by Carol Berg
“You’re very resourceful and your plan worked, but next time you might warn me.” MacAllister straightened, stretching his shoulders and back, wincing as he rubbed his wrists. “I could at least practice my name-calling.”
Trying to ignore his eyes on me, I took the kai’cet from its case, slipped it into its leather collar, and tied it about my neck so I could have both hands free. Then I pulled on my gauntlets, stowed the manacles and chain in my pouch, and coiled my whip. I didn’t need to see MacAllister’s expression to sense how he was revolted. “If you weren’t such a sniveling fool, you might give our safety a bit more consideration,” I blurted out. “I, for one, have no wish to die, so I don’t walk naked into the most dangerous places in the universe.”
Without letting him speak any more teasing foolishness, I tramped into the darkness, aiming for the cone-shaped spire Tarwyl had described. MacAllister trailed silently behind as I picked my way around the pits and cracks in the iron-hard earth. Though there was a small risk of the yellow lantern glow being spotted by one of the Riders ringing the lair, I wasn’t about to fall into some blast fissure and break a leg. I picked up the pace. We needed to hurry.
A thousand paces from the Rider hut we began to feel rumbling beneath our feet and hear the muted, angry grumbling of the kai. A blast of blue-orange fire to our left caused me to stop for a moment while I considered which way was shorter to get around a monstrous heap of rubble. MacAllister caught up with me as I moved off again to the left. “You’ll command him to speak his name, just like the first time with Keldar?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Whatever happens after ... you must get away as quickly as you can. If it’s not Roelan, I’ll be right on your heels.”
“And how will you manage that? It seems like you had to be carried before. I’ve dragged you far enough tonight.”
“I can do what I have to do. I’ve no wish to die.”
I didn’t say anything. He caught my shoulder and made me stop and look at him—the last thing I wanted to do with the balefire glaring in the sky just beyond the next rise. “Promise me you’ll keep yourself safe,” he said. “Please. It will help a great deal to know you’ve sworn it, because anything you’ve sworn to, I know you’ll do, no matter how much you hate it. Then I won’t have to worry about you.”
He didn’t know just how good I was at compromising my swearing. “I promise,” I said. “Now can we get this done?”
The kai lay buried in carrion. It had blasted a deep hole in the earth in a vain attempt to go to ground. Herd beasts had been driven in to feed it, and many of them had fallen into the pit where the kai could not reach them with either its fire or its jaws. So they lay uneaten, bloated and rotting, while the injured dragon roared its fury and pounded its tail. A charnel pit, the smell so foul that I came near vomiting up my last week’s food.
Blue flame spewed into the air as we lay on the ground at the top of the rise. MacAllister had pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth, his face the sick blue of the balefire.
I knew from the first it was the wrong dragon. It was not old enough. The brow ridges were not the most reliable indicators, but I had seen fifty dragons older than this one. And the left wing that lay partially unfurled, twitching so awkwardly, had clearly been broken in battle. The Elhim said that Roelan was one of the seven eldest dragons, and that the legend that named him hunchback was as old as his name. Any gathering of birds about this kai would be only the hardiest of vultures, desiring the rotting meat the kai could not reach.
“It’s not the one,” I said to the Senai, trying to explain, trying to make him give it up.
But MacAllister shook his head. “We’ve come this far; we must be sure.”
And he dared call me stubborn! I drew out my whip, in case the beast could get about on one wing better than it looked, and with a certainty that I was wasting what remained of my life, I scrambled and slid down the rocky slope until I was standing much too close to the kai.
“Teng zha nav wyvyr,” I cried, drawing its attention, its hatred, and its fire all at once. It bellowed so horrifically that I feared that Aidan’s skull would shatter. My own came near it. I called on the bloodstone and fought for control, laboring to build a cocoon of safety about MacAllister and me. If I let go, if I showed any weakness, the fire would creep closer and destroy us. This was a very different beast from the one they called Keldar.
“Speak your name, beast,” I shouted. “Speak the name your brothers cry out; speak the name your sisters call, the name your younglings heed.”
It just did not want to obey me. It writhed in its pit until the stench of the churned-up carrion made me gag. It screeched and bellowed and grumbled like a live volcano. It slapped its tail so hard I could scarcely keep my balance. The monstrous head hung above me, the flaming red eyes like twin suns from my worst nightmares—murderous, damned eyes. I commanded it again. “Speak your name!”
A ferocious bellow, louder and more violent than any so far, slammed me to my knees. My whip slipped from my fingers that were suddenly unable to grasp. I could not rise, could not think, could not hear anything but the roaring, twenty paces from my head. The noise wouldn’t stop, though the kai’s mouth was closed, and it was searching, searching with its hellish eyes. Its nostrils flared, and its head dipped. Control. I had to maintain control. I screamed at the kai to hold its burning—but I could not hear my own words, only the roar in my ears. I screamed at it again and commanded my muscles to work. Never had I been laid so flat by a dragon’s cry. Now perhaps I understood what Aidan felt. Aidan ...
I scrambled to my feet, grabbing my whip and loosing it at the slavering jaws gaping all too near my head. The head jerked away. The kai unfurled its uninjured wing and strained with it, while drumming the broken one on the ground, desperate to fly. Pain and anger were driving it into frenzy. Searing blasts of heat passed to each side of me. I could hear nothing but the roaring in my ears.
