“Good fortune be with you,” he said as Rath made his way down the causeway.
Rath stopped and looked over his shoulder.
“I will bring you the tale, if I am alive to tell it,” he said.
Then he vanished into the wind.
41
Beyond the walls of Highmeadow, northern Navarne near the province of Bethany
The day had been a long and fruitless one. Ashe’s head was pounding, from the reports of damage to Sepulvarta and the clashing of soldiers in the course of the evacuation of the Krevensfield Plain, to the arguments of the dukes about the allocation of resources for defense of the various provinces. The reconvening of the Council of Dukes in this new fortress had done nothing to ease the contentiousness of their discourse, as Ashe had hoped it would. He had been as patient as he could for as long as he could, until finally the hollow ache inside him threatened to cause his head to split.
“We will reconvene in the morning,” he had told the Council of Dukes from behind an enormous pile of papers on the desk before him. All had withdrawn quickly at the tone in his voice save for Tristan Steward, who had remained behind in the grand library.
“You could do with a glass of brandy, my friend,” he said, “and something to eat; if an army travels on its stomach, he who is commanding the army should not neglect his own. I will have something sent up for you.”
He went to the sideboard and retrieved a heavy crystal glass into which he poured three fingers of clear amber liquid, a honey brandy from the province of Canderre, known the world over for its excellent libations and other luxurious goods. He poured a glass for himself as well, and handed the first one to the Lord Cymrian.
Ashe waved him away.
“Thank you, no,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”
“But you must be thirsty,” Tristan Steward pressed. “You’ve been answering inane questions for the better part of the day, Gwydion. Even the Lord Cymrian deserves a cessation of the constant barrage of war preparation.” He set the glass down on the table in front of Ashe, whose head was resting on his forearm. “I’ll leave you to your thoughts. Be certain to get some sleep. Good night.”
“Thank you,” Ashe murmured as the door closed behind him, staring at the firelight dancing within the bowl of the glass. There was something fascinating about the way the gold liquid caught the light, refracting it into the warm colors of flame. As always, anything to do with fire reminded him painfully of Rhapsody.
Against his better judgment, he took the glass in hand and allowed the alcohol fumes to seep into his nose, stinging his sinuses and warming them a split second later. He took a sip; the liquid was as smooth as silk, and warm, filling his mouth with the delightful taste and his nose with a rich vapor. He had to credit Tristan Steward for knowing his drink.
The door opened quietly again. Ashe turned and glanced over his shoulder.
Rhapsody was there again, this time clothed not in traveling garb but in a filmy gown of thin white silk. Backlit by the fire, he could see the slender lines of her legs, the appealing curves of her torso shadowed through the flimsy material, tapering up to the swell of her breasts, above which the naked skin of her throat gleamed.
I miss you, she said, her voice at once soft and smoky.
Ashe took another swallow of the burning liquid.
“Go away,” he muttered. “You are a phantasm, a figment of my pathetic imagination. Or a sign of my pending insanity; go away.”
She smiled and came to him, the silken gown whispering around her bare feet.
I am no phantasm, she said, bending down beside him and filling his nostrils with the warmth of her scent. Not as long as I am within your heart.
Exhausted from keeping the dragon at bay, lonely and overwrought, Ashe reached out his hand, a soldier’s hand, calloused and worn from battle and the heft of a sword hilt, and brought it, trembling, to rest on the smooth hollow of her neck. Her skin was warm and smooth; her breath quickened beneath his touch.
“You are not real,” he said softly. “Though the All-God knows I want you to be.”
I can be, she whispered in return.
Ashe looked away. He closed his eyes and brought his forehead to rest on his forearm again. He lay there, allowing the fumes of the brandy to seep into his brain, his dragon sense registering the shape of the dream that stood beside him, waiting.
He felt the warmth of lips on his neck, the tickle and sweet scent of freshly washed hair, the aching availability, the willingness, the need.
And then he brought his head around quickly, and opened his eyes.
The chambermaid was there again, looking down at him with the same smile that had been on his wife’s face a moment before.
“Why are you here, Portia?” he asked brokenly. “What do you want of me?”
“Whatever you want of me.” The tone of her voice was almost magically inviting, stirring all of the nerves in his body to life.
Ashe slammed the chair back and brought his hands down on the table before him.
“What are you doing?” he shouted. “Why do you always manage to be around me when my mind is fragmented—or is it that my mind is fragmented because you’re around me?” The Lord Cymrian seized the hair of his own head and clawed at it “What sort of insidious game are you playing with me, Portia?”
The young woman’s eyes brimmed with tears.
“M’lord, I—”
The dragon within his blood exploded in rage.
“Enough! Enough!” Ashe shouted. He swept the papers before him off the desk angrily, splattering the contents of the ink well across the thick carpet. “Leave this place; go back to Bethany or wherever it is that you came from. Go work your evil wiles on Tristan Steward; climb into his bed. Perhaps he will succumb to your seduction, but I never will. Do you not think I would know you from my own wife? Did you think you could seduce me in my misery, cause me to betray all that I hold holy? You damnable beast.” Even as the dragon in his blood rampaged, his words and the voice that spoke them sounded mad to his own ears.
