon, but he didn’t tell me how to identify Roelan, or how to speak to him without the lake water, or what he meant when he said I had to become Roelan’s ‘third wing.’ ”

Shock had me on my feet. “Become his—” I choked before saying the words. No one outside the Ridemark was to hear them. No one. If any clansman spoke them carelessly, even in his own tent, his tongue would be severed instantly by his wife or his children or his parents.

“You know what it means,” said the singer softly, watching me stuff the cheese and my waterskin into my pack and throw the bag over my shoulder.

“You mustn’t say those words ever again. If any clansman heard you, it would be far worse than what you’ve suffered already ... and for me, too. They would think I told you. Damnation! Forget them.” I started down the path again. If I could have run from him, I would have done it.

He caught up with me quickly. “You’ve not said them. Keldar did, and I have, and if you tell me what they mean, I won’t have to say them again. If you don’t tell me, then all this is wasted.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I think I do.”

“It’s part of a ritual—the most sacred, the most secret of all the Ridemark rituals. It’s worse than death to betray the words. I can’t do it. I won’t.”

He stopped me, forcing me to look at him, at his dark eyes that had once been filled with holy visions ... at the mangled hands that rested so heavily on my shoulder. “I have lived worse than death, and my feet still walk the earth. You’ve done the same. You’ve forsworn your vengeance ... and I know what that means to one of the Ridemark. You’ve saved my life at the cost of your own redemption and your everlasting guilt, because you’ve sworn to do as Narim asks. You know he would insist that you tell me.”

Had Narim been with us, I would have broken his neck. I wanted to spit out the gall in my mouth. “It is the rite performed after a Rider dies, when a new Rider is mated to the kai and its bloodstone.”

“And the words?”

“The kai is surrounded by Riders with bloodstones. It is controlled and goaded to fury until it spews out its deadliest fire, white-hot fire that can melt stone and incinerate an entire forest in one breath. The words—the seven invocations—are said when the chosen Rider takes the dekai’cet—the bloodstone that has been forever bound to that dragon—and he walks into the fire, taking control of the kai, becoming one with it so that his will becomes the will of the beast, and his body burns with the inner fire of the beast, and the beast will bow down when he steps close and allow him to ride. Does that please you? Are you satisfied?”

Understanding dawned on his face ... and resignation. I wanted to hit him, curse him, anything to make that expression go away. He hitched his pack higher on his back and walked down the trail. I followed after, sick at heart, wanting to forget the conversation, to pretend I had never spoken. But I could not.

“You must understand that it’s impossible. You don’t have Roelan’s dekai’cet, and there’s no possibility, absolutely no possible way, for you to get it. You can command a dragon with any bloodstone, but to join with it, to step into its fire, you must have the dekai’cet, the one that has been bound to it since the beginning, since the Elhim first controlled them. We’ve never been able to bind a second stone to a dragon, whether we have its dekai’cet or not. The rite never works for a second stone. So you can’t do it.”

“I won’t need a bloodstone.”

“Of course you need a bloodstone. Without its protection, you’d burn. You’d—”

“The absence of the bloodstone must be the key to setting them free. To create the bond ... to become one ... without the stone. He said I must go as a youngling. In nakedness, he said, but I knew he wasn’t referring to clothes. He doesn’t understand clothes.”

By the time I recovered enough wit to close my mouth and follow him, his long legs had reached the bottom of the slope, and he had disappeared through a rocky tunnel that led into the wild western lands of Catania, toward Cor Neuill and the other dragon camps in Elyria and beyond, in search of the beast he had believed was his god.

Chapter 22

“Why don’t the blasted twits come back?” I threw my sword onto the dirt floor and it skidded into the stone firepit, no doubt nicking the exquisitely perfect edge I’d just spent most of a day giving it. “How long can it take to get a look at four dragons?”

“I don’t particularly like the waiting,” said the singer quietly, “but I can’t say I’d rather be poking around a dragon camp myself just now.”

“You—”

“I know. I’m a sniveling coward not worthy of being called a man.” Aidan MacAllister sat in the corner of the grimy hovel, his face expressionless, his hands quiet in his lap, exactly where he’d put himself that morning.

“How can you sit there and do nothing for eight hours on end? You’re driving me mad.”

He’d said not a word until I’d spoken to him. He’d not moved, not occupied himself with anything I could see, yet his eyes had stayed open, staring into nothing. It was infuriating. While I could think of nothing but climbing to the top of the sod roof and screaming at every Ridemark clansman in Elyria to come and fight me, the Senai sat on the damp, filthy floor as calm as an old granny.

“Practice,” he said. “I wouldn’t recommend the schooling though.”

“Pitiful,” I snapped, and for the fiftieth time that day I stepped outside the door of the hut into the rutted dung pit that passed for a road. I peered into the distance, watching for any Elhim approaching the cluster of hovels the locals called the village of Wyefedd. It was far too much of a name for the five filthy shacks and the half-burned “stable”—a lean-to that had housed no beast but rats for at least ten years. For one who had been born in a palace, MacAllister certainly knew more about the nastiest places in the kingdom to bed down than any Rider would ever guess.

Wyefedd lay just north of Vallior, outside the small dragon camp of Fandine, which housed dragons and Riders who had been injured in battle. Since leaving the mountains of the Carag Huim, we had been working our way toward Vallior and the large dragon camps of central Elyria, staying on back roads, avoiding cities and people and the persistent Ridemark patrols. Since there was no reason to believe “his” kai, the one he named Roelan, was any more likely to be there than at Cor Marag, or L’Clavor, or Aberthain, or in any of the twenty other dragon camps throughout the kingdom, MacAllister decided that we would visit Cor Neuill last. Though it was the first Ridemark encampment we passed, the singer’s sneaking visit with the leather merchant would ensure that it was closely watched.

We traveled at night. During the day we slept out in stables or sheds or sometimes in sleazy inns where a whisper to the landlord would get you a room that no royal guardsman or Ridemark officer would ever be allowed to find.

“I thought you were welcomed everywhere, fed and lodged without having to pay,” I’d said to MacAllister one morning as we lay down in a deserted, sod-roofed shack next to an abandoned coal pit. “How do you know about these vile places?”

“Because those who lived in these circumstances had the same claim on me as the high commander of the Ridemark.”

The Senai would answer whatever I asked of him, but no longer anything beyond it. Everything had changed since the cursed Iskendar had planted his vile seeds. Though no less gently spoken, Aidan MacAllister had closed himself up again. I believed he would name me his ally, but it was clear he no longer trusted me. Fair enough.

We had found Davyn and Tarwyl on the Vallior road ten days after leaving Cor Talaith. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say they found us. On a sultry dawn as we approached the turnoff to Grimroth Lair, our first dragon camp, we narrowly escaped running into a roadblock that had sprung up in the night. As we lay panting in a dry hedgerow, caked with dust and sweat after a half-league sprint down a wagon road, I told the Senai for the hundredth time that we needed to find Narim. “He’ll know what to do. He’s had enough years to think about every possibility. Even if we get to a camp with our heads intact, how do you propose to get inside? One slip will have you back in your cell.”

MacAllister shook his head. “I can’t wait for Narim to decide what bit of his plan to reveal to me today. He started me on this venture, but I’m the one who has to finish it.”

“Then why am I here? I’ve no intention of risking my neck for your private adventure. It’s only my swearing to Narim that keeps me with you. If you’re not interested in his plan, I’ll be off in a heartbeat. But what would you do then? Once you get inside a camp, how do you think to keep the dragons from cooking you while you figure out what to do? Will you sing to them?”

We were both tired from constant hiding and running, and we hadn’t even begun the search. He just didn’t see the impossibility of it, and I couldn’t make my tongue keep still. I wanted him to lash out, to explode in anger at the cruel things I said to him, to demand to know what I was hiding, so perhaps I would have no excuse to hide it anymore. But all he did was bury his anger. “Of course you’re right. Send him whatever message you want. But I’m going ahead.” I wanted to kick him.

We backtracked half a day’s walk to a wretched little market town called Durvan. Half the houses and shops were burned rubble, and the other half were worse: dark little hovels with sagging sod roofs, rotting timbers, and filthy rugs hung over the doors to keep out the rain and wind. Pigs rooted in the lanes, and people emptied slops jars right outside their doors. I never could see why people would think such places were better than tents. No one in the town would look you in the eye, and no one looked as if they’d had a decent meal in a year.

Just at the edge of the houses sat the Bone and Thistle, the inn where Davyn had been working at the time MacAllister was released from prison. We found two Elhim working there, a groom and a pot boy, neither of them familiar to me. They claimed not to know our friends and didn’t want anything to do with us. They just about chewed their boots when we made a sideways mention of Cor Talaith. But just before nightfall, when we slipped into the local market to restock our food supplies, we saw Davyn and Tarwyl playing draughts on an upended barrel.

They continued their game as we strolled past, and showed no sign that they knew us. I thought for a moment we must be wrong. One Elhim looks very much like another. But MacAllister said he could not mistake the hair that always fell over Davyn’s left eye nor Tarwyl’s nose that had been broken and healed crooked, so he assumed they were being cautious. We followed their lead and did not search them out, but took our time leaving the town. Sure enough, at nightfall, just as we left the last straggling shacks behind, two Elhim drifted onto the roadway two hundred paces ahead of us. We kept our distance and made sure no other travelers were watching as we followed the two down a narrow track into a thickly wooded glade. They were waiting with a lantern and outstretched hands.

“By the One!” said Davyn. “We’d almost given up on you. Not a word, not a glimpse, not a hint of your whereabouts until Greck and Salvor sent the news. You’ll probably hear a great sigh of relief go up through the land. We’ve set watchers everywhere.”

“It seemed prudent to stay hidden,” said the Senai. “We’ve had a wicked time avoiding Ridemark patrols. I would as soon have kept it that way, but Lara seems to think we’ll never accomplish anything without Narim. I have less faith in his plans. I can get people killed well enough on my own.”

“We’ve known the risk ever since we took Lara in,” said Davyn. “You must understand that it could have happened anytime. And Iskendar and his followers agreed to that risk. They never regretted helping her, no matter what the consequences would be. And they never regretted helping you either. You could have stayed there in peace forever if—”

“If I hadn’t given them reason to believe I was still interested in gods and dragons.”

“Yes. I see you’ve come to some understanding of the attempt on your life. When we saw your beacon, all knew what it could mean. Narim ... all of us ... tried to make Iskendar listen to reason. He didn’t have to agree with us; all he had to do was get out and live. But he wouldn’t. It’s not your fault.” Davyn laid his hand on MacAllister’s arm.

The Senai didn’t welcome it, but he didn’t shake it off either. “Perhaps if I had known some of this earlier, we might have been able to avoid the event as well as the guilt. So where is Narim?”

“He’s helping the survivors find a place to settle until we can find a new sanctuary. With your permission, we’ll send him news right away. He is most concerned ... most anxious, as you can imagine, to find out what’s happened with you ... what happened with Keldar. We’ve all wondered. ...”

“We need to keep moving. I’ll tell you about Keldar as we go.”

As we set out again on the darkening road, MacAllister was gloomy and untalkative. The Elhim enjoyed themselves as always. Davyn clapped Tarwyl on the back. “Never will I go plotting without you, friend. ‘Sit in the market,’ you said. ‘After thirteen days of hiding, they’ll need supplies.’ ”

Tarwyl laughed his deep-throated laugh, always unexpected from a soft-faced Elhim. “At least you remembered to bring your kit. I’ll have to share your cup and dig into my purse to buy a change of shirt!”

I brought up the rear and watched for pursuit. Someone had to keep a mind on danger.

In the three weeks since that day, we had visited three dragon camps. Tarwyl and Davyn would work their way into the lair, posing as an ironmonger’s assistants looking for custom from the Ridemark, or supply clerks hunting work. MacAllister instructed them to watch for any dragon that looked older than average and had either an oddly formed shoulder or back, or one that seemed to draw an unusual number of birds about it. Idiot. He might as well have told them to look for Grimaldi the dwarf king, the enchanted swan Ludmilla, or any other creature from his myth songs. But the Elhim took the Senai’s word as god-spoken. At the first three camps they had found no possibilities, and now we sat in the hovel near Fandine, waiting, waiting, waiting—interminably waiting.

“At last!” The sun was low when I saw the two slight figures coming over the rise in the road at the edge of Wyefedd. I yelled at the two as they strolled casually toward our hiding place. “Can you lift your feet any slower?” I said. “We’ve had such an exciting day waiting for you, I can’t bear it to end.”

“We’re saving something for the journey back,” said Davyn.

I felt MacAllister jump up in the darkness behind me. “You found something?”

“There are four dragons in Fandine. One of them has a ‘bad wing.’ We didn’t see it, but the smith told us of it. We could see flocks of birds over the place where it lay. It seems the first possibility.”

“We’ll go in tonight,” said MacAllister. “Show me how to find him.”

With a burned stick Tarwyl drew a map on a scrap of wood, showing a little-used path into the lair, the guard posts, the outbuildings, the Riders’ huts, and the approximate position of the kai.

“How will you know if he’s the one, Aidan?” asked Davyn. “You’ve never told us what you plan. Perhaps we should wait for Narim. He should catch up with us any day now.”

“Lara must command it to say its name, just as she did with Keldar that first time,” said the Senai, pulling his cloak about his shoulders.

Davyn was horrified. “But you said you almost—”

“I wasn’t dying; Keldar was. I felt it from him. This time I’ll be ready. Let’s go.”

“Wait!” I said as the Elhim followed the Senai out the door. “You might ask me—” But by the time I shouldered my armor bag, they were already halfway through the village. I had to shove my way through a clot of five nagging beggar children to catch them before they disappeared.

MacAllister strode the half league through the stickery brush and stunted trees to the boundary of the lair as if the legions of the Ridemark were on his heels. While Davyn and Tarwyl scouted the path into the lair, the two of us crouched behind a wall of crumbling red sandstone and looked down on Fandine. Short bursts of sharp-tongued, blue-orange fire streaked across the darkening sky. Balefire, my clan called it, for its color and intensity told us that the kai was in pain—and thus likely to blast anything that wandered within a thousand paces of its snout. Wounded kai were exceedingly dangerous.

“I’m sorry you have to go,” said MacAllister softly, breaking his long silence as if he had read my thoughts. “If I could spare you, I would.”

A kai screamed in the distance, the cry echoing from the red cliffs behind us and before us, and the Senai shuddered at the sound.

“We can stop now,” I said. “Even if they were once as you believe, they are no longer. They’re killers. They have no minds. You’ve been deceived. Narim has—”

“Has what?” His dark eyes flared, reflecting the blue-orange fire of the wounded kai.

I couldn’t answer. “Wait and talk to him.”

“No.” He pointed toward the spot at the cliff edge where Davyn had just reappeared and was beckoning us to hurry.

We used the last of the daylight to creep down the steep path—if one could call a crumbling, boot-wide seam in the cliff face a path. At every step more of the red stone dissolved to powder under our feet or split into tiny pebbles that skittered down the sheer drop beside us. By the time we wedged ourselves into the too-small crack in the base of the path where Tarwyl waited, the only light was a fading red glow in the west. The lair itself lay in darkness.

