The scales were still there, one wedged into the flesh between its fingers, the others digging into the folds of its belly where they had been hidden.
Faron opened the first two fingers on the hand before its eyes, just slightly enough to see what they held.
The sun glimmered onto the irregular green oval, pooling there, making the center shine like the light in a glade, leaving the tattered edges of the scale cool and dark as the forest’s core.
The creature’s failing heart leapt. It peered into the scale, fighting off the assault of sunlight in its stinging eyes.
Faron twisted the scale slightly, allowing the light to run in shining ripples off the lightly scored surface; in the creature’s hand the scale took on an infinitesimal film, an iridescent surface, like a veil of mist, behind which a cool and verdant wood seemed to beckon. When it ascertained which card it held, its smile grew brighter.
It was the Death scale.
Since the creature had taught itself to read the scales, it only knew how to summon into its primitive mind the future they could foretell. Ofttimes in the past, when scrying with the scales for its father in the cool and delicious darkness of its safe haven, Faron would become confused, bewildered by the images that it saw reflected in them.
Thankfully, the Death scale was clearly interpretable.
Faron tilted the scale and peered into it.
All around the scale, the world melted away, replaced by darkness.
Life as Faron knew it was now depicted in, and limited to, the small oval surface defined by the tattered borders of the scale.
Against the frame of flat blackness, the scrying card hummed with power, like the deep green iris of an enormous eye.
Within its center Faron could make out a forest, the same sunless glade that was always visible in the Death scale. No birds sang in this place; stillness reigned unchallenged by even a breath of wind.
Faron waited, oblivious of the bumps in the road and the excoriating sun on its skin.
After a few moments a translucent figure formed in the glade, as if from the mist itself. It was the figure of a pale man, garbed in robes of green that blended seamlessly into the forest behind him. His eyes, black and devouring as the Void, were crowned by thick thundercloud brows, the only part of him that seemed solid, which gave way to snowy white hair. It was Yl Angaulor, the Lord Rowan, whom men called the Hand of Mortality.
The peaceful manifestation of Death.
Despite his stern appearance, Faron had never feared Yl Angaulor. The creature watched, entranced, as the Lord Rowan slowly shook his filmy head, then disappeared into the mist from whence he had come.
The Death scale went dark.
Faron’s eyes closed as the heat of the day returned.
Not for me, the creature thought in its semiconscious mind. I not die now.
A single caustic tear welled beneath a heavily veined eyelid and burned as it fell.
The snow muted the sun’s light as it hung over the edge of the world, pausing as if reconsidering its descent.
With the last measure of her strength, the beast pulled herself up from the chasm, over the ice-covered battlements that scored the mountaintop in wide, frozen rings, to rest on the flat, cold ground outside the walls.
The word that had been driving her on, inspiring her to fight off the sleep that hovered on the edge of her consciousness and the numbness of her limbs, echoed in her brain, growing louder as she climbed.
Home.
She stopped and wearily inclined her head, her three-chambered heart thudding loudly.
Above her in the snowy air a castle reached to the clouds, formed of marble that had long ago been coated with so much ice as to appear chiseled from it. The three towers loomed above her in haughty splendor, unchallenged in the winter sky.
Home. Home. Home.
The dragon’s eyes opened slowly, widely, the vertical pupils that scored the searing blue iris contracting in the last of the afternoon light, drinking in the sight of the vast fortress and with the sight, the memory of it.
In her foggy mind the pieces of those memories were scattered in the dark corners, confused. Slowly, however, they seemed to crawl together and form a clearer picture.
The first memory that returned was an old one, the sight of the castle as she had first beheld it in her exile. She had come to believe she might have been a queen at one time, or a woman of some kind of import, because even as she had been walked to the edge of the icy slopes by someone whose face had not yet come into the picture, even as he had turned and left her in the blinding snow, alone for all time, her back had remained straight, her head unbowed.
