“Oh, yes.” The boy chuckled. “Rumor has it Rel the Traveler himself just arrived. He and the queen’ll be talking up old times. He was there, you know, when the queen lifted the spell off us, and broke the hundred-year sleep. Now over yonder, we’ve King Jussar the Golden, which referred to his singing, not his hair, which was black, and . . .”
Hibern had never met Rel, but she’d heard plenty of gossip about him, mostly praise from those who knew him, except from CJ of the Mearsieans, who seemed to waver between a wary friendship and a scowling conviction that he was an overgrown blowhard. All Hibern knew about him was that he came from some small kingdom in the middle of the Sartoran continent, and that he was often on the Wander.
Hibern waited for the guide to draw a breath after his history of another sword-bearing monarch on a marble horse, and asked, “What did Rel the Traveler do?”
“He got the queen to safety, by way of a morvende geliath. He’s friends with them,” the guide said proudly. “Not many sunsiders get to say that. He was also there at the end, fending off Norsunder when they tried to kill the queen. Not that I saw it. I was still asleep on the other side of town. But I’ve met him, twice, when I carried a fare to the garrison while he was visiting. He’s friends with what’s left of the Royal Guard, being very good with the sword.”
Hibern was done with the subject of Rel. To stem the flow of friendly chatter, she commented when he stopped for breath, “I really like the embroidery on your livery. Did you do it?”
“Yes,” he said proudly. “My dad taught me. He was a sailor, before the war.” His smile lessened. “He was out to sea when Nightland attacked.” Hibern was caught by his use of ‘Nightland.’ She’d read it on old records, a euphemism like ‘eleveners.’ “So I was gone for a century, but he wasn’t,” he finished.
“That must be very difficult.”
“I’m better off than most. At least I can hope he got a good long life, unlike mates whose families were killed by the Nightlanders. But you wanted a tour of the Way, not of my life.” He went on with his recitation of famous sights that Hibern had read about, and some that had local meaning; the patterns of his speech indicated he’d worked hard to memorize it.
When he paused, she asked the history of the various five-story buildings. Presently they rounded through the expensive shop area east of the palace, and curved back along the winding middle branch of the river to their starting point.
She recognized the square as the melodic bell rang the four chords, echoed by other city bells. She was sorry to climb out of the cart. “Thank you,” she said, digging for her coins.
“I’ll take half,” the boy said.
Hibern was startled. “But you answered all my questions. And I know they weren’t very good questions. I think I need to spend a week just walking and looking.”
The boy leaned on the edge of the cart, his mouth wry. “It’s the questions you didn’t ask: Where’s the spot where King Connar XXIII died, and are the bloodstains still there? Where’s the house where Alian Dei entertained the first Connar, before he married her? Where’s the stone marking the place where they executed Efran Demitros?”
Hibern smiled ruefully as she handed over the coins. “My unasked questions are all about the white tower, and I know whom to put them to.” She belatedly remembered her first-circle bow.
The boy returned her bow from his seat, and she hurried inside, to find the desk attendant peacefully reading his book. Hibern was considering whether to interrupt him and ask for a message to be sent, when Atan’s laughing voice preceded her appearance with a very tall, dark-haired fellow with deep-set dark eyes. Though he was dressed plainly in the ubiquitous traveler’s loose, belted linen tunic over riding trousers and boots, his size and breadth of shoulder drew the eye.
“Hibern,” Atan exclaimed. “I apologize. We went to visit friends over at the guardhouse, and just got back.”
Hibern had never heard that happy lilt in her voice before. Atan was usually so serious.
“I hope you didn’t wait unduly long,” Atan went on. Hibern was opening her mouth to say something diplomatic when Atan bent over the shoulder of the desk clerk, and exclaimed, “Oh, no, you were here an hour ago?”
“I came early because someone else canceled,” Hibern said quickly. “And so I wanted to see the famed dragon door—which I didn’t see—and the Grand Chandos Way, which I did.”
