The Unbearable Lightness of Dragons

by Katie MacAlister

  We left Aisling in the middle of scolding Jim. I took one look at the dark promise in Baltic’s eyes and allowed him to escort me out to the taxi he’d engaged, wondering just what form his idea of punishment would take, and whether I should make up a new batch of caramel sauce for it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Riga is an odd combination of an ancient city and a modern metropolis. It was part of the Hanseatic League, which made it a valuable port for trade, one of the reasons why Baltic chose the area to locate his stronghold. It boasted beautifully preserved historic buildings, a scenic castle, and gorgeous Art Nouveau architecture that mingled with stately elegance alongside the more mundane trappings of modern life. I hadn’t been to Riga in centuries, but even modernized, it had a strong sense of the familiar as we drove out of the now-sprawling city limits and through the tiny suburb of Ziema, headed for the forest preserve that protected the remains of Dauva.

  “It really is amazing that no one developed this area over the centuries,” I mused, as I pulled off the road serving as a boundary along one edge of the dense forest that covered about a hundred acres. “You’d think they would have needed the wood, if nothing else. But no one has touched it.”

  “I ensured no one would,” Baltic said as we got out of the rental car.

  I stopped in midstretch. “You did? How?”

  Thala, who had been forced to sit in the backseat, sniffed. I half expected her to add something really nasty, but she just smiled at me. Oh, it was an unpleasant smile, but still, it took me by surprise. “You lived here and you do not remember the protections Baltic put into place?”

  After eight hours of her presence while we travelled to Latvia, I was about at the end of my tether, but if she was going to suddenly switch tactics and play nice, then I would do the same. It had taken all of my persuasive powers to convince Baltic to come to Latvia when he preferred to be elsewhere. “In a way, no, I don’t remember what Baltic did to Dauva. My memory was wiped, thanks to your sister and her bigamous husband.”

  “Bigamous?” Her eyebrows rose as her gaze flickered over me. “How do you mean?”

  “Gareth married me twelve years ago in order to control my manifestations of gold. Only it wasn’t a legal marriage because he already had a wife—Ruth.”

  She looked as if she wanted to laugh, but she managed to control the urge. “Indeed. How very . . . awkward . . . to find yourself married to a man who already had a wife. But that must mean that your child is his?”

  I closed my eyes for a few seconds, wanting to do nothing more than turn her into a pineapple, or perhaps even a toe fungus. “Yes, Gareth is Brom’s father.”

  “I am his father. The other is a usurper, nothing more,” Baltic said as he gazed at the forest, his hands on his hips.

  “Gareth is his biological father, but he has nothing to do with us now. In fact, I don’t even know where he is. He and Ruth have gone to earth somewhere, taking all of our belongings with them. That doesn’t matter, though. Baltic, how did you protect Dauva? Was it a spell of some sort?”

  “Spells, wards, two banes, and several songs,” he said, taking my hand and leading me down a narrow path that curved around century-old trees dripping with long streamers of moss and assorted vines of ivy.

  “Songs?” I shuddered as I cast a glance behind us, where Thala walked, a small smile playing around her lips as she typed something into her cell phone. “Oh, you mean the magic kind, not the singing kind. Ugh. But . . . dragons don’t do much dark magic, and you can’t sing a song over a location as big as Dauva without invoking some pretty powerful dark forces, something like a dirge, and those aren’t done except by experts. Who did you get to do that?”

  “I did them, all three. I am a dirgesinger,” Thala said with a look of obvious pride, but I heard a faint thread of warning as well.

  “You’re half dragon, though, aren’t you? How can you be a dirgesinger? Dragons can’t handle the sort of dark power needed to sing a dirge.”

  “They can if their mother is an archimage,” she said with another of her creepy smiles.

  Oy. I made a hasty readjustment of my intention to have it out with Thala about her jealousy issues. I knew she was a necromancer of some esteem, because it’s not an easy task to resurrect a dragon, as she had done with Baltic. But if she was also able to cast the most profound level of dark magic spells commonly referred to as songs, it would behoove me to deal with her a bit more carefully in the future.

