Dawncloud was watching him now, and he knew that she, too, saw his thoughts. All five dragons were watching him, the four young draped along the tops of the walls. He looked at his mother’s dress and could see her wearing it before the red flowers of the flame tree.
“Where did she go?” he whispered. “What happened to my mother? She didn’t drown in the Bay of Dubla. Where is she?”
Then he sensed Dawncloud’s own eagerness and confusion. He sensed her desire, and then visions began to touch him, and he knew, all in a moment, how Dawncloud had lost her bard to murder, how she had slept away her misery in Tendreth Slew, then awakened to seek out a mate.
“But now another bard speaks to me, Tebriel. Somewhere she lives, she who lost her dragon even before my own agony. Somewhere Meriden lives.”
“She . . . is a bard?” Teb said hoarsely, hardly believing it. But knowing it was so, and wondering he hadn’t guessed before. Her songs, her strength, the way she seemed drawn away sometimes, searching. “She is alive,” he cried, caught in wonder. “But where? Where?”
“She is alive, she who turned from the skies in her own misery, and then was drawn back again.” Dawncloud reared tall above the broken walls and stared up at the sky and out to sea. Then she writhed her great body down again, into the chamber.
“There is a door in this city, Tebriel. I don’t know where, but I will find it. A door that enters, by spells, into the far Castle of Doors. And from that castle, one can enter anywhere, into any world. She is someplace there. Meriden has gone through one of those doors. And I will follow her.”
“My mother is alive,” he said. “Why did she go? Why would she leave us?”
“She went,” Dawncloud said, her voice ringing, “to a mission for all of Tirror. She went hoping to return. Do you not see her boat is still here? She would have sunk it otherwise. She went to give of herself in the saving of Tirror. She went to seek the dragon she thought did not exist anymore on Tirror. And to seek the source of the dark, too, and to learn, if she could learn, how to defeat the dark.”
“But how can you know that? You didn’t know before, or you would have gone before, to find her.”
“Somewhere in this room is a paper with words written on it. The paper tells this message.” Dawncloud sighed. “If I were not destined to join with Meriden, if I were not destined to know and love her, I could not know these words.” She fixed him with a long green look. ‘The paper is here, Tebriel. Search for it. And I,” she said, stretching up, then winging suddenly to the top of the wall, so the room was filled with the cyclone of her wings, “I must search now, for the door through which she vanished.”
She rose up towering, then was over the wall and gone; he heard the tremendous splash of her dive. Then three dragonlings leaped from the wall to follow. Seastrider remained, looking down at him. He stood a moment, his heart pounding; then he stormed up the wall and leaped into the sea and was beating the water, swimming after Dawncloud, choked in the waves she made. He felt Seastrider beside him. “No, Tebriel. No.”
“I must,” he said, choking, “My mother is there somewhere. . . .”
Dawncloud was so far ahead of him she was almost lost from his sight; the rocking of her passage sent water slapping into his face and up the stone walls. He felt Seastrider’s annoyance at him, and her love.
“Come onto my back, then, or we will lose her.”
He slipped onto Seastrider’s back and she leaped ahead with a twisting speed, her wings beating like great sails. He could not see Dawncloud. And then:
“I’m diving, Tebriel; hold on.” Seastrider dropped beneath the sea as he clung, and the water closed over him. Down, down . . . then up again, through a tall arch.
They were in a courtyard. Dawncloud filled the salty pool, rearing up before a dark stone gate all carved with symbols and held with a metal lock. He heard the words she whispered in her silent dragon’s voice, then she sang out loudly, so bright and wild he trembled. The dragonlings were singing with her, a strange song, not a ballad; this was a dragon’s command, and magical. The stone doors opened, and he could see nothing beyond but white mist, moving mist. Then Dawncloud was through. He leaped from Seastrider’s back to follow, but Dawncloud turned in the doorway, the huge silvery bulk of her filling it, and faced down at him, her great mouth open in a dragon’s terrible scream, so close to him he saw flame starting way back in her throat. “Stay back, Tebriel. Do not come here.”
“I must come. She is my mother.”
“All of Tirror is your mother. All of Tirror needs you and Seastrider. You would only hinder me here. How can I travel as I must, search as I must, with a small human companion? She is my bard, Tebriel. If she can be found, I will find her. A million worlds lie beyond this mist. I would lose you.