The chambermaid broke into tears and shuddering sobs.
“M’lord, I never—”
But the dragon in Ashe’s soul was raging, rampaging through his blood, leaving it burning in his veins.
“Silence!” he snarled, his voice more the roar of an animal than the words of a man. “Silence! Get out of my house. I want you out of here tonight; this moment! Take whatever you have and get out of here; leave my presence and do not return. I do not wish to ever see you or behold you in any way again. I do not know what trickery of the mind you are employing, but if you do not leave at once I cannot guarantee your safety here. Take whatever you brought with you; I want this entire keep purged of your presence, your essence, and anything to do with you. Go. Get out of my sight. Get out of here!” He stumbled blindly to the speaking tubes and shouted for the chamberlain.
“Gerald! Gerald Owen! Come at once and rid me of this monster!”
The chambermaid stared wildly at him for a moment longer, then buried her face in her hands and ran from the room, weeping loudly.
As she departed, something in the air of the room around Ashe seemed to shatter; the Lord Cymrian could not be certain it was a spell of some sort, a twisted snare like an invisible spider’s web that has been woven from evil power to deprive him of his sanity.
Or if it was the shattering of his sanity itself.
Ashe felt every clattering step as she bounded down the stairs, absorbed the slamming of every door in the course of her exit in the nerves of his skin. He was oddly grateful that her mourning appeared to cease very quickly; her calm returned almost immediately, judging by the beating of her heart in a normal rhythm, the slowing tides of her breath, and the deliberation with which she hurriedly packed her belongings and dashed out into the night by the back door, not even waiting to be shown out by the chamberlain. He closed his eyes, hoping for the same return to calm himself, and monitored her leaving until he could no long
er feel her presence within his lands, no longer smelled the scent of vanilla and sweet soap, wood smoke and meadow flowers in the upper reaches of his sinuses. He did not realize how badly his hands were shaking, or how rapidly his heart was thundering against his chest, or how, when the chamberlain came to him in a calmer moment, he would reconsider his tantrum, be swallowed by remorse, and need to rectify his actions.
He did realize, however, how close he had come to a mistake that would have cost him more than the whole world.
Portia ran out into the night, her heart pounding, but with the calm of one who had survived many such evictions.
She wandered the cold paths of the forest under the moon until she came to a shady glen, where the budding leaves cast black lacy shadows on the ground in the ghostly radiance all around her.
She shivered from the cold; her body had never been well padded, and the chill of the night air sank into her skin, leaving her trembling.
He will come for me, she thought. Already he regrets what he has done, and when the remorse takes over, he will come out into the night for me.
And bring me home with him again.
Tonight it will finally be consummated, she thought in delight, rubbing her hands quickly up and down her arms to warm them with the friction of it. Tonight he will finally take me in his arms, and to his bed. I will have all of him; I will ride him to the ends of the cliffs of pleasure, and as he drives himself into me, I will drive myself into his soul as well. I may not be able to evict the shadow of his wife, but she will find mine within him when she returns.
And then it will all begin.
It only took a few moments for the remorse to set in and take hold.
Ashe stood up from the table and went to the speaking tube again.
“Come, Owen,” he said, summoning the chamberlain. “I’ve been an ass. I didn’t mean to drive her out into the night, alone and without protection. Saddle up; we have to find her and bring her back. And then Tristan can make certain to take her with him when he returns to Bethany tomorrow.”
42
The halls of Canrif, Ylorc
As Ashe had predicted, the nightmares did return.
All the while they were traveling, Rhapsody had not really noticed them. There was too much occupying her mind as she, Achmed, and Grunthor made their way in haste out of the west and into the desert. When she had left the security of her husband’s arms with the baby in tow, the fear she felt at the thought of eyes above and below the earth searching for her child was nightmarish enough. Bad dreams were hardly noticeable in that time; reality was worse.
When they were encamped, she and Meridion had slept on Grunthor’s massive chest, much as she had when traveling along the Root through the belly of the earth itself. The bad dreams had been especially strong then, and while Grunthor had not been able to chase them completely away in the manner that Ashe and Elynsynos had, he had provided a large, gruff, and wide surface on which to sleep that proved to be surprisingly warm and comforting. He had also gotten good at jostling her from her dreams, talking her through the night terrors, and providing distracting conversation should he decide what she actually needed was to waken. He had not lost the knack, and especially had enjoyed cradling the tiny baby, curling up with the infant near his neck.
But the baby was gone, and now they were back in Ylorc among the Firbolg, who looked at her suspiciously as someone who had gone away and left them, the king’s harlot, or just a source of food.
Rhapsody was alone again.
She shifted in the linen sheets that dressed her large bed in her quiet chamber within the inner hallways of Canrif. She’d never particularly liked staying within the cold mountains, and in her time in the Bolglands, she had always chosen to remain in Elysian, alone, in the tiny cottage Gwylliam had once built for Anwyn in the days when they were in love, or at least pretending to be.
