The Assassin King
“You mentioned this once to me before, but it is not an entity I have any knowledge of outside of your words,” said Ashe.
“The Weaver is one of the manifestations of the element of Time,” the Patriarch said seriously. “Those who know the lore of the Gifts of the Creator generally only count five, the worldly elements, fire, water, air, earth, and ether. But there are other elements that exist outside the world. One of them is the element of Time, and Time in pure form manifests itself in many ways. The World Trees—Sagia, the Great White Tree, and the three others that grow at the birthplaces of the elements—are manifestations of Time. As is the Weaver.
“The Weaver appears as a woman, or so it seems, though you can never recall what her face looks like after you see her, no matter how much you study it at the time. She sits in that drowsy, timeless place, before a vast loom, on which the story of Time is woven in colored threads, in patterns, the warp, the weft, the lee.”
“The Weaver is the manifestation of Time in history,” he continued. “She does not intervene in the course of events, merely records them for posterity. It is a fascinating tapestry that she plaits, intricate in its connectivity. All things, all beings, are threads in the fabric; it is their interconnectivity that weaves what we know as life. Without those ties that the threads have to one another, there is merely void; absence of life.”
Ashe nodded. “When you told me of this before, you said that in those ties, there is power—that those ties bind soul to soul, on Earth and in the Afterlife. It is the connection that is made in this life that allows one soul to find another in the next. This is the means by which love lasts throughout Time.” His hand covered Rhapsody’s, and they exchanged a glance that brought smiles to their faces, in spite of the coming threat
“I did,” said the Patriarch. “But what I did not tell you was what I noticed in the tapestry she was weaving. In this massive record of history there are millions of threads, woven together into the perfect depiction of the tale of Time.
“In one place, however, there is a flaw—a discrepancy that in a tapestry on this side of the Veil would scarcely be noticed, if it was seen at all, an imperfection in thread or technique. But an imperfection in history that has already occurred should not be possible in the Weaver’s tapestry; it is only a record of what has gone before, without variability or equivocation. It is almost as if the threads of Time had been taken apart and rewoven there—as if Time itself had been altered in this one place in the Past.”
The only sound for a long moment was the crackling of the lantern flame.
“Time—rewoven?” Ashe asked at last. “How can that be? I thought you said the Weaver does not interdict in history, but just records it.”
“Aye,” said the Patriarch. “And as far as I know, she does not. But the split threads, the imperfections in history, appear only once in all of the tapestry, at least from what I could see—and it seems to have happened in the Third Age of history, at the very beginning of the Seren War—centuries before Gwylliam’s coronation, or the Cymrian exodus from Serendair.”
Gwydion saw the blood leave the faces around the room, most especially that of his guardians.
“Be there any clues as to how Time was altered?” Rial asked.
Constantin shook his head. “Only a prophecy woven into the threads above the flaw, a riddle of sorts that seemed to precede whatever event would have left history marred.”
“Do you remember it?” Anborn asked tersely.
“Indeed,” replied the Patriarch. “It was a primary object of my studies while I was beyond the Veil, but I never was able to connect it to anything else in history. It appears to be the last prophecy uttered in pure Time, before whatever change occurred took place.”
“Tell us, man, and be quick about it!” Anborn ordered harshly.
The Patriarch shot him a look of displeasure, then turned to the Lady Cymrian, whose face was now pale as milk.
“I speak these words to you as a Lirin Namer, m’lady, in the fervent hope that you might be able to decipher them,” he said softly. “To my knowledge they have never been uttered in this world, as they took place in Time before it was changed.” He cleared his throat and intoned the words carefully.
“THE PROPHECY OF THE CHILD OF TIME:
Brought forth in blood from fire and air
Sired of earth
A child of two worlds
Born free of the bonds of Time.
Eyes will watch him from upon the earth and within it
And the earth itself will burn beneath him
To the song of screams and the wails of the dying
He shall undo the inevitable
And in so doing
Even he himself shall be undone.
This unnatural child born of an unnatural act
The mother shall die, but the child shall live
Until all that has gone before is wiped away
“Like a tear from the eye of Time.”
Rhapsody’s back went rigid. Her shoulders stiffened and her arms began to shake. Then she looked down at the sleeping child in her arms. Her lips, until that moment firmly pressed together, responding to neither taunt nor tenderness, fell open as the words spilled out of her mouth.
“Dear One-God,” she whispered.
7
At the border of the Hintervold and Canderre
The wyrm paused at the bitter river, silver with glacial ice, that separated the southeastern edge of her lands from the northern tip of Roland. Her body was trembling from exhaustion and the cold that clung to the Hintervold long into spring. She had fought to drag herself this far, had battled the wind, the loss of blood, and the confusion that continually took her mind whenever she tried to concentrate for more than a few moments on anything other than the woman she wanted to kill.
It seemed to her, poised on the brink of the flowing glacial melt, that she was losing the battle.