“Stay with Seastrider here. See to the tasks you were born to. . . .” And then with one thrashing motion she was gone into the mist, and the great doors swung closed again.
He paddled close to Seastrider, heartbroken. Then he slid onto her back, sadly, silently, and they returned to the small room where his mother had slept, the four dragonlings close together now, steeped in the sadness of losing their own mother.
“We sang the ancient song for opening,” Nightraider said, filled with wonder.
“We sang it all together in our minds,” said Windcaller.
“It opened for her,” said Nightraider. “And she went through.”
“She will be through the Castle of Doors by now,” said Seastrider. “She will be out into another world by now,” she said sadly. “Searching for Meriden.”
In the little room, as the dragonlings lay along the top of the wall, Teb began to search for the small bit of paper or parchment that would hold his mother’s handwriting.
He found it at last, tucked down between an empty wooden cask and an iron pot, beneath the oak bed. He knew it at once, and wondered why he hadn’t guessed before. It was not a slip of parchment but his mother’s brass-bound journal that she had kept just as Camery kept a diary. His mother’s journal, locked, and the key missing.
He supposed he could break the lock, but he was loath to. Dawncloud had told him the message, surely all of it. He put the little book in the pocket of his breechcloth, then climbed the wall and down again, to examine the boat, as Seastrider watched from above.
The boat’s name could still be seen, Merlther’s Bird, then the name of her port, Bleven. Merlther Blish’s boat, reported lost months before his mother went away.
“She deceived us,” he said, fingering the cracked letters. “She meant to go away all the time. She lied to us.”
Seastrider sailed down to land beside him, dwarfing the boat and weighting it to its gunwales. She rubbed her cheek against his. “She did what she must. For Tirror. You do not listen well to my mother.” She was annoyed with him. He regarded her evenly.
“My mother said she went to battle the dark. Do you not listen? She deceived you only because it was required of her, because it would be wisest. Not because she didn’t love you. There was no deceit in her heart, Tebriel.”
He stood quietly, looking at the little boat that had been pulled in so carefully between the stone walls in this shadowed watery world. And he knew Seastrider was right. She nuzzled his hand until he put his arm around her. At last he let wonder touch him and the true joy that his mother was alive.
It was later, when he had returned to the little room that had been her last chamber in this world, that he began to wonder if his father had known all along. That she was not dead. That she had meant to go away in this fashion.
He must have hated the dark all the more, because it made it necessary for Meriden to go away. He must have felt terrible anger that he could not help her. That he must stay and guard Auric, while she did battle in a world so far away he might never see her again. Had he known, guessed, that they would never be together again?
Seastrider soared off the top of the wall and dropped down into the room beside him.
> “How can Dawncloud ever find her?” he said sadly.
“It will not be an easy search. Perhaps there are vibrations out among those worlds, just as there are in the sea.” She curled down around Teb and lowered her head on her back, making a cocoon for him. “Rest, Tebriel. When night grows darkest, we will go home. To the Lair. Tonight, Tebriel, you will sleep among dragons, at the top of the highest peaks.”
“And tomorrow?” he said, his excitement rising.
“Tomorrow . . . and tomorrow . . . we will begin to assess the dark, Tebriel. We will begin to discover how best we can battle it, to bring Tirror back to truth. We will begin to strengthen our powers—of creating image and memory and hope through song. We will begin to discover other powers.”
“What other powers? The opening of doors . . . ?”
“Perhaps. And perhaps we can master the magic of shape shifting, and perhaps other ways to confuse the dark.”
He leaned back against her warm, jeweled side and felt the strength of bard and dragon, teamed, and thought that, with training together, they might know more power than he had imagined. Together they would make song, would shape Tirror’s true past for those who lived today, and he knew that this was their one great weapon. For to know what has been is to know what can be. This was what the dark must destroy if it would win the minds of its slaves. If it would create a willing acceptance of slavery. As the night drew down, and the thin moon rose, Seastrider said, “We will go now,” and they swept out across the sea toward Windthorst and Fendreth-Teching, four bright dragons, one carrying her bard, he caught in the wonder of this first flight, caught in the wonder of beginning.
