Rhapsody wiped away stinging tears from her eyes.
“Please forgive me; I can’t talk about this any more. I will ponder everything we have said tonight, Ashe, as I hope you will as well. Now I must return to the dishes; I want to give them a chance to drain so you can tend to your drying duties before bed.”
She tossed a dishcloth to him and turned to the sink. If it were not for the sensitive network of draconic senses that obsessed over every detail of his wife, Ashe would never have known that tears were streaming down her face as she scrubbed the plates and pots amid the steam of the sink.
Finally, when the dishes were clean and dry and put away, Ashe came up behind Rhapsody, turned her around gently, and took her into his arms. He kissed her upturned ear.
“Are you angry with me, Aria?”
“Not in the slightest,” she said, her answer spoken into his shoulder. “I’m just sad because, after more than a thousand years, I don’t know what to do to make you happy.”
The Lord Cymrian exhaled, then pulled slowly away from her. He looked down into her eyes, studying them. Then he slid his fingers into the crown of her hair, caressing her head.
“Not in the long term, perhaps,” he said quietly. “But I am absolutely certain that until this night becomes the new day, you know exactly what to do to make me happy.”
He kissed her again, taking his time, then led her to bed, blocking out the notice that the smile she had given him in return had a tinge of sadness.
* * *
In the morning it was as if the conversation had never taken place, just as it had been every year before.
12
Ashe held the door of the turf hut as Rhapsody carried the last of her gear outside, then locked it carefully, amused at the ritual that was a gesture with no real meaning, but seen as a sign of his protection of their special place and its privacy.
As always, she had gotten up with the sun to launder the sheets, towels, and tablecloths and sweep the tiny house clean, had made the bed and written her note for their return next year.
The notes were another tradition that had begun at the end of the honeymoon after their formal wedding, wishing each other well amid loving and occasionally randy commentary. The honeymoon had been a gloriously private respite away from all the planning and celebration that they had endured and enjoyed leading up to the big day. After all the strife and misunderstanding, the betrayal and pain that had occurred prior to the success of the Cymrian Council, which had itself ended in tragedy and battle, the fortnight they had spent alone in the turf hut, adorned only with fresh rose petals and the simplest of luxuries he had provided as a surprise, had been the closest thing to reliving their one night in Serendair that he had been able to arrange.
He closed his eyes as the sweet wind buffeted his face, and inhaled, as he had done for a thousand years, trying to keep this place embedded in his memory.
A random thought appeared in his mind, a recollection from the second night they had spent as lovers, long ago, deep in the grotto of Elysian. His heart, until the previous day wounded from being torn open two decades before, was finally healed, and it overflowed into his eyes, which could not stop staring into those of the woman he held in his arms, tangled in the sheets of her bed.
All I ever want to do is to protect you, he had said to her, unguarded love ringing in his husky voice. I never want anything terrible to happen to you.
Rhapsody had smiled up at him, but her eyes had held a trace of sadness.
You’re sweet, she had said. But you are too late. Many terrible things have happened to me—and yet I am still here, having survived them.
I want to wrap my body and my life around you, and make anything that would seek to harm you have to come through me first, he had said.
Eyes closed, he could still see the tears form in hers as she smiled and kissed him.
When he opened them again, his wife was no longer in his sight. He let the dragon sense for her and found her down at the banks of the rushing waterfall, so he dropped his gear and made his way to her.
When he found her, he stopped for a moment to take in the sight.
The Lady Cymrian and Lirin queen was dressed in simple skirts and a woven shirt, her hair loose around her shoulders, looking for all the world like a peasant or commoner, the birth class to which she had been born. She had dipped her toes in the water, and was now sitting with her arms around her knees, watching the pools of golden sunlight form and rush away over the waterfall’s drop.
Ashe, who had dressed simply in common clothing as well, descended the hillside and sat down beside her.
“Are you ready to go?”
She smiled at the waterfall. “Not yet, unless you’re in a hurry.”
“No hurry,” he said, watching a tern dive and flap away again. “The children, the Grands, and the Greats have been arriving sporadically for the past sennight or so. We can go back whenever you want.”
Rhapsody sighed. “Another secret wedding anniversary come and gone,” she said, letting the sunlight dance on her eyelashes.
“Indeed,” Ashe said, putting his arm around her.
His wife turned and kissed his cheek. “I have three things I want to say to you before we go home.”
He pulled her closer and returned the kiss on her lips warmly, lingering as the wind rustled their hair, then smiled as she did. “I am listening, my love.”
“The first is this—thank you for keeping the land at peace for the better part of a thousand years,” she said, gently touching his freshly shaven face. “It has made the inevitable loss of the people we have loved a good deal easier. So far, Fate has blessed us; we have lost none of our children, our Grands, or our Greats, even as some of their spouses have passed. The next millennia will surely be a good deal harder.” Her face took on a trace of sadness. “I beg you not to leave me to face that alone if you possibly can help it.”