As the wyrm stared up at the frost-covered crenulations, the icy windows glazed over so thickly that sunlight would never again pass through them clearly, the towers piercing the clouds above, the images continued to return. She could now recall years of being alone in the cavernous halls that lay beyond the gates, the silence of her marble prison broken only by the echoes of her own footsteps and the crackling of the fires that burned in the mammoth hearths. Each century, each year, each day, even down to the hour came slowly back to her, her dragon blood surging with each beat of her heart, recalling the infinitesimal details as none other than a wyrm could recall, obsessing over them as none but a wyrm could obsess.
They exiled me to this place, she thought bitterly, an anger whose source she could still not remember burning in her blood now. Left me alone in the cold mountains, alone with nothing but memories. And now someone has taken even those from me.
At that thought, another image began to form in her mind. It was of a face, a woman’s face, though she could not make it out completely. A woman with golden hair and emerald green eyes, though little else was clear.
At the edges of the dragon’s mind, the fire of hate began to burn again. She still did not know who the woman was, or why her own caustic blood boiled with fire at the thought of her, but she knew that the memory would return eventually.
And when it did, she vowed that all the unspent fire, all the contained hate, would be unleashed in a thunderous fury that would rock the very foundations of the world, cracking the endless ice into hoary dust and shattering even the marble walls of the prison that was her home, her lair.
The beast crawled on toward the castle, seeking shelter from the coming night.
4
HAGUEFORT, NAVARNE
Gwydion Navarne waited anxiously in the opulent hallway outside the doorway of the Great Hall of Haguefort, the rosy-stoned castle that was his ancestral home. His sixteen years had been marked by loss, first of his mother, then his father, and scarred by near-loss as well, so whenever the doors closed on the place where critical discussions were undertaken and decisions of great import were made, leaving him out in the corridor, it made him anxious.
He was particularly nervous now, given that his guardians, the Lord and Lady Cymrian, had gone to great lengths to include him in virtually every decision of state that had been made since his father’s death three years prior. That they had politely requested he remain outside during their discussions was upsetting, though he told himself there was no reason for it to be. He trusted both his godfather and his godfather’s wife, the woman who had adopted him as an honorary grandchild, implicitly. Somehow, despite that trust, his nerves were on edge this morning.
His anxiety deepened into genuine dismay as one by one his guardians’ most trusted advisors began to arrive in the corridor outside the Great Hall. Each was announced, and quickly admitted, while Gwydion continued to cool his heels on the thick carpet of woven silk.
Finally, when a familiar advisor entered the corridor, Gwydion intervened. That he chose to approach Anborn, the great Lord Marshal and General during the Cymrian War, was less because the man had been a mentor of sorts to him than because the Cymrian hero was lame. Anborn had to be carried in on a litter, there had been a delay in his announcement, and so Gwydion seized the opportunity to speak to him before he enter
ed the Hall.
“Lord Marshal! What is going on in there?” he asked, coming alongside the litter and interposing his body between it and the doorway.
Anborn signaled to the soldiers who bore the litter to set him down and step away. His azure eyes, blue in the color of the Cymrian dynastic line, blazed beneath his wrinkled brow in a mixture of annoyance, amusement, and fondness.
“How would I know, you young fool? I haven’t even made it past the door, thanks to you. Move aside, and then perhaps I will have an idea.”
“Will you come back out once you do know and tell me, then?” Gwydion pressed. “If Rhapsody and Ashe have invited you to confer, the subject must be of great importance.”
The general shook his mane of dark hair streaked with the silver of age and snorted.
“Certainly, though I doubt I am going to stay for much of the discussion. Where you attend a trade apprenticeship is of little interest to me.”
Gwydion’s face contorted in shock as the icy horror took hold of his viscera.
“A trade apprenticeship? They are sending me away to be apprenticed? Please say it isn’t so.”
The general signaled to his litter bearers. “All right, then. It isn’t so. Now move out of the way, cur, and let me get this cursed conference over with so that I might get back to more useful pursuits—training my men, cleaning my boots, picking my nostrils, moving my bowels—anything other than this folderol.”
