Khaddyr had always known the legends were lies. All of the Filids knew it as well; the forest of Gwynwood was a virgin wood, free of fire-starters and other trees that would have sprung up from the ashes of so great a conflagration. There had never been a fire of any magnitude here, nothing that had even threatened a village or an outpost, just the occasional burning aftermath of lightning strikes and mishandled campfires and the destructive wake of attacks from Gwylliam’s forces in the Cymrian War. Only someone completely ignorant of woodcraft or forest lore would have believed the stories of the wyrm’s rampage.
He dreamt of the dragon’s fury nonetheless.
The keep of the Invoker was a strangely beautiful wooden palace that stood beneath, within, and above the trees at the edge of the forest that bordered the Circle. It was a living building, a place composed of both harvested wood and growing flora, an instrinsic part of the forest. The odd palace was one of the prizes of his new office, and Khaddyr had claimed it with relish.
The first time he had entered the ancient building as its master he had been filled with conflicting emotions—a heady excitement dampened intermittently by guilty dread. Like his father before him, he had grown up knowing this marvelous dwelling as Llauron’s home; his own visits to the keep were always at Llauron’s indulgence. There was something perversely satisfying about walking the twisting, polished hallways as its new lord.
Llauron’s longtime household servants, Gwen and Vera, had greeted him politely but coldly, refusing to meet his gaze but obeying his commands without question. On the first night, after he had ordered his supper, Khaddyr directed that the exquisitely carved bed in Llauron’s bedchamber be made up with fresh sheets of Sorbold linen, swallowing a chuckle at the undisguised expressions of horror that had beset the elderly women’s faces.
“Make certain the warming stones are between the sheets before I finish my after-supper cordial,” he had directed Vera. “The night wind is bitter. I want the bed to be cozy.”
To aid in achieving that end he had already selected a young acolyte, an especially comely woman he had instructed in the medical arts several seasons before, to help him celebrate his new freedom from the celibacy prescribed to him when he was still the Invoker’s Tanist. He had seen her ushered up the stairs before the meal began that first night, and was displeased by the resistance she had displayed. It appeared he would need to go over her lessons of obedience and servitude again.
Now each night when the weeping young woman was unbound from the bedropes and led away to her own chamber for the night, Khaddyr had settled back into deep, sated rest in the Invoker’s bed, silent and comforting. The voice of his master that had long haunted his mind was finally silent, no longer demanding the fulfillment of his instructions.
Everything had gone according to plan. Llauron was dead. The office of Invoker was his. The fornication was everything he had always dreamed it would be and more, coupled with the unexpected pleasure of power and victory over resistance. Khaddyr had discovered that pleading and cries for help only heightened the experience for him, and now slipped off into dark unconsciousness contemplating new methods to bring them about.
It was always after a particularly good climax that his visions of the dragon were especially intense.
In the darkness of his dreams the skies would turn bloody. He was at first convinced that this had been suggested to his unconscious mind by the stained sheets he had summoned Vera in the middle of the first night to change. But after that first delicious experience the image of the bloody sky remained in his nightmares, broken now with walls of flame reaching to the firmament of clouds that roiled with ash and smoke. His mind’s eye rose above the fire into the sky, fixing its gaze on a forest beyond the horizon.
In the vast distance he could see a great winged beast, serpentine, with copper scales glinting in the light of the growing fire, coiled around the base of a tall, thin white oak, a tree in bright blossom, even in winter’s depth. The Great White Tree in the days of the Earth’s childhood, Khaddyr thought to himself. And Elynsynos herself. The wyrm stretched in the firelight, dwarfing the small tree as it rose, wings outspread, above the smoke, disappearing into the swirling ash.
His inner sight returned again to the forest in which he stood. In the distance he could hear the panicked screaming of the Filids as they dashed about, fire ripping through their robes, falling to the forest floor and igniting the dried leaves beneath the snow. The words of calm direction he had spoken in the dream had come forth not in his own tones, but in the sonorous voice of Llauron. It didn’t matter; the terrified victims paid him no heed, dashing to burning deaths so vividly gruesome that he could smell the reek of it even upon awakening.