Atan turned a wide-eyed glance up at the fellow. “Rel, did you hear that? Dragons?”
Hibern gazed in surprise. So this was the Rel whom CJ of Mearsies Heili spoke so disparagingly?
Atan turned a hand her way. “This is my study partner Hibern. Let’s find Hin and Dorea—no, that’s right, the scribes put Dorea on archive duty, did they not? She would love that. Wouldn’t want to leave.” She turned her gaze from Rel to Hibern as she said with a return of her old, careful, sober manner, “This is my hour. Perhaps we could visit Tsauderei. Is that all right with you?”
Hibern didn’t need coaching to know that when a queen asks if something is all right with you, you say, “Yes, your majesty.” Yet she’d heard a tone in that soft declaration, this is my hour, as if all the hours belonged to someone, or something, else, and she remembered what Erai-Yanya had said about Atan needing a taste of freedom.
* * *
—
Tsauderei was old enough to find little to surprise him and much to amuse him in the vagaries of human nature. He had expected the newly enchantment-free Sartoran mage guild to be jealous of their prerogatives, which extended to their new young queen. And so it had proved.
Few people in the world were granted immediate magical access to Tsauderei. Atan was one of them. When magic warned him of multiple transfers, with Atan’s tracer among them, he waited, ready to drop a stone spell over them in case there was treachery afoot. But a quick glance at the little group recovering in the Destination outside his one-room cottage made it clear that she was with them willingly.
“Tsauderei, I’m so very glad to see you,” Atan exclaimed as she led the way inside. “I apologize for not sending a message ahead, but I only have my hour.”
“I’m entirely free,” Tsauderei said, as Hibern looked around with intense interest at the living quarters of one of the world’s most famous mages.
Tsauderei lived in a one-room cottage with a loft above. Three walls were entirely covered with books. The fourth was an enormous glassed-in window looking out over a steep valley above a deep blue lake.
The old mage turned the hourglass sitting on his side table and said, “That’ll warn us. So, begin with introductions?”
“Here’s Hibern. This is our magic study hour, actually. But she agreed. You’ve heard me talk about Hinder.” The morvende boy flicked a hand in greeting, his talons today painted a distinctly virulent green. “And this is Rel, who helped us against Norsunder.” She clasped her hands together. “I remember going through your books about dragon legends when I was ten or so. You used to tell me, when a subject comes up three times during separate circumstances, the wise mage pursues it?”
Tsauderei laughed. “And that subject is dragons?”
“Yes. Is there any truth about their once being in the world? And if not, why do legends about them persist?”
Tsauderei laid his gnarled hands in his lap. “I can answer that. Of course I’ve never seen one. No one has. But I have seen where they once lived.” He paused, and saw four pairs of interested eyes. “As you can see, we are quite high up. Much higher are the mountains between your Sartor and Sarendan below us. Imagine an enormous plateau of heat-blackened stone. It’s cold there all year round, with either snow or dry wind. Far in the distance, what looks like small hills are huge caverns, the walls black and glassy, as if melted by fires of unimaginable heat. The plateau is where dragons once perched, and the caverns, we believe, were where they sheltered their young. I spent a very cold
summer studying those caverns when I was a journeymage. I wasn’t the only one. Despite the thin air and the barrenness and the cold, there were many of us who went over that place looking for any hints of dragons’ lives all those thousands of years ago. But all there is to be found are the faint remains of carvings in the rock, made by the humans who lived among the dragons and cared for them. Those carvings are yet to be deciphered, but the carved images make it clear that the dragons chose to be there.”
Atan said, “So humans did live with them, even in such a terrible place! Is that the appeal of dragons, then? That they were immense?”
Tsauderei gave a crack of laughter. “Atan. I taught you better than that.”
“I know there’s seldom any ‘simply,’” Atan hastened to say. “But the dragons have been gone so long we don’t know anything about them, other than that they were large. And flew, and breathed fire. So I’m thinking that humans seemed to admire large creatures for being large as well as the dangerous predators for their ability to kill.”