The river, for all its rushing rapids, was shallow, the dragon knew. The inner sense that she had been gifted with from birth had allowed her the same ability to assess the world around her in intimate detail that all wyrms possessed, even when she had been in human form, though she did not remember that time. Apparent to her in minute specificity was the temperature of the tumbling water—a hairsbreadth above that of solid ice—the speed at which it was traveling—two and a quarter times as fast as an unsaddled stallion could run—the number of fingerling cetrinfish that slept in the mud of the riverbed—seven hundred thirty-six thousand four hundred eighty-eight—and myriad other pieces of information about the height of the clouds above her, the degree of snowmelt on the riverbank, its width, the trees that surrounded it, all the elements of life that were taking place around her.
The number of facts to process was clouding her mind. The dragon struggled to clear it, focusing all her attention on the river.
The form she had been trapped in, seemingly for the rest of her life, was a cold-blooded one, and so exposure to a great degree of cold might serve to slow her heart to the point of death, she knew. Conversely, the hated thing that was expanding within her, tearing her flesh, causing her agony, was growing from the heat that her body generated, the firegems within her stomach that allowed her to vent her anger in caustic flame were feeding the steel, allowing it to grow.
Anwyn quickly calculated that the river’s chill might make it stop, though she knew that the three-chambered heart that beat within her serpentine chest might choose to follow suit.
She decided she had no choice but to take the plunge.
Steeling herself as she had against the pain of her wound, the beast slowly slid into the frigid waters.
Her gnarled feet slipped almost immediately against the slimy rocks at the bottom of the riverbed, causing her bleeding chest to slap the crest of the rapids. The wyrm gasped from the shock, struggling to keep from falling, face first, into the river and being swept away by it. There was something both old and young in the translucent water, the know
ledge that it was simultaneously forty thousand years and forty minutes old at the same time, having been glacial ice less than an hour before. In spite of the pain and cold, the beast liked the sense of Past that raced along with the current, like time slipping over her the way water runs down a hole in the ground, returning to where it belongs.
I will live, she thought angrily to herself. No matter how much they seek to destroy me, I will always prevail, because my hatred is strong.
The wyrm came to a stop midstream; the water was barely up to the joints in her legs. Once she adjusted to the temperature, she found that the dissolved solids speeding along around her gave her a sense of strength, a tie to the Past, a prehistoric time that only she could see. Even without the spyglass it was coming into focus, a land, far off, of dry desert sands and healing springs, of rocks for basking beneath the moon and temples that lay buried in two millennia of clay beneath the skittering wind.
Kurimah Milani, she thought. It was a place lost to the desert long before her birth, a land that had been beyond Elynsynos’s dominion, and thereby she knew almost nothing of it, save for its reputation as a place of almost divine healing that had been swallowed in sand and howling wind five hundred years before her father had set foot on the soil of the Wyrmlands. A place of the past, truly, she mused, struggling for purchase, finally abandoning the struggle and allowing her feet to sink into the muddy earth below the riverbed. As I am a thing of the Past, perhaps it will welcome me.
The dragon, her feet anchored in the frozen silt of the riverbed, slowly began to make her way east, fighting the current each step of the way.
8
Haguefort, Navarne
“Rhapsody, I beg of you, please do not panic,” Ashe said quickly. His hands moved under the baby’s back, even though the loss of color in his wife’s face was scarcely greater than that in his own. “You remember what my father said about prophecies—that they are not always as they seem to be.”
He carefully took his son into his arms as his wife leaned back against the earthen walls of the chamber, and attempted to smile down at the infant, but could not close his ears to the memory of the rest of his father’s statement. The value of seeing the Future is often not worth the price of the misdirection, Llauron had noted. Ashe had found that while the interpretation of prophecies could be misleading, in the end to ignore them was a choice with even more dire consequences.
“I am not panicking,” Rhapsody said, her voice steady, though her face was still pale. “But there is no question in my mind that Meridion may well be the child of which this prophecy speaks, though I do not understand why something in the tapestry of the Weaver, from a time where history seems to have been undone, would apply to him. When Jal’asee, the Sea Mages’ ambassador from the Gaematria, was here during Gwydion’s investiture, he spoke to me of the lore that was growing within me, with the mixing of your blood and mine. He used that same nomenclature—saying that he would be a Child of Tune.” She inhaled, remembering the mage’s words, spoken with the wisdom of the most ancient of all races.
Your child will be blessed and cursed, with the power of all the elements, Rhapsody. You walked through the fire at the heart of the Earth—do not fear; of course I know this, because you clearly absorbed it. What the rest of the world mistakes for mere beauty, one such as myself, who has seen the primordial elements in their raw form, can recognize them. You and your child were cradled in the arms of the sea during your recent captivity—I know this too, not by seeing it, but because the waves told me of it during my journey here from Gaematria. Your husband is the Kirsdarkenvar, the master of the element, so there is a tie to water in both parents. The earth is in you both as well—you because you have traveled through Her heart, your husband because he is descended of the wyrm Elynsynos, as thus linked to it, as you are both linked to the star Seren. And finally, as the Lirin queen you are a Child of the Sky, a daughter of the air. So your child will have all of the elements nascent within his blood. Do you know what all of those elements add up to?
Tell me, she had whispered.
Time. He will have the power of Time. I hope you will do me the honor of allowing me, when the child is old enough and the occasion permits, to help teach your child how to use it.