“A quarter of the way around the lair to your right, just below that cone-shaped spire,” said Tarwyl. “Just as I drew it. There are three Rider huts along the way; only the first two are occupied.”

A thunderous bellow split the night, and the spout of fire lit the valley. MacAllister’s face grew so rigid that I thought his skin must split and show the iron beneath it.

“They don’t wander ... the wounded ones?” said MacAllister, his eyes fixed on the bilious streaks fading in the sky.

“No. Only if its Rider commands it. If it is not allowed to go to ground where it chooses, it will stay in one place until it heals or dies.”

I was donning my armor as I answered him. MacAllister had, of course, not brought his. A worried Davyn started to speak, but another bellow—grinding, shrill, murderous—cut him off. By the time the echoes had died away, I had finished lacing my boots, and Tarwyl had given a small lantern to MacAllister.

“I’ll carry that,” I said, jamming my helm over my hair to mask the last evidence that I was a woman. “You stay behind me, just out of the light.” I hung my coiled whip on my belt and patted my belt pouch to make sure my emergency gear was still in it. I didn’t want MacAllister to see what I’d brought. It might worry him. It might make him leave me behind.

“The blessings of the One Who Guides go with you,” said Davyn. “We’ll be waiting for you right here.”

MacAllister pressed his hand and Tarwyl’s, and then turned to me with a mocking bow. “To our doom, Mistress Lara,” he said, raising his dark eyebrows to pull his eyes wide open. “Shall we be the dragon’s saviors or its supper?” Then he motioned me to lead.

A hot, stinking wind gusted through the narrow, steep-sided valley. Because the only kai in the lair were wounded, they could be held in tighter quarters. The tighter, the better, clan lore said. Perhaps because it was more like the caves to which the dragons would go to heal or die if they were allowed.

We crept past vast pens crammed with goats that surged against the stout fences in waves of bawling terror at every blast of balefire. Beyond the herd pens were a few wooden sheds built up against the cliff walls: a cookshed, a smithy, a storehouse, a granary, a shelter for the women who cooked and served the Riders, and one for the drovers who kept the herd pens filled. A hospice for wounded Riders sat at the far end of the valley, far from the noisy, stinking pens. Lantern lights flickered in several of the buildings, and two slaves were hauling a heavy slops wagon slowly toward the pigsties.

We held up for a moment in the shelter of a wood cart until the wagon had passed. A heavyset man took a piss outside the smithy and then went back inside, shutting off the orange glare flooding out of his door. A short distance beyond our position, a dry, rutted wagon road angled to the right into a narrow cleft in the cliff wall—the main entrance to the lair. The guard posts would be at the far end of it. Unless you were holding hostages, you didn’t need guard posts inside a dragon lair. To our left we could see the first Rider hut, its back to us. It faced the center of the lair where the kai were held captive by the ring of bloodstones. We would either have to cross the open expanse of the road behind the Rider’s hut, or risk the Rider—or a dragon—spotting us as we went on the darker, more dangerous front side of the hut.

I chose the road. A mistake. No sooner had we stepped onto it than a party of horsemen came galloping out of the cleft—on us too quickly for us to dive back into our shelter. Two of them were Riders, very drunk from the sounds of their bawdy singing; two more were other clansmen equally drunk, each with a woman astride behind him. One horse carried two more women—drunk enough or stupid enough that they didn’t know how difficult it was for a drunken Rider to control his inner fire when he was mating. They would likely be dead before morning. The other two horsemen were servants carrying torches. The Riders’ horses reared as the party pulled into a milling knot no more than fifty paces from MacAllister and me, the women laughing and squealing like pigs. The men dismounted and turned the horses over to the servants. I thought we might escape notice in the confusion. But one of the servants lifted his torch high and called out, “Who’s there?”

No time to think. No time to delay. I had to keep them away from us. I pulled out my whip and whirled about to face MacAllister, keeping my back to the Riders’ party. “On your knees,” I said quietly, “and do exactly as I say.” I cracked the whip on either side of him to drown out any protest he might make. Voices carried exceedingly well in a lair. Unfortunately mine was a woman’s voice—entirely inappropriate for one in Rider’s armor. “You must be my voice,” I whispered. “Tell them your name is Ger, and you’ve brought in an injured kai from Gondar and a Senai card cheat from Vallior. Say it like a Rider.”

As I cracked the whip again, raising spouts of dust and dried mud, MacAllister dropped to his knees with a steel-eyed glare. “Stay away!” He screamed out the words I’d told him—remembering to use the old tongue and the very voice of besotted arrogance that would be expected. “I’ll take my pleasure with the Senai vermin undisturbed; then I’ll join you and see what revels can be found in this pitiful excuse for a camp.”

Blast them, I thought. The clansmen stood watching, swilling from bloated wineskins while the women wrapped themselves obscenely around their waists.

“We’re going to have to play it out,” I whispered as I kicked MacAllister sprawling and wrapped a thong of my whip about his wrists.

He screamed out, “Never again, Senai. Never will you think to cheat a clansman of the Ridemark!” Then he struggled to get up, whispering back to me with the slightest edge of anxiety behind his smile, “As long as you don’t get to like this.”

I kicked him again and stuck the point of my rapier under his chin.

“Now what to do with you,” he snarled, then followed with a string of curses that I wouldn’t have imagined he knew. “Something fitting for a Senai donkey.”

I coached him, and he played it well. Sheathing my sword and yanking on the whip, I stretched his hands over his head and dragged him away from the drunken party toward the wood cart. He helped by digging in his feet as if to get up and fight, but would propel himself forward so that it wouldn’t be too obvious that it wasn’t easy for me to drag him. Several times he stumbled onto his back, and I had to drag him on it until he could get purchase with his feet again. I dared show no mercy. When we had covered the distance to the wood cart, he dragged himself slowly to all fours, working to get his breath, while I pulled manacles and chain from my pack and dangled them high in the torchlight. The onlookers laughed and cheered and whistled.

“Ask them if they approve,” I said. “Hurry. Keep them amused, and they won’t get involved.”

“One moment.” He gasped; then he looked up and saw what I held. “Oh, gods ...”

“Say it.”

“So you approve?” he screamed, all the while shaking his head. Then, quietly, “No ... no ... I most certainly do not.”

As the drunkards cheered, I kicked him flat again, stepped on his chest, and loosened the whip enough that I could lock the iron bands about his scarred wrists. “I don’t know any other way,” I said. Then, without looking at his face, I attached the length of chain to the rings bolted to the wood wagon. “We’ll go between them and the Rider’s huts, just like I’m planning to take possession of the empty one. It’s the only way.”

It seemed to take two hours for MacAllister to drag the wood cart the fifteen hundred paces to the deserted Rider hut. The wagon was three-quarters loaded, heavy and cumbersome. Our audience cheered as we passed them by. I saluted with my sword and repeatedly laid the whip as close as I dared to the Senai. Once I grazed him on his cheek, and another time on his shoulder, ripping his tunic and drawing a smothered curse from him. He flinched dutifully with each crack, and I believed there was more truth to his groaning effort than he would care for anyone to know.

Once we were past them, the onlookers seemed to remember their own plans and staggered toward the occupied Rider’s huts, calling out that I should come join them when I’d had enough of my vengeance.

“Tell them to save you a woman,” I told MacAllister.

But he was panting and heaving, and shook his head. “Can’t.”

So instead I raised my sword again and whirled it in circles above my head. I didn’t let him stop until we reached the third hut, and even then I scouted the area thoroughly before I unlocked his bonds.

He bent over, resting his head and arms on the side of the cart. “Thank the Seven, it wasn’t fully loaded,” he said.

“We’ve got to get moving. The Riders and their friends were drunk enough to forget us, but the servants weren’t. They’ll ask about the new arrival.”

“You’re very resourceful and your plan worked, but next time you might warn me.” MacAllister straightened, stretching his shoulders and back, wincing as he rubbed his wrists. “I could at least practice my name-calling.”

Trying to ignore his eyes on me, I took the kai’cet from its case, slipped it into its leather collar, and tied it about my neck so I could have both hands free. Then I pulled on my gauntlets, stowed the manacles and chain in my pouch, and coiled my whip. I didn’t need to see MacAllister’s expression to sense how he was revolted. “If you weren’t such a sniveling fool, you might give our safety a bit more consideration,” I blurted out. “I, for one, have no wish to die, so I don’t walk naked into the most dangerous places in the universe.”

Without letting him speak any more teasing foolishness, I tramped into the darkness, aiming for the cone-shaped spire Tarwyl had described. MacAllister trailed silently behind as I picked my way around the pits and cracks in the iron-hard earth. Though there was a small risk of the yellow lantern glow being spotted by one of the Riders ringing the lair, I wasn’t about to fall into some blast fissure and break a leg. I picked up the pace. We needed to hurry.

A thousand paces from the Rider hut we began to feel rumbling beneath our feet and hear the muted, angry grumbling of the kai. A blast of blue-orange fire to our left caused me to stop for a moment while I considered which way was shorter to get around a monstrous heap of rubble. MacAllister caught up with me as I moved off again to the left. “You’ll command him to speak his name, just like the first time with Keldar?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Whatever happens after ... you must get away as quickly as you can. If it’s not Roelan, I’ll be right on your heels.”

“And how will you manage that? It seems like you had to be carried before. I’ve dragged you far enough tonight.”

“I can do what I have to do. I’ve no wish to die.”

I didn’t say anything. He caught my shoulder and made me stop and look at him—the last thing I wanted to do with the balefire glaring in the sky just beyond the next rise. “Promise me you’ll keep yourself safe,” he said. “Please. It will help a great deal to know you’ve sworn it, because anything you’ve sworn to, I know you’ll do, no matter how much you hate it. Then I won’t have to worry about you.”

He didn’t know just how good I was at compromising my swearing. “I promise,” I said. “Now can we get this done?”

The kai lay buried in carrion. It had blasted a deep hole in the earth in a vain attempt to go to ground. Herd beasts had been driven in to feed it, and many of them had fallen into the pit where the kai could not reach them with either its fire or its jaws. So they lay uneaten, bloated and rotting, while the injured dragon roared its fury and pounded its tail. A charnel pit, the smell so foul that I came near vomiting up my last week’s food.

Blue flame spewed into the air as we lay on the ground at the top of the rise. MacAllister had pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth, his face the sick blue of the balefire.

I knew from the first it was the wrong dragon. It was not old enough. The brow ridges were not the most reliable indicators, but I had seen fifty dragons older than this one. And the left wing that lay partially unfurled, twitching so awkwardly, had clearly been broken in battle. The Elhim said that Roelan was one of the seven eldest dragons, and that the legend that named him hunchback was as old as his name. Any gathering of birds about this kai would be only the hardiest of vultures, desiring the rotting meat the kai could not reach.

“It’s not the one,” I said to the Senai, trying to explain, trying to make him give it up.

But MacAllister shook his head. “We’ve come this far; we must be sure.”

And he dared call me stubborn! I drew out my whip, in case the beast could get about on one wing better than it looked, and with a certainty that I was wasting what remained of my life, I scrambled and slid down the rocky slope until I was standing much too close to the kai.

“Teng zha nav wyvyr,” I cried, drawing its attention, its hatred, and its fire all at once. It bellowed so horrifically that I feared that Aidan’s skull would shatter. My own came near it. I called on the bloodstone and fought for control, laboring to build a cocoon of safety about MacAllister and me. If I let go, if I showed any weakness, the fire would creep closer and destroy us. This was a very different beast from the one they called Keldar.

“Speak your name, beast,” I shouted. “Speak the name your brothers cry out; speak the name your sisters call, the name your younglings heed.”

It just did not want to obey me. It writhed in its pit until the stench of the churned-up carrion made me gag. It screeched and bellowed and grumbled like a live volcano. It slapped its tail so hard I could scarcely keep my balance. The monstrous head hung above me, the flaming red eyes like twin suns from my worst nightmares—murderous, damned eyes. I commanded it again. “Speak your name!”

A ferocious bellow, louder and more violent than any so far, slammed me to my knees. My whip slipped from my fingers that were suddenly unable to grasp. I could not rise, could not think, could not hear anything but the roaring, twenty paces from my head. The noise wouldn’t stop, though the kai’s mouth was closed, and it was searching, searching with its hellish eyes. Its nostrils flared, and its head dipped. Control. I had to maintain control. I screamed at the kai to hold its burning—but I could not hear my own words, only the roar in my ears. I screamed at it again and commanded my muscles to work. Never had I been laid so flat by a dragon’s cry. Now perhaps I understood what Aidan felt. Aidan ...

I scrambled to my feet, grabbing my whip and loosing it at the slavering jaws gaping all too near my head. The head jerked away. The kai unfurled its uninjured wing and strained with it, while drumming the broken one on the ground, desperate to fly. Pain and anger were driving it into frenzy. Searing blasts of heat passed to each side of me. I could hear nothing but the roaring in my ears.

The dragon lurched halfway out of its pit, blasting constant fire. I tried to remember the lie of the rocky hillside as I backed away up the slope. I dared not turn my back. Careful, careful. Make sure the snout comes no closer. Make sure the head stays up and the angle of the fire stream stays steep or you’ll be ash. ... But I had only two eyes and too little practice. I didn’t see the undamaged wing sweep around behind and graze my left leg with its poisonous edge, slicing through my leather greave as if it were paper and through the flesh underneath as if it were air. I staggered backward, trying to stay upright, for a fall was sure death. But my boot found no purchase, and the side of my foot hit the side of a hole, bending my ankle sideways much farther that it should. My leg was already in agony from the long, deep cut and the sticky yellow dragon venom eating away the tissue. My ankle refused to hold me up, and with curses I could not hear over the roaring in my ears, I fell. I might have fallen all the way down the slope into the kai’s pit, except that I landed right in Aidan MacAllister’s lap.

Chapter 23

I could not stand alone when the Senai got me back upright, for my ripped leg kept folding up underneath me as if it had forgotten its purpose. The only thing I could hear was the torrent of noise from the dragon behind and below us. MacAllister’s chest was rumbling as he held me, so I knew that he was saying something, but I tried to make him understand that the bellowing was just too loud. Damnably awkward. Drops of blood rolled down his face like tears, joining the dribble from the lash mark on his cheek.

Fire exploded below us, and MacAllister dragged me up the slope, motioning that we’d best hurry. It was annoying the way he kept waving at me instead of speaking louder. Once over the rise he put his arm around my waist, I gripped his shoulder, and we started back the way we’d come. At first we couldn’t go three steps without getting our feet tangled, and I yelled at him to follow my lead, but I couldn’t even hear myself. He held up his fingers, one and then two, one and then two, telling me with gestures how we would proceed. On the count of one, we would step with our outer legs. On two he would step with his inner leg, and I would most certainly not step on mine. He tapped the rhythm on my ribs as we went. We got faster and smoother, and soon we were back to the herd pens. A dark shape stumbled out of the first Rider hut and hurried into the wilderness toward the blaze of orange fire.

