Shakily she drew Daystar Clarion, the elemental sword of fire and ether; the luminous blade trembled for a split second in her hand, then stopped as Rhapsody drew herself up to her full height, her own eyes blazing with fury.
“Direct your wrath at me, Anwyn, you coward,” she said, her voice ringing in a Namer’s commanding tone.
The beast’s nostrils flared, and she rose up, her torn wings spread wide, blotting out the light of the sun. The air crackled and hissed with malevolence.
She inhaled deeply.
Achmed fired.
Three whisper-thin disks, forged of blue-black rysin-steel, sliced into the dragon’s underbelly as she reared back, each driven more deeply in by the force of the one that followed.
The recoil, and the impetuous shove from Rhapsody, left him off balance and he stumbled; he dropped the cwellan, clutching the bundle under his arm.
The dragon screamed in pain and in rage; the heat of her scorching blood was causing the disks to expand rapidly, tearing open the flesh below her throat and into her abdomen. Her first attack of breath went wide, lighting the trees above them and the brambles to an inferno of yellow-orange flame. As the forest caught fire she inhaled again, bleeding profusely, and aimed her acid breath directly at the golden-haired woman whose face had haunted her dreams.
In the fragment of a second before the immolating flames washed over Rhapsody, the air in front of her turned gray and silver with just the tiniest hint of glittering copper. A great translucent figure appeared from the ether before and around her, thin as a breath of the wind, barely visible, surrounding the Bolg king and Lady Cymrian with its body, interposing itself between them and the rampaging dragon.
Just as Anwyn exhaled, loosing fire so acidic that it melted the stones of the ground beneath her, Llauron loosed a lore of his own, letting go of the elemental earth that was within his blood and soul.
Going solid.
Forming a vast, ossified shell around the man, the woman, and the child.
Saving them.
Ending.
43
The flames washed over Llauron’s rocklike form, licking the perimeter, burning the grass beneath it. Rhapsody and Achmed could hear the blast, recognized it by the intensity of its hollow roar, could distantly make out the shrieks of wrath, then the silence.
Inside the shell it was dark; the palest of light remained, glowing ethereally. The Bolg king felt around in the darkness until he found Rhapsody’s hand, and clutched it; she was shaking violently, watching the process of Llauron’s Ending going through its terrible stages.
With the release of the earth lore came the dissipation of the starfire that was also his birthright; the cool light hardened the shell of his body, solidifying it. Her heart beat painfully against her ribs as the water within him evaporated; she felt the tears and the rain both on her face, both drying as the lore vanished into the world from what had once been the soul of a man who had loved the sea. As the water left, the shell hardened further, tempered and cooled. Only the element of wind remained; it took the form of sweet, heavy air hanging in their midst.
For a moment, no sound could be heard inside the dark cavern of Llauron’s body.
Then, quietly, Rhapsody began to weep.
Achmed’s eyes, the night eyes of a Bolg, watched as she walked over to the wall, striated in the pattern of ribs, and reached out her hand to rest it there. She slowly slid down to the floor of the cavern, overwhelmed with grief.
In his arms, the baby began to whimper as well.
Achmed stood for a moment, unmoving, then slowly lifted the swaddled bundle up against his shoulder and rocked it, swaying awkwardly back and forth.
“Shhhhhh,” he said. “Hush now.”
Outside the enormous shell of the dragon that had once been her son, Anwyn stood, frozen in shock.
At first her astonishment came from the immediacy of what had happened; a second before, she had the woman she hated in her sights, vulnerable, was anticipating the relief of her pain that would come with Rhapsody’s death, was looking forward to breathing in the bitter scent of her ashes once her body was immolated.
Then the wyrm calling himself Llauron had intervened, had appeared from the very ether, had surrounded the woman and her child and the monster who was guarding them both, and Ended. Anwyn had forgotten much of the lore of her race, but even in her fragmented awareness, she comprehended the horror, the finality, the sacrifice of what had just come to pass.
