“No, sorry,” she said, moving away. “We have to be at Council very soon, and I know this ploy.”
“This is no ploy; it’s a royal edict.”
“Well, I hate to disappoint your—edict,” she said, “but there are a hundred thousand people waiting, and I think they might notice us missing.”
Ashe ran a hand over his unkempt hair. “Sheesh, no wonder Anwyn didn’t have a chance against you,” he said. “You’re tough. Please, Emily, come back to bed. The Council be hanged; I’ll be in a ugly mood if you don’t.”
“Sorry,” she repeated, but her smile was sympathetic. “The way I see it, an ugly mood at the Council is almost unavoidable; I know mine was. But I’m about to take my bath—excuse me, the royal bath. Would you like to join me?”
“Yes!” There was a dramatic pause. “I hope you mean that literally.”
“You really are naughty. Come on.” She took his hand and pulled him out of the bed.
He put his arm around her as they walked to the bathroom. “Naughty? What an awful thing to say, m’lady. I assure you, my intentions are—”
“Purely honorable; I’ve heard this before. Do you want to get a book to read before we go in?”
“Not a bad idea,” he said, looking thoughtful. He stooped and picked up the volume that she had bounced off his head the night before, and tucked it under his arm. “I’ll be safer this way.” Rhapsody laughed, pulled it from beneath his elbow, and tossed it into the growing pile of rumpled clothes.
“Come on,” he said, his eyes sparkling mischievously. “Let’s go make our own version of Crynella’s candle.”
“Hmmm?”
His lips brushed her hair as he held the door for her. “You know; water within fire.”
Gwydion lay back in the tepid tub and sighed. The water was disappearing through the drain in the bathtub’s base, one of Gwylliam’s marvelous designs, leaving his chest and waist exposed to the warm air of the bathroom, heavy with vapor. With the water the anxiety and loneliness of the past half-year was draining, too; he looked over at his wife on the other side of the bathroom and sighed again. He was happy.
Rhapsody stood unclothed before the long silvered looking glass, examining herself from different angles. Her eyes seemed fixed on the area of her abdomen, and her face was thoughtful, almost pensive. Gwydion gripped the sides of the tub and raised himself, still dripping, out of the cooling water. He went up behind her and took her in his arms, laughing as she squirmed away.
“Iiiiggggggghhhhh, get a towel.” She kissed him, then turned back to the mirror again.
He drew her closer and nuzzled her neck. “No, I prefer to dry myself by the fire,” he said teasingly, enjoying the feel of the warm skin of her back on his chest. Her attention was still on the mirror, something he had never seen before. “What are you looking at?”
Rhapsody stared a moment more before answering. “I’m trying to figure out why my abdomen felt as if it were expanding, why Elynsynos thought there was something evil growing inside me, if it really was you in the Teeth that night—it was you, wasn’t it? I didn’t dream that?”
Gwydion ran his hands over her hair soothingly as her eyes widened in concern. “Yes, yes,” he said hurriedly, then turned her around and took her into his arms. “That was me, Aria, every clumsy, inept moment. And prior to that inelegant assignation, I didn’t leave your side for a moment from the time we became lovers, so unless you made love to someone who looked like me after I left that night, the demon definitely was lying.”
Rhapsody’s face, pressed up against the hard muscles of his chest and shoulder, took on a half-smile. There was a question in his voice that she knew he would never ask her, so she answered it for him. “I didn’t make love to anyone at all after you left, Sam. I would have thought that was obvious last night. But that still doesn’t explain why I have felt those sensations in my abdomen, and what Elynsynos noticed.”
Gwydion looked her over thoughtfully, then took her hand and led her back into the bedroom and over to the bed. “Here, lie down,” he said soothingly, “let me see if I can detect anything.” She climbed on top of the coverlet and lay back on the pillows while he sat down beside her, resting his hand on her flat stomach. There was no hint of swelling whatsoever.
