Ashe’s face colored in much the same way as hers had a moment before. He cleared his throat.
“Uh, well, you’ve been the Invoker for eight months now, little bird. I can’t imagine why you would still be observing an—er—unnatural state.”
“Oh, trust me, I’m not,” Laurelyn said breezily, causing Ashe to break into embarrassed laughter. “Syril is of Cymrian lineage, but it’s so many generations removed from the First that the longevity it grants will most likely be minimal. There’s not a moment to waste.”
Ashe nodded reflectively. The gift of an expanded life span had been both curse and blessing to his family over the centuries, though at least at this moment in Time, death had taken none of his progeny from him. But his own third-generation Cymrian lineage and the blood of the dragon Elynsynos in his veins, coupled with the seeming stoppage of Time on Rhapsody, who had not aged a day in a thousand years, had meant that some of his grandchildren appeared considerably older than their parents and even their grandparents. Loss of friends and family members over time had been something that his family had become as pragmatic about as it was possible to be.
Still, he hurt for his daughter, realizing that she would never have what he and Rhapsody shared—a union lasting a thousand years.
And, given how quickly he seemed to be aging, he was not certain how much longer he would be enjoying that blessing, either.
“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” he said, finishing his lunch.
“That’s one of you,” Laurelyn said, looking down at her plate to keep from laughing. “All the serving men and women who work in the Invoker’s Palace have discreetly chosen to find other lodging for the time being. Apparently they aren’t so glad to hear it—at least at night. The walls of the Tree Palace are not particularly soundproof.”
“Well, good for you both. I guess some things do run in the family.” Ashe swallowed as Laurelyn rose, folded her napkin, and came to him. She bent and kissed him, then went to where her staff stood, leaning against the wall, took it in hand, and turned to face him again.
“I must be off,” she said regretfully. “I hope to make it to the guesthouse in Tref-Y-Gwartheg by nightfall. My father worries incessantly about me if I ride by night.”
“You’re absolutely right, he does,” Ashe said, rising as she walked toward the door of the library. “He also prefers you to ride with a regiment—or two—or four—”
“I’m the Invoker now, Papa,” Laurelyn said indulgently. “I command the forest roads. Please, stop worrying. I’m almost five hundred years old.”
“To me, you will always be the tiny child sitting alone in the garden, singing quietly to herself, the plants, and invisible fairies—my little bird,” Ashe said, his heart in his aged eyes as he stopped in front of her near the door. “Your brother made exceptional use of the Singing lore your mimen taught all of you in the form of True-Speaking, but you employed it in song, softly, making things grow, and bloom, and heal. You can’t imagine how much I love you, how much I miss you—how proud I am of you. You won’t ever understand, until you have children of your own.”
“What makes you think they were invisible?” Laurelyn asked, amused.
“What?”
“The fairies. They were never invisible to me, Papa.” She watched his eyes take on a gleam, and she came into his arms again. “Not sure if the ‘children of my own’ path is for me—my sister’s daughter has children of her own now, children who apparently bounced the stuffing out of their great-grandfather a few hours ago. We will see how things come to pass, one challenge at a time. Goodbye, Papa. My love remains with you.”
“Goodbye, Your Grace,” Ashe whispered in her ear. “My love goes with you, my little bird.”
He closed his eyes as she left the room, allowing his dragon sense to wash over her, following her down the stairs and out into the world beyond his protection. He went to the window seat beneath the large library window once she had mounted her gelding and had passed through the forest gate in the western wall of Highmeadow and sat, letting his inner sense follow her to the edge of its reach—about three leagues—until the cool green vibrations of her heartbeat were at last beyond his awareness.
A flash of red, like an explosion of blood behind his eyes, roared through him, sending a shock of heat and palpable anger with it.
Ashe closed his eyes tightly, but the image shot across his brain, narrated by the seething tones of the dragon.
An image of a massive, knuckled claw descending from the sky above the forest canopy.
Snatching Laurelyn from the saddle.
Get back here, the voice in his head hissed. Mine.
Ashe struggled to blot the image from his mind, breathing shallowly.
In a few moments it was gone, his brain his own again.
As a wave of despair crested inside him, he recalled the message he had received that morning.
I love you; I’ll be home soon.
Please come home now, Emily, he thought. I can feel the strings of my mind unraveling without you here to bind them up again.
* * *
After they passed through the eastern wall of Highmeadow, Reynard, Goodeve, Mendel, and Corynth rode farther on until they came to a sheltered spot in he road. Reynard was the first to signal his intention that they come off the pathway, a neatly groomed forest thoroughfare that was maintained and guarded by the forces of the Alliance.
He sat up straighter in his saddle, amid the dusty shafts of sunlight streaking the forest floor through the canopy.
“I need help making sense of this,” he said quietly to the others. “Have we been ordered, or challenged?”
“It’s not clear to me,” Corynth said, casting a glance around him. “There was no direction or timetable set.”
“How could there be?” Goodeve asked. “In all of the order that has been maintained for centuries, this is the one source of random mayhem. It’s unpredictable.”