Ashe exhaled but said nothing. He turned back to the waterfall.
She kissed his cheek again. “I love you.”
“I know,” he said. “I love you, too. And I apologize for the discussion last night. I’m selfish and grumpy and I say stupid things. I feel so very old, especially when I see you sitting here in the sunlight, the image of the girl I remember from Merryfield. I sense the time is coming when my aging will be more of a trial for you than it has been for me.”
“How so?”
“I don’t want you to waste your youth tending to a cantankerous old man.”
Rhapsody chuckled. “Why not? You spent yours putting up with a demanding and hotheaded woman.”
He turned to her and looked at her seriously. “I have been nothing but blessed.”
“How’s this?” she said, trying to sound practical. “This was the second thing I wanted to say: we have another anniversary coming up shortly—that of our formal wedding. Let us each consider what the other has said, and agree to talk about it again on that day, a few weeks hence, instead of waiting another year. I will try to behave less emotionally. But please understand, what you have asked of me is without question the most awful request I have ever had to contemplate. I am trying to be brave about it, but I have not been able to find the courage to face it. I understand that you believe this to be the best solution to your torment and pain, but I am in great fear of losing you in the Afterlife—and, were that to happen, I might as well be condemned to the Vault of the Underworld after death.”
“I know.” He finally looked back at her. “What was the last thing you wanted to say?”
A glorious smile broke over her face. She leaned closer and brought her lips as near to his as she could without touching them, filling his nose with her scent and causing his hands to tremble.
“It’s actually a question, but I don’t need words to ask it,” she said.
She let her lips, light and dry, brush his, then sat back abruptly on her heels, seeing the longing come into his eyes. She slowly untied the laces of his shirt as he leaned bac
k, lost in her eyes, and opened it, exposing his chest, muscled still in spite of his age in the trim of a mature man that had in his youth been a strapping soldier, the skin slackened but still fit, and ran her lips down that chest to his belt.
Ashe leaned back in the sweet green moss that grew along the banks on his elbows and closed his eyes against the sunlight again.
“Words or no, you never need ask,” he said quietly. “Never.”
“I know,” she whispered, echoing his own words of a moment before as she addressed his belt and what lay beneath it, exposed momentarily to the wind but comforted by the warmth of her mouth a moment later, the silky locks of her hair spread like a sunlit meadow across his chest.
He lay back completely on the moss as she pushed him gently down on it, pulling his shirt wider as she climbed atop him and kissed up his abdomen to his neck, leaving him shivering as her lips caressed his throat, his jaw and ear. As the sky began to turn different colors behind his eyes and his body to tremble, he reached up under her skirt and explored her with his shaking fingers, making her sigh.
Something about the sigh struck a nerve.
Lying in the soft green grass, amid the scent of sweet woodruff and lavender, Ashe grasped her thighs, pulling himself suddenly and roughly within her, rocking her urgently from below.
And, overwhelmed utterly with passion and without any other choice, he loosed the dragon that was panting beneath the surface of his consciousness.
The gentle lovemaking she had initiated in the green moss intensified into something harsher, something possessive and greedy, roaring past even the most athletic movements they had often made use of in their intimacy, and turning wanton.
Fire roared through Ashe’s body as he seized his wife, his treasure, more insistently and began to thrust himself angrily into her, pulling her down hard onto his enraged tarse, filling her with himself.
He gripped her thigh even harder as he loosed one hand and ran it roughly up her torso, still mostly clothed, and tore aside her shirt, grasping at the breasts he had always addressed gently and in wonder in the past, losing every element of love as what he was making to her turned to a demanding expression of possession.
Mine, he thought as he panted and plunged wildly, clutching the hard muscles of her leg and the soft firmness of her breast. Mine! Mine!
The earth below him echoed his thoughts—Mine! Mine!
As he raised himself up and applied his mouth roughly, carnally to her chest, his teeth bared, Rhapsody took hold of his hair, interlacing her fingers through his curls, and put her mouth next to his ear.
Yours, she said in between breaths. Yours. Only yours.
Ashe stopped short.
She was speaking the words in the language of the Wyrmril.
Though she could not approximate all the pronunciation, being born without the draconic aperture of the throat, her linguistic intention was unmistakable.
She continued to whisper soft phrases of comfort in the language that spoke to the dragon in his blood as her husband lay motionless beneath her, gasping for breath. She removed his hand that was clutching her breast and took it in her own, kissing it.
You do not frighten me, she whispered in his ear, interlacing her fingers through his and pressing him gently onto his back again with her chest. You may be stronger than me, and twice my size, but you have always been so. You swore not to hurt me on our first nights as lovers, both times, and you never have. You do not frighten me. I love you.
Ashe blinked, his eyes teary.
I am not made of glass, Rhapsody said, nuzzling his ear. Do not be afraid. Make love with me—I want you.