Rel looked down at his hands.
Tsauderei leaned back, eyeing him. “Your large friend appears to disagree,” Tsauderei observed. “Is that due to your size, young man?”
Rel lifted a hand. “Has nothing to do with my size. If you’ve ever traveled by earning your way cross-country, you’ll discover that the easiest job in any city is to work for the Wand Guild. Anyone can wave a magic stick over horse droppings in a street. But the bigger the beast, the bigger the pile, and you soon lose any admiration for size.”
He stopped there, shrugging.
Hinder laughed, his cobwebby hair drifting. “I did not think of that. What a nasty job—surely that had to be during the days of slaves, for who else would wand dragon droppings? Not I!”
Tsauderei’s smile was sardonic. “Then you’d be wrong. You’re forgetting the chief appeal of dragons: their treasures.”
“I thought dragon hoards were the false part of the legend,” Atan exclaimed. “It makes no sense. What use would an enormous creature like a dragon have for cups of gold, bejeweled crowns, and the like?”
“Cups of gold are certainly the distortion of legend.” Tsauderei chuckled. “Dragons breathed fire. They melted rock to make their caves, so what do you think their internal arrangement was like?” He studied the four bewildered faces before him, clapped his hands on his knees, and laughed again. “Their excreta came out as gemstones, my dears. Volcanic glass. Sometimes precious metals, depending, I guess, on what they’d been eating, which was mostly ores of various sorts from mountaintops, left from very old volcanos. Their caves were piled high with the stuff, until humans carted it off.”
Atan said, “Why didn’t I know that?” Then she winced. “Now I feel stupid. Dragon-stones, dragon-eyes, the rare and expensive gems—those were dragon droppings?”
“Yes.” Tsauderei chuckled again. “There are few real dragon gems left, though there are numerous types of rock misnamed dragon-eye and the like, usually rocks with a thin layer of some other substance compressed in the middle.”
“‘Greed and beauty. Two human traits,’” Atan quoted as she moved to the little kitchen arrangement in the corner opposite the door.
Tsauderei delighted in how unconsciously she resumed old habits, but it was not an unmitigated pleasure. Atan had not changed at all since he’d seen her last, which meant she had not only performed the Child Spell, keeping her from maturing to her adult form, she was holding onto it. It would be too simple to assume she had done it to keep her court from negotiating a marriage. He suspected her reasons were more complex than that, connected to the emotions Atan seemed to be trying to hide.
He could have told her that emotional attachments were not avoided by doing the Child Spell, only the physical component of such attachments. Even in this short visit it was clear that she was developing feelings for Rel, and that Hibern, the age-mate whom he and Erai-Yanya had so carefully chosen for her, seemed oblivious.
As for Rel, there was no more heat in his gaze than there was in hers, but then, big as he was, his cheeks were still smooth. That sun for him was clearly still below the horizon, as it was for her.
Well, and if the sun came up, so what? The passions of the teen years were like thunderstorms, wild for a short time, soon gone. Rel seemed an excellent young man for Atan’s first experiments into relationships, whenever she decided to step over that threshold. But he foresaw yet more conflict from the Sartoran first circle, who could not be prevented from talking about a future royal marriage.
He watched from under hooded eyes as she went about preparing hot steep. She knew all the spells. The firestick under the tiny grate had probably been made by her, one of a magic student’s first projects, to repeat, over and over, the spell to capture the sun’s heat.
Unaware of his scrutiny, Atan was trying to recapture the sense of being Tsauderei’s student again. It was good to be here again, and with people she liked, and yet that sense of goodness was so conscious. She knew it would end soon, which hurt.
She glanced a fourth time at the sand trickling relentlessly through the glass, and scolded herself. She would never want to go back to the days when Sartor was enchanted, never, never, never. She was happy to be able to make steep with fresh leaf, because Sartoran leaf was growing again on the northern slopes, and she should celebrate that its trade all throughout the world would help fill an empty treasury.
