The earth split a stone’s throw away, and the dragon appeared, a keen light burning in her searing blue eyes. She was battered, her hide tattered and reeking still, but even a mad oracle knew better than to deny a dragon her due, especially one that had come such a great distance for it.
Well met, sister. The beast’s voice was smooth with an undertone of desperation.
Manwyn shrugged. “You will find her,” she said absently, ignoring the forced pleasantries and jumping to the question she knew was coming. “But you may not want to.”
The beast’s eyes narrowed into glowing azure slits. She slithered forth from the ground, her enormous form dwarfing her sister in the empty desert. Manwyn pulled the thin silk of her tattered green gown closer around her shoulders.
What do you mean by that? The wyrm’s wind-spun voice held more than a hint of menace.
Manwyn blinked; whatever she had uttered was now gone from her memory.
Curls of angry smoke began to issue forth from the dragon’s nostrils.
Tell me where the woman I seek will be in the near Future, the draconic voice in the wind insisted. At a time when I might be able to meet her, not more than one turn of the moon. I wish it to be soon, but I will need time to travel.
The question was phrased in precisely the manner that Manwyn could understand. The clouds in her silver eyes cleared; she raised the ancient sextant and peered through it at the night sky.
“Today, until four days hence this night, she will be in the lair of our mother.”
The dragon’s heart burned at the words, hatred rising without the memory of where it had come from.
And where is the lair?
Manwyn lowered the sextant, pondering the words.
“Deep in the forest of Gwynwood, on the western coast, beyond the Tar’afel River.”
Hot flames shot forth from the dragon’s mouth, and the air roared with her fury.
The sea is more than a thousand miles to the west! I cannot travel through the earth in that time! Do not play with me, Manwyn; sister or no, I will burn you to smoldering cinders—
“You can be in Gwywood in a heart’s beat if you travel along the roots of the Great White Tree,” the mad Seer whispered, shaking in the wind. “The taproots run throughout the whole of the world, and tie in to the main root of the tree, which is bound to the Axis Mundi, the centerline of the earth. Those of dragon blood can travel along those roots in ethereal form, because the earth is ours. The roots lead directly to the Great White Tree in the center of the forest. From there the lair is only a few days’ travel for man, less for beast.”
The wyrm inhaled slowly, trying to calm her racing heart.
Where will I find a taproot? she asked casually, noting that the Oracle’s skin had gone gray and her eyes were clouding over again. Read the stars for me, sweet sister.
Manwyn looked into the sextant again.
“You will burrow into the desert sand here, following the clay until it turns brown in the north, to the dry bed of the Blood River. It is there that you will find the taproot you seek.”
The dragon’s eyes gleamed with victory.
Thank you, sister, she said distantly, her mind already turning to her path. She slid back into the rip in the clay from whence she had emerged and disappeared into the earth’s crust while the Oracle watched in confusion.
The earth had barely settled into peace in the dragon’s absence when Manwyn spoke again.
“You will kill your own progeny in pursuit of her,” she said vaguely.
Anwyn was already too far away to hear her.
The Seer stared up into the starry night, watching the southern tip of the aurora blazing in abundant color; the pulsing lights caught her fancy, and she watched until the wind became too chill.
Then she drew her filmy silk tatters around her and made her way slowly back to her decaying temple, having forgotten why and how she had come to leave it.
40
When the song of Meridion’s birth had finally faded, when the warmth of the cave had begun to dim, and the afterbirth and blood had been cleared away, Krinsel took the baby from Ashe’s arms, scowling at him as much as she could get away with, and carried him to his mother to be fed. Ashe motioned to Achmed, who had remained in a quiet corner of the cave, and came forth reluctantly. Both men traveled a way up the tunnel to be out of earshot of the women.
“Thank you for your help,” the Lord Cymrian said, offering his hand.
The Firbolg king snorted. “I don’t think observing from the corner counts as ‘help,’ ” he said sourly. “You might wish to consider thanking my midwife, however; she’s the one with the blood on her hands.”
The warmth in Ashe’s eyes dissipated.
“Well, in some way we all have blood on our hands, Achmed,” he said evenly, trying to force the wyrm in his blood from rising in ire. “At least hers comes about for a happy purpose. And I do thank you for saving my wife.”
The Bolg king nodded perfunctorily.
Ashe cleared his throat awkwardly.
“So you will be heading back to Ylorc now?”
“Shortly.”
Ashe nodded. “Then I won’t delay you. I don’t suppose I could prevail upon you to divert your travels to the Circle, or to Navarne, and send back a coach for Rhapsody and the baby?”
“No, you could not,” Achmed said testily. “The Circle and Navarne are both to the south, and quite a distance out of my way. I have already spent far too much time at parties and investitures in your lands, to the detriment of my own kingdom. I’ve done as she asked, and brought her the midwife she trusted to deliver her child. Now that is done, I see no need to stay, nor to delay our return further by running errands for you. Perhaps your position allows you to abandon your post for extended periods of time, but mine does not. Each time I journey west to attend to yet another of Rhapsody’s whims or needs I return to an abominable mess. I can barely wait to see what I am returning to this time.”