She began to move again, gently but firmly, gripping him from within as well as without, building him up to a towering climax again, which she joined him in, riding him as he held her with a more reasonable grip until their cries and gasps of laughter were drowning in and dancing over the noise of the waterfall, warmed by the sun shining down on them, cooled by the breath of the wind, making love as they had so many times before over a thousand years of happy married life.
The heat of the dragon’s possessive rage dissipated as the human being returned, sheltered beneath the leafy branches of the birch and crabapple trees, rustling in time with their dance.
When that dance was over, she stretched out on top of him, lying motionless for a long time, listening to his heart race and then begin to slow, brushing away his tears and hers, caressing his shoulders and chest, guiding his free hand to hold her backside, until she felt that the dragon rage was long past.
The man beneath her was left on the brink of either joy or despair, waiting for her to push him over onto one side or the other.
She raised her face to him, shining, and smiled as warmly as she knew how.
I love you, I am yours, she said again in the language of the dragon, then switched to the Orlandan tongue. “Always.”
The despair in his eyes tempered a little, but Ashe could not bring himself to smile in return.
“I am so terribly sorry—”
“No,” she interrupted decisively, her hand still entwined in his. “Do not insult what we have made together, this day, and over the last thousand years. I have given myself to you in all that time in trust, and I do now, still. Do you not think that I was aware the first night you came to me in Elysian, declaring your love and your desire to be my lover, that you could have crushed my throat in bed in passion, or in my sleep, had you wanted to? Our swords hung, side by side, on the sword rack downstairs as we slept together for the first time, a sign of a willingness to embrace a mutual trust in days when there was none of that to be sensibly had, anywhere on the continent. You are the same man now that you were then; the dragon is closer to the surface, certainly, and harder to keep in control, but, as you can see, I can handle it.”
“At the cost of bruised thighs, and—”
“I can heal myself, another happy benefit of being a Namer.”
Ashe fell silent. Until the day you cannot, he thought, because I have, in fact, crushed your throat.
She kissed him one last time, then rose and disrobed, walking toward the falls.
“Come,” she beckoned. “The pool you dammed for the laundry has had all the suds washed out. We can bathe before we return to Highmeadow.”
Ashe followed her, wishing for all the world that she were beyond his ability to hurt her.
And knowing she would never be.
HIGHMEADOW, NAVARNE
In three days’ time, the Lord and Lady Cymrian arrived at the doors of the main dwellings where the family had gathered. The word of their arrival had spread quickly, and as they cantered into the compound, a great cheer went up.
Rhapsody rode before Ashe on his horse, leading hers, and the sovereigns both broke into grins at seeing the beautiful group gathered in the courtyard, the young children waving and dancing in excitement.
It had never ceased to amaze Ashe how many people now comprised his family, each one beloved and counted and obsessed over by both the dragon and the man. He brought the horse to a halt amid much joyful noise and buried his face in his wife’s hair, kissing her repeatedly and nuzzling her neck.
“The greatest celebrations in all the world are the simple domestic gatherings of our clan,” he said, his mood jovial and excited again. “Put up to comparison with all the ponderous, formal nonsense that was undertaken to officially celebrate our thousand years of reign and marriage a few years ago, I would always prefer to make mud pies and thumb-wrestle with my Grands and Greats any day.”
Rhapsody laughed. “It helps that they are better at both those things than you are.”
He dismounted slowly and took her down from the saddle as well, then turned with her to greet the swell of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, some of whom looked older than both of them.
“I am glad to see that this housing complex, so long a fortress and military garrison, is finally now a place where our family gathers and lives,” he sai
d to Rhapsody as four of his Greats tried to climb him simultaneously.
“Both of those aspects were things you gave me to make me safe and happy,” she said, bending and embracing another wave of little ones. “I can never thank you enough for all this, Sam.”
“All right, then,” the Lord Cymrian declared aloud, “the Cymrian House of Manosse o Serendair is well met! Let there be much singing, love, laughter, and delight in the children.”
“And food?” suggested Leonin, one of the younger great-grandsons. “I do hope there will be some food.”
The family laughed and followed the Lord and Lady into the hall.
PROPHECY OF THE CHILD OF TIME
Brought forth in blood from fire and air
Sired of Earth
A child of two worlds
Born free of the bonds of Time
Eyes will watch him from upon the earth and within it
And the Earth itself will burn beneath him
To the song of screams and wails of the dying
He shall undo the inevitable
And in so doing
Even he himself shall be undone
This unnatural child born of an unnatural act
The mother shall die, but the child shall live
Until all that has gone before is wiped away
Like a tear from the eye of Time
13
HIGHMEADOW, A SENNIGHT LATER
Ashe looked on regretfully as Rhapsody and their adult children gathered the youngest Grands and the Greats and passed out lanterns for the traditional walk in the dark to the family quarters in the adjacent buildings.