The dragon, Khaddyr could hear a woman’s voice screaming as the dream faded into obscurity. The dragon comes.
It had taken a few hours to shake the feeling of dread the first time the dream had plagued him, but as it settled into a random occurrence Khaddyr became accustomed to the shaking aftermath, the cold sweat. Ever since he had become a thrall, a servant of the demon, he had lost the fear of fire, the weakness of compassion. Very little worried him anymore; he was in the servitude of ultimate power, with a great deal of his own. He had waited his entire life to assume the position of Invoker. He had no intention of being robbed of the pleasure by the pangs of a conscience he no longer possessed.
“You’re a myth!” he found himself shouting at the wooden ceiling of the bedchamber one night after awakening from the vision. “I’ll not be intimidated by a lie, even one as old as the ages! Burn yourself to cinders!”
The silence of his keep reverberated around him.
Navarne
Cold cinders lay in sodden mounds amid the scorched ruin of the House of Remembrance. They blackened the crystalline snow as it fell, leaving a desolate pit of mire where the great outpost had stood, once a monument to perseverance and bravery, now a testimony to cowardice and evil. The first outpost of the Cymrian Age, a proud and glistening fortress that withstood the perils of the land and war and countless years, had been reduced months ago to nothing more than meaningless rubble.
All except for the palm-sized harp. Nestled firmly above the first hollow of the trunk of the sapling of Sagia that stood in what had once been the central courtyard, the tiny instrument played softly, resolutely in the darkness, weaving a song of protection and healing that surrounded the young tree and the ground beneath it. There, within the silver arms of that child of the ancient tree, born at the place where starlight first touched the Earth, hope burned, a tiny candle of belief refusing to be swallowed, not by fire or storm or the darkness of coming night. In that singular place, within the icy ruin, there was eternal spring, a warmth of love so deep that it had caused the oak sapling to blossom in flowers of purest white that rivaled the falling snow.
Ashe rose wearily from an unsettling repose beneath the sapling where he had come to rest. It was easy to feel close to Rhapsody here, on the warm ground she had blessed with her song. Surely the place had absorbed some of the pure elemental fire that burned in her soul. His dreams as he slept here had been happy ones, at least at the onset, but had twisted into nightmares of dark regret and isolation. Her words came back to him now on the cold wind.
I don’t want to see you until the Council meets. I may never want to see you again after that.
The world reverberated around him, as it had in flight coming here. Gently he touched the bark of the young tree. It was deliciously warm beneath his frozen hands.
“I love you, Aria,” he said softly. His fingers trembled and stung with the rise of his other nature, creeping below the surface of his skin.
Goodbye, Ashe. May your life be long and happy. Please close the door behind you.
The rage began to burn behind his eyes again. He recalled other words she had spoken long before, in a happier time, when they were just discovering each other as lovers, traveling together, hidden away in his room behind the waterfall. They were words o
f melancholy, spoken in a shared confidence, before a crackling fire.
My past is a corridor of doors I left open, never meaning to close them. I never closed a door if I didn’t have to, in the hope that things would be right again one day if I only left the chance open.
The note of finality in her voice squeezed his chest, making it hard to breathe, enflaming the dragon in his blood.
Please close the door behind you.
Ashe could feel the snap, the dam of his human resolve breaking. Over the slippery hold he had tentatively maintained, the dragon roared forth. As if drowning in a dark flood, his consciousness gave way to that of the beast, and he was swallowed within the void of himself, disappearing into a place darker than death as the wyrm rose, rampant.
Gwynwood
At the onset of the attack, when the first trees at the outer forest rim succumbed to the flaming bolts raining down from the sky, Khaddyr sat up in bed, wide awake and trembling. For all that he had known that the nightmares had been nothing more than the hauntings of anxiety, sublimated with ancient lies, he knew as certainly that this was different. He could feel it through the Earth.