“Then, when he was born,” she went on, “he, like all dragons, needed a name to be formed, and so I gave him one that harked back to Merithyn and his own father, but ultimately I wove the phrase Child of Time into his appellation as well.”
Ashe nodded at the memory. His time with his new son had been so brief, but at least Fate had been kind enough to allow him to witness the baby’s birth in the cave of the Lost Sea, the lair of his great-grandmother, Elynsynos, where Rhapsody had taken refuge.
Elynsynos, who had long ago forsaken her earthly draconic form for one of ether, had taken the physical shape of a woman, the same form she had assumed to meet Merithyn, his Seren great-grandfather, so that she could assist Krinsel, the Bolg midwife, with the delivery.
As he witnessed the miracle unfold, Ashe’s eyes had gone from his wife’s face to that of his great-grandmother, who in all the elegance of her regal beauty wore the plainly excited, childlike expression he had often seen her wear in dragon form. He had continued to watch in a mix of fear and awe until he felt Rhapsody’s hand clutch his. He closed his eyes now, relishing the memory like a treasure in his own hoard.
Sam?
Yes, Aria? The word was Lirin for my guiding star, and it had fitted her role in his life perfectly.
She had reached up falteringly and rested her small hand on his chest.
I need the light of the star within you. Our child is coming.
He had bent closer to her and rested his hand atop hers.
Whatever you need. How can I give it to you?
Open your heart. Welcome your child.
All Ashe could do was nod as Rhapsody began to softly sing the elegy to the lost star, Seren, that she had learned from the Seren Sea Mage. As she sang she wept, listening only to the music radiating from the piece of that same star that had been sewn within the realm of the Rowans within his own chest, the pure, elemental song of the lost star, blended with the music of wind and fire, the lore that resided within her, and the earth and water that had come from his blood.
Come forth, my child. Come into the world, and live.
Ashe felt his throat tighten, remembering how close she had been to death as his son was coming to birth.
Elynsynos had conferred one last time with Krinsel, the Bolg midwife Achmed had brought from Ylorc at Rhapsody’s request, then the dragon in Seren form raised her hands in a gesture of supplication and reached into Rhapsody’s belly from above, her hands passing through as if they were made only of mist and starlight.
It was, he thought, the most magical thing he had ever witnessed.
Elynsynos then drew back her hands and lifted aloft a tiny glowing light, pulling it gently from his wife’s failing body and putting it on her chest, into her hands.
Name him, Pretty, so that he can form.
Ashe had barely heard the words she had spoken over the thundering of his own three-chambered heartbeat.
Rhapsody had reached for him with one hand. When his fingers had entwined with hers, she whispered the Naming intonation.
Welcome, Meridion, Child of Time.
For a moment, nothing remained in her other hand but the glowing light. Then slowly a shape began to form, a tiny head, smaller hands held aloft, then waved about. A soft coo erupted a moment later into a full-blown wail, and suddenly the cave was filled with the ordinary human music of a crying infant.
The most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
“I still believe it is very possible that this prophecy is not even about our child,” he said to the assembled group. “There are too many things that do not apply; obviously, and blessedly, Rhapsody did not in fact die, as the mother in the prophecy was proclaimed to do. Furthermore, even though he is unique and unusual in his lor
e and lineage, Meridion is not an unnatural child.” His face colored for a moment. “And he was certainly not born of an unnatural act; he came into the world, had his beginnings, in the same way every other child does.”
“I’m not so sure that’s true,” Achmed said. “Sexual congress with a dragon could possibly be viewed by any number of reasonable minds as an unnatural act. It is certainly not something I want to contemplate on a full stomach.”
A flash of heat shot through Ashe, and ugly words spilled forth from his mouth before he could stop them.
“And what, then, would you consider your own conception, Achmed? I shudder to even imagine what coupling would have produced a being that is half Dhracian, one of the most ancient of all the world’s races, and half Firbolg, one of the most bastard strains of demi-human monsters ever to scar the face of the earth. You’re hardly one to talk about being born of unnatural acts.”
Rhapsody regarded him reproachfully as the rest of the council stared at him in silence. The Bolg king said nothing, but the Sergeant-Major glowered at him in a way that added threat to the very air of the tiny hidden room.
“Perhaps it is not Meridion’s conception, but rather his actual birth that the prophecy means by brought forth in blood from fire,” Rhapsody said. “Not even you can deny, Sam, the unusual circumstances of his delivery. His birth took almost all the blood in my body, from which I am still weak. And, given what has happened to me over time, it could be assumed that I am the fire from which he was brought forth, and you, as a dragon, are the earth that is his sire. But it seems to me that all of this is irrelevant. If there’s any chance whatsoever that the Child of Time Talquist is seeking could be Meridion—or if Talquist thinks he is—then we must do everything we can to protect him, whether or not he is the child of which the prophecy speaks.”
“I agree,” said Ashe. He exhaled deeply, contemplating what to do next.
“I thought, Rhapsody, that you are supposed to remain silent,” said Anborn. “There is still much to report; I do not believe His Grace is finished with his tale, and I am by no means finished with mine. Let’s get on with this.”