“And remember, protecting the Alliance is my duty as Lord Cymrian. You should be grateful to have been allowed the chance to be incarcerated behind heavy doors that will spare you from the rampaging dragon and furious husband whose marriage you tried to ruin. For that alone I should cause your body to turn inside out, as I did to Khaddyr when he betrayed my father. You are the luckiest of men, the kind that never really gets what he truly deserves.”
He opened the door and gestured with his sword.
Tristan Steward glared balefully at him as he passed through the doorway, stopping one last time.
“I will never forgive you for this, Gwydion. Never.”
Ashe smiled ruefully, causing Tristan Steward to shudder.
“Those are not words you want to teach me, Tristan—you would curse the day you did, if I ever were to return the sentiment. Come; your new quarters await. If I’m feeling sporting I may even spot you a flask of Canderian brandy every now and then to keep you company.”
10
THE KREVENSFIELD PLAIN, SOUTHERN BETHANY
The aftermath of the retreat from Sepulvarta had filled the very air of the Krevensfield Plain with desolation and despair. Those morose emotions hung, above the ground, extant in the wind that whipped the new grass of early spring, unable to be cleared from the place or the army that was encamped on it.
In spite of not having been an actual part of the battle in which the army of Sorbold sacked the holy city of Sepulvarta, the fighting force that the Lord Marshal had assembled out of the reserves and forward installations along the southern rim of the Plain had been devastated by that battle anyway. They had gathered in the highest of spirits, called to martial duty by the ancient hero of the Cymrian War, a historic conflict fought centuries before the great majority of them had been born. They had dropped everything to ride with their brothers and sons to the rescue of the Citadel of the Star in the City of Reason, the sacred seat of their faith, and that of the Patriarch who was the head of that faith, in time to see the city in ruins, blazing with fire and patrolled from the air by nightmarish beasts that snatched its citizens from the streets and carried them off into the burning skies.
As they moved slowly through the smoke, the hastily assembled army had no idea that the Patriarch they had ridden to rescue was actually encamped among them. The fighting force had been gathered from all across the southern continent, so most of the soldiers had not served with one another before, and therefore did not recognize the tall, older man in the gray hood and robes as anything other than a comrade-in-arms who, like them, had been too late to aid the holy city.
Not only did the heartsick soldiers not recognize the Patriarch in their midst, they fairly believed him dead. The assumption of this assassination was the greatest reason for their depression.
Anborn ap Gwylliam sat atop his beautiful black warhorse at the crest of a low swale at the eastern outskirts of the encampment, watching the men he had gathered drifting aimlessly, going about their assigned duties as if they were ghosts. His thighs were aching from gripping his mount, an action which until that morning had been denied him for over three years. The feeling had begun to return to his toes and heels as well, though his calves and the arches of his feet still were numb.
Unlike his feet and those walking ghosts, Anborn’s spirit was not numbed by the failure of the rescue he had undertaken. The impending rebirth of the use of his legs had filled the Lord Marshal with new hope, and the memory of a time in his life, long ago and long forgotten, when the ideals of selfless military service, defense of home, kin, and homeland, leadership, brotherhood and camaraderie, and valor were the foundation of his life. Thus, the grit of the battlefield smoke that was drifting over the encampment from the holy city eighty leagues away did not reek of despair or failure for him, but of invigoration, of grim and stolid determination.
A call to arms, ringing deep within the soul he had forgotten he had.
He cast his eyes around until they sighted on a trumpeter, sitting despondently in the gray light of foredawn, staring into a battered metal mug. He turned his mount into the wind; the horse intuitively lowered its head, knowing a command was coming.
“Soldier! Rise and attend!” The general’s booming battlefield voice rang out in the smoky air of morning. The man, his neck snapping around in shock, leapt to his feet, dropping his mug down the front of his trousers.
“Follow me,” Anborn instructed. He clicked to his mount, and the horse bore the general smoothly to the front of the rise. The trumpeter followed him, stumbling but eager.
At the crest of the rise the general stopped and surveyed the encampment again. Then he cleared his throat and signaled to the trumpeter.
“Sound muster,” he ordered.
The trumpeter licked his lips, raised his horn, and let fly.
The silver blast rang over the encampment, causing a following wave of shock. Ten thousand faces turned in the Lord Marshal’s direction.
Anborn sat up straight in the saddle. His black hair, streaked with silver, flowed freely in the wind above his burning azure eyes as he surveyed the army below him. As if gathering power from the very air around him, he swept his cape back over his shoulder, allowing his black ring mail interlaced with silver to catch the diffuse light of the sun rising behind the clouds of smoke, causing his chest to glow like a beacon above the army below him.
“Men of Roland, of the Alliance,” he intoned. “Cast off your misery and rise.”
The soldiers stared at him, then slowly began to stand.
“Rise!” the Lord Marshal thundered.
The army jumped to its feet, a new wave of energy surging through them at the threat and Right of Command in Anborn’s voice. At just that moment, a shaft of sunlight broke through the morning haze and the smoke, lighting the rise on which he sat atop his mount, his broad face wreathed in the scowl of an ancient hero’s disgust.
