“For the life of me I cannot imagine why you would want to go sit in a cave with a vapid beast who might accidentally incinerate you should she get a head cold. Is my wretched nephew’s company even more dull than I had imagined?”
“You have never met Elynsynos,” Rhapsody said tartly, her ire rising. “I don’t appreciate you speaking about her, or Ashe, in that manner.”
The general chuckled. “Elynsynos is my grandmother.”
“So perhaps you should take the time to come to know her. She’s fascinating.”
Anborn shrugged. “Perhaps. Maybe someday when I have nothing better on which to spend my time. It appears I value mine more than you do,” he said, a playful note in his voice, but a serious look in his eyes. “Stay here, Rhapsody, where Gwydion can take care of you. This pregnancy was ill advised; do not make it even more dangerous by hiding away in a dragon’s cave where no one can find you to help if you need it. At least at Haguefort you have access to the very best healers in Roland.”
Rhapsody shook her head. “To my knowledge, none of those healers has ever delivered the child of a Lirin mother and a dragon father,” she said lightly. “It’s a somewhat exclusive experience. There are few in the world who have ever been involved in such a pregnancy, and Elynsynos is one of them. She conceived Manwyn, Rhonwyn, and your mother while in human form, and could not then change back to her wyrm form until they were born, so she has had the experience of carrying babies of different blood in her body and giving birth to them. I hope to learn a great deal from her, and perhaps fare better in the delivery than I would have otherwise.”
“What can she possibly teach you? She was a serpentine beast of ancient race, an egg-layer that took a Seren form, mated with a Seren man, and carried triplets in a body that itself was foreign. That is not your situation.”
“No, it’s not,” Rhapsody admitted. “But as far as I know, there is only one other person who had a closer situation to mine, whose natural form was human, and that was your mother.” She sighed deeply. “I wish that events had worked out differently with Anwyn, that I could have come to know her and learn from her, as my grandmother-in-law. I wish she could come to know her grandchild. If only I had not gained her ire, perhaps—” Her voice broke off in midword.
Anborn’s face was bloodlessly pale, his azure eyes gleaming with wild intensity.
“Do not ever speak those words again,” he choked, his voice raw. “You are a Namer; may the All-God forbid that your wish ever be granted just because you were foolish enough to misuse your power.”
Rhapsody stared at the Lord Marshal in amazement. He was more visibly upset than she ever remembered seeing him, even in the heat of battle.
“Anborn—”
His hand shot out and roughly covered her mouth. “Stop—do not utter another sound.” He glanced around behind him, then above, as if listening for something in the wind. “You do not know what you are saying.” His voice dropped in tone to just above a whisper. “If there is anything in this life that you have to be grateful for, it is that the misbegotten hellkite is dead, rotten into coal in her ash-covered grave, and therefore will never know your child, or that you even have one. She was the absolutely last entity on the face of this earth that you would want to seek maternal advice from; trust me on this.”
His hand trembled as it cupped her lips.
Rhapsody’s emerald eyes, wide with surprise, blinked above his fingers. Then her expression resolved into one of more calm, and she placed her hand over his and pressed his hand to her lips, then gently pulled it from her face.
“All right, Anborn,” she said quietly. “I believe you.”
Her eyes searched his face, trying to ascertain the reason for the intensity of his alarm. She knew that Anborn had led his father’s armies against his mother’s in the Cymrian War, and doubtless that had given him opportunity to see Anwyn’s brutality at close range. But the war had been over for more than four hundred years; the general seemed to have made peace with other old adversaries and buried his enmity in all other matters. The strength of his reaction confounded her.
After a moment’s staring at each other, she still had found nothing tenable, so she smiled, hoping to diffuse his mood. The wildness in the general’s eyes seemed to pass, and he stared at her with a new clarity.
“It’s time I got started,” he said finally, reaching over the side of his chair for his crutches, pulling them into his lap. “Young Gwydion will be waiting; he’s already champing at the bit.” He continued to watch Rhapsody for a moment longer, then leaned forward.