“Well, thank you, nonetheless,” Ashe replied, struggling to maintain his happy mood. “I hope you will travel well.”
The Bolg midwife coughed politely from behind the two men.
“Rhapz-dee needs two days of rest and watching, but after that, baby must return home,” she said cautiously. “Thaw is coming to an end; soon it will be too cold for him to travel—will harm his lungs.”
“They can remain with me until spring,” said Elynsynos idly, dangling a shiny necklace of glittering gems from a claw over the baby’s head and chuckling as his tiny vertical pupils contracted in the light that sparkled from it.
The Bolg woman shook her head.
“Rhapz-dee is weak. Has lost much blood. Needs healers, special medicines; must return soon.”
Ashe felt his throat constrict. “Will you stay with her the two days at least?” he asked Achmed, noting the look of concern in Krinsel’s eye. “I will leave for Navarne immediately and get the carriage myself. If you can find it in your heart to wait with Rhapsody here for the two days Krinsel says she needs watching, at least I will be able to leave her, assured she is as safe as she can be.”
“By all means, I will happily divert my plans, then, Ashe, as your peace of mind is paramount to me,” said Achmed unpleasantly. He glanced over his shoulder and met the eye of the midwife, who nodded her agreement wordlessly.
“Thank you,” the Lord Cymrian said, seizing his hand and shaking it vigorously. “If I have to leave them, it will give me comfort to know that they are safe with you. I will leave forthwith—just let me take a moment to say goodbye.”
Achmed waited until the Lord Cymrian had been gone long enough to have crossed the Tar’afel before he approached Rhapsody, who was cuddling the sleeping baby in a corner of the cave, crooning a wordless melody.
He watched her for a moment; her golden hair, normally bound back in a staid black ribbon, cascaded over her shoulders, making her appear younger and more vulnerable than he usually thought of her. She looked up at him,
her smile bright, and he felt an unwelcome tug at his heart, much as he had in their earliest days together, during their travels along the Root that bisected the world. Those were lost times, long-ago times that he occasionally found himself longing for, back before the responsibilities of kingdoms and other people had come into their lives, back when the whole world was little more than Rhapsody, Grunthor, himself, and the continuous struggle to survive one more day in a place where no one even thought to search for them.
“He’s asleep?” he asked awkwardly.
“Yes, deeply,” Rhapsody said, her smile broadening. “Would you like to hold him?”
The Bolg king coughed. “No, thanks,” he said hastily. He glanced around the glittering cave. “Where is the translation? Since I am stuck here for the next two days, I may as well make good use of my time and get started on reading it.”
Rhapsody’s face hardened, and her voice lost its gentle tone.
“Did we not go over this already?”
“We did. Give me the translation.”
Silence fell, a silence so deafening that it disturbed the child, and he began to whimper in his sleep, then wail aloud.
Rhapsody shook her head and looked away.
“Unbelievable,” she said angrily, rocking the baby as his crying increased in volume and despair. “After all we’ve just been through, after everything I’ve said, you are still insistent on carrying out this folly?”
Achmed glared at her.
“Carrying out folly is a tradition with us, Rhapsody,” he said, his voice harsher. “You never listen to my concerns, and I reserve the right to disregard yours. You’ve made your position completely clear, as clear as the promise you made to help me in whatever I needed in this matter. Since I believe I have come through for you in your hour of need, again, I would think that you would be willing, if not grateful, to return the favor. Now give me the bloody translation.”
The dragon’s head appeared, misty and ethereal, above a mountainous pile of gold and gems at the water’s edge.
Shall I eat him, Pretty? the beast inquired tartly.
Rhapsody continued to meet Achmed’s stare, matching his intensity, for a moment, then finally exhaled.
“No,” she said firmly. “Give it to him.” She drew the baby closer to herself and watched as the dragon blinked in surprise, then disappeared into the ether. A moment later a bound journal, half the pages empty, appeared on the ground at Achmed’s feet among the coins.
“Take it,” Rhapsody said bitterly. “And then be gone. I do not want to see you again.”
Achmed seized the book.
“Thank you,” he said. He opened the journal quickly and began to peruse the pages, carefully graphed in Rhapsody’s neat handwriting; much of what she had written was in musical script, but each staff had been carefully annotated.
“Go,” Rhapsody demanded. “I mean it, Achmed.”
The words rang through the cave, the Namer’s truth ringing in them.
The Bolg king raised his mismatched eyes and met hers; they were gleaming, green as summer grass.
“I told your husband I would stay two days,” he said shortly, conflicted and hating the feeling of it.
“I relieve you of your promise, even if you were unwilling to relieve me of mine,” Rhapsody said shortly. “Take your bloody translation, and Krinsel, and anything else you have ever given me, including your friendship, and go. What you have demanded has put an end to our association; I cannot save you from yourself, or from your own foolhardiness, but I do not have to watch you as you blunder into lore that you do not understand. You threaten this world, the world my child has just entered, with your actions. I can’t forgive you for that, Achmed. Go away.”
The Bolg king considered for a moment, then nodded. He turned and silently gestured at the midwife, who was watching with concern in her eyes, but she said nothing, stooping to collect her bag and its contents, before following her king up the long, winding tunnel to the light and cold of the forest again.