He took his time, checking her over carefully with every divining sense of his dragon nature, but it only confirmed what he had known from the beginning; she was unaltered. He had memorized every detail of her, to the core of her essence as only a dragon could, and knew irrefutably that she was not pregnant or carrying anything living inside her. There was, however, an infinitesimal trace of something tainted in her blood, growing less with each beat of her heart, as if the endless circulation of her blood was dissolving it. In addition, there was a glow within her that he couldn’t identify, a diffuse energy; perhaps it was her tie to the element of fire. He smiled reassuringly at her, hoping to dispel the look of uncertainty in her eyes.
“Tell me what the demon said when this happened,” he said gently.
She thought for a moment. “‘Virack urg caz,’” she said, shuddering at the memory. “Then he said, ‘conceive.’ After that, he said ‘Merlus,’ or something like it, and then said, ‘grow.’”
A shiver ran momentarily down Ashe’s back. “All right, darling, let me assure you, there is nothing growing inside you anymore.”
Rhapsody began to tremble. “Anymore?”
Gwydion stroked her arm. “Well, there never was anything real there at all. You know that there are various ways that the F’dor can possess someone, like the soldiers who only did its bidding once and didn’t remember?” She nodded. “The demon undoubtedly knew it was trapped, and that it was dying, so in a last effort to save itself it planted a seed, not the seed of a child, but the seed of a doubt. It had been priming you, talking to you all along; it knew the vibrations of your brain and what it would take to make you believe something; F’dor, as you know, invented deception. But you see, Rhapsody, because you are a Namer, you are particularly vulnerable to something like that. How many times have you told me that you prefer to believe what you want and then make it happen, rather than accept what is?”
It’s probably better if you don’t even try to understand it.
You’re probably right. I think it’s better for me to just decide how things are going to work out, and then they will.
“Yes,” she admitted reluctantly.
Gwydion caressed her face. “In a way, you invited him in, and you didn’t even know it,” he said gently, trying to ease the frightened look out of her face. “Once you believed he might be telling the truth, you gave him entry, and then, in a way, he was telling the truth. He possessed a small piece of you, and the more you believed it, the more he owned. The seeds of doubt were growing. Eventually, if you had stopped wondering and decided it was true for certain, he would have possessed your soul; you would have been his completely.”
He stroked her stomach as he saw it begin to clench. “The good news is, now that the belief has been eradicated, so has the possession. In a way, your hope, or faith, saved you. And ever since you’ve discovered the truth, each breath you’ve taken, each beat of your heart, has cleansed your body of the vestiges of that possession. Now you’re free of it. You belong totally to yourself again.”
Rhapsody smiled. She took his hand and kissed it. “Not true,” she said. “I belong totally to you.”
Gwydion grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said mischievously, leaning over her. “Why do you think I had you lie down on the bed?”
She pulled him to her and kissed him, encircling him with a slender leg. “Let me see if I can guess.”
82
Even as far from the Moot as she was, she could still hear the sounds of shrieking and merrymaking, could still see the bonfire’s roaring flames flickering against the dark sky in the distance. The wind that blew around the rise of the swale on which she stood carried with it the smell of embers and the taste
of a bitter Past made sweet again by hope.
Anwyn stared down at the horn in her hands. Even in the absence of the moon’s light it gleamed, like a luminous pearl in the darkness. Its metal was still warm, doubtless residual heat from the woman who had usurped its usage, had pressed her perfect mouth to it and summoned Anwyn’s own people to her feet. Of course they had been compelled to come. None that sailed from Serendair, nor those of their blood who came after them, could resist the command of the horn; Gwylliam had made certain of it.
It was no excuse, not for the betrayal she had suffered.
No excuse whatsoever.
She closed her eyes and held the horn aloft, stretching out her arms to the starlit darkness of the sky.
The words of the upstart wench came back to her now, blowing in the laughing wind of night, drunk with celebration.