  Baltic held back a branch, allowing Thala and me to pass. “Most of the magic has been broken by Kostya over the last few months in his attempts to access my lair, but we have begun the process of weaving new layers of protection over the ground as we reclaim Dauva. He might hold Dragonwood, but he will never hold Dauva.”

  Baltic loved Dauva beyond darned near anything, certainly more than the house in England he had built for me. I knew this, and didn’t raise an objection when he had informed me two months before that reclamation and rebuilding of Dauva would take utmost precedence in his plans. I was confident that once we had straightened out the business with the weyr, I could start to work on negotiating Dragonwood back from Kostya.

  “No more songs, though,” I told Baltic with a little shudder. “Those are just bad juju all around. We don’t need the sacrifice of innocents on our—” I stopped, the conjunction of words ringing loudly in my brain. “Sacrifice of innocents. I wonder if that’s what he meant?”

  Baltic waited impatiently for me while Thala proceeded ahead of us deeper into the forest. “Mate?”

  “Coming. Er . . .” I held him back for a moment, allowing her to get out of earshot. “Have you ever heard of Constantine using songs on anything? He didn’t try to have one sung over Dauva after we were killed, did he?”

  His fingers tightened around mine. “I do not know what happened after he killed us, other than what Pavel has told me. He said that Constantine destroyed Dauva rather than let it stand as a monument to the black dragons. The spells I had woven around it while it was being built ensured that it would remain hidden from all eyes but mine, the songs and banes driving away the mortals, as well as concealing it from poaching dragons and other beings.”

  “Hmm.”

  He gave me an odd look, half curious, half annoyed, but said nothing more as we marched deeper into the forest. There was a sense of magic around us, dampening the noises from outside the woods, as if this area was isolated by time from the busy city beyond. Birds called softly to each other, leaves rustled with the passage of unseen little animals, and a slow, gentle drip of water sounded all around us as moisture slid from the leaves to the rich, loamy soil below. The air smelled of earth, green things growing unhindered by man, sunlight dappling the ground. My heart lightened as we made our way through paths long lost, flickers of memories teasing the edge of my mind just as streams of sunlight teased through the leaves. I took a deep breath, savoring the scent of the woods, happiness flowing from the living things around us through me, making me want to laugh and run through the forest.

  “Dauva,” I said, my eyes closed, my hands out as I reached blindly for something that was no longer there. “It’s Dauva.”

  “It is.” Baltic took my hand, and I opened my eyes to find him smiling down at me, his black eyes lit from within with pleasure. It was as if the centuries had peeled away, leaving us standing in a time that no longer existed. “Welcome to my home, mate.”

  I smiled, allowing him to lift me off my horse as I looked beyond him to the grey stone towers that seemed to rise to the very sky itself. The drawbridge we stood upon was not wide, but it was long, covering the broad stretch of moat surrounding two-thirds of the castle. The far side ended in a sheer cliff that dropped perilously into a gully below. It looked impregnable, as solid as the earth from which it rose, the three towers as imposing as the solid granite of their walls. “It’s beautiful, Baltic.”

  And it was beautiful, in a stark, massive sort of way. It was the heart of the black dragon se
pt, its foundation, its soul, and I knew as Baltic led me across the drawbridge to the outer bailey that it would stand as a testament to black dragons for all the ages.

  The light shifted, darkening to that of a cloudy sky, the wind picking up with winter chill. I shivered and rubbed my arms, glancing around. “This is like at Dragonwood—the past is imprinted on the present.”

  “Yes.” Baltic looked with mild interest as shadowy forms of dragons long dead flitted past us. Beyond, Thala was hunched over an outcropping of rocks and ferns that was overlaid on the image of the nearest tower. “You must be envisioning it right before the fall. Not a very pleasant time, mate.”

  “I can’t help it.” I stepped aside as a small group of men charged toward the drawbridge, the hooves of their horses ringing with steely bites on the wooden planks. “Was that you?”

  Baltic glanced after the horsemen. “No. I was in the tunnels, fighting Kostya and his men.”

