“Tell me more of the implications of this nightmare,” he said finally to Anborn.
The General exhaled, still watching the port below.
“A certain amount of increase in trade is to be expected when a guild hierarch, someone who has excelled in the mercantile all his life, assumes a throne,” he said quietly, not watching Gwydion’s face. “That’s not what we are seeing here. Slaves such as these are not for the amusement of the arena; they are for the production of goods. We are seeing the buildup to war, also not unexpected, though Talquist has been hiding behind a cover of peace and the cultivation of prosperity in his lands.
“What is terrifying is the scale—we came here on an ordinary day, without being seen, and have witnessed, therefore, an ordinary day’s activities. If this is how Talquist operates on an ordinary day—if Ghant has gone back to being a military port, with ships offloading supplies totally possessed by the Crown, then the scale of what he is planning is unimaginable. It dwarfs the buildup to the Cymrian War—and that conflict almost destroyed the entire continent.”
“Is there any other possible explanation?” Gwydion asked, already knowing the answer.
“No,” Anborn said flatly.
“Then the only thing to do is to return to Navarne at once and warn Ashe,” Gwydion said.
“Indeed you must.”
The young duke blinked. “Me? You’re not coming?”
“No. I’m here, so I may as well make use of the journey. I’m going to ride east to Jierna’sid and scout as many of the harbor points, mines, work-fields, and arenas as I can along the way. Once I get to the capital, I will gather as much intelligence as I can, then I will return and aid your godfather in planning the strategy for the war I’ve told him all along was coming.”
Gwydion fought down his panic, which had risen above the knot in his gorge and was threatening to choke him.
“Alone?”
The Cymrian hero reached out had steadied the young man’s shoulder.
“You can do this; do not be afraid. The honor guard is suitable to defend the coach if you are attacked, and the sword you carry will be a decided advantage against any brigands you should engage, or soldiers, if it comes to that, but it won’t, because Talquist will not wish to tip his hand by assaulting a noble in the Cymrian Alliance, at least not yet. If you follow the route back that brought us here, you will be fine, Gwydion. Once you’re out of Sorbold you can stop at any of the way stations of the guarded mail caravan and demand aid. You’re the duke now; they will give you whatever you want, including supplies, a fresh horse, and escort back to Navarne. Just keep all the lessons I’ve taught you in mind.”
“I—I meant you, alone,” Gwydion stammered. “How are you going to make it across the Sorbold desert—”
The Lord Marshal’s brow darkened like a thunderhead. He raised himself up on his elbows and slapped the ground, sending a scattering of sand into Gwydion’s eyes.
“I’d been traveling this continent alone for centuries before your father was an itch in your grandfather’s trousers,” he scowled. Then he dragged himself over the rocks to where the horses waited, and slowly, painfully crawled up his mount’s side, until he was clinging to the stirrup. Gwydion hurried over to him, but the ancient hero slapped him away, pulling himself with great effort into a vertical position, his useless legs limp beneath him. Gwydion could only stand there, suffering silently, as he watched Anborn struggle into the saddle. Finally, when he was atop the horse, he looked down at the young duke with a mixture of triumph and exhaustion in his eyes.
“Mount up,” he said, his voice ringing with the tones of a general. “I will accompany you back to the honor contingent in Evermere, then as far back as Jakar; I want to see what is happening in the gladiatorial arena there. After that you’re on your own, but you will be just over the border of Tyrian. I suggest you ride the forest road; your ‘grandmother’s’ status as Lirin queen will assure your safety there. Tell my nephew that I will be back as soon as I have fully ascertained what is going on in this godforsaken sandbox, but in the meantime, he should be girding the loins of Roland and the entire Cymrian Alliance. It may already be too late.”
The rest of the way home Gwydion’s pulse was thrumming in his ears. The drumbeat grew louder when he parted company with Anborn on the crossroads of Nikkid’saar, the gambling borough in the western city-state of Jakar. From the coach window he watched the ancient hero, his mentor and friend, disappear into the endless lines of foot and mounted traffic that plied the roadways of the city, hoping that this sight of him would not be his last. Then he ordered the contingent to turn west to Tyrian, on his way back to his ancestral lands and the mantle of responsibility that awaited him there.
In his mind he practiced endlessly the words he would use to break the news to his godfather that the war Anborn had so long predicted was finally coming. He pushed the honor guard to ride at double pace, finally leaving the carriage at a way station just inside the border of Roland, riding on mount the rest of the way home. His mind focused on silly things as they flew over the ground, like how far outside his keep he would need to stop and make himself less unkempt before entering, how he would communicate to Gerald Owen the urgency of his need to see Ashe without giving away his terror to the servants, how he would break the news to them without appearing as childish and frightened as he felt.
By the time he reached Haguefort, Ashe was gone.
31
HAGUEFORT, NAVARNE
Outside the window of the vast library, the snowflakes drifted down lazily on the warm wind, melting before they touched the earth.