Rhapsody rolled over in her sleep and sighed brokenly. She missed the little house on the island in the center of the grotto’s lake, a place of hidden magic where she had first felt safe upon coming to the new world. She and Ashe had fallen in love there, or at least had admitted that they had for the first time. They had spent a short but sweet spring there, exploring the purple crystalline caves, swimming in the dark water where filaments of stone formations and underwater stalagmites formed lazy cathedrals of beautiful muted colors beneath the surface. The firmament of the cave had been carefully bored through with dozens of holes, allowing spots of sunlight to shine down upon it, making gardens possible. Rhapsody had passed many happy hours tending to the baby trees, planting flowers and herbs, and generally reliving her childhood, in a simpler time on a farm in the middle of the Wide Meadows of Serendair.
Now, alone and frightened in the darkness of Ylorc once more, she was defenseless against the demons of the night that lived in her own mind. As long as she could remember she had been prescient, had seen the future and sometimes the past in her dreams, and so she did not drug herself into a deeper stupor or consume the herbs that might have made her slumber so intense that her mind could not process what it had seen, for fear that she should miss something that was important, the need to be known in order for those she loved to remain safe.
And so she submitted to the dreams, to the horrid sights of burning ships in a harbor alight with flames; the images of terrified villagers running from soldiers with swords, attacking from horseback as they passed through, riding down anyone they saw; of great winged shapes that streaked through the night sky, raining fiery death down on the thatched roofs of houses below.
But mostly she dreamt of Ashe.
Except for the times when she employed her skills as a Singer, reaching out to him over the waves of time with the musical lore she had studied, most of her dreams of her husband were terrifying. Night after night she saw him in her sleep, cold and wandering, sometimes adrift in the waves of the sea, lost without the family that the man treasured, that the dragon considered its own. She could feel, even hundreds of miles away, the unraveling of her husband’s mind, of the ascendancy of the dragon in his soul as the broken-hearted man receded back into the shadows.
Each night she wept, often losing sleep and lying in exhausted numbness throughout all the hours of the long night until the morning finally came, when it was time to return to her work on the Lightcatcher.
One particularly brutal night, she dreamt of her old home in Merryfield, of the Patchworks in the Wide Meadow where she and the boy she had called Sam had fallen in love beneath a starry sky, beneath the willow tree, alongside a meadow stream. The pasture, the stream, and the tree were all still there, all burned black to ashes in the aftermath of the Seren war. The bones of those she loved lay strewn in the field around her, and at her feet a tiny skeleton lay, its skull graced with the traces of flaxen curls.
Rhapsody began to weep as if she was seeking to empty herself of every tear.
And then, just as her mind began to fill with scenes of terror and destruction, she felt a soft musical vibration surround her, fill her ears with gentle music, chasing her dreams into the darkest corners of her mind again, as if it were opening a window in her soul, allowing sunshine in. She recognized the vibration.
It was the one emitted by both of the dragons she loved in her life, her husband and Elynsynos.
Though exhausted, Rhapsody struggled to awaken. It can’t be Ashe, she thought drowsily, fighting the dark cobwebs of sleep. I know he is not here, but I can feel the song which he used to chase my dreams away, settling me down to dreamless, restorative sleep again. It must be Elynsynos; she’s here somewhere, not dead.
Fighting the heaviness of her eyelids, Rhapsody struggled to find the vibration and opened her eyes, looking for the dragon that had chased her nightmares away.
There, on the coverlet beside her, she was greeted with the sight of tiny, twinkling blue eyes, scored with vertical pupils expanding in the dark, taking in the sight of her. Porcelain hands and feet moved about in the air amid soft co
oing sounds, coming from a head crowned with flaxen curls.
Her baby.
Rhapsody’s hands immediately went to her abdomen, once again flat beneath her palms. Then, tears of joy pouring down her cheeks, she reached out gently and caressed the smooth skin of his face, sliding her hands carefully beneath him and bringing her lips to the hollow of his neck, kissing him over and over again gratefully.
Meridion just lay on the coverlet, staring up at her in the dark, his eyes twinkling.
“I should have known,” Rhapsody murmured, smiling down at her son. “I knew you would come back; I just didn’t know that you already have the power of dragons to chase away dreams. My, aren’t you a special boy.”
The infant gurgled.
43
In the northern forest of Gwynwood, past the Tar’afel River
If Melisande had not seen two hundred foresters mount up and ride into the woods around her, followed immediately by another five hundred on foot who disappeared into the great forest behind them, she never would have known that she and Gavin were anything but utterly alone on their journey.
The mounted men who had accompanied them from the Circle for the last several weeks had taken off in two cardinal directions upon crossing the Tar’afel River, riding north and west with the rising sun behind them to the outermost edges of the lands of the dragon. The Invoker had explained to her that only the scouts assigned to the farthest reaches would continue to ride; foresters could move far more quickly and quietly on foot than on horseback when traveling through the heavy glades of virgin wood such as those that comprised the lands of Elynsynos. His face had no hint of a smile as he further explained that foresters would not wish to tempt a dragon with horse meat unless the distance made it necessary. The young Lady Navarne had listened to his explanation from atop her own mount, a thick-bodied forest mare with gray dappling.