  The image of Dauva wavered, and pain lanced me, regret at what could have been and sorrow at what was. I blinked away accompanying tears, knowing what pain Baltic must have felt the first time he beheld the ruins of his beloved stronghold.

  “It wasn’t supposed to end this way,” I told him, rubbing his knuckles on my cheek. “It was supposed to stand forever.”

  “Only love lasts forever, chérie. We will last for all the ages; all else is trivial.”

  “For someone who is commonly held as an example of all that is bad about dragons, you certainly are the most romantic man I’ve ever met,” I said, melting into his arms. “I love you, you know.”

  “I know,” he said, his fire whipping around us as his lips teased mine.

  I pinched his behind. He slapped mine, then wrapped an arm around me and spun me around. Visible through the partially translucent image of the castle, a small hill rose, covered in mossy rocks and giant ferns, their leaves forming great arches against the grey-brown stone. I glanced at the rocks, noticing the very faintest of images in the face nearest me, turning to the image of the tower next to us. On the lower quarter was an elaborate carved band depicting various saints. Scrambling up the far side of the mound, Thala appeared, frowning and kicking at small stones until she grunted her satisfaction and squatted, her hands drawing symbols in the air.

  “The entrance to the lair?” I asked, accompanying Baltic to the top of the small hill.

  “Yes. Kostya raided it a few months ago, but Thala arrived to protect it almost immediately thereafter, placing new songs and banes on it so that he could not take all that remained.”

  I glanced at Thala as she examined the magic she’d layered on the entrance, wondering why she and not Baltic was in charge of protecting the lair. “You didn’t have guards on it once you knew Kostya was out and about?”

  “It was not necessary. I knew that Thala would guard it. I had other things to take care of.”

  “Other things like trying to steal May?”

  His lips tightened. “I did not want the silver mate. I simply wanted the dragon heart.”

  “Why?”

  He slid me a questioning glance. “Why did I want the dragon heart?”

  “Yes. From what Kaawa said about it, the only time it’s re-formed is either to re-shard it into different vessels or to use it for unimaginable power, like taking over the weyr, and I can’t believe you ever wanted to do that. You may be many things, Baltic, and you have committed acts that I may not have liked, but you’ve never been power-mad. So why did you want the dragon heart?”

  “To re-form it is to summon the First Dragon,” he answered.

  “You wanted to talk to him?” I searched his face for answers, but as usual, there were none there. Baltic was at his most dragon, his eyes glittering with a light that wasn’t human. “But . . . why?”

  “Always you ask why, but the answer is ever before you,” he said, shaking his head with mock exasperation. He lifted my hand and kissed my fingers.

  “It was me,” I said softly, reading the truth in the depths of his mysterious eyes. “You wanted to ask the First Dragon to bring me back. That’s why you tried to kidnap May. And attacked the sárkány. You were going after the shards, one by one, systematically forcing the wyverns into situations where they would have to hand over the shards. That’s why you were helping Fiat, isn’t it? Aisling said he held two shards. It all makes sense now. But, oh, Baltic, no wonder everyone thought you were mad. It was a crazy plan!”

  “The promise of having you back was worth any sacrifice,” he said simply.

  “Not that of innocent dragons. Could you have stopped Fiat from killing his own people?”

  He was silent for a minute, brushing a strand of hair from my cheek. “I don’t know. I didn’t think he would go through with his plans. I thought . . .”

  “What?” I prompted.

  He hesitated. “I thought his plans too mad to be successful. I still think they were.”

  Thala shouted for him, asking for his help to move a heavy rock. He gave my hand a squeeze, then climbed up to heave the boulder out of the way.

  I thought about what he didn’t say—that Fiat’s plans couldn’t have been successful . . . not without help. Not unless someone else was involved, someone like the leader of a band of outlaw dragons. I looked at my watch. I had just an hour before I was supposed to meet with Maura back in Riga.

  “I’m going to look around a bit,” I called to Baltic, waving a hand vaguely to indicate the trees. “It’s fascinating seeing Dauva as it was, even if it’s not real.”