“Hot steep in moments,” she said with forced cheer, bringing the tray of cups to hand out.
The water boiled. Atan poured it through the new leaf, filling the cottage with a delicious summery smell. She sniffed it in, hoping the aroma would chase the resentment out of her heart.
Hinder held out a hand. “Steep I can get any time. Everybody says that people can fly in this valley.”
“They can,” Tsauderei said, pointing to the ledges and small plateaus around the steep slopes above the lake, on which could be seen, amid the trees, tile roofs. “It’s the way the villagers get from ledge to ledge. By ancient magic, beyond anything we are capable of now.”
“I want to try flying,” Hinder said, bouncing gently up and down so that his painted toe talons clicked on the clean-swept stone floor.
Tsauderei said, “Here’s the magic word and sign.” He demonstrated. “Perform them at the same moment, then spring up. You should figure it out fast enough—”
The door closed on the last word. The others watched Hinder through the great window. He did the magic while running, then flung himself over the side of the cliff, causing Hibern to suck in her breath, the backs of her knees gripping sickeningly, the way they did when she was confronted with heights.
The boy vanished, then he reappeared, hands outflung, the wind ripping through his snow-white hair and his tunic as he shot skyward, cartwheeled clumsily, began to fall, righted himself, then arrowed off to the west and vanished from view.
“Now we’ll never get him back in time,” Atan said, hating how she could not keep her heart from twisting anxiously as the sand spilled inexorably into the lower chamber in the glass, already much less above than below.
Tsauderei smiled. “I can send him along when he’s finished flying.” He then filled the remaining time with easy questions about Atan’s and Hibern’s studies and Rel’s travels.
When the last sands ran out, they got up to leave. He noted the regret Atan tried to hide, and said merely, “Come again when you can.” So she didn’t want to talk about whatever was bothering her. He reminded himself that it was right and good for her to cleave to her Sartorans. She would always be his student, but they’d talked frankly about the fact that if the enchantment did break, and Sartor was freed, he would cease being her guardian.
“I will,” Atan promised, hating the way her throat tightened. She refused to add, If I can.
She, Rel, and Hibern transferred to Sartor in time to hear the bells of the h
our ringing melodiously.
The break from the customary hour of scholarship had caused Hibern to remember outside affairs—specifically Clair and the prospective alliance.
She turned to Atan. “Have you met any other rulers our age?”
“I haven’t met any at all,” Atan said. “I know there are several, many due to troubles with Norsunder, and others due to civil disturbances. Have you met them? Besides the king of your country?”
Bong-g-g-g!
Hibern said quickly, “Clair of Mearsies Heili. She mentioned some time back that she wishes to start some kind of alliance, among only people our age. Mutual help.”
Rel said, “That sounds like Clair.”
Atan gave him a glance of surprise. “You know her?”
“Pretty well. I travel a lot with her cousin. I haven’t been back this year, but this doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Bong! As the last ring died away, the door opened to a silent waiting steward, bringing the invisible yoke of duty to tighten around Atan once more.
“Tell me about it next time,” she said, walking backward, and to Rel, “Where will you be?”
Rel said, “I’m off to visit Mendaen and the others. Do you want me to carry any messages?”
Atan lingered in the doorway, and as they talked quickly about people Hibern had never heard of, she decided not to interrupt them. She transferred back to Roth Drael, her emotions in turmoil.
Tsauderei was wrong about her obliviousness. Hibern had immediately been aware of the difference in Atan’s behavior, the way she glanced at Rel when he spoke, and the way he looked at her.
Hibern hadn’t the experience to be certain about the bond that she perceived, but she could guess. She could also guess how much trouble there might be because of it. In spite of Atan’s wish to be regarded as an ordinary person, she wasn’t ordinary, would never be ordinary, because Atan was one of a kind: the last Landis of a very, very long line, Queen of Old Sartor.
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