“I have one final thing I want to say to you,” he said, his voice firm but calm again. “Just in the event I don’t return.”
Rhapsody went pale. “Don’t even think that, let alone say it,” she said.
Anborn smiled slightly. “It’s a possibility that occurs every time one leaves another’s presence. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes. But I don’t like the way it comes out of your mouth. When I said it, it was a reminder to tell the people you love how much they matter to you. When you say it, it feels like goodbye.”
“It’s meant to be neither; I just wish to pass along to the only Lirin Namer I know something that I have never said to another person, for the sake of history. Both of my parents were selfish, misguided monarchs that allowed a petty disagreement and their own thirst for power to plunge a continent into war and destroy the civilization their people had built from nothing. There is an element so avaricious, so self-important, about this that it can only be ascribed as evil—both of them.”
He leaned closer, so that his words, spoken softly, could be clearly heard.
“And while there are those who would discount what I say as biased, or self-serving, I swear to you, Rhapsody, that while Gwylliam, my father, may have been a man whose selfishness made him evil, my mother was wicked, malevolent, on a much deeper level. Llauron might disagree, were he to appear from the ether, or whatever elemental state he currently lounges about in, because he always took her part, but despite what my brother might say, I can tell you from firsthand experience that my mother was evil incarnate. She was soulless—she had been cursed with the ability to see only into the Past, for all intents and purposes, and she was reminded constantly of the wrongs that had been done to her, the slights and the betrayals, those injuries which good men and women put behind them and bury in what went before so that they might move on. Perhaps anyone so afflicted would also have turned wicked. But Anwyn had a ruthlessness that came from a deeper place. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was she that allowed the demon that you and your friends vanquished to grow in power, to escape notice for centuries as it sowed the seeds of its destructive plans. But I know more—much more. And I can tell you that there has been nothing in my experience more close to gazing directly into the Vault of the Underworld than looking into my mother’s eyes. May she putrefy in that Vault forever.”
He signaled to his bearers and was carried from the room, leaving Rhapsody watching him go in stunned silence.
25
THE CAVE OF THE LOST SEA, GWYNWOOD
Elynsynos’s lair was exactly as Rhapsody remembered it.
The journey with Ashe had been much easier than the first one they had made to this place together. Then they did not trust each other; the land was rife with hidden evil, in the grip of an unseen F’dor, causing even those who were allies to be suspicious of one another. Now, as they returned to the hidden cave set in a hollow in the hillside near a small woodland lake, lost in the wonder of love and impending parenthood, the Lord and Lady Cymrian found that sweet memories were all that remained of that first journey, the mistrust and acrimony lost to history.
The lake at the base of the hill was frozen, its crystalline ice reflecting the trees that lined it like a mirror.
From the depths of that cave a voice sounded as they approached, a voice that held the timbres of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass simultaneously.
&nb
sp; Hello, Pretty. You’ve brought your husband and your baby. How lovely.
Rhapsody chuckled. “Hello, Elynsynos. May we enter?”
Yes, of course. Come in.
Together Ashe and Rhapsody followed the winding path down into the dragon’s lair.
The great wyrm, matriarch of all that lived on the continent, was waiting in her horde of glittering coins, chests of treasure and jewels, and artifacts recovered from a jealous sea—tridents and masts, figureheads from lost ships, rudders and wheels formed into chandeliers with a thousand candleless flames. As always, Rhapsody struggled not to become entranced by her eyes, prisms of colors and hypnotic light scored with the same vertical pupils that could be seen in Ashe’s eyes. Those enchanting eyes were dancing with the light of excitement.
The great beast lifted herself from the salty water of the lake that filled the bottom of her horde, her gleaming scales and enormous, serpentine body fluid as the wind. Elynsynos had long ago given up her physical form and existed in a purely elemental state, in much the same way that her grandson Llauron, Ashe’s father, had chosen to do.