And she resented it with every fiber of her tattered, bleeding being.
The rysin-steel blades were expanding in the heat of her body; she could feel them growing larger, compressed by their cold manufacture no longer. Each breath she took tore a little more at her muscle, rent her flesh by inches, as they worked their way toward her three-chambered heart. The wyrm willed her breath to slow, tried to compress her bodily functions as much as she was able, but she could not control the beating of her own heart, the circulating of her blood.
She wanted to scream, wanted to vent her rage in fire and blood, but the disks hovered within her thoracic cavity, threatening her life with every tiny movement.
Finally she decided that she had no choice but to slowly, cautiously make her way back to the frozen north, to her lair of ice and frost. She hoped that the cold would help contain the disks with her, allowing her to pry them from her flesh, but knew that even if that were not possible, she would rather die in her lair than in this alien forest, this place where she should have memories and instead found only emptiness and denied gratification.
This place where a dragon had Ended.
That alone was enough to terrify her. In her mind she heard dark chanting, voices of beings of a different elemental race, cackling as the lore of Earth was diminished by the loss of one of her kind. She no longer could stay; the sight of the massive stone statue, its wings extended forward, wrapped around the people it had died protecting, gave her chills that resonated throughout her body, made her tremble, though later, as she crawled into the Tar’afel and swam against its hardening current, she realized that her shaking was not only from fear, but from her proximity to death herself.
Achmed listened in the darkness to Rhapsody weep. It was a sound he had hated from the first moment he had heard it, a harsh, horrific vibration, unlike the natural music she emitted that he found soothing. It tore across the sensitive nerve endings in his skin, making them vibrate with agony. He set his teeth against the pain and remained silent, allowing her to vent her grief; weak as she was from giving birth and from fleeing the dragon, she had little strength to keep it up for long.
Instead he was watching her child in the darkness. He had laid the little boy down on his back; the floor of the dragon’s stone body was warmer than the ground of the forest would have been. The child seemed to like the position, waving his tiny arms aimlessly, breathing in the cool, sweet air that hung heavily above his head.
Rhapsody leaned back against the cavern wall, spent. She did not have the night vision that Achmed was blessed with, so, to dispel the darkness and cold from the place, drew her sword and rested it on the ground, allowing the cavern to fill with its warmth and light.
“The irony is threatening to choke me,” she said dully, watching her baby entertain the Bolg king.
“How so?”
“All Llauron wanted to do was to come to know this child, and to have the child know him. He made a sacrifice to save him, and us, that is unimaginable—like sacrificing your Afterlife along with your life. And here Meridion is trapped within the shell of his grandfather’s own body, a grandfather he will never know now.”
Achmed sighed dispiritedly.
“Don’t you Lirin Namers have something you are supposed to do when these sorts of things happen?” he asked pointedly. “Like singing a Song of Passage or something, rather than just freeform bemoaning? I find your current lyrics a bit tiresome. Llauron was a complicated man, a draconic man even before he gave up his human body for an e
lemental state. He never let anything stand in the way of what he wanted or thought was right, not the well-being of his family, or the safety of his allies, or any small consideration such as that. That he was willing to do whatever this was may have been the first truly noble gesture the man ever made. Why don’t you just do whatever you are supposed to do to elegize him, and leave your grief, and the grief you are borrowing for you child, out of it? Meridion may not even miss him.”
Rhapsody exhaled, then pushed herself up a little straighter.
“You’re right about the elegy,” she said shortly. “As a Namer, it’s the least I can do. But I don’t want to sing the Lirin Song of Passage for him; I did that once, when he tricked me into immolating him with the sword, that he might attain his elemental dragon state. I don’t think I could bring myself to do that again.”
“Fine,” said Achmed, shifting to find a more comfortable place in the dark. “Sing a bawdy brothel song, or one of Grunthor’s lewd marching cadences; I’ll bet Llauron would appreciate either of those.”