“Probably the reason for the old practice of Spring Cleaning,” said Mendel archly. “While history extols the aid that the Bolg have given to major battles throughout the second Cymrian era, the wildness, the primitive violence has never been bred out of them.”
“Their repulsive king takes great pride in that,” Goodeve said. “I have heard the briefings.”
“Are all of your seconds in place?” Reynard asked. He received three nods in response. “Then, given the conditions, it seems a visit beyond the southern Teeth, to the city-states, is in order.”
“We’ll need reinforcements,” Mendel said.
The others nodded in agreement and returned to the forest road.
4
CENTRAL TYRIAN IN THE REPOSITORY OF LORE
Meridion was finishing up his paperwork from the symposium he and his mother had just conducted when he heard, or rather felt, her voice singing his true name, a complex mathematical series of notes that made up the essence of who he was on the deepest of levels. It was a skill known only to the Namer, one of the rarest of professions in the Known World, although he and Rhapsody had just spent the better part of a fortnight working and training with most of the rest of the Namers that now existed.
She had left two days prior to get to the southeastern border of Tyrian, the great forested realm of the Lirin, in order to meet up with her two best friends in the world, Achmed the Snake, king of the Firbolg and, on a far more personal basis, guardian to him and each of his brothers and sisters, and Sergeant-Major Grunthor, his and their godfather, so hearing her speak next to his ear as he was putting papers away was a bit of a surprise.
Meridion ap Gwydion, eldest son, Child of Time, pippin, please come to the Thornberry longhouse. I love you. Mimen
Her wordless song was light, with a merry tone, so he assumed the summons was a pleasant one rather than an alert.
Meridion chuckled at her use of the word pippin in her salutation, the Lirin word for baby. His assistant, Avriel, was energetically packing up his materials, her back to him, obliv
ious to Rhapsody’s call.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on his namesong again, particularly the musical passage Child of Time.
Around him, Time itself seemed to slow to a halt.
Meridion glanced at his assistant, frozen between the threads of it.
He finished his work, jotting a quick note for Avriel, then went to the coat tree at the door of the Repository and took down his cloak and walking stick.
He turned around and glanced at his assistant again.
Avriel had not moved, nor had Time.
Satisfied, he left his office in the Repository of Lore, walking past the various men and women in the hallways, all motionless, and exited the building, taking the forest road, where he concentrated more intensely.
A cylindrical corridor of power opened before him. Meridion stepped over the threshold into it.
The trees of the forest seemed to rush past him in the blink of an eye, one moving blur, until he found himself outside the door of the longhouse to which he had been summoned.
Meridion stepped out of the corridor.
Then he closed his eyes and concentrated again.
Birdsong and the breath of the wind greeted him upon his exit, the dancing boughs of trees still in leaf, the passage of foot travelers in the distance, and all the other movement of life that had come to a halt while he was traveling.
The Three had not arrived yet.
He imagined by now Avriel had become aware of his exit, and most likely was not particularly surprised. She had become accustomed to his odd comings and goings, and rarely complained, unless he had forgotten to leave a note.
He was pleased that he had remembered to so do this time.
Avriel—thank you for your stellar help, as always. Answering the Lady’s call. Will return shortly. M
He smiled, anticipating the arrival of the Three, the trio of epic renown that to him had always been guardian, godfather, and mother.
He was indulging in fond thoughts and funny memories when a twinge of the Future rattled his good mood.
Meridion looked rapidly around, but saw nothing. He cursed under his breath.
While his gift with the manipulation of Time was a very convenient and useful one most often, on occasion it was unduly disturbing. He had almost unlimited access to the noncorporeal vision of the Past, allowing him to step back in Time, if he knew where he needed to go, to see things that had occurred long ago, or, one of the traits most annoying to his friends and relations, repeating disputed words of an event for the record. He also could travel, quickly and unseen, over great distances in the wink of an eye, in the Present.
The Future, while more available to him than to most people, was a mystery that occasionally gave him broad or subtle hints, but only small ones.
And it raised his hackles without giving him reassurance.
It was a small enough price to pay for the other aspects of the power.
And, he reminded himself that, while as far as he knew, his ability to pause and manipulate Time was a unique one, many people had such glimpses of the Future, from premonitions and dreams to simple gooseflesh out of nowhere. His own mother had been bedeviled by such premonitions and dreams until she had married his father, a man with dragon’s blood who could chase such nightmares away.
He cherished a memory of her from the distant Past that he had once caught while experimenting with the Time Viewer, a machine of a sort, an invention he had been tinkering with that allowed him to catch glimpses of things that had happened in the Past. It was a vision of his mother as a young child, four or five, perhaps, working on her family’s farm in Merryfield in the old world.
She had been gathering eggs in the chicken coop when a shiver had run through her.
Daddy, she had said to her father, a man Meridion had never met. It happened again.
His human grandfather had turned around and smiled at her.
The tickle?
Yes.
That’s just a goose walking over your grave. Pay it no mind.
His mother had looked at her father seriously. I have a grave?