Anwyn ap Merithyn, tuatha Elynsynos, I rename you The Past. Your actions are out of balance. Henceforth your tongue will only serve to speak of the realm into which your eyes alone were given entry. That which is the domain of your sisters, the Present and the Future, you will be unable to utter. No one shall seek you out for any other reason, so may you choose to convey your knowledge better this time, lest you be forgotten altogether.
The Seer began to laugh. At first the mirth came forth as a chuckle, then a gasp. Then she threw her head back and roared with merriment, maniacal as her sister Manwyn, but far more insidious. She laughed until it would have been impossible to tell if she were screeching with glee or shrieking in madness, though no living soul could hear her above the bellowing of the bonfires that still filled the Moot with dancing light.
Henceforth your tongue will only serve to speak of the realm into which your eyes alone were given entry.
Anwyn clutched the horn even tighter, her searing blue eyes gleaming in the darkness as they opened.
“Very well,” she said aloud. “As you command, Your Majesty.”
I need your memories, the demon-spirit had whispered from within the fire. Her own reply blended into the bristling wind.
“I understand,” she said.
Anborn was in an unusually good mood as he rode west across the foothills to the broad expanse of the Krevensfield Plain. Considering the way the day had started, and what had transpired, it was a refreshing surprise to see how well things had turned out.
It had been many centuries since the Lord Marshal could remember feeling so free, so burdenless. The wind was high, the night clear and starry, the damp air of near-morning filled with the fresh scent of summer tinged with the sharp odor of smoke from distant bonfires. Anborn pulled the helmet from his head and set it before him, running his hands through his streaming hair. The smooth gait of the horse, the pounding against the earth beneath them—there were still things in life to be cherished after all.
After so many centuries of disillusionment, the vault of stone around his heart had shattered at last. Anborn had been an idealist in youth; he remembered the intensity with which he had once lived life, the deathless vows he had made early in his martial training to uphold the statutes of the Kinsmen, the ancient brotherhood of warriors to which he sought inclusion. All of that impassioned commitment had died on the battlefields of the Great War, along with his soul—or so he had presumed.
He remembered the words of his instructor in the sword, Oelendra Andaris. I serve no Lord, no Lady, only a, people, she had said. When those that would lead would also serve, then shall I swear fealty to a crown. Only then. For both of them, Anborn and Oelendra, both Kinsmen, both irreparably scarred by a war, the time had come to believe again. Like the coming dawn, perhaps peace was on the horizon.
His mind went to Rhapsody, as it often did when he was not concentrating on anything in particular. Anborn wondered what she was doing at that moment, then squelched the thought. He had caught the look between her and Gwydion. Unless his nephew was an utter fool, he had a fairly good idea what she was probably in the process of undertaking, and it would not be gentlemanly to speculate about it further.
He laughed aloud, delighted in the turn of events and the promise of a new beginning. Good cheer broke over him like a wave, racing through his hair like the wind that flapped his cloak behind him. His spirits were high as the starry sky above him, around him, all the way to the endless horizon just beginning to lighten at the approach of morning.
Anwyn brought the horn to her lips and sounded it.
The blast that issued forth was not heard in this time, nor by any living soul. It echoed instead through the realm of the Past, as it had so many centuries before, swelling from the silvery horn and hovering on the heavy air of ancient memory.
Then, after a long reverberation, it rained slowly down from the air and settled into the earth.
Anwyn smiled and closed her eyes. In a voice hollow with memory she began the chant.
The raid on Farrow’s Down.
The siege of Bethe Corbair.
The Death March of the Cymrian Nain.
The burning of the western villages.
Kesel Tai.
Tomingorllo.
Lingen Swale.
The slaughter at Wynnarth Keep.
The rape of the Yarimese water camp
The assault on the southeastern Face.
The evisceration of the fourth column.
The mass execution of the First Fleet farming settlements.
The Battle of Canderian Fields.