“Apprenticed?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, buck up, boy,” the General said as the soldiers lifted his litter. “Going away to continue your education is a necessary part of your training to be duke one day. Your own father was apprenticed to any number of different masters in his youth. You will survive and be better for it.” The doors opened; the General’s litter was carried into the Hall, and the doors shut decisively behind him.
Gwydion sank onto a bench of carved mahogany and groaned.
“What’s the matter?”
He looked up to see Melisande, his nine-year-old sister, watching him, concern in her dark eyes. Gwydion smiled quickly.
“Perhaps nothing, Melly,” he said reassuringly. Melisande had suffered many of the same tragedies he had suffered, but she was much younger. It had been an unspoken agreement between Gwydion and his guardians that her life be made as stable and free from worry as possible.
“You’re lying,” Melisande said evenly, tucking away a bag of jackstraws and sitting down beside him on the bench.
“No, I am not,” Gwydion said. He turned in time to see a man he recognized as Jal’asee, the ambassador from the distant Isle of the Sea Mages, enter the far end of the corridor. Both siblings watched in respectful silence as the elderly man walked past with his retinue of three. Jal’asee was an ancient Seren, born of one of the five original races of men that originated in the time before history. His race was unmistakable in his tall, thin frame, his golden skin and dark, bright eyes; the Seren were said to have been descended of the stars. Gaematria, the mystical island on which they made their home, along with other ancient races and ordinary humans who had come as refugees there centuries before, lay three thousand miles to the west, in the midst of the wide Central Sea. It was said to be one of the last places on the earth where magic was still understood and practiced as a science.
“If the Sea Mages are sending a representative, there must be something else going on here,” Gwydion mused aloud. “It would be vain beyond measure to imagine that my schooling was of any interest to them—or to anyone else in that room except Rhapsody and Ashe, and perhaps Anborn.”
“Maybe they are going to execute you instead,” Melisande said jokingly, rising from the bench and drawing out her jackstraws again. “Your report from the tutors must have been worse than we imagined.”
At that moment the doors opened, and their guardian emerged. Both children stood immediately. The Lord Cymrian, whose given name was also Gwydion but whom they both referred to in private as Ashe, was attired in court dress, a happening so rare that it made both Melisande and Gwydion begin to fidget.
The Lord Cymrian’s eyes, cerulean blue with vertical pupils that told of the dragon’s blood in his veins, sparkled warmly as he beheld the children.
“Melly! You’re here as well. Excellent. Please remain here in the hallway for a moment, and then they will bring you in.” He held out his hand, banded at the wrist in leather at the end of a sleeve of white silk slashed with dark red, to Gwydion. “Will you come with me, please, Gwydion?”
The youth and his sister exchanged a terrified glance; then Gwydion followed Ashe through the vast double doors, which closed almost imperceptibly behind him.
As they passed through the entrance to the Great Hall Gwydion’s eyes went to the vaulted ceiling on which historical frescoes representing the history of the Cymrian people had been meticulously rendered in a circle around a dark blue center. When his father was alive, they had entered the Great Hall only on rare occasions, spending most of their time in the family quarters and the library, so the grandeur of the Hall never became commonplace to Gwydion. He found himself unconsciously following the story of his ancestors who had refugeed from the doomed Island of Serendair fourteen centuries before.
Each vault on the ceiling covered a period of the history. Gwydion stared up at the first panel, a fresco depicting the revelation made to Lord Gwylliam ap Rendlar ap Evander tuatha Gwylliam, sometimes called Gwylliam the Visionary, that the Island would be consumed in volcanic fire by the rising of the Sleeping Child, a fallen star that burned in the depths of the sea. It made him even more nervous when he realized that the court clothing that Gwylliam was wearing in the painting was very similar to what Ashe, who was walking before him, was wearing now.