They passed over Nightpool in darkness, high against the stars where no earthbound creature could see them. Yet in the empty meeting cave, before the sacred clam shell, Thakkur saw. This vision was clear and strong. The white otter smiled, and put from him his loneliness for Tebriel, in the knowledge that Teb was now, in this time in the world, exactly where he belonged.
Above, so close to stars, Teb grinned too as he stared up at the heavens, then down toward the dark earth below him, and he thought, Tonight I will sleep among dragons. The night wind washed around him, stirred by Seastrider’s powerful wings, and he felt her laughing pleasure, like his own.
We are together now, Tebriel, and soon my brothers and sister may find their bards, and my mother return with Meriden, and we will be an army, then, to challenge the lords of the dark.
#
About the Author
Shirley Rousseau Murphy grew up in southern California, riding and showing the horses her father trained. She attended the San Francisco Art institute and later worked as an interior designer while her husband attended USC. “When Pat finished school, I promptly quit my job and began to exhibit paintings and welded metal sculpture in the West Coast juried shows.” Her work could also be seen in many traveling shows in the western States and Mexico. “When we moved to Panama for a four-year tour in Pat’s position with the U.S. Courts, I put away the paints and welding torches, and began to write.” After leaving Panama they lived in Oregon, Atlanta, and northern Georgia before returning to California, where they now live by the sea.
Besides the Dragonbards Trilogy, Murphy wrote sixteen children's books and a young adult fantasy quintet before turning to adult fantasy with The Catswold Portal and the Joe Grey cat mystery series, which so far includes sixteen novels and for which she is now best known. She is the winner of five Dixie Council of Authors and Journalists Author of the Year awards—two of them for Nightpool and The Ivory Lyre—plus eight Muse Medallion awards from the national Cat Writers Association.
Dragonbards Trilogy, Book 2: The Ivory Lyre
Dragonbards Trilogy, Book 2. The bard Tebriel and his singing dragon Seastrider together can weave powerful spells. With other dragons searching for their own bards, they have been inciting revolts throughout the enslaved land of Tirror. Only if they can contact underground resistance fighters and find the talisman hidden in Dacia will they have a chance to break the Dark’s hold on the world.
Dragonbards Trilogy, Book 3: The Dragonbards
Dragonbards Trilogy, Book 3. Only the dragonbards and their singing dragons have the power to unite the people and animals of Tirror into an army that can break the Dark’s hypnotic hold over the world. Before their leader Tebriel can challenge the hordes gathering for the final battle, he must confront the dark lord Quazelzeg face to face in the Castle of Doors, a warp of time and space.
The Shattered Stone
An omnibus containing the first two books of the five originally published as the Children of Ynell series. In most regions of Ere to be a Seer, gifted with telepathic and visionary powers, means death—or does it? For some it may mean an even worse fate: destruction of their minds and enslavement by the dark powers determined to conquer the world. In Ring of Fire, Zephy and the goatherd Thorn are dismayed to discover that they themselves are Seers, but once they know, they are driven to escape from the repressive city of their birth and rescue others, many of them children, who have been captured and imprisoned by its attackers. Only the discovery of one shard of a mysterious runestone offers hope that they can succeed. In The Wolf Bell, set in an earlier time, the child Seer Ramad seeks the runestone itself with the aid of an ancient bell that enables him to control and communicate with the thinking wolves of the mountains, who become his friends. But will they be a match for his enemies, the evil Seers of Pelli, who are determined to control Ramad’s mind and through him, to obtain the stone for their own dark purpose?
The Runestone of Eresu
An omnibus containing the last three novels of the five originally published as the Children of Ynell series—The Castle of Hape, Caves of Fire and Ice, and The Joining of the Stone—which tell of the adult lives of the characters in The Shattered Stone. As a child Ramad of the Wolves had sought the potent Runestone of Eresu that could save his world from the dark, only to have it shatter at the moment it came into his hands. Now as a man, leader of his fellow Seers in their war against the dark powers, he knows it is up to him to find and rejoin the shards before evil Seers can do so. Following his true love Telien into far reaches of Time, he is followed in turn by the Seer Skeelie, who also loves him. The quest to make the stone whole again demands the commitment not only of Ramad but of others, ultimately including his son, for only far forward in Time can the final battle against the dark forces be fought.
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