Though we had moved a considerable distance from the raging kai, the noise was as loud as ever. But kai never screamed so long at once, and at last the thought penetrated my thick head that something was wrong with my hearing. I pounded and dug at my ears, trying to unclog them, to let the roaring out, anything to make them work right again. Locked inside myself with the fire in my leg and the terrible noise, I was sure I was losing my mind. MacAllister grasped my hands and pulled them away, then pressed his gloved fingers on my chin and forced me to look at him. He was not smiling, but his look was telling me that everything would be all right if I just wouldn’t panic. Easy for him to say.

“Too loud,” he said. I could clearly see the words he formed, though I couldn’t hear them. “Too close. It will take time.” Then he put his arm around me again, and helped me across the endless wasteland to the base of the path. The Elhim were waiting. How in the cursed world were they going to get me up the path? It wasn’t even wide enough for one.

They sat me on the dirt leaning against the cliff. Tarwyl brought down my bag to stow my armor and whip, ready to haul it up the track. MacAllister looped my sword belt about his neck and hung my belt pouch from his bleeding shoulder. But it was Davyn’s sturdy shoulders across which they draped me like a sack of grain for the most terrifying ascent I had ever made without leaving the earth.

By the time we got back to Wyefedd, my face and fingers were numb, and I was seeing two or five of everything—clear signs of dragon poisoning. They laid me on the dirt floor of the stable, and a blur of faces—some of them pale, some of them blood-streaked—hovered over me, mouthing things I could not hear. I tried to speak calmly, determined not to lie there sobbing like a Udema milkmaid. I needed to tell them where to find the gillia in my pack, the leaves that could draw the dragon venom from the wound before it ate through the muscle and bone. But my tongue refused to work, and the yellow light wavered, and everything was lost in the roaring of my ears. Someone must have touched my leg then, because it felt like a dragon had bitten it off. I screamed, but no sound came out.

Torchlight. Jostling. What were they doing? Vague impressions of being imprisoned with a flock of sheep while being battered with wooden planks, of begging them to cut off my limb before I lost my mind, of cool water dripped on my lips, sun-dappled greenery, and a resting place so soft I believed I had fallen from a dragon and landed in the clouds. The clouds would have been a peaceful ending but for the ever-present roaring in my head and the waves of fire that consumed my left side over and over again so that I knew I was falling ... burning ... falling from the sky. ...

I must be dead. Nothing hurt anymore. Was it the heavy earth that held my eyes closed or gold coins laid on them by clan brothers at my funeral rites? If only the roaring noise would stop, I might figure out the truth. At least I was not alone in the realm of death. Spirits tended me, and their touch was gentle, but nothing of flesh, so I wept beneath the cold weight on my eyes. It was fearful to be dead. “Oh, please, good spirit, speak to me,” I begged, as I sank further into darkness. “Touch me with a hand of blood and bone, not these fleshless things.”

And the spirit heeded me, for in my next half waking the hands that eased my fears were made of flesh. They were not human hands, though, for their shape was wrong and they were so very cold. But I was not afraid. I recognized their kindness.

A weight lay on my chest like that on my eyes, and it grew heavier with passing time. The darkness crept into me and around me, and I felt myself melting into it, becoming part of it, losing all memory and feeling. Drowning. I hungered so for life.

I clasped the spirit’s hands with my own and said, “If I warm your hands, kind spirit, will you speak to me? Will you send me back to the living? I can’t be dead. I have things I need to do, but I can’t find my way back.”

And into the grinding bedlam intruded a sound so magical it might have been the speech of stars, a brief, haunting breath of music ... no words that I could understand, yet the melody penetrated the chaos and settled in my soul, bringing peace and clarity to order my confusion. I was no longer afraid, but neither would I yield my last breath if I could help it. I could see the path that lay before me, and slowly I began to climb out of the darkness.

The smell of rain and green grass. Somewhere bacon was cooking. The roaring had fallen silent. I heard only random snapping against a background of insect sounds— swarming locusts perhaps. The cold weight had been lifted, and I carefully cracked my eyes open, shoving aside the fearful thought that I was about to look upon the world beyond the last crossing. My clan loremaster had never taught that one might find bacon in the warrior’s encampment of the afterlife.

I was confused at first. I saw clouds and blue sky and birds high above my head, but the birds were not moving and the clouds did not change shape as I watched. No sun beat down on my face though the sky was bright like noonday. I glanced to the left and was startled to see walls. And I was on the inside of them, so the sky—I looked up again—was painted on a ceiling. A very high ceiling. Between me and the wall lay an endless spread of dark green carpet. The room was as big as a kai’s cavern, brightly colored and strangely furnished. A long yellow couch with a gray wool blanket thrown on it, two lumpy shapes—chairs?—shrouded in white. More shrouded shapes sitting on the floor or hung on the pale yellow walls. I was tucked up in what must be a bed, though it was far too large, and I had felt nothing so soft in all my life. I shifted my head very slightly. A dark-haired man in a blue shirt and black vest was sitting in front of a white marble hearth, poking at something inside it. The insect sounds were only raindrops, falling on a flagstone terrace beyond two doors thrown open to a gray day.

“Am I dead?” The very asking was a comfort, for I could hear my own words through my ears and not just inside my head. And what dead woman is unsure enough to ask?

The dark-haired man whirled about, wielding a long-tined fork with a thin slab of half-cooked bacon skewered on it. On his lean face blossomed a smile to win a kingdom. “You tried,” he said, “but you weren’t very good at it.” He propped the bacon fork on the fire grate and came to help me sit up on a bed as large as the tent where I was born, supported by more pillows than I thought existed in the world. The bedsheets were fine linen, and clean. I’d never been in a room so grand.

MacAllister poured wine into a crystal goblet and pressed it into my hands. “Until I can get you something more substantial.” He wore no gloves. “How are you feeling? Limp as plucked weeds, I’d guess. Can you really hear me?”

I shifted my position and got a mild but reassuring twinge from my left leg. I’d seen many warriors left limbless by dragon venom, and I remembered my maddened begging. My cheeks grew hot. “Of course I can hear you. What are we doing in a place like this?” I tried to focus on the present. He must have done something stupid; this was not some abandoned hovel by the side of the road. “What if someone finds us here? We’ll have our hands cut off for thieving if the owner catches us.”

“No need to worry. The owner hasn’t been home in a very long time”—he didn’t look at me—“and he doesn’t mind.”

“Yours ...” Though I knew of his childhood, I’d never actually connected him with a place ... a house ... such a grand house.

“Mmm.” He returned to the hearth, dipped a cup of something from a copper pot, then set it beside the bed on a table that had legs carved in the shape of birds. Seating himself on the edge of the bed and biting his lip like a five-year-old child, he slowly and awkwardly lifted a spoon to my mouth. When the spoon slipped a little and he spilled half the contents on the sheets, he sighed, then laughed in exasperation. “This was easier when no one was watching.”

I took the spoon from his gnarled fist. “How about if I do this, and you tell me what in the name of Vellya we’re doing here?”

“If you’re sure ...”

I showed him that I could hold the cup with a steady grip and maneuver the spoon much better than he, and he relaxed a bit.

“Well, our activities in Fandine set up quite a noisy party, and we had to get out of the way pretty fast. One of Tarwyl’s cousins found us a wool cart, but we needed someplace to take you. We were only half a league from here, but I wasn’t sure ... Well, it seems my cousin hasn’t given the place away even after all this time.”

His cousin. The king of Elyria. I had never really believed it.

“Tarwyl found caretakers about the main house, but I knew they wouldn’t bother to come back here. It’s pretty deep in the park. No one’s lived here since my mother died.” He poked one of his horrid fingers through a tiny hole in the sheet. “This is a guesthouse—the place where she would stow discreet friends and unpleasant relatives. She’d be horrified to see it so dusty, insect holes in the linen.... She always wanted it comfortable and welcoming.”

All my life I had scorned those like Aidan MacAllister. I knew more of life; I was stronger, harder, closer to the world. I understood their soft, decadent lives, but they could have no concept of mine. But in an instant I saw how impossible it was that I could understand anyone who had grown up in a place like this. I had never thought of Senai as people with bacon forks and insects and unpleasant kin, with beds and couches and hospitable mothers. Perhaps there were reasons beyond his own nature that Aidan MacAllister did not belch and throw his cups on the floor or strike me when I said something to hurt him. What was I, who had considered the Elhim cavern a palace, doing in such a place? I looked down at my clothes, expecting to see the shabby reminders of my own life. But I was clad in a soft white shift, high-necked and plain, made of embroidered linen so fine it felt like silk. Nothing underneath it. I glanced up quickly.

MacAllister’s fiery red face was averted. “The Elhim ... Davyn took ... takes care of those things ... private things.” He was about to break into a sweat.

Carefully I set down my cup and pulled a pillow to my mouth, trying to smother the sounds that burst forth unbidden. I needed to hide, lest I reveal the truth about testy, vicious Lara the Dragon Rider, who chewed up men with her fangs and spit them at the world. MacAllister’s embarrassment shifted to worry. Frowning, he dragged the pillow away. “What’s the mat—”

But I was not in pain, only laughing as I had never laughed in my life. He turned red all over again, then exploded into hilarity of his own. Did he know there was music in his laughter?

“Where are the little twits?” I said when I could speak again, knowing full well whose hands it was that had bathed me and combed my hair and drained my festering wound ten times a day for uncountable days. “And how long have I been here?”

“Ten days.”

“Ten days! And no one’s recognized you? In a place you’re so well known?”

“No one’s likely to know me anymore. Who would come looking for a singer presumed dead for seventeen years? Not much profit in that. But the Elhim bring supplies when they come back from a scout, so I’ve no need to go near the main house or the village.”

Back from a scout ... My laughter fell dead. “You’re not still hunting this phantom dragon?”

His sobered expression was answer enough.

“You can’t mean to go on. We’ll not get ten steps into any dragon camp. The guards will be tripled. It’s madness even to think of it.” I could not bear to hear his answer. I begged the roaring deafness to return before he spoke it.

“I’ve no choice. But you—”

“Of course you have a choice. There’s always a choice. You had chains on your wrists in Fandine, and I had dragon poison in my veins. We could have died, or you could have ended up with your friend Goryx for the rest of your miserable life. And for what? For nothing. We learned nothing. Accomplished nothing.”

MacAllister looked stricken—as if I’d chained his hands again and left him naked for the wolves of winter. “Gods, Lara ... I thought you knew ... I thought you heard ...” He sat on the edge of the bed beside me. “The dragon in Fandine ... her name was Methys, which means ‘daughter of the summer wind.’ She had almost forgotten it. There at the end she sang to me, and it waked ... a spark. I don’t know. Just for a moment. And then you were hurt, and we brought you here. I thought you were going to die, and I ... I tried ... I can’t seem to do it again, but I believed you heard and that it made a difference.” His face was like those of the starving villagers who came begging at Ridemark camps.

He was mad. There was no other answer. I’d heard the “song” of the injured dragon in Fandine, and it was not the glorious melody Aidan had sung to me in my dying. There could be no connection between such horror and such beauty. But if I told him I’d heard his singing and that it had taken away my fear and made me choose to live, it would lead him nowhere but to the dragons. So I couldn’t tell him. I cursed Narim, then, and I cursed the Elhim and my own people and King Devlin, and I cursed the dragons and the universe that had created such monsters. They had robbed a good and innocent man of his life and his reason, and I could not tell him the truth he yearned to hear lest I be a party to their cruelty.

“I heard nothing. You’re a fool. You can’t go on with this, or you’re going to be dead.”

The silence was long. I could not meet his gaze while he sat so close. To my relief he moved away to stand quietly by the hearth. “Ah, well. Foolish. I’m sorry,” he said at last. He picked up a polished oak stick that was standing next to the hearth and twirled it idly for a moment. “The Elhim say your ankle was only sprained, not broken, so you can get up whenever you feel like it.”

“Now would be none too soon,” I said.

He forced lightness into his words. “You hate being down. I can tell that. Even worse than being dragged around by mad Senai.” The mockery in his smile was not for me but for himself. “Tarwyl even brought you a cane to start. From another cousin.” He tossed me the stick and grinned. “I’ll help if you need it, but I’m going to make you ask for it. I figure I can get myself comfortable for a long wait.” He flopped onto the yellow couch, stretched his long body, and closed his eyes.

Before I had made three circuits of the room leaning on Tarwyl’s cane, two soggy Elhim burst through the door from the terrace, dropping an armload of parcels on the carpet. “Lara!” shouted Tarwyl. “You’re awake!”

“I can hear very well, thank you,” I said. “Unless you keep up the yelling.”

“And ready to hike the Carag Huim, it seems,” said Davyn, smiling as he joined me on the far side of the room. “Healing well?”

“I’ll be ready when I need to be,” I said, “for whatever stupidity comes next.”

Davyn laughed uproariously. “I expected no other answer.”

Foolish Elhim. He offered his arm to escort me back to my bed, for which I was sorely grateful. I would have crawled on the floor on my belly before asking the Senai.

“What did you find?” said MacAllister. He had popped up the moment the Elhim came in and sat poised on the edge of the yellow couch like a skittish cat.

Davyn’s cheerfulness dropped away with his wet jacket. “Nothing likely. Precious few dragons about any of the camps in northern or central Elyria. We’ve covered them all. We did drag back something interesting, though he lags behind so pitifully he may never arrive to show himself.”

“Patience, you sprout of a nocre-weed,” said the Elhim just stepping through the doorway. “Ah, Lara, you must find a new way of making friends. Wrestling with dragons is the hard way.”

“Narim.” Not since the worst days of my burning had I so hated the sight of him.

He came to my bedside, took my hand, and smiled. “You are blooming, my lovely Lara. Aidan has done well by you.” Sympathy welled up behind his kind and cheerful face, as if he could read every thought in my head. “Did I not tell you that this one would change your opinion of Senai?”

“He has his uses,” I said, averting my eyes. I did not want to acknowledge the bond between Narim and me until I could avoid it no longer.

Davyn took up MacAllister’s abandoned bacon fork and was soon busy melting cheese on hot bread and cooked barley. Tarwyl presented me with my own boot, the slit down its side skillfully repaired by yet another Elhim “cousin.” Narim and the Senai sat on either side of the bed making conversation across me about less than nothing: where the Elhim thought to make their new sanctuary, the futile attempts to convince Iskendar to leave Cor Talaith before the assault, our hunt for Roelan, and our adventure in Fandine. Nothing of importance. Nothing of the essence—the unyielding, unforgivable truth.

Davyn served up supper and gossip. “In Lepan we heard a rumor that the host of the Ridemark is gathered on the Gondari border. The Gondari king has been getting bolder with his raids into the southern kingdoms. Ten villages destroyed. Two thousand people burned out of their homes.”

“Burned half of Grenatte before the southern legion chased him back across the border,” said Tarwyl around a mouthful of bread. “The Riders grumble that King Devlin has lost his spine, as he’s still not crushed these Gondari upstarts or even pursued them with a will.”

“They say MacEachern has started shifting the legions himself,” said Davyn. “Always closer to the border. Always in more vulnerable positions.”