Rhapsody waited until their footfalls could no longer be heard echoing in the tunnel before she gave in to the tears.
The air of the cave glimmered behind and around her; Elynsynos appeared, cradling her in the crook of her claw.
There, there, Pretty, the dragon intoned softly.
Rhapsody shook her head.
“Do not comfort me, please, Elynsynos,” she said weakly, brushing her fingers over her son’s downy hair as he returned to his sleep. “What he contemplates may assure that there never is a reason for any of us to feel comforted again.”
41
NORTHERN YARIM
The dry bed of the Blood River was a deep length of sand above a layer of red clay, covered in a thin coating of snow. The dragon found the three strata to be the perfect place to cleanse the stench and remaining offal from herself; she bored up through the clay, spiraling, allowing herself the painful luxury of rolling in the sand until the snow finally coated her, cooling her angry flesh.
Any fury she had known before the assault on Ylorc had only been an irritation, an annoyance, beside what she felt now. Her anger had transmuted from the glowing hot rage of volcanic wrath to a far more frightening state, the cold, emotionless mechanisms of a dragon reviled. It was this same cold state in which she had planned the death of half a continent, had committed some of her most unholy acts, the unpardonable sins which she was grateful to have been born soulless, lest one day she should have to pay for them.
None of that mattered now. She did not remember her actions, her sins; her mind had placed but one goal into play, shutting down all other thoughts, all other desires.
She searched in vain for almost a day before she located the taproot of the Great White Tree her sister said she would find in this arid place. It had dried and withered to little more than an underground branch, but its power was still nascent in its fibrous radix. She did not directly remember the Tree itself, but somewhere in her memory there was a space where she believed those recollections should be, as if it had at one time been important to her.
The dragon steeled her nerve and concentrated, allowing her despised wyrm body to transcend material flesh and become ethereal.
Then she slid into the thin, dry root hairs, crawling along them as they thickened and grew moist, taking on speed, racing along the thicker root now, drawing the power of the tree her mother had tended so lovingly into herself as she passed from one side of the continent to the other in a beat of her three-chambered heart.
THE CIRCLE, GWYNWOOD
Gavin the Invoker had been summoned to Sepulvarta to meet with the Patriarch, the only religious leader on the middle continent of his stature. In his absence, his Filidic followers, nature priests who tended the Tree and the holy forest of Gwynwood, were clearing winter’s deadfall, harvesting the herbs and hardy flowers that had bloomed in the time of Thaw, making ready for the return of snow when the dragon appeared, hovering in the ether at the base of the Tree.
At first the Filids stopped in shock, believing they were witnessing an apparition. Three years before, Gwydion of Manosse, the Lord Cymrian, who was wyrmkin, had passed through their forest on his way to wreaking his vengeance on the apostate Invoker, Khaddyr, the thrall of a F’dor demon who had supplanted Gwydion’s father, Llauron. In his wake, much of the forest had been consumed in cleansing fire, though it was mostly the huts and settlements of the traitors that had managed to burn, while the rest had been spared.
One look into the hypnotically terrifying eyes of this beast, and any hope that such evenhandedness was forthcoming vanished.
The beast inhaled, then spewed her breath. It rushed forth in fire that burned black at the edges, glowing blue in the center as it left her maw from the sheer heat that was boiling in her belly.
Then she quickly closed her eyes and concentrated, so that she could enjoy the agony, drink in the pain and fright that was hanging in the smoky air when the fire diminished above the piles of charred bone and ash.
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It was a delicious sensation.
The wyrm opened her eyes. Now that her murderous impulse was satisfied, she saw that she was looking out at a grassy meadow surrounding the Tree, whose glistening white branches rose above her for as far as the eye could see, and stretched out over the wide meadow. Beyond the sickening haze reeking of burnt human flesh she could see a settlement of huts, some longhouses, others tiny cabins, fairly newly built, each with a tiny garden or kraal, most decorated with strange hex signs above the doorways. The image was familiar; she looked to the edge of the meadow, trying to remember what was missing, but nothing resonated.
All around her was the song of the Tree; it issued forth in a deep, melodious hum, reverberating the tones of the living earth itself, achingly beautiful. The dragon felt it tug at her heart, or whatever vestige of one she possessed. On some level she knew this place had once been important to her, that if she tried hard enough, she might locate memories that would constitute pieces of her soul here, in this natural cathedral, where one of the five trees that grew at the birthplaces of Time still stood.
The holiness of it was unmistakable, impossible to deny.
The dragon steeled her will.
I choose to be unholy, she thought grimly. It annoyed her to see that the bark of the Tree had sustained no damage from her breath, that not even the leaves had withered or burned while the grass was scorched, the tenders of the Circle reduced to human rubble. It was yet one more defiance of her power which had just been laid low by a mountainful of demi-human Bolg, and served only to drive her smoldering rage into even greater fury.
She cocked her head, looking for signs of the woman, but there was nothing on the wind, nothing but the shouting of the Filidic priests and the foresters as they evacuated the area, fleeing the onslaught they believed was coming.