His grandfather’s smile had resolved into a pleasant, though serious, expression.
Everyone has a grave, child, but being that you are half Lirin, yours will probably be the wind. It’s just a silly farm-folk expression. Now, finish up with the eggs.
The little girl had nodded. Yes, Daddy. She had gone back to the nests, shaking her head of wavy golden hair, muttering to herself, too quietly for her father to hear.
No damn goose better be walking on my grave, whatever that is. I don’ like gooses.
Meridion chuckled as he always did upon seeing the image again. He leaned back against the door of the longhouse and closed his eyes.
Enjoying the memory, the sun on his face, the wind in his hair, the song of the birds in the trees of southern Tyrian, and the undisturbed Present he was sharing with the rest of the world, without a thought of the Future, looming in the distance, beckoning.
SOUTHWESTERN TYRIAN, NEAR THE FOREST EDGE
Achmed sat back in his chair and raised his tankard to his lips, hiding his smile behind it.
A pleasant serenity reigned in the longhouse where the Three had taken shelter; the food had been more than satisfactory and the ale was of a solid quality and pleasant. The laughter that had accompanied the meal had banished the Sergeant’s exhaustion, and his own disquieted melancholy.
Now Grunthor and Rhapsody were engaged in a fiercely competitive Bolg game of cards known as Crusher that, when played in Ylorc, involved the exchange of varying levels of violent blows, usually to the face, but occasionally to the balls. The other two of the Three were exchanging flicks of the fingers, still more dangerous to Rhapsody than to Grunthor, while he himself sat, with his feet on a footrest of perfect height, taking in the tableau of how things had once been when days were simpler.
And happier, he thought. Definitely happier.
There had been a good deal of catching up, of bawdy laughter and repulsive humor, the sharing of stories, both amusing and sad, and, above all, an ease of being in one another’s presence again.
Meridion, Rhapsody’s eldest son, had met them at the door of the longhouse upon their arrival. Achmed was grudgingly fond of all of her children, but had a special affinity for Meridion, having participated in his life-threatening delivery and through the many stages of danger that had hovered around him as an infant, to see him grow into a likable young man with a worldly sense of humor and an appropriate view of his own place in said world.
Rhapsody’s youngest and oldest children favored her physically, being the slightest of both the men and women in the generation, both with their mother’s golden hair, though Meridion had inherited his father’s curls, and both had the vertical pupils in their blue eyes that all of Ashe’s children displayed.
After Meridion were two strapping offspring, Allegra and Stephen, each sporting their father’s red-gold hair and their mother’s emerald eyes atop bodies reflecting the soldier’s build of their father more than the slight build of their mother.
Then a pair of brown heads had been born a century or so apart, Elienne, who had arrived in between the two redheads, and Joseph, who Rhapsody claimed had the same hair color as her brothers. Achmed and Grunthor had disputed those claims and had made great merriment pointing at a multitude of dark-haired men of revolting backgrounds, nominating them as her so-called “bastard” children’s fathers, much to Rhapsody’s amusement and Ashe’s annoyance.
The final child was Laurelyn, recently ordained as the Invoker of the Filids, who looked so much like Rhapsody from a distance that it still tended to startle the Bolg king, who had searched her for her heartbeat, without finding it, more than once before approaching her.
Though he would have never admitted it, some of Achmed’s favorite times over the millennia had been those days in which Rhapsody had brought her children to Ylorc for visits and training, particularly in the forge and the engineering
that their great-grandfather Gwylliam had originally brought to the mountain. Stephen and Elienne had shown the most aptitude for that, while Allegra had trained at length with Grunthor in military leadership, and Laurelyn had been effective in learning the ways of the Bolg midwives. Joseph and Meridion had studied the Lightcatcher, the redesigned machine set into the peak of Gurgus within the mountain range, that made use of the science of colored light and sound.
But a millennium had passed, and now Rhapsody’s children were grown, as were most of their children. Achmed had begun to notice some aging occurring in the line among a few of the grandchildren whose other parents had little or no Cymrian heritage, and the discovery had unsettled him.
Thankfully, the oldest child, Meridion, still maintained the appearance, air, and demeanor of youth. He sat with Achmed while the other two exchanged gentle finger flicks and participated in delightfully sardonic commentary.
“Do you wish to lay a wager on the game?” Achmed asked him in a loud aside. “I will give you two to one on Grunthor.”
Meridion bowed his head in false modesty and demurred.
“Stand up straight and shrink from no one,” his mother said in similarly false annoyance as she flicked Grunthor’s hand, causing him to whimper and put it in his mouth for comfort. “Look every man in the eye, Meridion, and spit in that eye if you feel the need to—including that of your loudmouthed guardian.”
Both the Bolg king and her son chuckled.
Finally, Meridion rose from his chair.
“I must return to the Repository to finish up with the cataloguing of the symposium,” he said, a tone of genuine regret in his voice. “I’m delighted that you summoned me, Uncle; it’s been marvelous seeing you both on this side of the continent. Don’t let me disrupt your game, Mimen; it appears you have Grunthor at disaster’s door.”