Rhapsody nodded, unable to smile. “You’re probably right. For all that he had a very proper exterior, he did have a raunchy sense of humor. When I first was studying with him, he used to sing me sea chanteys every night, and some of those would have curled his followers’ hair.” She stood and walked over to Achmed, then crouched down in front of the baby, who turned his tiny eyes in her direction. “Of course, my grandfather sang the very same songs.”
She hummed wordlessly for a moment, smiling down at Meridion, then wordlessly started to croon a song of the sea. After a few moments she added the words, singing one of Llauron’s favorite chanteys, a lonely tale of wandering the wide world, never able to rest, looking for peace in the sea.
Maritime lore held no interest for Achmed, but it had been a long time since he had heard her sing. He sat quietly in the flickering light of Daystar Clarion, whose cool radiance reflected Rhapsody’s somber mood, remembering their journeys together along the Root and overland on this new continent, just the two of them with Grunthor. He missed those times more than he realized.
A strange tone buzzed in his ear; he listened more carefully and realized the baby was cooing along to the chantey with her in harmony. Rhapsody noticed it as well; her voice became softer, and she carried the tune past its ending until the child began to whimper.
“I suppose he does know his grandfather after all,” she said as she lifted him to her shoulder, patting his back. The gesture was to no avail; Meridion continued to fuss, his whimpering turning to a cackling cry.
“Well, I believe he breathed in the last of his essence; that heavy air seemed to hang over him, almost as if Llauron wanted him to absorb it,” Achmed said, his brows drawing together as Rhapsody opened her shirt and positioned the baby on her breast. He turned away hastily, to Rhapsody’s surprise, keeping his back to her while she nursed the baby.
“You don’t have to turn your back,” she said, surprised, as she drew the swaddling blanket over the two of them. “I’m covered now, and I apologize if it bothered you.” She saw him shrug, but he did not turn back to face her. “After all, we lived on the Root for a thousand years or more, and in camping conditions after that. There’s not a shred of modesty left in any of us by now.”
Achmed stared above him at the interior of the dragon cavern, noting the curves of the thoracic cavity and spine. “Had it occurred to you that I might not want to witness you nursing another man’s child?” he asked bitterly.
The silence that answered him was heavier than the air had been.
He continued to examine the intricacies of the shell Llauron had left behind until finally he could hear her patting the child’s back against her chest, humming a wordless lullabye. He turned then, finally, to see her looking above her as well.
“Gods, we’re back on the Root again, in a way,” she murmured. “Trapped in a cavern with no exit, away from anyone who might find us. And it’s dark and close in here.” Unconsciously she wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and drew the baby nearer.
“Yes, but this time we don’t have Grunthor along to make it bearable.”
“No, you’re right, we don’t.” Rhapsody’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. “You have changed so much in a few short years, Achmed,” she said sadly, swaying the baby in her arms. “Even in the darkness, I barely recognize you.”
The Bolg king’s breath escaped his mouth in a hiss of sorts as he swallowed a laugh. He stretched out his legs and wrapped his arms behind his head. “Is that so?” he said. “Perhaps it does seem that way to you, Rhapsody, because you never have really understood what mattered to me. You have always assigned me altruistic motives where none exist, because you want to believe that we have the same priorities. At one time I believed we did as well. But who really has changed here?”
The child sighed in his sleep, a high, sweet sound, and she looked more sharply at Achmed.
Achmed leaned nearer, so that his words would carry the weight without the volume. “You risk your life, and the life of a child whose fate you cannot possibly be certain of, and all of the people who follow your vision, for whatever fancy moves you. I don’t remember you ever being careless with those things before. And I, who never felt an obligation to preserve anything other than my own neck, now guard a Child of Earth, and a people who no longer wander the world eating their enemies—oh, and a foolish queen whose husband seems unable to do it alone.
“Who has changed? I suppose we both have.”