“I had been under the impression I was leading men, not children,” he said disdainfully. “Cease your mourning, and stoke your rage. The holy city has been savagely attacked and burned; the Merchant Emperor of Sorbold is not even crowned yet and has already spat in the face of the All-God and wiped his feet on the documents of peace and friendship with the Alliance signed by his predecessor. Yet rather than mobilizing with grim determination and righteous anger, you are weeping and walking around like shades of men. Rise, you soldiers! You defenders! You sons of Roland! You, unlike your forebears, are united in the cause of Right, are not fighting your own brothers, but an invading army from the south that threatens your homes, and your God! Even in the most heinous battles of the Cymrian War, the holy city of Sepulvarta was never touched, never damaged by either faction. This is an outrage. It is an abomination, a sin. It should stir a fierce and merciless call for retaliation in your souls. Rise! We have a continent to protect, a Patriarch to restore, and you, sons of Roland, are going to establish the ramparts which will turn the open, undefended pastures of the Krevensfield Plain into a threshold of death to those invaders.”
“M’lord—the Patriarch is dead,” one of the field commanders said haltingly. “The Scales of Jierna Tal, the instrument that would decide a new Patriarch, are deep within Sorbold, in the armed city of Jierna’sid. How are we to—”
Before he could finish, the Lord Marshal signaled impatiently to a tall man in the hooded robes of a pilgrim standing at the foot of the swale. The man climbed quickly to the top of the rise and turned to face the makeshift army at Anborn’s feet. Then, with a violent snatch, he pulled down his hood. The same sunbeam that was lighting the general’s armor came to rest on the tall man’s white-blond hair, causing it to burn with a radiance that outshone even the crystalline blue of the furious gaze in his eyes.
Gleaming on the holy symbol of Sepulvarta that hung around his neck.
A wave of silence swept over the Krevensfield Plain.
Then, as if from one monstrous, all-consuming voice, a roar of acclaim and fury billowed forth, rising in
to the wind and bellowing across the land. It grew, second by second, as weapons were raised to the sun, as men turned to one another with renewed spirit in their gleaming eyes, as the sun pierced the gloom and flooded the vast fields with light.
Anborn threw his head back and laughed aloud, then drew his bastard sword and raised it to the sky as well. He let loose a war cry that melded with the roar of his men, who doubled their volume. Then he signaled to his field commanders.
“Mount up! Separate into the sectors from east to west that each cohort came from, and follow me. While we await the arrival of the united army of the Alliance—an army that Sorbold does not even know exists—we will build a chain of armed farming settlements from here to the sea. Now, come.”
He sheathed his sword, patted his steed, which cantered forth, and rode off to the west without so much as a backward glance.
With a reinvigorated fighting force ten thousand strong falling closely, excitedly in a great wide rank behind him.
11
THE DRAGON’S LAIR, GWYNWOOD, NORTH OF THE TAR’AFEL RIVER
Melisande waited at the opening of the cave for the Invoker to return.
Every now and then sounds echoed up the winding tunnel, plinks and skittering noises, dripping water, the rustling of leaves swirling in the cave’s mouth. The little girl rubbed her hands up and down her arms in the attempt to dispel the cold that had taken hold of her, but stopped after a few moments, realizing that the chill came from within.
From the vantage point atop the hill she looked down over the lake. The mirrorlike surface shone darkly below, its frozen patches duller than the areas where Thaw had melted the water. The call of a nightbird resounded off the surface, then was swallowed by the wind. Melisande thought it might have been the loneliest sound she had ever heard.
Below her in the greenwood she heard the crackling of brush.
She spun quickly around and peered into the darkness of the cave, but there was still no sign of Gavin.
The rustling grew louder. Whatever was moving through the brush was of a size and heft larger than her own, and there was more than one of them. Melisande shrank back from the cave’s entrance, whimpering in fear and hating herself for it.
“Gavin?” she called into the depths. “Gavin, something’s coming.”
“Indeed, Lady Melisande Navarne,” answered a voice from the dark behind her. Moments later, she could see the shadow of Gavin’s form emerge from the blackness, the Bolg midwife in his arms. “I called for them.”
Melisande looked back down the hill and watched as the Invoker’s horse and the one on which she had ridden to this place emerged from the greenwood. She never ceased to wonder at how the nature priest was able to compel the birds of the wood and the beasts in his service to respond to silent signals, but she was glad to see them.
She turned and came over to the Invoker. Krinsel had been wrapped in muslin strips soaked in a spicy liquid, so Melisande could barely see her skin. “Is she alive?” she asked.
“After a fashion,” Gavin replied gravely. “I have done what I can for her, but her wounds are beyond my skills to heal. The man who awaits us at the white forest’s edge will be able to do more, but dragon breath is caustic and burns in a way that no mortal medicine can really affect. She requires the talents of a healer with primordial lore.”
“Like a Lirin Skysinger? A Namer?”
Gavin nodded.