Each of the additional ceiling frescoes told more of the story—the meeting of the explorer Merithyn and the dragon Elynsynos, who had once ruled undisputed over much of the middle continent, including Navarne; her invitation to the people of Serendair to take refuge in her lands; the construction and launch of the three fleets of ships that carried the Cymrian refugees away from the Island; the fates of each of those fleets; the unification of the Cymrian royal house with the marriage of Lord Gwylliam to Anwyn, one of the three daughters of the dragon Elynsynos; the building of the mighty empire over which the first Lord and Lady Cymrian had ruled, and its eventual destruction in the Cymrian War.
Gwydion had once suggested to Ashe that the blank blue panel in the center be painted to commemorate the new era into which they had recently passed, known as the Second Cymrian Age, with his godfather’s ascension to the Lordship along with Rhapsody, who had been named Lady by the Cymrian Council three years before. Ashe had merely smiled; the panel remained blank.
In the Great Hall itself numerous chairs had been set up. Occupying those chairs were the dukes of the five other provinces of Roland and representatives from each of the other member nations of the Cymrian Alliance, the loose confederation of realms loyal to the Lord and Lady. Rial, the viceroy of the forested kingdom of Tyrian, where Rhapsody was also the titular queen, nodded to him pleasantly, but with a look of sympathy that was unmistakable. The back of Gwydion’s neck began to tingle.
Before they passed under the arch that demarked the second vault, Ashe turned and took him by the arm.
“Come in here for a moment,” he said, diverting him into a side room.
Gwydion followed blindly, his stomach clenching with worry. Ashe closed the door behind him. The echo of the vast hall was swallowed immediately by the smaller room’s carpets, drapes, and tapestries.
In the room near the windows the Lady Cymrian was standing, watching the leaves on the trees beginning to lose their verdant hue and turn the color of fire. She, too, was dressed in heavy velvet court clothing, a deep blue gown that hung stiffly away from her slender frame, hiding the swell of her belly. Her golden hair was swept back from her face and plaited in the intricate patterns favored by the Lirin, her mother’s people. She turned upon
hearing them enter the room and eyed Gwydion intently for a moment, then broke into a warm smile that faded after a second into a look of concern.
“What’s wrong?” Rhapsody asked, coming away from the window. “You look like you’re about to be executed.”
“You’re the second family member to suggest that this morning,” Gwydion replied nervously, taking the hand she held out to him and bowing over it formally. “Should I be worried?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, pulling him close and tousling his hair fondly. The skin of her face, normally a healthy rose-gold tone, paled visibly; her clear green eyes brightened with tears of pain. She released him and walked over to a chair where she sat quickly. Her pregnancy was a difficult one, Gwydion knew, and she became fatigued and nauseated easily.
“We have a few announcements to make shortly, but since all of them concern you directly, I thought you should hear of them before the general council does,” Ashe said, pouring a glass of water for his wife and handing it to her. “And, of course, if you object to any of them, we will reconsider.”
Gwydion inhaled deeply. “All right,” he said, steeling himself. “What are they?”
Ashe hid a smile and put his hands on Rhapsody’s shoulders. “First, Highmeadow, the new palace I’ve been having built for your—grandmother”—his dragonesque eyes twinkled in amusement at the word—“will be ready on the first day of autumn. I plan to move our lodgings there; it is time we leave Haguefort and set up our own residence.”
Gwydion’s stomach turned over. Rhapsody and Ashe had been living in his family’s home since the death three years prior of his father, Stephen Navarne, who had been Ashe’s childhood friend. Their presence was the only thing that had made living in Haguefort tolerable; otherwise the memories would have been too strong to bear. Even though he had been a young boy, and Melisande an infant, when their mother was murdered on the road to town, he still remembered her, and missed her when the night winds shrieked and howled around the castle parapets, or on warm, windy days, like the ones on which he and his mother had flown kites together. And the loss of his father in battle, before his eyes, had dealt a death blow to his optimism. Though he knew he would always carry the weight of these tragedies, the load seemed lighter when shared with people who loved him, and who had loved his father.
Elegy for a Lost Star Page 4