Have you come to visit, as you promised, Pretty? the wyrm asked, settling down on the cave floor.
“Indeed,” Rhapsody said. “I am hoping to learn about carrying a wyrmkin child from you, and to find a way to feel better while doing it.”
How do you feel now? the great beast asked.
Rhapsody considered; the nausea had vanished from the moment she walked into the cave, lulled by the rhythmic sloshing of the small salt sea. While the darkness and closeness of the place reminded her of the Root, there was something about the love in it that seemed to keep the fear she was sometimes consumed by underground at bay. The sea treasures were signs of the dragon’s love of her lost Seren sailor, Merithyn the Explorer, who had found this place a millennium ago and had inadvertently started the dynasty that would build and destroy the continent.
And was rebuilding it now.
“Better,” she said. “Almost well.”
The wyrm regarded her with an expression of mixed fondness and concern.
“Will you take care of my wife for me for a little while, Great-grandmother?” Ashe asked, helping Rhapsody into a hammock that had been fixed to the stone wall by a trident thrust into the rock of the cave.
Of course, the dragon said, manipulating the wind as its voice. Have you chosen a name for the child?
The expectant parents looked at each other.
“We have discussed one, but we wanted to see what the baby looked and seemed like first,” Rhapsody said.
Very well, said Elynsynos. As long as you understand that the child will need a name in order to be born.
“Er—no, I hadn’t realized that,” Rhapsody said.
A dragon emerges from the egg in an elemental state, said Elynsynos. Because wyrms contain mostly Earth lore, but each of the other elements as well, whatever name is given will largely determine what the child is like. So choose well; many mother dragons are grumpy after egg-laying, and the names they give their offspring when they hatch yield even grumpier wyrm adults.
“Will that be the case for our baby?” Ashe asked, sitting down beside an enormous pile of rysin coins, forged of a blue metal found deep in the mountains. “He or she won’t be full wyrm—I am actually hoping that since his or her blood will be so dilute, it will yield a low draconic tendency.”
The great beast shrugged, a gesture that made Rhapsody giggle.
Every beast is different, Elynsynos said. It’s impossible to know what the combinations of blood will produce. When you consider, there really are only a few known examples of wyrmkin in the world, and all that I know of are related to me. My three daughters, Manwyn, Rhonwyn, and Anwyn, are first-generation wyrmkin; of them, only Anwyn reproduced. The only other living wyrmkin I know of are Anwyn’s three sons, Edwyn, Llauron, and Anborn, and, of course, yourself, Pretty’s Husband. All of you are different, though there are some family traits that are consistent. What this child will be like, who can say? He or she will be like himself, or herself.
Ashe smiled at his great-grandmother. “Wise words—and we will cherish our child, whatever he or she is like. I just hope you are willing to help instruct this child in the use of dragon lore; no one did that for me, and I think it would have been useful to help understand this second nature, this nonhuman side.”
The great beast snorted.
Dragon nature is straightforward, Pretty’s Husband, she said with an injured air. It is human blood that makes wyrmkin inconsistent.
Dragons are protective of their land, because they must be. We are the last guardians of the primordial earth; its lore is extant within us as it is within no other creature. We alone understand the stakes of death, the finality of ending, because we do not have souls as other creatures do. No dragon would ever consider killing another dragon, no matter how much he hated the beast, because we understand the need for our race to remain intact. This is a lore that is older than me, is older than all of us. But whether wyrmkin have the sense of it, I do not know. I suspect that Anwyn’s sons had it—they never took the initiative to kill each other, or their mother, when they could have, particularly Llauron. But Anwyn—I do not know if she would have held to the dragon ways if they did not suit her purposes. The dragon eyed Ashe, causing prismatic flashes of light to dance over the coins scattered throughout the cave. And the books of history are not written about you yet, either. We will have to see if you remain faithful to the draconic code, or if the mix in your blood leads you elsewhere.