“But Rhapsody is back in the Bolglands now,” Melisande said sadly. “I do not believe that there are any others of her kind on the continent, or if there are, they’re within the Lirin realm. Krinsel may die before she gets there, and even if she does not, the Lirin and the Bolg are not friends. They might kill her, thinking she’s an enemy.”
Gavin emerged from the cave into the wind, and began heading carefully down the slope of the hillside to where the horses waited.
“Leave the worrying to me, Lady Melisande Navarne,” he said, laying the Bolg midwife gently across the front of his saddle. “You’ve done your part; now it is left but for me to do mine. Stay with her.”
“Where are you going?” Melisande asked nervously.
The Invoker barely glanced at her as he climbed back up the hummock to the mouth of the cave. “You already know the answer,” he said as he pushed her back away from it. “I am doing as you, and the Lady Cymrian, command me. Stand clear.”
The little girl covered her eyes as Gavin raised his muddy staff. Around the tip of his left hand, the wind whistled, almost as if it were tying itself in a knot there, causing the newborn leaves and young spring branches to dance wildly in the gathering breeze. The clouds raced along above them in the dark, and beneath her feet the earth seemed to be coming alive.
Inside the black cave tunnel, cracking and rumbling sounds began to issue forth along with a sputum of stones and rising dust. Melisande backed away, trying to shield her face from the stinging grit now flying forth.
I hope we’re doing the right thing, she thought, but there really was nothing else to be done. As uncertain as she had been from the moment her carriage was attacked, one thing of which she was sure was that the cave had been empty.
The dragon was gone.
She maintained a stoic silence as boulders of all size began to roar down from within the rocky cave and from the mountainsides above. The Invoker stood amid it all, unflinching, as even the historic inscription calling the Cymrian people into being was covered in rubble. Melisande could not see clearly in the dark, but even in what little light there was she knew that the cave entrance had been sealed so completely that no one would ever have known it was there in the first place.
She stood quietly until the Invoker lowered his arms and turned to face her once again.
“I have done as you asked, Lady Melisande Navarne,” Gavin said. His voice was as plain and toneless as the wind that had died down around them. “The cave is sealed. Whatever treasure the dragon had, whatever secrets lay within this place, are now lost to history, at least until one of greater power than mine comes to unseal it.”
Melisande only nodded.
“Come, let us be on our way,” the Invoker said, resting his hand on her shoulder. “We will find a place by the shore of the lake to make camp until the moon rises, then return to the Circle, where the Bolg woman can find healing, and where you can find passage back to your father’s keep.”
“There is no one there for me anymore,” Melisande said in a dull voice as she mounted the horse the Invoker held for her. “Everyone is leaving Haguefort and moving on to Highmeadow, where Ashe will be leading the fight against whatever is coming.”
“Then we will arrange to get you to Highmeadow,” Gavin said, pulling himself into the saddle without jostling Krinsel at all. “Wherever you must be, I’ll see that you get there.”
Melisande took hold of the reins, but as she did, her horse snorted and danced sideways, shaking its right front hoof in pain. She gentled the mare down and dismounted, crouching down to examine the ground where the beast had trod.
Lying beneath a frozen fern was a strange dagger, rough-hewn, long and black, and wickedly sharp. It seemed to taper to a sickle-like point, bony ridges running along it from its man-made handle to what seemed to be a stone blade. Carefully Melisande picked it up and turned it over in her hands.
“What do you have there, Lady Melisande Navarne?” Gavin asked, wrapping the injured woman in his saddle blanket.
“It’s a knife of some sort,” the little girl answered, staring at it. The surface of the object hummed as if the stone were alive, vibrant, but there was no warmth in the thing.
The Invoker nudged his mount until he was alongside her own, and extended his gloved hand. Melisande complied with the silent demand, handing over the odd weapon, but feeling a tug of resistance bordering on resentment.
“It looks like a dragon’s claw, in fact,” he said, returning the blade to her after a moment. “Keep it. It will make a fine weapon as long as you are careful about k
eeping it sheathed unless you truly need it drawn.”
Melisande’s petty resentment turned quickly to horror.
“We—we can’t take that,” she stammered. “That’s treasure; dragon treasure. We’re not supposed to remove anything from the cave, not even a pebble. Rhapsody was quite specific about that.” Her mind went immediately to her Cymrian history lessons, most notably the ancient ballad The Burning Fields, which told the story of a dragon’s wrath upon discovering that a tin cup had been stolen by thieves from his lair. The tale ended in a gruesome and detailed description of the destruction of much of the Middle Continent, up to and including the central province of Bethany, where a great temple was later built in gratitude for a firebreak that spared the eastern continent. Rhapsody had assured her that the legends were lies, including one about Elynsynos’s fury called The Rampage of the Wyrm, but having seen the gargantuan size of the beast’s lair, and having felt the heft and sharpness of what had once been a mere single claw, she was beginning to wonder if perhaps the Lady Cymrian was believing what she wanted to believe about a dragon who had been fond of her, rather than the reality of the race.