MacAllister propped his chin on his hands. “He’s trying to force Devlin into an assault.”

“I’ve heard that too,” said Davyn.

“He’ll push and provoke the Gondari until there’s no going back, never understanding why Devlin hasn’t done it yet.”

“Why hasn’t he?” asked Narim, his spoon poised in midair.

But MacAllister’s mind was far away, and he didn’t answer for a long while. And when his outburst came, it answered a different question altogether. “Aberthain!” MacAllister leaped up from the table, slamming the heel of his fist onto the table. “Stupid. Stupid. Why didn’t I think of it before?”

Narim voiced our question. “Think of what?” Aberthain was a vassal kingdom in the southwestern mountains. Forever embroiled in local disputes. Unimportant.

The Senai was twitching with excitement. “Eighteen years ago I visited Aberthain. I couldn’t sleep for the music pounding in my head, so I went out to the lair. I’d never felt Roelan so clearly, so close, and—prideful, insupportable stupidity—I thought it was something in me that made it so different that night. Within days the dragons in Aberthain Lair allowed hostages to go free, and within a week I was arrested. All this time we’ve spent hunting in Elyria, but Roelan is in Aberthain. I’m sure of it.”

Chapter 24

Davyn, Tarwyl, and Aidan left for Aberthain the next morning. Narim and I were to follow more slowly, allowing me time to regain strength and mobility before making any attempt to command a dragon. I dreaded the moment Narim and I would be left alone, so I leaned on the cane and trailed Aidan across the terrace into the lane where the horses were waiting. The damp terrace steamed in the morning sunlight.

“The lair at Aberthain is near impossible to get in,” I said, as he loaded his pack on his horse. “The surrounding cliffs are a sheer drop, and there’s only one gate. The road to the lair leads right through the city.”

“I remember. I saw it.”

“You heard Davyn. They’ve got every lair heavily guarded. There will be signs, passwords, inspections. No Senai will be able to get into Aberthain Lair. None.”

Aidan cast a solemn glance over his shoulder. “I promise I won’t go without you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid of—”

“You’re not afraid of anything. I know.” Only after he’d turned away did I recognize the teasing glint in his eyes. He fumbled with his straps for an interminable time and faced me again only when he was finished with them. “The Elhim say that when you save someone’s life, that life belongs in part to you. You’re obligated to participate in its future course—delight in its pleasures, grieve at its sorrows. Davyn will tell you. So we are inextricably bound together, I think—you, me, and the others. No matter how much we dislike it.” Perhaps he thought his smile could soothe the sting of his words.

“And what do the Elhim say if you destroy someone’s life?” I gave him no smile to ease my words. But as ever, I could not seem to make him angry—only melancholy.

“Ah ... that I don’t know. Perhaps it doubles the requirement. Fitting punishment to know you can give them no comfort, to be unable to heal the wounds you’ve caused. I’ve given it a lot of thought these past days.”

I was ready to tell him that I was not referring to his crime, when Davyn and Tarwyl walked out of the house with Narim in tow. “Time to be off,” said Davyn. “We’ve got a plan. We’ll meet seven days from this at the Red Crown, just outside of Aberswyl. Turns out the cook is—”

“Tarwyl’s cousin.” MacAllister and I said it at the same time. The three Elhim chortled and embraced each other, and with no more than that, MacAllister, Davyn, and Tarwyl were off.

The hoofbeats had scarcely faded, and I’d not yet taken my eyes from the leafy lane where the three had disappeared, when Narim voiced the thought I would have died to keep my own. “You love him.”

I did not speak. Instead I returned to Aidan’s house, stripped off the fine linen shift, and pulled on my own threadbare russet breeches and coarse brown shirt, my vest of cracked leather, and the repaired leather boots. Only as I twisted my hair into a braid that would keep it out of my face as we rode ... only then did I trust myself to speak to Narim. He had followed me. “I’ve sworn to do whatever you ask of me. I keep my oaths.”

The Elhim who had exhausted himself for two years to make me live stood in the doorway, his face left in shadow by the bright morning behind him. “It was never my plan to hurt you, Lara. And you must believe that I value Aidan MacAllister even as you do. I hope to give each of you the single thing you most desire, but this ... it cannot be. You know that.”

“I know far better than you. Have no fear. I’ll do exactly as you’ve told me. But I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll never forgive myself, and don’t tell me of dragon souls and the Elhim’s sin and the changing of the world. You were wrong.”

“He could not have sustained his life as it was. The dragons were getting wilder. He was at the peak of his talent. He would have lost their voices and died inside, never knowing the truth. Would that have been better?”

“You never asked him, Narim. You thought you understood what was happening. You plotted and schemed and scribbled in your journal. But you were wrong. It was never the dragons. It was his own heart that made his music, and you ripped it out. And now he’s going to die. He will either step into a dragon’s fire unprotected or he’ll be captured. I’ll kill him myself before I allow him to be taken prisoner again.”

I did not give Narim the chance to answer. I had listened to him too often ... like the night he first told me that terrible deeds were sometimes necessary to save the world. I hadn’t been interested in saving the world. I didn’t believe in Narim’s legends of Dragon Speakers. I had done as he asked because I was twisted with hate and craving vengeance, and now I was locked into his schemes by my honor as a warrior. To refuse him would complete my own corruption, violate my only remaining link to my clan. I could not do it. But I believed it was going to destroy my life as surely as it was going to destroy Aidan MacAllister’s.

We left the green and beautiful place called Devonhill and rode slowly southward in the garish spring weather. I would have preferred rain and gloom. In the first days I had to stop every hour and walk to loosen up my leg, and after only a few hours of riding I was so tired I would drop off to sleep on whatever piece of ground was closest.

Narim reviewed his plan, insisting that the impossible would happen and the Senai would learn what was necessary to free the dragons. I mouthed the answers he wanted from me. Yes, I would see the dragons brought to Cir Nakai right away. They would not come to the lake on their own, for they would surely remember the poison, the jenica in the water that had caused all their trouble. MacAllister must convince Roelan to lead the others to the water. It was the only way. And yes, there must be no delays. Once the hold of the Ridemark was broken, there would come a storm of vengeance such as the world had never seen. The dragons must be secure before the storm could break. I would not think of what was to come after. It would never get that far.

Narim was as mad as MacAllister. Was this the punishment for my childish rage at the future life had parceled out to me? Because I was not content with my own people, I must live out my days with lunatics of other races?

By the fifth day we were making good speed through the rolling forestland of southern Elyria, stopping only to rest the horses and to eat. On the sixth morning, as the land began to rise toward the rainswept hills of Aberthain, I could not spur my mount fast enough. I felt like wolves were nipping at my feet. When Narim called a midday halt at a deserted crossroads, I wanted to scream.

“One moment only, Lara, love,” he said, “and you can be off at your own pace to find our friends. Our paths must diverge here, for my instinct is the same as Aidan’s. I believe he will find Roelan in Aberthain, so I’ve got to set things in motion. I’ll come find you the moment I get word you’ve made the attempt.”

Mad. They were both mad. “So you’ll not be there to watch him die?”

“I’ll not be there to see him reap the joy he so deserves. No. Sadly not.” Tenderly he brushed away the hair that straggled across my ugly face as he had done so often when I was healing from my burns. “But I will see him after, and I will see the fulfillment of your destiny, Lara. You will soar across the sky, and your beauty and courage and honor will be visible for the world to see.”

I spurred my horse as hard as I dared and left Narim, hand outstretched, in the middle of the crossroads.

By nightfall I rode into the stableyard of a small, tidy inn tucked away in the forest half a league from Aberswyl, the royal city of Aberthain. Lanterns sparkled in the clear darkness, and laughter and the music of pipes and whistles spilled out doors and windows opened to the warm, humid night. I left my horse with a stable lad—a sleepy Florin boy with a slave brand burned into his cheek.

I headed across the yard toward the inn, but the boy’s scarred cheek reminded me too closely of my own. The thought of stepping into a brightly lit common room was so repulsive that I walked right past the door and into the dark cluster of sheds, storehouses, and refuse heaps crowded between the inn and the surrounding trees. Crouching beside a stack of bricks, I waited for the party to be over and the lamps to be turned down. From the number of revelers who staggered into the yard to vomit, and the tittering flower-decked couples who stumbled into the trees only to emerge panting and rearranging clothing a quarter of an hour later, I gathered it was a Udema wedding party. If so, it could go on all night.

I settled down for a long wait and slept a bit, only to be waked about moonset when a wagon decorated with flowers, wheat sheaves, and cowbells carried the happy couple to their bed. The remaining guests returned to the inn for another hour of serious drinking before heading home.

It was in the quiet that followed that I heard the call of the teylark from the woods. Only those who had grown up in the tents of the Twelve Families would remark the nasal, yipping cry of the most common bird in Elyria. And no one else would recognize the code: one chirp, then two rising, then one again, and a trill. All is ready. A double whistle, then a single. Hold until the command. In a ring around that forest glade the calls repeated, blending in with the humming insects, the rustling of new green leaves, and the occasional bark of a dog who’d had good luck in its night’s hunting. Inside the inn a sentimental piper squalled on his pipes.

Ridemark discipline would permit no further breaking of the silence, so I would learn nothing more of their plan. But it was easy enough to guess. Somehow they had learned that MacAllister was inside. As soon as the wedding guests were gone, they would take him as easily as boys stealing blackberries. The question was whether they had a man inside keeping watch on the Senai. If so, the problem was far more difficult. My instinct said not. Best test it quickly. More guests were straggling away down the road, and soon the teylark would cry again with a far deadlier message.

How was I to get to the door? If the watchers were counting who came out and who returned, my unexpected appearance could set off the very attack I feared. Amid the cheers and laughter of the company, another flower-draped couple darted out the front door into a rose arbor to express their fervent hopes as to the newlyweds’ fertility. Before I could figure out how to take the girl’s place, they were strolling back to the inn.

An unendurable quarter of an hour until someone else staggered out of the doorway. The pudgy man relieved himself against my pile of bricks, happily singing mournful songs of youth and love along with the piper’s tune. Clearly the fellow had drunk a barrel of ale. I plowed a foot straight into his belly before he could get himself tucked up again. It knocked the wind right out of him. I dragged him into a stinking slaughtering shed, trussed him up with my belt and a scrap of rope, then patted his cheeks and his exposed bit of Udema manhood. “We’re setting up a surprise for the groom,” I whispered in his ear, counting him too drunk to remember that the groom had already gone. “Hold quiet here until he comes, and we’ll have a good laugh.” Udema love bawdy jokes.

My victim giggled, then shushed himself, spluttering. “Shhh ... no noise ... good joke ... shhh ...” He would most likely fall asleep and dream a hilarious outcome. I borrowed his cloak and stumbled across the yard toward the inn, growling a note or two as I went.

Perhaps twenty people occupied the lamplit common room. Most of them were gathered about two long tables littered with empty tankards, baskets of flowers, pools of ale, and the bones, crumbs, and rinds of a farmer’s feasting. They were singing at least three different songs at once and drinking prodigiously. A fat man snored from one corner of the room, while an exhausted serving girl carried a heavy tray of filled mugs to replenish the table, and a drowsy Elhim turned a goose on a spit. No one in the group had the air of a Rider.

MacAllister and the two Elhim huddled over a small table to one side of the party, not looking at anyone. I shed my stolen cloak and startled the three of them out of a year’s peace when I dropped onto the bench beside MacAllister. “You’ve got to get out of here right now ...” I said, forestalling the Elhim’s greetings as I told them of the circle of Riders posed at the edge of the forest. “We can pretend we’re wedding guests. Head down the road with some of these others.” Even as I said it, three young men fell weeping on each other’s shoulders and waved farewell to the others, holding each other upright as they staggered out the door.

“They’re sure to have a checkpoint on the road,” said Tarwyl.

“Through the woods might be better, then,” said MacAllister. “We could slip between the watchers.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “These will be experienced Ridemark scouts, and the moon’s full. You couldn’t do anything in the woods they wouldn’t notice.”

“Well,” said Davyn. “There’s one thing they wouldn’t notice.” He nodded his head toward a burly man who had his hand down a blond woman’s bodice while she slathered his mooning face with kisses. The other partygoers began cheering and garlanding the two with flowers. A fiddler took up the piper’s tune.

“Tjasse’s gift!” toasted a red-haired farmer with a feathered hat. “May Ule sire fifty sons!”

“May Norla birth healthy babes!” cried a wizened woman, who then sucked down a tankard of ale without taking a breath. The group laughed and applauded when the burly man and the blond woman, draped in flowers and already half-undressed, ran out into the night bearing the blessings of Tjasse. The more matings at this celebration, the more pleased Tjasse would be and thus the more likely to bless the newlyweds with children. Two more fawning pairs were close to bolting.

“Offer to buy a round for the party,” said Davyn, placing a silver coin on the table. “Make your good wishes. And ... demonstrate your sincerity.” He jerked his head at me. He had to be joking. MacAllister flushed, his gaze riveted on his mug.

“We’ll take the road and kill the sentry if we get stopped,” I said. “Attach ourselves to the other guests here. Or do something else ... set fire to the place to cause a commotion.”

Tarwyl ignored me, wrinkling his brow. “You could each approach one of the guests. At a Udema wedding party anyone is fair game—well, I don’t think they’d take me or Davyn.” He grinned. “But of course if you two were together it would be easier. Once you were sure the watchers had lost interest—a convincing few moments at most—you could be away. We’ll come along later. Meet you at the shop in Aberswyl. Aidan knows where it is. Are you game?”

MacAllister glanced over at me bleakly. “We’ll think of something else.”

The Elhim were right, and we had to be quick. “I can do what’s necessary. You keep saying the same of yourself. Prove it.”

Davyn was sympathetic. “I understand that customs differ widely in these particular matters—”

“Stop talking and do it,” I said, fighting not to scream at them. Every time the music fell quiet, I feared I would hear the teylark’s hunting call that meant now.

“Begin here,” said Davyn, laying a hand firmly on Aidan’s arm as the Senai started to stand up. “Do not these activities take fire in small ways?”

A grinning Tarwyl raised his cup and proclaimed loudly in his deep voice, “To our human friends who have developed such affection for each other—an uncommon bond, unrivaled in all of history.”

If we were not so desperate, I might have laughed at Tarwyl. MacAllister closed his eyes and murmured, “Vellya, god of fools, defend us.” Then he raised his mug to Tarwyl, drank deep, and laid his arm around my shoulders as if trying to do it without touching me.

“Your turn, Lara,” said Davyn. “We’re trying to attract attention here, if you recall. From your current aspect you might well be mistaken for a part of this bench.” The two Elhim were having more fun than the Udema.

“Put your hands on him, Lara,” whispered Tarwyl, unable to smother his grin. “I’m sure hands are important.” I gritted my teeth and clasped the gloved hand that rested so lightly on my shoulder, and I put my other hand on Aidan’s cheek, pulling it close to mine.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “I can’t—”

“Perhaps it would help to think of something else.” Aidan’s head was resting on mine. He whispered in my ear, “Did I ever tell you about the time I was chasing bats out of a cave and set my hair on fire?”