He knew the dragon had come for him.
At first he was so choked with terror he feared he might lose his water in the bed. Then, after a moment’s contemplation, calm returned.
There was far more power nascent in the forest of Gwynwood than inherent in any dragon, even Elynsynos herself. The strength of Gwynwood was the Great White Tree, the living vessel of the energy of the Earth, the last place where Time itself began. It was the reason the Filids lived at the Circle, and made their lives’ work its tending and nurture. The Tree was the Signpost of the beginning of the world; the Invoker of the order that sustained it could draw upon its power to shield the holy forest. He had seen Llauron do it a number of times.
Llauron was dead. He was the Invoker now. And while he had only begun the ritual of staining the earth around the mighty Tree’s roots with his blood to bend it to his master’s will, he knew that in the banishment of the wyrm from the holy forest he would be able to draw on the Tree’s power easily. He had been Llauron’s Tanist for three decades. He was the Invoker, heralded by a Namer, undisputed.
Slowly Khaddyr rose from the beautiful bed and donned his simple gray robe. He shuffled to use the privy, then washed his face and hands in the ceramic basin. The face that stared back at him in the looking glass was a noble one, he decided, freed from the lines of care and weary duty that had long beset his features when he was still a mere healer. Becoming Invoker had imbued him with a strength of countenance as well as the power of the land. He reached for the staff of his office and ran his hand along the smooth white oak of the shaft, enjoying the way the golden oak leaf atop it glistened in the firelight.
“Let her come,” he said, smiling. The face in the glass smiled back with confident strength. “Let the dragon come.”
By the time the fire reached the inner forest edge, it was clear that the beast was being selective about what it destroyed.
Contrary to the descriptions in the old manuscripts, no vast serpentine shadow darkened the land from the skies overhead. No earthquake rumbled through, no towering wall of water appeared on the horizon at the edge of the sea. It would have been easy to mistake the initial stages of the dragon’s rampage as nothing more than a winter brushfire, sweeping through the holy forest with a brutal vengeance, heightened by the bitter wind.
The villagers from the outlying settlements, fearing just that, had swarmed in waves to the protection of the Circle, seeking shelter beneath the arms of the Great White Tree. Almost as quickly they left and returned to their homes when the flames broke along the forest roads, sparing the villages, hospices, and training settlements of the foresters who plied the Cymrian Trails as pilgrimage guides. At least one peasant was heard to remark at the power of the new Invoker, a dominion so ever-present that even the element of wildfire did not touch his faithful.
Blessed be ye, Your Grace.
Khaddyr stood beneath the Tree and watched them go.
57
Lark stepped out of the fireshadows, trembling.
The wood was burning, though the flames had passed the villages and hostels; it was as if the fire was sparing the faithful, withholding its wrath from the exterior settlements.
It was coming instead to the Circle with a vengeance.
The herbery and Lark’s lands, several leagues away, had been consumed in a rolling wave of fire that crept from the forest edge, turning the white snow and the brown earth orange with its light. Branches in the trees above her burst into flame, even though the fire had not reached that area yet, rained down and fell to the ground around her, seemed to follow her as she ran.
Khaddyr, she thought desperately. I have to get to the Invoker.
As she hurried along the forest road ahead of the conflagration, she could see hundreds, perhaps thousands of the faithful milling through the wood, could hear their nervous talk. Tales had caught the wind, fragments of stories of a dark man walking, unscathed, through the inferno, little more than a shadow wrapped in mist.
Lark had little use for such rumors, discounted the words shouted by fleeing people above the wind of the fire, until she caught a single one.
Dragon.
She had to stop for a moment to restart her breath; her heart had constricted in fear at the word, squeezing the air from her lungs.
When her breath returned she covered her stinging eyes with her arm and hurried to the Circle.