  “There is nothing to see out there but Constantine’s army.” Baltic climbed down and took my hand again, leading me past a fallen tree to where a ghostly tower thrust up out of the earth. The light shifted back and forth across the bushes and leaves, to solid stone and mortar, faint, distant noises reaching us as the castle’s few remaining occupants ran about preparing for the siege that would destroy most, if not all, of them. “Thala will be busy for some time unmaking the magic. We will go into the tunnels and watch as I battle Kostya.”

  “I’ve already seen you die, thank you.” I pulled my hand from his. “And I don’t want to see it again.”

  “That was only the end. We fought the traitors for almost a day before Kostya struck me down. You will enjoy watching me fight him. I did not wear heavy armor then, just a cuirass, but you always enjoyed seeing me wield a sword.”

  “I’m sure you were beyond manly with a sword, but I think I’ll pass on the sight of you and Kostya hacking away at each other. I know how it ends, and honestly, I don’t think I could witness that again.”

  “You control the vision, chérie, not me.”

  “On the contrary, I don’t control it at all. It runs like a movie in front of me.” A thought occurred to me. If this was, in fact, the fall of Dauva, then I might be able to see if Constantine was killed here as well. It would make summoning his spirit a hundred times easier if I knew where to find it. “I’m just going to look around for a bit, if you don’t mind.”

  “As you like. But it will only upset you if you see Constantine strike you down again.”

  “I don’t intend to watch that, but I wouldn’t mind seeing where he died.”

  “That would be satisfying. You will mark the place and I will dance on it later.”

  I laughed at him, seeing the twitch of his lips that let me know he was teasing me.

  “You think I am not serious?”

  “I think you’re pulling my leg, yes. You have no reason to dance on Constantine’s grave, assuming I find it.”

  “I have many reasons, but I will not go into them now. I am more concerned as to why you are so determined to find where he fell.”

  “My little job for the First Dragon, remember?”

  Baltic made a face. “You take that too much to heart. Do not go beyond the confines of Dauva. You are protected here, but outside you are not.”

  “Protected from what?” I asked, picking my way over a fallen tree now consumed in moss and
fungus.

  “Kostya. He will no doubt descend upon us once he learns we are here.”

  I didn’t think that was any too likely, but I kept my opinion to myself.

  The snowy ghostly scene faded in and out of my vision, leaving me to believe it was a memory of the land I was seeing, rather than a personal vision. Those were much more immersive, whereas this was just faint images of a time long past. As I walked over the drawbridge toward the road that led up from Riga, faint snow whirled around me at the same time that birds chattered high above in the treetops warmed by the sun.

  “This would be confusing as hell if it wasn’t so interesting,” I told a couple of snow-covered guards posted at the fringe of Constantine’s camp. Men and horses milled around in the darkness of night, small fires dotting the area, their flames flickering wildly in the wind and snow. Tents cast dark shadows against the present-day trees, giving the entire place an eerie appearance.

  “All right, Constantine. Let’s have this out, you and I,” I murmured as I started to search the ghost camp.

  He wasn’t in the big tent that I assumed belonged to him. As I prowled the shadowed camp, I passed a couple of men who spoke in French, pausing when one said he had two prisoners.

  “Black dragons? Put them to death,” one man said with a dismissive gesture.

  “They aren’t dragons,” the other replied, shivering and huddling into his fur-lined cape. “We caught them skulking around the north wall.”

  “Humans? We have no need of them.”

  “Human but not mortal—”

  I continued on my way. Fifteen minutes later I was ready to give up. I had turned back toward the castle when I saw a flash of color from a high ridge of trees to the south. Stumbling over a snowdrift that was really a sprawling red-berried elder bush, I fought my way through the forest to the spot where, three hundred years before, I had pleaded with Constantine to leave Baltic alone, and was slain by the man who claimed he loved me.

  “I really could go the rest of my life without seeing myself killed again,” I grumbled as I beat back a feathery tamarisk shrub that tangled in my hair. “At least I don’t have to see Baltic being—whoa!”