I turned my head and stared at him, sure he’d gone mad.

“Oh, gods, don’t look at me,” he whispered, ducking his head so that I could only feel the heat from his rush of embarrassment. “Do you think these people will notice if we take the Elhim with us for tutors? Were ever two players so woefully miscast?”

From such a close view, I could not miss the nervous terror behind his merry humor. Suddenly I understood a great deal about him that I had never imagined. “You’ve never ... in all your youth ... all the people you met ... the women and girls fawning over you ...”

“I never had time. Always traveling. Preoccupied. Tangled with gods and music. And I’d been brought up so strictly. You just didn’t ... not even to look ... until you’d known someone a long—Until you married. And I never learned—Damn! Am I red enough now?”

To Davyn’s and Tarwyl’s immense satisfaction, I burst out laughing. Was nothing ever easy? I’d thought he was only excessively modest or disgusted by my common manner or revolted by my ugliness. I had never imagined that a Senai noble who had grown to manhood in the world could be a virgin.

“Laugh as you will,” he growled quietly. “But you’re perhaps not so worldly as all that. You were only thirteen when you took up with Elhim!”

“I grew up in a tent smaller than this room with my parents, two grandmothers, two uncles, one aunt, three cousins, and an older brother with many friends. Modesty is not a value the clan prizes, nor is celibacy. There is nothing that you don’t see and nothing that you don’t hear, and a Ridemark girl is available to her father’s friends and her brother’s friends and any Dragon Rider when she is eleven.” I said it lightly, but it had been yet another teaching of my true place in the clan. There was nothing of pleasure in the remembrance of ale-sotted men and groping boys in the dark corners of the family tent.

“Ah ... Well.” He didn’t know quite what to say. “I’ll do as you command me, then.”

“The couple at the end of the table are the bride’s parents,” whispered Davyn, who had been observing the Udema while we were babbling. “And they’ve sent a boy to light their lantern.”

“Time for the second chorus,” said MacAllister. “Perhaps I can do better at this part. I suppose you’ll have to bear with me.” His grin chased away a shadow from his face. I had most likely revolted him with my unclean past. He looped my hands over one of his arms so he could grip his ale mug securely with both hands; then he approached the wedding party, wobbling a little as if he’d drunk as much as they.

“Greetings, good friends,” he said, slurring his words ever so slightly and bowing to the stocky blond pair at the end of the table. “Please excuse my intrusion on this happy occasion, but I could not hold back my congratulations and best wishes for the bride and groom—not when I am so blessed myself.” He pulled his elbow inward. I took the hint and clung to him. “Innkeeper! A round for these good Udema. And a toast”—he drained his mug with a flourish and tossed it onto the pile of empty ones littering the table—“to the happy union. May Tjasse bless them with ... all her blessings!” To my astonishment he threw his arms around me and, with tenderness quite at odds with his performance, he kissed me on the left side—the scarred side—of my face. “I am reminded of a verse from one of your great poets. ...” Softly he pressed my horrid cheek to his chest as he began speaking in the tongue of the Udema rather than the common speech. I did not know the words, but he did not slur them; rather he caressed them with his beautiful voice as gently as his hands were unbinding my hair. Before he was finished every eye among the Udema was swimming with tears. I was on the verge of panic.

As the wedding guests wiped their eyes and murmured their thanks, Aidan leaned over and buried his face fiercely in my neck. I had to wrench myself to pay attention to his whispered words. “What about the time I was practicing on my flute while riding my horse and knocked myself silly on a tree branch?”

I buried my disbelieving laughter in his chest, while a large, soggy Udema woman next to me snuffled and said, “Tjasse’s gift ... you lucky, lucky girl.” In an instant we were blanketed with daisies and milkweed, and amid sentimental blathering about Ule’s seed and Norla’s womb, we ran out the door.

“To the left of the road,” I said, trying to recapture my wits. There were fewer trees to the left, which meant the watchers were farther apart. And it was hillier, which meant it would be easier to get out of sight. “And make likely noises.” With as many sighs and moans and giggles as we could muster, we hurried into the trees. At about the right distance for the Ridemark perimeter, I yanked MacAllister toward a broad-trunked oak, pushing him down on his knees to mask his height. I pulled his head up against my belly and draped my unbound hair over his head. “We’re going to push farther into the woods,” I said. He did not answer. His breath came fast, and he must have felt the Riders close, for he was trembling. After a moment we ran on, stopping twice more as if we could not contain our desire, until we found a dark, grassy hollow sheltered with monkberry bushes. We rolled onto the ground, and I draped his long cloak over us, making sure that no observer would hear or see anything to question.

I tried to keep my mind on the deception, on the mockery we made rather than the living man who knelt beside me doing his best not to touch me again. But after only a few moments more we stopped. Just as if we had done the thing we mimed, we suddenly lay still and quiet in the darkness under his cloak, all merriment fled, all cleverness exhausted. No satisfaction, though. Only the lingering kiss on my scarred cheek was left of our playacting. I had never felt anything like it. Lucky, lucky girl. Foolish, stupid girl.

I shifted to sit up, and, when my arm brushed his, Aidan jerked away as if it scalded him. Disgusted with myself, I threw off the cloak. “We’ve got to hurry. If we’re lucky, they’ll think we’ve fallen asleep. Davyn said to go south and that you’d know the path. Is that right?”

“I’ll know it.” His voice was husky, and he wrapped his cloak tight, strange for a warm night, as we scrambled through the woods toward the southern guide star just visible through the trees.

When we reached a narrow, rutted track, he pointed to the right, still without words. Too much hung between us, like the sultry nights of summer when you need a thunderstorm to clear the air. “A good ruse,” I said. “Better than chains and whips, at least.” He didn’t answer even then, and I dismissed the remembrance I carried on my face. We hurried through the night, ready to bolt into the trees when the inevitable pursuit would catch us up.

Chapter 25

Three times we were forced to duck into the trees to avoid Ridemark search parties or messengers racing down the road toward Aberswyl. We had to hide a fourth time when a party passed us from the other direction and set up a checkpoint two hundred paces behind us. Their commander gave them the order to spread out and search the woods, and we took our chance and ran, keeping to the edge of the trees, hoping their noise would mask our own. Just about the time we thought it was safe to get back out on the road instead of clambering through gullies and over fallen trees, we came on a second checkpoint. Torches blazed to either side of the road, but only three men stood guard. We dared not proceed through the woods lest the rest of their party be waiting for us, yet we could not fight three. Trapped. If the two search parties converged we’d be caught.

But as we crouched low in the scrub, debating how to proceed, two horsemen passed by very slowly ... slight, with blond, curly hair ... Elhim. “Hsst, Davyn,” I called softly. They were listening for us. Tarwyl slid off his mount and stepped into our hiding place, proclaiming loudly that he had to relieve himself—though Elhim truly had very different habits than humans and were far better at controlling such urges.

“You two take the horses,” said Tarwyl. “They’ll not expect you mounted, and they’ll assume you’ve already passed through the first checkpoints if you’ve made it thus far.”

We had no time for planning or deception. The longer we delayed, the more likely the searchers would stumble on us. “Ride hard and don’t stop,” I whispered to MacAllister. Our only advantage would be surprise. We could not risk stopping for the checkpoint in some vain hope to convince the clansmen that we weren’t who they thought. So Davyn dismounted as if to take his turn in the trees, and Aidan and I mounted up. The Elhim spoke to their clever horses, slapped them hard on their rumps, and Aidan and I shot forward between the two guards like bolts from a crossbow. We left the warriors scrambling for their horses and screaming for their comrades. I would have sworn I heard the Elhim laughing from the forest.

The little horses from Cor Talaith raced through the night, up and down the rolling ribbon of road, and in no more than half an hour we were slipping through the quiet lanes of Aberswyl. MacAllister led me into a small, muddy stableyard behind a dark shop labeled, Mervil, Tailor.

“We’ve been staying here,” said the Senai, pointing me up a wooden staircase stuck onto the back of the tall, narrow building. “There are beds in the room upstairs. If you’re as tired as I am, you won’t mind the clutter. We’ve been preparing ... Ah, well, you’ll see in the morning.”

“And what of you?”

“I ... think I’ll stay down here. Unsaddle the horses. Wait for the Elhim.”

“I’ll help.”

I reached for the buckles, but MacAllister tugged on the reins to move the beast away from me. “Please go. I’ll do it. I need—Please.” His voice was tight, his eyes averted. I was too tired to argue or question. If he preferred to sleep with the horses rather than in the same room with me, that was his affair. Perhaps he thought I would ravish him. Or perhaps he had finally realized how close he was to being dead. He’s a madman. Who cares what he thinks?

The hot little room over the tailor shop had five pallets on the floor. Every other bit of space was crammed with gaudy, useless junk: piles and rolls of silk and satin, boxes of thread and lace and beads, a long worktable littered with scraps of silver wire, fabric, and thread. Various articles of clothing, fit for no one but whores and princes, hung about the walls. I saw no evidence of my companions’ preparations for our assault on Aberthain Lair, but I was too tired to be curious, even when I laid down my head and stared into the empty eyeholes of a silver mask.

I woke up in early afternoon and found Davyn and Tarwyl occupying two of the pallets. Davyn’s eyes opened just after mine, and he sprang off of the floor as if he’d slept fifteen hours instead of five. “Ah, Lara, it was good to find you safe last night.” He yawned, peered out the tiny window, yelled, “Sausage!” to someone in the yard below, and then kicked Tarwyl, who was sprawled on the pallet next to the door. “Up, lazy wretch. We’ve slept away the morning, which leaves us less than ten hours to finish this.”

Tarwyl groaned and pulled a blanket over his head. In Cor Talaith Tarwyl had been well known for sleeping like the dead and never speaking a word until he’d been awake for an hour. Davyn started to kick him again, but thought better of it. Instead, he poured water from a flowered pitcher onto his friend’s head, blanket and all. While Tarwyl leaped up, cursing and rubbing his dripping hair, Davyn grabbed a biscuit from a plate of them on the worktable. He grinned at my curiosity and waved his biscuit about the room. “Have you guessed how we’re going to get you into Aberthain Lair?”

“If you think to put us in a delivery wagon or play some stupid impersonation like MacAllister tried in Cor Neuill, give it up,” I said. “They’ll be waiting for just such a thing now they know we’re here. The warriors of the Twelve Families are not idiots.”

“Well, one might argue that,” said Davyn, “but they certainly almost had us last night, and this will be far trickier.”

“What, then? Are you planning to weave us into a bolt of cloth?”

“Actually ... Here, let MacAllister explain.” The Senai, a sword belt draped over his arm, topped the last stair carrying a plate of sausage.

“Explain what? Oh, all this?” He jerked his head about the room as he set down the plate and dropped the sword belt onto the table. “We’ve another bit of playacting to do. Easier”—he was concentrating on the soupy porridge he was scooping into a painted mug—“easier than the last time, I think.” He filled three more mugs, and we settled down to the fine-smelling breakfast. “You said there was only one entry to Aberthain Lair, Lara, but in fact there is a second. The Aberthani purposely installed their dragons close to the palace. They see it as a measure of their wealth and privilege to have dragons, and they like to show them off. Makes them feel strong and safe. In fact, whenever King Renald entertains, he takes his guests to view his little flock. At midnight his servants open the gate onto a balcony that overlooks the lair. Though they’re rarely used, steps lead from the balcony straight down to the dragons.”

“And you think to sneak into the palace and broach this gate?” I could not hide my contempt.

“Not at all. We’re going to let King Renald open it for us.” He picked up something from the table and whipped it across his face as he gave me a sweeping bow. The silver mask. “Madam, may I request the honor of your presence at a masked ball given by King Renald of Aberthain in honor of his daughter’s birthday? I’ve managed to come by an invitation, and I would very much regret going alone.”

A ball! At the royal palace of Aberthain! I had to force my mouth to speak instead of gape in disbelief. “You’re mad. Absolutely mad. You couldn’t possibly get in, and even if you could ... With me? No mask has ever been crafted that could pass me off as so much as a servant.”

Tarwyl bustled into a corner and returned holding a long gown of dark green silk, sewn with silver thread. “Mervil has only to finish the hem.”

“I can’t wear anything like that.” It was a ridiculous garment. A ridiculous plan. “I won’t.” In his other hand Tarwyl held a second silver mask, one designed to cover the eyes and the left side of the face.

“We won’t be there long,” said MacAllister, tossing his mask to the table. “We’ll arrive about eleven. The king always opens the gate at midnight. We’ll go through with the rest of the guests, but we won’t return with them. The Elhim believe they can hide your gear in the lair. Only an hour and we’ll be in. They’ll never think of us walking in the front door.”

“And how do we get out?”

The Senai hesitated only briefly. “I suppose Roelan will take us.”

Madness. “And if your dragon friend isn’t there or you can’t get its cooperation?”

“He’s there,” Davyn broke in eagerly. “I’ve seen him—a dragon the age of Keldar with a malformed shoulder.”

“And you’ll go whether I agree or not,” I said to MacAllister. “Whether you can get out or not. Whether you will be captured or go mad—or whether I will.”

“I have to go.”

How in the name of heaven was I going to stop it? “When is this ball? I don’t even know how to dance.”

MacAllister grinned like a fool. “Tonight. So you’ve no time to figure out how to talk me out of it. As for dancing ... I’ll teach you.”

Twice that day Ridemark search parties swept the Elhim districts of Aberswyl looking for a Senai murderer and an abducted woman of the Ridemark. Mervil’s front door was kicked in by angry clansmen, and MacAllister and I had to hide in a cupboard with a false back. As soon as the searchers were gone, Mervil packed his family and his assistants off with friends who planned to take refuge in the new Elhim sanctuary in the hills south of Aberthain. “Bad times coming,” he said.

MacAllister disappeared in midafternoon, and Tarwyl left with my armor bag to deliver it to Aberthain Lair. Davyn attended to me, seeing me bathed and combed and measured so that Mervil could finish the hem of my gown. Ten times I gave it up. “Narim never made me promise to wear silk gowns, nor to scrub my fingernails with stiff brushes, nor to allow some filthy Elhim to wash my hair with stuff that smells of whorehouses.” When Davyn smiled and began scrubbing my feet, I kicked him and said I would wear my own boots or they could all be damned. “This tent of a garment will cover my feet well enough, and I’ll not step into any dragon lair without my boots.”

As he had all afternoon, Davyn gazed at me with his soulful gray eyes. “Your boots are already gone with Tarwyl and will be dutifully awaiting you behind the cookshed in the lair. I’ll confess that shoes have been our greatest dilemma. Mervil has none to fit you, and there’s no time to get any made. Aidan has promised to come up with something.”

Aidan. “He’s enjoying this, isn’t he? Making me look ridiculous in this Senai finery.”

“Ah, Lara, when will you understand that you could never be ridiculous in his eyes?”

“Repulsive, then. Hideous.”

Davyn shook his head. “Do this for me. Watch his face as he sees you come down the stair tonight and judge how repulsive he finds you. As for now, we must practice your curtsy.”

“I will not.”