One by one, ever so patiently, she recounted each grim history, each bloody event in the Great War, a conflict ignited by the F’dor but brought about by simpler factors—rage, betrayal, jealousy, lust for power. Hatred, even older than the Before-Time.
When she had recited all the great losses of the war she moved on, to each conflict since, each place where men fell at the manipulation of the demon-spirit.
Finally, when the litany was complete, she raised the horn to her lips again and sounded it.
Anwyn opened her eyes. She smiled.
As Anborn crested the rise of a great swale his stallion reared in fright. Anborn brought him to heel, gentling the animal down, then cast a glance over his shoulder to see what had spooked the horse.
For a moment, he could see nothing in the dark. Then, as his vision sharpened, the blood of the dragon within his veins roared like fire with panic.
“Sweet Creator,” he murmured. The words caught in the back of his throat.
The darkness at his feet was shifting.
The wide expanse of the Krevensfield Plain was moving.
Without taking a second breath Anborn dragged his horse back from the brim of the swale and bolted, galloping back toward the Moot, as the ground beneath him split asunder.
83
A haze hung over the Moot; it was not merely the vaporous mist that collected in the Bowl each morning, owing to its low-lying topography, but a cloud of thickheadedness enhanced by the excessive intake and absorption of alcohol. The Great Cymrian Fog, as it was later jokingly known, lifted, as Ashe had predicted, around the same time as the sun came into position directly overhead, forcing even the most resilient of day-sleepers to squint and rise, to make ready for the second session of the Council.
“What a waste,” Rhapsody whispered to Gwydion as they surveyed the human wreckage stumbling and groaning below them in the Bowl as the attendant Cymrians set about becoming functional again. “I can think of a much nicer form of debauchery than drinking oneself into a stupor.”
“Hold that thought,” Gwydion replied, patting her “muffins.”
Rhapsody had sought out Oelendra and privately told her the upcoming news. The Lirin champion’s eyes filled with tears and she hugged her queen with an embrace more maternal than any Rhapsody had experienced since she left home. The new Lady Cymrian’s throat tightened for a moment, and when she pulled away, her eyes glimmered like those of her ancient friend.
She had dressed for the occasion in a gown of azure silk, fitted at the waist and sleeves before flaring into a
full skirt, on which she had belted Daystar Clarion in a waist scabbard. Gwydion’s eyes had twinkled when beholding her in it, and he had brushed a kiss on her cheek.
“What a beautiful dress; very royal.”
Rhapsody shook her head. “It’s camouflage. I’m hoping to blend in with the sky. Maybe they won’t see me and will leave me alone.”
The ovation that greeted the new Lord and Lady was more subdued than it had been the night before upon their selection, owing mostly to the headaches that excessive applause and whistling might cause the assemblage. The atmosphere seemed to clear up quickly, however, when Ashe took to the Rise and presented his Lady, then asked for a moment of attention for a portentous announcement.
“It is with great joy and consummate humility that I proclaim to you the wonderful news that the Lady Cymrian has graciously consented to be my wife.”
The Cymrian multitude was silent for a moment; then a wave of excitement swept through the Bowl, swelling into a roar of approval. Applause and acclamations in myriad languages rang out. The Mountain Knives, the contingent of Nain that Ashe had described on Midsummer’s Night the previous year, sent up a war whoop that rocked the Moot, causing the heads of many of their fellow Cymrians to feel as if they had split. Rhapsody smiled at the cheering crowd, the sun glinting off their armor and banners, gleaming with a radiance that bespoke hope for the new age.
A voice, recognizable to her from the day before as a heckler from the House of McLeod, shouted above the gleeful din.
“Gwydion ap Llauron, grandson of Gwylliam the Abuser and Anwyn the Manipulator; how did you gain this Lady? She is unlike your line, which is why she was so well affirmed. Can you assure this assemblage that no violence or coercion was used to reach this agreement?”