Ashe looked absently out the window, bored with the grain treaty he was rewriting. His dragon sense had been observing the flakes in their descent. Thaw was here; winter would return soon in its fury, making travel more difficult. He chuckled to himself; he was looking for reasons to leave again.
It had been more than a month since he had last visited Elynsynos’s lair, had been able to hold his wife and sing to his child under the approving eye of the wyrm who was caring for them both. For all that he missed her presence with the intensity of a dragon missing its treasure, he had come to believe that her decision to visit with the beast was a wise one. She was much more hale and at ease under Elynsynos’s magical care and fond ministrations.
The door of the library opened silently; had he not been aware, by the nature of his blood, of every minuscule happening within a range of five miles, he would not have heard Portia come in. He had to acknowledge, albeit grudgingly, that Tristan had been correct about her worth as well as that of the other servants he had loaned to Ashe and Rhapsody. The two other women were still awaiting their full usefulness, but Portia had quickly become an invaluable member of the household staff. She was quiet and unassuming, entering a room or delivering a message in a way that was never disruptive. Oftentimes she was gone without even leaving a trace of her vibration on the air of the room.
She gave a quiet cough now, a subtle verbal sign Ashe had learned was her way of informing him that his noon-meal repast was warm and would chill unpleasantly, then took hold of the door handle again.
Just as her hand began to turn the handle, the dragon in Ashe’s blood caught the slightest hint of a scent on the wind, a fragment of cinnamon and a drop of vanilla, mixed with the strange and intoxicating aroma of woodland flowers. It reached down into his brain, into memory so deep it did not even need consciousness to be evoked.
Rhapsody’s scent.
He shook his head infinitesimally, and the scent cleared. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a golden flash, like the movement of a fall of hair. He looked up quickly, turning in time to see Portia’s tall, dark form start through the door.
Not a sign of golden hair anywhere.
He ran a hand through his own metallic red-gold hair, then called out to her just as she was closing the door behind her.
“Portia?”
The chambermaid turned, her dark eyes wide with
surprise.
“Yes, m’lord?”
Now that she was there, staring at him in confusion, anything Ashe would have asked fled from his brain, and he found himself speechless. He gestured clumsily with his hands, trying to think of a way to phrase a question that didn’t sound utterly insane, but no words would come into his mind.
He wanted her to explain how suddenly her presence, fleeting as it was, had reminded him, in a primitive sensory way, of his wife.
And realized in the same instant that she would think him unbalanced if he told her such a thing.
He smiled awkwardly, then shook his head as he rubbed the back of his neck.
“Sorry,” he said. “I—I don’t remember what I was going to ask you.”
Portia dropped a curtsy.
“Ring for me if you remember, m’lord,” she said pleasantly. “Good evening.”
Over the next few days it happened several times more.
At first Ashe suspected trickery; his upbringing and nature did not allow for an easy application of trust, and so he began to watch Portia carefully, noting her movements, keeping track of her out of the corner of his eye, and when she left the room, with his innate dragonsense.
Each time he felt a twinge of shame afterward.
The human side of his nature had granted him his father’s ability at cool, detached assessment and equanimity, so after a week or so of noting her movements, he began to look elsewhere for an explanation of what he had noticed. The new servant was discreet, modest, and kept to herself. She rose early, kept her quarters straight, worked hard, was prompt when summoned, eschewed after-hours gatherings with others who worked in the keep, and rebuffed the advances made by a young man who had come to deliver foodstuffs to the buttery from Avonderre. She was tall, broad-shouldered, and dark, with deep brown eyes and an olive complexion, a physical opposite of Rhapsody’s slight Lirin frame, rosy skin, blond hair, and green eyes. Her behavior appeared to be above reproach; since Ashe could not read minds or look into people’s hearts, he had little other choice but to assume she was not responsible for his odd inclinations.
Once Portia herself was ruled out he began to muse, almost to the point of melancholy, about why he was seeing aspects of his wife in a serving maid. Certainly he missed her, had always missed her in her absence, and had been driven to the brink of insanity when she was missing the last summer, taken by an old nemesis and hidden in a sea cave where the water, normally an element over which he had power, clashed against the rocks, hiding her from his inner sense. The kidnapping had loosed a wild ugliness in him, a desperation that felt uncomfortably close to the madness of dragon blood that he had seen in some of his other relatives.
I am distracted at best, going insane at worst, he thought glumly, blotting the ink on a new draft of the harbor code he was writing. If she knew, she would come home.
The thought kindled in his second nature an interest that took a while to extinguish. Almost as much as the man craved her company because of his love for her, the dragon sought it as well, but for different reasons. There were gemlike qualities to Rhapsody—her eyes a clear emerald, her hair like golden flax—that had been imbued in her both by nature and by her rather life-changing experience of walking through the fire at the Earth’s core. It was as if all physical flaw had been burned away, and perfection was something that appealed to the avarice in the dragon’s nature.
Blessedly, it was the existence of flaw that the man cherished, the pigheaded stubbornness, the occasional inability to see the forest for the trees, the wild anger that exhibited itself at inexplicable times, all parts of this woman that he enjoyed as well, and so the duality of his nature remained in agreement and in balance, despite taking opposite sides of the debate.