“You will be presented to the king of Aberthain. If you don’t curtsy, you’ll be arrested. Now do it.”

My leg did not enjoy curtsying. That gave me even more reason to curse the Senai, and the Elhim, and every male or sexless being that ever walked the earth.

Tarwyl staggered in at sunset with his left arm broken, his clothes in bloody shreds, and his face battered beyond recognition. As Davyn tended his injuries, Tarwyl kept trying to talk. “Have great care, Lara. They know you’re here. They’ve guards everywhere, primed to kill. I did no more than look at a Rider, and they were on me. They said I smelled of vigar. I don’t even know what that is.”

“The grease,” I said. “The fireproofing. Did they find—”

“Your armor is safely stowed. But you and Aidan must take care.”

“We’ll be all right,” I said. “Now let Davyn take care of you.”

“Then I’ll see you next at Cir Nakai,” he said. He smiled through the wreck of his face and let his eyelids sag.

“At the lake,” I said, though I did not believe it in the least. “Where is the blasted Senai?” I asked Davyn.

“Out procuring transport, I believe.” His kind face was grim and colorless as he dressed Tarwyl’s wounds with soft cloths and herbs and ointments.

“The fool will be recognized.”

“He promised to be careful.”

Two hours after Tarwyl’s return, when I was about ready to rip off the green silk gown, I heard a horse and carriage in the cobbled lane. From the window I watched them pull up just outside the tailor’s shop. A light-haired man was driving, and a dark-haired one—MacAllister—jumped down from the box beside him and disappeared into the shop. Moments later Davyn burst through the door. “Time, Lara. The carriage is borrowed and may be wanted.”

The Elhim gave a last touch to my hair that he had piled up on the top of my head like a Florin pudding. I slapped his hand away. “Do you remember that I still have no shoes? I can’t go. I look like a whore.”

“Aidan has them. Come, Lara, you are beautiful enough for any king.”

“Madness.” I grumbled and tried to think of some other reason not to go down. But eventually I gave it up and crept down the tailor’s narrow stair, trying not to trip on my skirts. I hadn’t worn skirts since I was thirteen. I felt naked. In the front the gown fell from a narrow band at my neck to a band at my waist, but it had no back at all. I had been ready to call off the whole thing when I saw it had no sleeves. My left arm was as scarred as my face and my legs, but Davyn had shown me the long silk arm coverings favored by Senai ladies. The sleeves, made separate from the dress and fastened tight about each arm with thirty tiny buttons, left only a narrow band of my shoulder bare, successfully hiding the telltales of fire.

When I turned the corner of the stair, I caught sight of Aidan head-to-head with Mervil. Good. I wouldn’t have to see him laugh at my ridiculous clothes. But at the same time I couldn’t help but notice how fine he looked, as natural in his dark jacket, waistcoat, and breeches, white ruffled shirt with a high collar, black hose, and low black boots, as he had been in the coarse shirts and breeches the Elhim had given him. He wore white gloves, and his dark hair was held back by a green ribbon. Tomorrow he would be dead. I could not imagine any woman in the world who would not walk into the fires of death alongside him.

“I can’t do this,” I murmured and began backing up the stairs. He turned just then, and I closed my eyes quickly so I would not see.

“My lady, you are a vision indeed.” His voice was polite and even.

When I peeked again he was expressionless. Clearly he was forcing himself sober. Well done, though. If his lip had so much as quivered, I would have killed him. He held out his hand for mine, but I stuck out my foot instead. “Tell me, Lord Aidan, how many ladies of your acquaintance go shoeless to royal balls?”

“I’ve only now received the remedy from Master Mervil—and a wonder he’s done with it. Please be seated.” This time I took his outstretched hand so I wouldn’t rip the cursed skirt as I sat down on the stair. He knelt in front of me and lifted my foot onto his knee. I thought it was a necklace that he held, but he twined the simple band of pearls around my ankle and great toe. A narrow strand of fabric stretched beneath my bare foot to hold the loops together snugly, leaving all the pearls exposed on the top of my foot—the most elegant sandal one could imagine. I’d never worn anything so beautiful. His awkward hands rebelled at fastening the gold clasp on the side of my foot, but he set his jaw and accomplished it in only four tries. “This is a fashion that was popular in my mother’s day,” he said as he worked at my other foot. “She would come to my room to tell me good night before going off to a ball, and she would show off her feet. She’d say, ‘Silly, is it not, that we scorn peasants for having holes in their boots, when ladies of fashion have decided it elegant to go dancing barefoot?’ ”

“These are worth a city’s ransom. Where in the name of sense did you get them?” I said.

He finished the second clasp and nodded in satisfaction. “When we were at Devonhill, I retrieved a few things of my mother’s. One was a pearl necklace I’d sent her from Eskonia.”

“Your mother’s pearls! I can’t. Not on my feet.” I’d heard his voice when he spoke of his mother.

He shook his head. “She would think it a terrific adventure. This whole thing.” He stood up and offered me his arm. His dark eyes sparkled with the smile he knew better than to display. “She would be honored to have you wear them. As am I.”

I wanted to say something horrid, to break the spell he laid upon me with his voice and his manner and his teasing. If I could shock him enough, remind him of my origins, of my hatred ... But Mervil bustled over with a lightweight cloak of black, lined with green, while Aidan bounded up the stairs to see Tarwyl. The singer was back in time to hand me into the carriage. I spit on the ground when he offered a quiet suggestion on how to lift my skirt the proper way. Aidan shook hands with Mervil and embraced Davyn.

“Thank you, my true and honest friend,” he said to Davyn, whose eyes glistened in the torchlight. “Regret nothing, whatever comes.”

“The blessings of the One go with you, Aidan MacAllister, and the hopes of the world.”

MacAllister jumped into the carriage and rapped twice on the roof. We started off, rocking gently on the cobbles. The Senai sat opposite me. He propped an elbow on the window and leaned his chin on his hand. After a moment he spoke softly. “The hopes of the world ... It would be a great deal simpler if everyone believed as you do.”

“The only hopes you carry are those of three lunatic Elhim,” I said.

“Then why is everyone so devilish determined to get their hands on me?”

“And what do you do but walk right into their hands? There’s proof of madness.”

He leaned his head back against the cushioned seat and laughed. “Ah, but what else would you be doing on this beautiful summer evening? We are elegantly dressed, riding in a duke’s carriage, and on our way to a royal birthday party—an adventure to be sure for a woman who seems perfectly suited for adventure.”

“I can think of only a thousand things I’d rather be doing. Almost anything.”

As the carriage turned slowly out of the lane, we were passed by three horsemen riding furiously back the way we’d come. Even in the feeble light of our carriage lamps I recognized the leader. “Desmond!”

Aidan rapped once on the carriage roof, and we rolled to a stop. We crowded together to peer through the window back down the dark lane toward Mervil’s shop. Torchlight blossomed in the quiet night. Loud hammering and shouts echoed in the lane, drawing curious heads from every window and door.

“I’ve got to go back,” said the Senai, his easy humor vanished.

He shifted to open the carriage door, but I moved quicker, shoving him back onto the seat and rapping twice on the roof. “We’ve left nothing behind to connect us to Mervil or the others. You’ll do them no service by showing up at their door.” I fell into the seat opposite him as the carriage jogged forward again. “And Desmond will never think to look for me dressed in silk and riding in a Senai duke’s carriage. Wherever did you come by such a thing?”

He kept glancing back uneasily, but I nagged at him until he paid attention to me. “I would rather not have done it,” he said, “but you can’t just walk into a palace ball. So I remembered a man from Aberswyl who once told me he’d do any favor I asked. He’s got no family to reap the consequences, and he happens to drive for the Duke of Tenzilan. He believes I’m a ghost.”

“What did you do for him to earn such a gift?”

MacAllister shook his head. “He owed me nothing. It is I ... I who owe everyone.” He sank into grim silence as we rode through the streets of Aberswyl.

All too soon the carriage slowed, then rolled to a stop, only to creep forward a few paces before stopping again. From the carriage windows I could see nothing but trees and blazing lights. There were voices ahead of us. Roadblock. I felt for the knife I had secured in the waistband of my gown and cursed the lack of a sword. “We need to get out before they search the carriage,” I said.

MacAllister shook off his preoccupation and laid a hand on my knee. “No, no. We’re in the carriage line to be left off at the palace. Dougal will open the door when we reach the front portico.” He searched my face, his brow wrinkled with concern. “Are you all right with this? I’ll tell you whatever you need to know.”

“I feel like a fool.”

He leaned over and took my hands in his, and in his dark eyes I saw the reflection of a woman I did not recognize. “You are the most beautiful, the most glorious fool I have ever laid my eyes on,” he said. He gave me my silver mask and donned his own, as the carriage door opened and a flood of music and light welcomed us to our doom.

Chapter 26

The royal palace of Aberthain made Aidan’s guesthouse at Devonhill look as plain as a Ridemark tent. I never knew there was so much gold in the world or so many candles, or rooms so large a forest of marble was required to support the roof. I had never seen walls painted with scenes of dancers so like to life you felt the brush of their skirts or warriors so real you heard the clash of their swords.

Surely a thousand people crowded the room, all of them wearing diamonds and emeralds, silk, brocade, and satin, and every kind of mask: some simple like ours, some elaborate concoctions of paint and feathers, jewels or ivory. I would have stood gawking until the world ended had not Aidan taken me on his arm and propelled me through the mob. He spoke to the footman at the door, who passed along the whispering to a line of ten others in gold-crusted livery, ending with a haughty man in blue satin. The haughty man cried out, “Lord Fool and Lady Fire” as we descended a long flight of steps into the room.

“Lord Fool?” I scoffed, thinking I had mistaken MacAllister’s ease in these surroundings for some small talent at intrigue. “You think no one will question such a ridiculous name?”

“Our masque names,” the Senai murmured as he led me through the crowd. “I gave my father’s title as our true identity—it will appear on the Elyrian Peers’ List when they check. But at a masque they’ll not announce it, and by the time anyone makes the connection with me, we’ll be gone.”

I felt like an ignorant beggar. I would rather have walked into a lair undefended than take one step into that ballroom. The air was thick with sickly perfumes and the smells of wine and roasting meat. The lamps—huge, garish things made of bits of glass—hung over our heads, blazing, brilliant, threatening to expose our true identities. People swarmed everywhere, bumping into us. Women glared at me through their masks. Men bowed and grinned, and glanced over their shoulders as we passed. What were they looking at? Everyone talked at once. Though they used the common speech, it might as well have been the tongue of frogs for all I could understand of it. Everything was light, noise, and danger. My stomach curled into a knot, and I thought I would suffocate.

But then an odd thing happened. I stepped on a sharp pebble tracked in on somebody’s boots. I winced and kicked it away, but somehow when I felt only the cool marble beneath my bare feet, I was able to breathe again. It was a touch of reality, a steadiness beneath my feet in a strange and unreal place. Whether he knew it or not, MacAllister had done me a great service, leaving me shoeless.

At the far side of the room were two huge doors, flanked by tall trees that had every leaf and twig painted silver. Between us and the doors, a line of guests moved slowly. I couldn’t see what they were doing, but Aidan steered me to the end of the line, murmuring in my ear. “Once we’re received by Renald, the queen, and the princess, we’ll be on our own. You must curtsy to each one, and for the king you stay down until he gestures you up. No need to say anything unless they speak to you. Take it slow and don’t fall over, and you’ll do fine.”

“But ...” Before I could ask him what kind of gesture the king might make or what in the world to say if he did speak to me, MacAllister started talking to a man wearing a bird mask. It sounded as if he knew the man. Aidan was making some idiot’s joke about “did we not fly together at the Duke of Folwys’s hunt last year?” How could he be so stupid as to speak to someone he knew? I tried to pull him away, but he wouldn’t budge.

The bird man laughed and presented his wife, who wore a mask of swan feathers and diamonds. “Countess Cygne,” he said.

“Lady Fire,” said Aidan as he bowed, tugging slightly at my elbow to remind me to dip my knee at the swan countess. The lady looked down her nose and nodded so slightly, you’d think she believed her head would break off if she moved it. The line crept forward like a snake. Aidan kept talking about nothing, and I listened to the others near us in the line. They all talked like that, as if they knew each other even when they didn’t.

The princess was a cold-eyed, dull-looking girl of ten or twelve, her plump child’s body stuffed into a silver gown that was much too tight for her. Little rolls of pink fat peeped out around the armholes of her gown, above her long sleeves. The queen was tall and slender and wore a ruby-studded gold mask that curled into her dark hair like a devil’s horns. She was too proud to notice us, but greeted the swan countess over our heads and began talking about “the princess’s fine health.” Aidan bowed gracefully, but I wobbled a bit on my curtsy, saved from falling by his hand under my elbow.

“Lord Fool and Lady Fire,” announced another man in blue satin who stood just behind the dark-haired, heavyjowled man of thirty-some years—King Renald of Aberthain.

The king wore no mask and scowled impatiently at the room while speaking to someone over his shoulder. The aide standing behind him was also unmasked, dressed more for war than a ball. “They know we’ll fight,” said the king. “They don’t have to ensure our alliance by trumping up some story about murdering madmen. Clear them out of here. I don’t care what they say. I don’t want them ruining Raniella’s birthday.”

“They refuse, sire,” said the aide. “They’ll not leave without bloodshed.”

MacAllister sank to one knee and pulled me down beside him. It boiled my blood to do it. A daughter of the Ridemark making obeisance to a Senai king—it was humiliating, obscene. I tried to make it as brief as possible, but Aidan dug a finger into my arm so hard I almost struck him. The king dismissed his aide, then waggled a finger, which must have been the “gesture,” for the singer finally allowed me to get up.

“Is that you, Gaelen?” The king cocked his head at MacAllister as he actually looked at us for the first time. “I’ve not seen you since winter.”

“No, Your Majesty, the good Earl of Sennat does not lurk behind this Fool’s mask. And it is a very long time indeed since I was fortunate enough to visit Aberswyl. It was your late father—all honor to his memory—who last received me here.”

“Ah, well, then.” The king lost interest and shifted his attention to the bird-masked man.

We had to greet fifty other nameless people in the line, all of them soft and proud and garbed with outlandish extravagance. Only then were we able to pass through the double doors into an even larger hall. Musicians were playing all sorts of harps and flutes and horns. Long tables were piled with food enough for a small city. I couldn’t even say what most of it was. A few guests were dancing, and some were drinking and making loud, boisterous conversation. But more of them were standing about in small groups, speaking in furtive voices with sidelong glances. Perhaps that had something to do with the soldiers who stood alert at every doorway, and the proud strangers clad in red and black who stood with them.

“Clansmen!” I said. “We’ve—”

Aidan quickly swept me around to face him and stuffed a pastry in my mouth before I could say anything more. “Don’t notice them,” he said, smiling. “Pretend they are furniture.” He guided me through the crowd and between the silent watchers onto a flagstone terrace.