“I have blood on my hands, it’s true,” Ashe said, his voice melancholy. “As far as I know, I have never killed one of my own kind. But had I been given the chance to take my grandmother from the sky as she strafed the Cymrian Council in dragon form, or when she took my wife into the sky with her, I would have ripped her heart out without a second thought. Blessedly, Rhapsody did it for me, but I cannot say that I mourn her passing. She was a bitter, vicious, bloodthirsty woman, and her death was a good thing for everyone involved.”
Untimely death is never a good thing, said the dragon sadly. You say that because you have not truly come to understand it. I had not either, until Merithyn died. I had never before felt death, tasted its foul burning in my teeth. The creatures I had consumed—stags, harts, and the like—had experienced death in my maw, but with their passing had come life, sustenance, and so it did not have the same bitter taste. But Merithyn’s death was an ending so complete that it took part of my life with it as well.
Rhapsody reached out from the hammock and caressed the dragon’s massive shoulder.
“Merithyn gave his life saving his ship, and much of the First Fleet. Out of his death came life as well, Elynsynos. It was a great sacrifice, for him and for you, but a nation lived because of it. Perhaps it is one of the greatest sacrifices in history.”
The dragon shook her head violently.
No, Pretty. I will tell you of the greatest sacrifice. It is important that you both know it, because it is the heritage of your child, the legacy of his dragon blood. I will tell you of the Ending.
You know the stories of the Before-Time, of the great battles between the five Firstborn races, when the children of air, earth, water, and ether, the Kith, dragons, Mythlin, and Seren, banded together to force the destructive fifth race, the F’dor fire demons, into the center of the world where they could no longer wreak havoc upon the earth. And you doubtless know that the part dragons played was the contribution of the Living Stone to make the Vault in which the F’dor were imprisoned, yes?
“Yes,” said Ashe.
But what you do not know, my great-grandson, Pretty’s Husband, is that the Vault, as it was built, with the vast majority of our treasure of Living Stone, was still not enough to completely contain the F’dor. The Progenitor of all dragons, the first of our race, could see that the cage of Living Stone would not hold them. So he made the greatest sacrifice in history. That sacrifice is known to all dragons
as the Ending.
A dragon’s decision to die, to give up its life, is undertaken with the understanding that for us there is no Afterlife, at least not a conscious one. Most often that decision comes at the end of an extremely long life. The dragon is too tired to continue to live; it is in pain and exhausted, and so it merely ceases to try and stay alive. And it ends. That kind of ending leaves some of the dragon’s lore behind—the blood that ran in the beast’s veins turns to gold. And some of what was the dragon remains with it—the avarice, the possessiveness. Why are men so hungry for a soft yellow metal that does nothing to further their ends? They cannot sate their hunger with it, or heal themselves when they are ill or injured. They cannot even forge it into a weapon. And yet they fight wars over it, commit all sorts of atrocities, even lose their souls to it. Much like a dragon would.
“I had never considered that,” Rhapsody said. She was taking notes in her journal.
The Progenitor saw that the F’dor might well escape from the Vault. And after all the death, all the destruction, and all that had been sacrificed in the fight to contain them, he understood the incalculable cost of that happening. So just as the lock of the Vault was being sundered, the Progenitor wrapped his body, more vast than can even be imagined, around the Vault, subsuming it. He had been in an ethereal state; once he had enveloped the Vault with his own being, he slowly let go of each of his elemental lores—the ether, the earth, the water, the air, and the fire. His body dried and hardened to a vast shell that surrounded the Vault inside it, preventing the escape of the F’dor. He just Ended. That is his legacy—and it’s the legacy of your child. Each dragon has the power to End, but none, to my knowledge, ever have done so since, because it is the most complete and final form of death. Not even your lore remains behind in gold or gems that can one day adorn the empty heads of kings, or the breasts of vain women. Dragons have more of a stake in the Earth that shelters all beings, because we have sacrificed more to guard it.
Elegy for a Lost Star Page 25