But now, if the physical cues that reminded him of his wife were beginning to manifest themselves for no reason, there could be more beneath the surface. Upon contemplating that possibility, Ashe felt cold.
Because it might be a signal that the dragon side of him was beginning to take over.
His desire to see her return grew stronger. He countered in by chanting under his breath, reminding himself that she was happier in the lair of the dragon than she was in Haguefort, and ultimately safer, but the diversion only worked for a short while. Then he would see Portia pass by, carrying linens or a tray to the kitchen; she would bow or smile slightly at him and hurry away, leaving in her wake a flicker of golden hair, a flash of rosy cheek and the scent of soap and vanilla.
He began to dream about his wife ceaselessly, fevered dreams that caused him to wake, sweating with unmet passion or the shivering chills of fear. Some nights in his dreams she came to him, pulled the covers aside, and settled down into his arms; from those dreams he awoke feeling lost and sick, his head pounding as if it were about to split.
After the worst of those nightmares Portia had come into his rooms, as she often did, delivering a clean basin and fresh, warm water for his morning shave. She bowed and disappeared, leaving such a strong image of Rhapsody in Ashe’s mind that he pulled the covers over his head and groaned loudly enough to frighten the tabby cat in the corner into a frenzy.
Finally the last blow to his peace of mind was struck on an especially cold night.
Ashe was sitting before the fire again, warming himself by its flames and in thoughts of his wife, when the serving maid entered the room, carrying a tray with his supper. She placed it down on the table before him, uncovered the plate, and turned to go; Ashe caught the scent of spice and vanilla, and the faintest hint of summer flowers in the folds of her rustling skirts. But rather than leaving, she came slowly up behind him, the heat of her body far more intense than that of the fire on his back.
With the lightest of touches, she let her hands come to rest on his shoulders, then allowed them to run lightly over his collar as if she were smoothing it. Her hands closed gently on the heavy muscles of his shoulders, her thumbs dug deliciously into the tight bands that encircled his spine as her fingers gently massaged the soreness from his neck.
Just as Rhapsody had always done.
She had magic in her hands, magic that soothed his tension and brought warmth to the deepest places that were tight and sore. Against his will Ashe closed his eyes, surrendering for a moment to the blissful ministrations of her hands.
Then went cold with the horror of what was happening.
Rage began to burn in his belly, anger at the liberties this servant was taking with him, but a deeper fury was building, directed at himself for allowing her to take those liberties.
And enjoying them.
He tried to keep his smoldering anger from igniting too quickly, reminding himself that it was a common practice in other keeps, other castles, for the servants to believe that servicing the master’s needs, physical and sexual, was part of their indenture. When he was an adolescent his own father, a holy man widowed by Ashe’s birth, had had a coterie of whores, each of whom had the countersign to open the secret door into Llauron’s office. So he kept himself as steady as he could, despite his inner desire to fling the girl across the room.
He set his teeth and spoke in as calm a voice as he could.
“Portia,” he said quietly, “you have truly beautiful hands. Soft as milk, and gentle. It would be a shame if I have to cut them off, which I will, if you don’t remove them from me immediately.”
A gasp of shock went up from the doorway. Ashe spun in his chair.
The serving girl was standing in the doorframe, the lid of the serving tray still in her hands. She began to tremble in confusion, tears forming in her large brown eyes.
Ashe looked wildly around him; his meal was still on the table before him, untouched. The nap of the silk carpet showed two sets of her footprints, and his dragon sense could immediately tell from the lack of heat in them that she had made her way directly to the door, rather than lingering.
His stomach clenched.
“Forgive me,” he stammered. “I—I thought—”
&
nbsp; The young woman burst into tears.
Ashe pushed the tray aside and rose; Portia froze, her body going rigid with shock.
“I am sorry, again, I apologize,” the Lord Cymrian said awkwardly. “You may go.”
Portia dropped a quick curtsy and skittered through the door, closing it behind her. She waited until she had gotten all the way back to her bedroom, had thrown herself on her bed and pulled the cover over her head, before allowing herself the pleasure of a grin.
By that time, the Lord Cymrian was no longer thinking about her, and was actively ignoring anything his dragon sense might tell him about her. He had bounded up the stairs, two at a time, to gather the provisions he would need for his trip to the silent lake in the forest of Gwynwood.
He did not even wait until morning to leave.
32
THE DRAGON’S LAIR
The silence of the forest was broken occasionally by the twitter of winterbirds.
Achmed stopped long enough in his trek to point a deadfall out to Krinsel, the Bolg midwife, before stepping over a rotten tree. He waited until the woman had nodded her understanding and had circumvented the natural trap before turning and continuing deeper into the forest.
They had been traveling along a tributary of the Tar’afel River for some time, knowing that the brook would eventually empty into a quiet lake near the dragon’s lair. Achmed was listening intently, paying little attention to the glistening white trees, their branches dripping soft drops of snow in the heat of the morning sun.