Tall poles at every corner of the terrace were hung with garlands and topped with flaming torches. Fountains splashed, and flowering shrubs grew right out of the paving. Only a few people stood on the terrace, so it wasn’t a good place for us to hide. I tried to drag Aidan back toward the ballroom, but he placed his left arm behind my shoulders, catching my left hand in his, then clasped my right hand with his right, just in front of us. I growled and tried to pull away, but there was steel beneath his soft manner. I could not get loose without drawing attention. “We need to be dancing,” he said. “Too many curious eyes about tonight. Follow my steps, and we’ll practice.” He moved me forward three steps, then stepped behind me, coming out on the other side. Forward three steps more.

“I don’t need—”

He spun me about until we were facing each other, then bowed and caught my hands again. “This is a rondelle ... the most romantic of dances. Hear the rhythm: one, two, three, one, two. One, two, three, one two. One ...” As he had when he led me across Fandine, he tapped the rhythm with his fingers and willed my feet to move in harmony with his. I fretted about my bare toes and his mother’s pearls, about tripping over his feet and falling into the fountains, or tumbling into the beds of roses and entangling us with mud and thorns. But after my first stumbling steps, I felt the music flowing through him and into me, a clumsy warrior who had never lifted a foot to dance. The torchlight blurred. The other people disappeared. For one moment Aidan took me away from that place, made me into something I never thought I could be. All I saw was the torchlight and the spinning garden and the white ruffle of his shirt in front of my nose, and all I heard and all I felt was music....

“Are you sure you’ve never done this, Lady Fire?” came the question from above my head.

Startled, I stumbled. He caught me, never missing a step. But the world came back into focus, and I yanked my arm away, unable to contain myself. Anger, I called it. Humiliation. “A curse on you and your Senai ways. No oath can make me do this.”

He smiled his infuriating smile beneath the silver mask. “Then don’t do it. I’ll walk you to the door, we’ll call for the carriage, and Dougal will take you anywhere you like. I’d like nothing better than for you to walk out of here safely.” I started to answer him, but he laid his white-gloved finger on my lips. “You believe I’ll die anyway, so what use is there for you to take these risks?” He took my hands again, and we drifted with the music. The scent of flowers lay heavy on the garden air. “Shall I tell you—since we are masked and not ourselves at all, Lord Fool can speak as a fool at last—shall I tell you what Aidan MacAllister would wish to be the reason that you stay?”

“No.” My answer came out weakly. Not at all as I wanted. “You should not tell me anything.”

“Should not. Mmm ... not enough to prevent a fool. He—this Aidan who is the greatest of fools, a mad fool—would wish that perhaps you did not want him to die. And if his death were to be the result of his madness, then at least he would have spent his last hour in your company, regretting nothing ... nothing ... that had brought him to it.”

For that single moment, everything I never knew I wanted lay in my hand. All I had to do was pretend that the past had never happened and the future was unknown. The music soared. The lights shimmered. The night whispered a promise of joy. But I could not do it. I had abandoned the teachings of my people, betrayed every tradition, every code, every rule, but I would not permit my desire to destroy the remnants of my honor.

Yet neither did I do what I ought. I needed to tell him he was wrong, that I despised him, that I would be happy to let him die in a dragon’s fire or in the torment of Mazadine. I wanted to say that only my oath would force me to go into Aberthain Lair with him and aid his futile purpose. But I could not do that either. I held mute, and Aidan laughed with delight. We danced through the glass doors into the whirling crowd, and I would have slain the gods themselves to make time stop.

“My lords and ladies!” A trumpet fanfare and a shouting fat man in blue satin brought me back to my senses. The music fell silent, and a hush fell over the crowd. “His Majesty King Renald welcomes all to this joyous celebration of Her Royal Highness Princess Raniella’s natal day. May King Renald reign in glory, and Aberthain ever triumph o’er all that seek her downfall. Let the gates be opened so that all may witness the power of Aberthain!”

The trumpets shrilled again, and Aidan’s arm urged me toward the glass-paned doors at the farthest end of the ballroom and the iron gates just beyond. I refused to move. Two Ridemark warriors had moved swiftly into position beside each of the three doorways. “Vanir’s fire, do you see who’s in command?” I whispered, nodding to the tall warrior who stood to the side watching all three doors. “It’s Duren Driscoll, the high commander’s adjutant. He saw you in Cor Neuill.”

MacAllister paled beneath his mask. “This way,” he said, and he began to work us sideways through the press. I could not see our objective above the heads of the crowd, until we came upon the man in the bird mask and his swan wife.

“Countess Cygne,” said Aidan, bowing and sidling up close to the lady. “I had a delightful story from King Devlin when last I saw him. One could hardly believe it true. I’ve never known him a great joker. Before I pass the story along, I thought I should confirm it with someone who knows His Majesty better than I. What do you think?”

The simpering countess hung herself on Aidan’s arm as if he had offered her the Elyrian crown, and the bird count took my arm as the crowd flowed toward the doors and the Ridemark commander. At Driscoll’s direction, the warriors in red and black were forcing some of the guests to remove their masks or ... curse it all ... their gloves. Surely MacAllister could not see what was happening or he’d never be prattling so calmly.

A sudden silence from beside me made me realize that the count was waiting for me to answer him.

“What? Pardon, my lord, I didn’t hear you. The noise ...”

“What think you of the ball, my lady?” He spoke as if taking care that his words did not fall so low as the floor.

Aidan had smoothly arranged himself between the count and his wife so there was no possibility of getting his attention. How did these people talk?

“Delightful, a delightful ball”—only two people remaining between the warriors and us—“except for these ruffians. What business have Ridemark scum at King Renald’s palace?”

“Intolerable, I agree,” said the count, his lip curling and his eyes glittering fiercely through his ivory and feathers. “They’re pretending to hunt a criminal. Likely they only want to spy on their betters. Barbarians.”

I dearly wanted to pull my dagger on the sneering count and introduce him to a barbarian.

A red-cloaked young man in front of us was commanded to remove his mask and gloves, and he put up a great fuss. Aidan was still babbling with the countess. I fingered the knife hidden at my waist. I would not allow Aidan to be taken.

“How dare they touch King Renald’s guests?” I said to the count, slowing my steps. “I’ll scream if their foul hands come near me.”

Driscoll—cold and hateful as I knew him—addressed the young nobleman’s complaint by stuffing the gloves in his mouth and twisting his arm behind him as if to break it. Heads turned away, choosing not to see as the choking guest was dragged to the side.

The young clansman just ahead of us forced another man to remove his gloves before allowing him to pass through the doors. Then it was our turn. Aidan was laughing, his head close together with the countess, their arms entwined. I clung to the count and shrank from the clansman, while using my left hand to ready my knife.

The warrior motioned to Aidan. “Show your hands before you pass. Take off those gloves.”

But before Aidan could turn his head, the count laid his hand on the jeweled hilt of his sword. “Touch anyone in my party, and I will remove your nose and ears.”

“I have orders—”

“You have no orders that pertain to the Count de’Journay. I will pass here as I choose, or we will settle it with blood. However skilled you may deem yourself, consider that I have forty years’ experience in my arm. You will not prevail.”

The warrior looked helplessly at Driscoll’s averted back, but the commander was still occupied with the rebellious young nobleman. Evidently the count’s name carried weight, for the Rider gritted his teeth and jerked his head toward the gate. “Pass. I’ll inform my commander of your refusal.”

“Tell your mongrel commander that my challenge extends to him also, beast rider.”

The count escorted me and his wife and Aidan, who had scarcely paused in his chatter, through the iron gates. We came onto a broad terrace that hung out over the night like a dead limb of the brightly lit palace. Servants passed through the crowd with trays of wineglasses, and Aidan carefully handed them around. He lifted his own in a toast to the count and his lady. “Though it is proper to toast Aberthain and its king when on this terrace, I will offer my first to the noble and gallant Count de’Journay, the hero who turned back the barbarians at Desmarniers as well as in this latest minor skirmish, and to his ravishing wife—may you continue to grace Aberthain and Elyria with honor and beauty.”

The count nodded an acknowledgment, then responded with a toast to the king. I only pretended to drink. I needed all of my wit to keep the fool of a Senai alive.

The swan countess put her hand on Aidan’s arm. “Tell us your identity, Lord Fool. I’m sure I know you, such a charming young gentleman. Your voice is so familiar.”

“Ah, my lady, now is not the time to show ourselves. Allow us lesser lights to glow for a while longer in your brilliance. When the moment comes to unmask, all shall be revealed. But if I am not to be found, you must ask King Devlin, when next you meet him, who it was knew the story of his father’s missing crossbow. For now I must beg your indulgence. My Lady Fire has never seen the dread glory of Aberthain, and I would show her before the trumpets recall us to our dancing.”

As he kissed her hand, the swan lady laughed at his foolishness. Then she took her husband’s arm and moved away to greet someone else.

Though his voice had been light and even, Aidan was trembling as he guided me to the outer wall of the terrace. A gout of fire arced across the sky, and the crowd cheered along with a distant bellow. “To the western edge,” he said. “The wall is lower there.”

From the pit of blackness before us came an answering bellow, closer this time, furious, tormented. MacAllister faltered, losing what color remained in his face. I draped my arms around him and laughed as if we were flirting, but I kept him moving toward the wall. “How long until they go back inside?” I said. “Is there any place to hide? No one bothered to tell me your plan.” Anything to draw him from his distraction. “Tell me what to do, or I might as well put this knife in you right now.”

“Over the wall.” He forced the words out. “Around the outside to the steps. We’ve only a few moments, no more, until everyone goes inside again.”

The crowd was thinner near the waist-high wall on the west end of the terrace. Most of the guests remained well away from the wall, chattering and laughing as if they had no idea what horror lay so close by in the darkness; several couples, who seemed to enjoy being alone among so many, drifted toward the outer edges of the crowd. Three men and one woman stood singly, gazing out over the dark lair. Those four were the dangerous ones—lone observers who might notice something unusual.

“We’re going over the wall?” I said. Aidan nodded, drawing breath sharply as another cry echoed from the towering cliffs to our right and left. I put my hands around his neck and drew his head down close to mine. His eyes were squeezed shut, and his breath came shallowly. He was not going to be able to think of his plan, much less tell me of it. “I’m going to sit on the wall,” I said, “and you must examine my ankle as if I’ve hurt it. Do you understand me?”

“Ankle ... yes ...”

“You’ll have to help me get up.” I stumbled and grabbed onto his arm. He put his arm around me and half dragged, half carried me across the terrace, then awkwardly supported my waist as I lifted myself onto the wall. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t—”

“It’s all right. Now examine my ankle however a Senai gentleman would think proper.”

He knelt in front of me, murmuring so softly I had to bend over to hear him. “Lara, I’ve got to tell you—”

He was interrupted by another trumpet fanfare. Dancing music started up inside the palace, and laughing guests began to stroll inside. One of the lone observers walked away.

“When I tell you, dive headfirst over the wall ...” I peered over my shoulder to make sure of the terrain. It was as bad as I expected—a narrow, outsloping strip of rock and turf, verging on nothing. “... instantly.”

The terrace was emptying rapidly. We couldn’t wait too long or we’d be too conspicuous. The clansmen might check for stragglers. The count was arguing with the Ridemark warrior again. The second man of the four single stragglers called out to a friend and moved toward the gates, and the woman hurried away.

Aidan pretended to adjust my nonexistent shoe. I reached down and removed the pearls from my feet, dropping them into his gloved hand. He stared at them for a moment, and then stuffed them into the pocket of his cloak. The last lone man glanced toward the doors, where Duren Driscoll was gesturing violently at the Count de’ Journay.

“Now,” I said, and rolled backward off the wall. Aidan came headfirst after me, and we tumbled and slid down the small weedy slope much too fast. I dug in my fingers and toes to stop us. None too soon. My head dangled over the edge of the cliff, looking down upon the fire-streaked desolation of Aberthain Lair.

Trumpets blared from behind the wall, and a voice cried out, “All hail the glory of Aberthain!” We heard a clash of iron as the gates were closed and locked. MacAllister and I lay paralyzed, waiting to hear the alarm raised, but no cry interrupted the noise of the ballroom, now muffled by the palace walls. No head peered over the wall. No sword jabbed our necks. We gave it a few agonizing moments, then crept along the narrowing gap between the wall to our right and the sheer drop to our left. But just as we reached the steep flight of steps that dropped from the terrace into the black pit, the iron gates rolled back again. We crowded into the dark gully where our little shelf of rock and dirt met the stone steps.

“... fools not to get the attendance list. He mocks us by putting it there for all to see.” The voice floated over the terrace wall just above our heads.

“Who could expect he’d use his father’s title?”

“Not the cretins I sent here to watch, obviously. Two of you check the walls. The rest of you into the lair. The vermin will not escape us this time.”

“Hurry,” I whispered to MacAllister as I yanked the small knife from my skirt and the longer one from the strap on my leg. “Go on down. I’ll take care of these bastards from behind and catch up with you.”

“No.” He laid his hand on my wrist. “No one is going to die tonight.”

“Except you. Is that it?”

“If that’s the way of it. But I have no wish to be excepted. Wait for them to pass.”

Three clansmen clattered down the steps just above our heads. We climbed up onto the stair and ran recklessly downward after them. My back crawled with the certainty that Driscoll would glimpse us from the terrace wall above, but we reached the lower stair without discovery. A glimmer of lantern light told me we were nearing the bottom of the steps, a likely place for a guard posting. At this point one side of the stair hugged the cliff wall, and the other side dropped off into the pit.

I grabbed MacAllister’s coat and his attention, pointing down off the side. He nodded and went first, supporting himself with his forearms and stretching his long legs into the sheer darkness, craning his head to see how far was the drop. One muffled groan as his foot slipped and his damaged shoulders bore his full weight. I dropped to my knees and locked my arms with his as he fought to find a foothold. Lying down on the step, I stretched my arms and lowered him over the edge to give him a little more extension; then I felt his fingers tapping rapidly on my arm. I let go. A quiet thud, not too far away. Then a soft whistle. As I scrambled over the edge, preparing to let go of the warm stone and drop through the darkness, a wave of dizziness and terror almost stopped my heart. Stupid. We weren’t yet in the fire.

Aidan kept me from hitting the ground, though rather more in the way of allowing me to fall on him than catching me. We ended up in a ridiculous heap of silk and satin, dirt and rocks. My bare back was on his face, and his arms were wrapped about me. While grunting to catch his breath, he murmured, “We’d better find your armor or I’m going to have the devil of a time keeping my mind on business.” I shoved his arms away and stood up, digging my elbow into his gut hard enough to make him clamp off a groan. We had no more time for teasing nonsense.

Tarwyl had told us that the cookshed was fifty paces left from the bottom of the stair, and without checking to see if MacAllister was behind me, I set off, creeping along the cliff wall. Three men rushed past us, their torchlight flattening us against the rocks for a terrifying moment. But their eyes were straight ahead of them, and they didn’t see us.

We ran the rest of the way to Tarwyl’s hiding place, a waist-high shelf where the broad, outsloping cliff wall broke away from the back wall of a ramshackle shed. My bag was stuffed in the corner of the niche, which was littered with bones and rotting scraps from predators who preyed on stray herd beasts. We dared not stay long enough for me to change into my armor, for the Elhim might have been forced to reveal our plan. I grabbed the bag, and we hurried away from the herd pens and the lamplit sheds toward the center of the lair.