The Lady Cymrian stared at him; Achmed noted with interest that her green eyes had now cleared of the draconic pupils. The baby drifted into soft clicking sounds, and then silence. Finally she spoke.
“When first we stepped forth into this new land, Achmed, you and Grunthor were consistently annoyed that I could not let go of the past. You had fled Serendair because there was no longer anything there that mattered to you, only death waiting to find you should you have remained. But I lost everything when you decided to drag me along with you. And then all you did was complain when I mourned. ‘Serendair is gone,’ you said. ‘Your life is here now.’ You were fairly insistent that I come to accept what had happened, put the Past aside and live in the Present.”
“True,” Achmed assented. “And I gave you a project that you seemed to relish—helping to end the atrocities that Roland was committing against the Bolg, and to assist in building them into a kingdom of men, albeit monstrous ones. I gave you a duchy in my kingdom, paid for all the useless trinkets you could possibly desire—there are still two dozen gowns in Elysian, rotting quietly in the grotto.” He sat back heavily against the wall and exhaled. “Perhaps I should commandeer them and pass them out to Bolg women to wear while they are skinning game and rendering tallow.”
“By all means, do,” Rhapsody said, caressing her son’s cheek. “They can wear the skirts around their necks, the way they wore the horns of the unfortunate oxen you brought into the kingdom as codpiece decorations. But don’t avoid your own point—you are happy to see me living in the Present as long as by doing so I am achieving your ends. Should I choose to turn my attentions to other matters which you do not value as readily, such as the Cymrian Alliance or the kingdom of Tyrian, or raising a family, that is not sufficient to assuage you. In your twisted mind, I have ‘changed’ because I am no longer doing what you want of me. Perhaps it is audacious of me to expect it, but I would like to live my life as I see fit, and not by your command.”
The Bolg king snorted. “Neh,” he said. “You’d only bollix it up.”
For the first time since the Ending Rhapsody smiled slightly. “No doubt,” she acceded. “But it is mine to bollix up, Achmed. If anyone has been in support of that belief, it would be you. You have always told me that I have the strength to do things that need doing, to lead when I don’t want to, keep on when I want to give up. But you never share your reasons for anything you do, so I can’t understand them. You support me unfailingly, and feel betrayed when I can
’t do the same for you as well.”
“Something like that.”
“So explain it to me,” she insisted. “Tell me why you are so set on building this damnable thing, so willing to risk so much for it. Maybe if you could make me understand your willingness to experiment foolishly with primordial magic, I might be able to help you.”
For a long time Achmed was silent. He continued to look above him, gazing around at the interior of the cavern. Finally he spoke.
“Did I ever tell you what I was running from the day Grunthor and I were unfortunate enough to run into you in Easton on Serendair?”
Rhapsody shook her head. “I know that you were enslaved to a high priest who was the host of a F’dor demon,” she said, rubbing the baby’s back gently. “I thought you were running from him.”
“I was,” the Bolg king said dully. “But do you remember the key I used to open Sagia, to allow us to pass into it in the first place?”
“Yes—it was made of Living Stone, as if it were the rib of a Child of Earth.”
“Did it ever seem strange to you that I had such a key? Did you ever wonder where it came from?”
Rhapsody thought for a moment in the darkness. “Not really. There are so many things about you that are secretive, odd, or difficult to grasp that it never occurred to me to wonder about that. I always supposed that if you wanted to tell me, you would.” She looked above her in the darkness and sighed. “After fourteen hundred years, I’ve learned to live with knowing that you probably wouldn’t.”
Achmed sat quietly, listening to the echoes of sound inside the hollow shell. He saw the expression in Rhapsody’s eyes as they wandered over the ossified corpse of her father-in-law, a man she had loved despite his manipulations and betrayals. The expression on her face was one he had seen before, long ago, on the day they had first emerged from the Root, only to discover how far away from home they had traveled, how lost in time they were.