The Invoker stood in the shadow of the Great White Tree, leaning on a white wood staff, its golden oak leaf tip gleaming in the oncoming light.
Khaddyr breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of burning leaves and smoke. All about him the Filids were panicking, hurrying westward where the fire still had not ringed the inner forest. He had tried to keep them calm, had tried to assure them that they were safe beneath the boughs of the Great White Tree, but the fear had taken hold. He could not command them, could only stand and watch them run into the arms of death.
“Your Grace.” The words were whispered, barely audible above the distant fire’s roar.
Khaddyr turned around to see Lark standing behind him, her face a mask of smoke. He smiled slightly.
“Ah, Lark, I should have known you alone were stalwart enough to stay.”
“I’m leaving, Your Grace, and so must you. Come with me; there is still time to flee west. The dragon comes.”
“Flee? To where? To the sea? To the lair of the beast herself? Don’t be ridiculous.” Khaddyr smiled beneficently and held out his hand to her. “Do not fear, Mother. Elynsynos would not burn the Tree.”
Lark stared into the reddening sky above her, the normally placid features of her Lirindarc heritage taut with panic.
“The dragon comes,” she repeated. “You must make haste and leave at once, Your Grace.”
Khaddyr patted her shoulder, struggling to keep his hand steady.
“She cannot broach the Circle, Mother,” he said as comfortingly as he could manage. “Wyrmkin or no, the family of Anwyn no longer has dominion over Gwynwood; that rests solely in the hands of the living Invoker.” He squeezed the white oak staff, the rising light of the fire in the distance glimmering off the golden leaf at its tip.
Lark glanced quickly over her shoulder at the darkening clouds, rolling with bloody light.
“Llauron in his time could hold the whole of the forest,” she said in a low voice. “Recall the plague of yellow locusts, or the great midsummer storm ten years ago? He commanded the insects to be gone from Gwynwood; he told the winds to be still, and they obeyed. Something is wrong, Khaddyr. You should have been able to banish this menace from the outer rim of the wood. Yet still it comes; the forest is burning with its wrath! I beseech you, leave now and save yourself.”
Khaddyr pointed angrily toward the west, where the fire was beginning to spread through the trees.
“Go now, then,” he said tersely. “Qu
it this place, Lark, if you’re afraid. I do not fear the dragon. My power here is absolute—absolute! You saw me wrest it from Llauron, saw me take the staff from his lifeless hand. You are my Tanist; if you doubt me, then go. You no longer serve a purpose here.”
Lark’s face hardened in the light of the approaching flames. “All right, then. Deceive yourself. Stay here and burn with your absolute power—it will make a pretty pyre.” She whirled and ran through the hail of flaming leaves that were wafting about in ashes on the coming wind.
The inferno’s rage burned ever closer, but still Khaddyr did not fear.
Faith, he intoned to himself. Stay the course.
His master’s words came back to him now, spoken softly in the shadows of the winter festival bonfires.
Unquestioned authority. Invulnerability. And Life unending.
Khaddyr gripped the staff even harder, trying to contain his excitement.
I will kill her, as I did Llauron, he thought, feeling the sweat from the heat and the arousal of power course through him. I will be the one to vanquish the mighty Elynsynos, to drive her back into the ether. I have the power now.
He laughed aloud.
“Let the dragon come!” he shouted to the burning sky. “Let her come!”
In reply the ground beneath him trembled. Khaddyr’s eyes flew open. The walls of fire that had now reached the Circle seemed to part, opening a dark corridor in the pulsing sheets of light.
Even surrounded as he was by searing heat, Khaddyr felt suddenly cold.
In the midst of the roaring flames and billowing smoke stood the shadow of a man. The hood of his cloak was thrown back, revealing hair that gleamed in the reflected waves of light like bright copper on a hearth. Other than the shining hair, all his physical features were wreathed in darkness. The fire seemed to dance around him as if he were no more than a shadow himself.