Unlike Fandine and Cor Neuill, the floor of this valley was not flat. At the base of the cliffs was a broad shelf ring on which they had built the herd pens and barracks, the serving women’s shelter, and the smithy. At the inner edge of the shelf ring was a steep, rocky border where the land dropped away into the heart of the lair. The Riders’ huts would be down below, butted against the rocky slope.

The farther we went, the worse I wanted my boots. An afternoon rain had turned the blasted wastes into thick, black muck, and every step was a small panic lest I slice my bare foot on a stray dragon scale. Shouts rang from every direction, and twice we had to cram ourselves into some narrow shadow to avoid Ridemark patrols. There seemed to be five hundred clansmen in the lair to guard the three dragons of Aberthain.

After a third close call with a search party and a moment’s pause to let MacAllister recover from a dragon’s bellow that had him staggering, we streaked across a deserted area of the shelf and scrambled into the rocky perimeter of the inner lair. From a sheltered niche in the rocks we peered into the vast pit, and just below us, not five hundred paces away, was the kai we’d come to find.

The beast was immeasurably old: the brow ridges as gnarled and thick as old oak trees, the neck folds so deep you could hide an army in them, layer upon layer of jibari encrusted on its scales. And its right shoulder was not a long, smooth taper into the bulging haunch, but sharp and angular, as if a giant had broken it and set it improperly. The right wing sat higher than the left, yet the twisting deformity was not a new thing. Jibari grew thick in the shoulder crease, and there was no slackening of the beating fury of the wings when it tried to escape the binding that kept it earthbound.

“The birds,” whispered MacAllister in awe, his hand on my shoulder. “Look at the birds.”

Indeed there must have been five thousand small, dark shapes hovering about the kai, picking its leavings from the blasted earth, settling on its back and shoulders, twittering and chirping, yet never getting caught in the streams of fire that poured from the beast’s mouth. But this beast was no gentle companion. The kai lurched in its half-walking, half-flying way toward a penned cluster of no less than fifty bawling sheep. An arc of orange fire shot from its mouth as it let forth a raging bellow loud enough to split one’s skull. Its eyes were windows on the netherworld, and its massive tail whipped and pounded until the very earth shuddered. With little more than a flick of one taloned foot, the kai left the sheep a bloody, writhing wreckage. After another blaring trumpet, its jaws closed around the gory mess, slavering blood and spitting fire.

Aidan drew back and sank to the ground, leaning against the rocks in shadows neither the growing moonlight nor the sallow glow of dragon fire could reach. I could feel his eyes on me, the dark eyes welling with tears of blood for his lost god. “Lara, how am I to do this?” His voice was filled with anguish and fear, and I was on the verge of such weakness as I had never imagined. But any answer was precluded by another blaring wail from the dragon, and like the herald summoning me to battle, it reminded me of where and who and what I was.

I dumped out the contents of my bag—the articles that were the proper focus of my life. “You will be silent,” I hissed, as the flesh-tearing screech died away. With no heed to his shyness, I stripped off my false skin of mud-fouled silk and pulled on my own life: coarse wool and leather and russet, the stinking armor of my clan. I twisted my hair until my scalp ached and jammed the stiffened helm on it, and I arranged the coils of my whip and snugged its sharp steel tips without regard to the watching eyes that were revolted by it.

The treacherous moon had crept over the cliff wall and invaded our hiding place, throwing MacAllister into deeper shadow and glinting off the tin box that lay at my feet, where it had fallen from the armor bag. It was time. The singer was going to die, and he deserved to know the truth before he screamed his mind away in a dragon’s breath. I wished that hatred and revenge might deter him from his course, but I knew better, so I would not dally while he read what I would show him.

“This is how we shall proceed,” I told him. “I’ll say all the words as they are spoken for the binding rite in the clan—the seven invocations that I should be damned forever for revealing. When the kai is ready, at the moment the Rider would step forth with the kai’s bloodstone, I will raise my left hand. You’ll have perhaps half a minute to do whatever you imagine will save your life.”

He tried to speak, but I would not permit it. One word and I would crumble.

“Before you address this creature, you should review a few bits of dragon lore,” I said, pulling Narim’s journal from the box and opening it to a page written almost eighteen years in the past. I thrust it into the white-gloved hands, then strapped the bloodstone about my neck and left him sitting in the cleft of the rocks, reading the account of how I had stolen his life.

Chapter 27

Day 26 in the month of Vellya

Year 497 of our shame

Year 4 in the reign of the human King Devlin

Journal entry:

What satisfaction is in my heart tonight! There is no doubt that this Aidan MacAllister is the one for whom we have waited, the Dragon Speaker that Jodar described to me over five hundred years ago. He sings their visions and follows them about the land without understanding why, completely unaware of the trail of chaos he leaves behind him. Never in my long life have I heard such beauty and clarity and truth. And the youth himself is all that is good.

Even such a magnificent discovery leaves a trail of complications, though—however small in comparison to the finding. How am I to tell him he is unfinished—a boy who has no idea of what he is and what he is capable of doing? How can I convince him that he must leave his life behind for seven years? In ancient days Jodar told us of the seasoning time of silence needed for a true Dragon Speaker, and though it is beyond our understanding, we dare not proceed without it. What if MacAllister is not strong enough to do what we need? He is human. He is so young. Humans are so easily distracted—a penalty of short-lived races. Humans need answers for all mysteries.

Even if I could convince him, where could I send him to live out seven years safely, now that the Twelve know such a one exists and hunt him? If they discover him, we are lost.

Lara says she was able to hide her bloodstone for four years, that the Twelve cannot see what is right under their noses. The child is filled with bitterness, but her perceptions are acute. If only I could believe her.

Yet if she is correct, there could be a plan here, now I think of it. Under their noses ...

By the One, the thought that comes to my head appalls me. Yet the more I consider it, the more reasonable it seems. The Ridemark will not rest until they discover who is inciting insurrection among their dragons, and if he continues, they’ll likely kill him in their rage. But what if I were to solve their problem for them? MacAllister must live in silence for seven years to perfect his gift, and I have no doubt that he will need to be coerced to do it. Those of the Ridemark clan are experts at coercion of a cruel and deadly sort, but they would never dare truly harm MacAllister, for he is cousin to the king and known across the world. And I have the perfect resource to reveal his identity to the Twelve. Lara will tell her brother the name of the one who torments their dragons, and that Narim’s secret journal says that the only way to cure him of it is to force him silent for seven years. MacAllister will do as he is told, for he is human and will be afraid. Once he sees the Ridemark is sincere—a scratch or two perhaps—no other course will be open to him. He will obey and be silent, and in seven short years we will all of us be free.

Chapter 28

I picked a position perhaps fifty paces left of MacAllister and halfway down the steep ring wall, among the largest boulders I could find. The boulders might shelter me briefly, though no venue so close to a kai was safe for long. It didn’t matter that I was still outside the Riders’ perimeter, for the purpose of the rite was to drive the beast into madness so that its fire burned sheer white, the hottest it could possibly be. When I took up my stance on the top of an angular boulder, a new risk presented itself. Just below me was a stone-and-leather hut—a Rider’s hut. Bad luck if it belonged to the Rider who controlled this kai. I wasn’t sure I could prevail in a direct contest of wills with the bound master of the beast. But there was nothing for it but to begin.

I dismissed every thought of Aidan, of love and guilt, of doubt and fear. There could be no place inside me for anything but will. Already the kai’s nostrils flared wider, and the red eyes blazed hotter, and from the monstrous head came a low rumbling that made my teeth hurt. I uncoiled my whip and unsheathed my dagger.

“Teng zha nav wyvyr,” I cried out.

Thus began the most difficult battle of my life—harder even than the disastrous venture of my childhood. On this night I had not only to control the kai, but, at the same time, purposely drive it into uttermost frenzy. It wasn’t going to take long. By the time I was through the initial summons and the first of the seven invocations, the beast screamed so powerfully that I lost my balance and fell backward on the rock. Without releasing my control I got back to my feet and found a steadier foothold on a narrow ledge with my back to the angular boulder. Then I pronounced the second invocation.

I had reviewed Narim’s journal where he had written all he knew of the Rite of the Third Wing—of the day the Elhim had enslaved the dragons using the songs the dragons sang to calm their restless younglings, of the day the dragons had seen those younglings dead and breathed white fire upon the Elhim, somehow binding dragon and Elhim to the vile bloodstones. I had racked my childhood memories for tone and position and every slight variation that could influence the outcome. But in the rites I had witnessed, the Rider had carried a bloodstone and worn armor to protect him from the dragon’s wrath. And the only Elhim to survive the long-ago debacle beside the lake of fire had worn bloodstones. Aidan planned to go defenseless, thinking ... what? That he could himself become some living bloodstone? That his talent ... his heart ... his compassion would bind him to some scrap of sentience buried in this horror and allow him to control it?

Concentrate, fool, or you’ll be dead before him.

I spoke the third invocation—a verse about gathering with brothers and sisters in the realm of the wind. The kai thrashed its tail and unfurled its wings, an ocean of flailing green and copper that seemed to cover half the valley. Forbidden by its bound Rider to fly from the lair, the kai set up such a screaming that I thought I would be deaf again. It lurched closer, half the distance between us in the space of a heartbeat. I pressed my back against the rock, wishing the kai were blind like Keldar or crippled like the beast in Fandine.

From before and below me came a glimmer of red light, and as I screamed out the fourth invocation, the Rider stepped out of his hut. The kai’s hatred was made more vicious and more direct by the command of its Rider. The beast lurched forward again, and the snout waved back and forth, searching ... listening ... closer. My eyes burned with the acrid smoke. Too close. I ducked and shifted right along the ledge, trying to find a place where I could retreat, then threw myself onto the ground again when a wing swept past my head. I was coughing and choking, buffeted by the stinking wind of its passing. Raging malevolence blazed in the red eyes as I struggled to speak the fifth invocation. I lay on my back, pressed to the rock by the weight of hatred from the devil kai.

“Lara! What madness is this?” The voice came from behind and above me. My brother’s voice.

“Get her out of here!”

“She’ll have us all baked.”

“Holy Jodar! Treachery! She wears a bloodstone!”

“Slay her now and be done with this. Gruesin, get up here!”

“Let it go, Lara,” Desmond yelled. “Gruesin will control the kai if you but let it go.” Four men in Rider’s armor moved toward me from the left. A fifth, the Rider from the hut, climbed up from the valley floor to my right.

I lashed out to each side with my whip, as much to keep Desmond and his cohorts away as to deter the monstrous head that swayed toward me. I screamed the sixth invocation, and the dragon reared backward, spewing fire straight up—white flames only slightly tinged with orange. My helm had been knocked off when I fell, so the skin of my face blistered in the heat.

Hands clutched at my armor, and I slashed at them with my dagger while I struggled to get out the last verse. I had never listened to the words before. “Take this youngling, child of fire and wind. Lift its wings with your breath and your power. Be its third wing until it masters the upper airs. This fledgling is yours and not yours. It lives by your grace and dies by your command, and its service shall ever be your pleasure. In the sun shall you fly as one; in the cold moonlight shall you together devour the night. Inseparable. Unchanging. Eternal.”

The Riders dragged me across the rocks and up the slope, away from the raging kai. My dagger was snatched from my hand, and my whip snagged in the rocks. Five whips slashed around me and at least two bloodstones flickered, fighting to keep the maddened beast at bay. But as the screeching kai stretched its neck high above us and belched forth a trailer of pure white flame, I pulled loose my left hand and raised it high. Abruptly I was dropped onto the hard, hot ground, while my captors pointed and yelled in dismay at a dark figure scrambling down the steep rocks on our right. I began kicking and screaming, laying my hand on the spare knife hidden in my boot and embedding it in at least one leather-clad leg so they had no chance to give chase until it was too late. For, of course, the kai had seen him, too.

He stopped no more than twenty paces from the mad dragon and raised his arms in supplication. So tiny, so fragile a being beside the monster. I could not hear if he said anything before he began screaming, for the dragon knocked him instantly to his knees with a bone-shattering bellow and bathed Aidan MacAllister in eye-searing white fire. “Aidan, beloved!” I sobbed. His hair and clothes were burning when I closed my eyes, and covered my head, and sank to the hot, stony earth. I could not weep. All my tears had burned away with my heart.

Chapter 29

Chaos. The red claw shatters wholeness. Rends.

Grinding discord rules.

The hglar—our masters whose stink is unlife,

whose claw is red that scrapes, wrenches, tears—

the hglar torments me ever.

Fly ... fly to seek wholeness,

but the biting red claw will not loose me.

I who once ... what was I? Lost am I.

These noises ... the hglar makes words of remembering:

of flight, of youngling wings so tender, of the upper airs.

Ahhhh ... to remember! To fly!

Yet not. Crushing horror,

Bound to this hard, unyielding plane.

Heaviness. Vileness.

The taste ever in my mouth—

red, warm, stinking human blood and human flesh.

Despised taste.

Bitter taste of wretchedness, yet become an unstoppable

craving.

Take the human blood and flesh the hglar offers,

It numbs pain, silences remembering, and there is

nothing else.

Nothing.

I am become chaos. Chaos ever.

Again come the words of remembering.

I would sear the younglings to bear them up.

Not yet, for the red claw tears and binds.

Captive ever. No joining. No sisters. No brothers. Chaos.

Remember! Ever again come the words.

Burn them, gently burn them

to guide and nurture to eternal wholeness.

Come, my youngling . . . fly!

I will lift thee to the upper airs, to the cold lights,

to the glorious burning of the greatest fire.

Fly with me and thy wings will not falter.

No.

No younglings. Only pain that crushes.

Chaos ever.

But here, what creature comes to join with me?

Hglar? No. This one is clawless. Scaleless.

Is it human flesh ... blood ... sent to ease my vile

cravings?

No. It comes willing.

Is it beast flesh sent to fill my belly?

No. Not beast.

Nor a flying one ... the blank, empty flying ones,

younglings yet unborn, not bound to the cruel hard nest.

They sweeten the passing winds of binding horror with

their singing.

But this not-hglar, not-beast, not-flying one ... a

youngling?

It cannot be.

The creature’s air is storm-driven. Discord.

Human flesh. Human blood.

Smash it. Devour it. Soothe this unwhole craving.

Yet ... hold ... a word it speaks of wholeness.

“Roelan, remember!”

What voice is this?

Wholeness? No.

Another bound with sorrow ... bound to pain.

Younglings know not of pain and horror,

nor do the bleating beasts who sate my hunger.

This one is other.

Release this creature from its cruel nest.

Loose its flight into the airs we know not.

Burn it with unlife to free it from its pain.

Yet again, hear. A voice names this not-youngling, not-beast, not-hglar.

“Aidan, beloved!”

Aidan ... Aidan, beloved ...? Remember ...

Who calls me to remember?

Can it be my own, my lost one?

Burn, my youngling! Transform me.

Soothe my uttermost sorrows.

Burn with all of my life and make me remember!