The dragon lurched halfway out of its pit, blasting constant fire. I tried to remember the lie of the rocky hillside as I backed away up the slope. I dared not turn my back. Careful, careful. Make sure the snout comes no closer. Make sure the head stays up and the angle of the fire stream stays steep or you’ll be ash. ... But I had only two eyes and too little practice. I didn’t see the undamaged wing sweep around behind and graze my left leg with its poisonous edge, slicing through my leather greave as if it were paper and through the flesh underneath as if it were air. I staggered backward, trying to stay upright, for a fall was sure death. But my boot found no purchase, and the side of my foot hit the side of a hole, bending my ankle sideways much farther that it should. My leg was already in agony from the long, deep cut and the sticky yellow dragon venom eating away the tissue. My ankle refused to hold me up, and with curses I could not hear over the roaring in my ears, I fell. I might have fallen all the way down the slope into the kai’s pit, except that I landed right in Aidan MacAllister’s lap.
Chapter 23
I could not stand alone when the Senai got me back upright, for my ripped leg kept folding up underneath me as if it had forgotten its purpose. The only thing I could hear was the torrent of noise from the dragon behind and below us. MacAllister’s chest was rumbling as he held me, so I knew that he was saying something, but I tried to make him understand that the bellowing was just too loud. Damnably awkward. Drops of blood rolled down his face like tears, joining the dribble from the lash mark on his cheek.
Fire exploded below us, and MacAllister dragged me up the slope, motioning that we’d best hurry. It was annoying the way he kept waving at me instead of speaking louder. Once over the rise he put his arm around my waist, I gripped his shoulder, and we started back the way we’d come. At first we couldn’t go three steps without getting our feet tangled, and I yelled at him to follow my lead, but I couldn’t even hear myself. He held up his fingers, one and then two, one and then two, telling me with gestures how we would proceed. On the count of one,
we would step with our outer legs. On two he would step with his inner leg, and I would most certainly not step on mine. He tapped the rhythm on my ribs as we went. We got faster and smoother, and soon we were back to the herd pens. A dark shape stumbled out of the first Rider hut and hurried into the wilderness toward the blaze of orange fire.
Though we had moved a considerable distance from the raging kai, the noise was as loud as ever. But kai never screamed so long at once, and at last the thought penetrated my thick head that something was wrong with my hearing. I pounded and dug at my ears, trying to unclog them, to let the roaring out, anything to make them work right again. Locked inside myself with the fire in my leg and the terrible noise, I was sure I was losing my mind. MacAllister grasped my hands and pulled them away, then pressed his gloved fingers on my chin and forced me to look at him. He was not smiling, but his look was telling me that everything would be all right if I just wouldn’t panic. Easy for him to say.
“Too loud,” he said. I could clearly see the words he formed, though I couldn’t hear them. “Too close. It will take time.” Then he put his arm around me again, and helped me across the endless wasteland to the base of the path. The Elhim were waiting. How in the cursed world were they going to get me up the path? It wasn’t even wide enough for one.
They sat me on the dirt leaning against the cliff. Tarwyl brought down my bag to stow my armor and whip, ready to haul it up the track. MacAllister looped my sword belt about his neck and hung my belt pouch from his bleeding shoulder. But it was Davyn’s sturdy shoulders across which they draped me like a sack of grain for the most terrifying ascent I had ever made without leaving the earth.
By the time we got back to Wyefedd, my face and fingers were numb, and I was seeing two or five of everything—clear signs of dragon poisoning. They laid me on the dirt floor of the stable, and a blur of faces—some of them pale, some of them blood-streaked—hovered over me, mouthing things I could not hear. I tried to speak calmly, determined not to lie there sobbing like a Udema milkmaid. I needed to tell them where to find the gillia in my pack, the leaves that could draw the dragon venom from the wound before it ate through the muscle and bone. But my tongue refused to work, and the yellow light wavered, and everything was lost in the roaring of my ears. Someone must have touched my leg then, because it felt like a dragon had bitten it off. I screamed, but no sound came out.
Torchlight. Jostling. What were they doing? Vague impressions of being imprisoned with a flock of sheep while being battered with wooden planks, of begging them to cut off my limb before I lost my mind, of cool water dripped on my lips, sun-dappled greenery, and a resting place so soft I believed I had fallen from a dragon and landed in the clouds. The clouds would have been a peaceful ending but for the ever-present roaring in my head and the waves of fire that consumed my left side over and over again so that I knew I was falling ... burning ... falling from the sky. ...
I must be dead. Nothing hurt anymore. Was it the heavy earth that held my eyes closed or gold coins laid on them by clan brothers at my funeral rites? If only the roaring noise would stop, I might figure out the truth. At least I was not alone in the realm of death. Spirits tended me, and their touch was gentle, but nothing of flesh, so I wept beneath the cold weight on my eyes. It was fearful to be dead. “Oh, please, good spirit, speak to me,” I begged, as I sank further into darkness. “Touch me with a hand of blood and bone, not these fleshless things.”
And the spirit heeded me, for in my next half waking the hands that eased my fears were made of flesh. They were not human hands, though, for their shape was wrong and they were so very cold. But I was not afraid. I recognized their kindness.
A weight lay on my chest like that on my eyes, and it grew heavier with passing time. The darkness crept into me and around me, and I felt myself melting into it, becoming part of it, losing all memory and feeling. Drowning. I hungered so for life.
I clasped the spirit’s hands with my own and said, “If I warm your hands, kind spirit, will you speak to me? Will you send me back to the living? I can’t be dead. I have things I need to do, but I can’t find my way back.”
And into the grinding bedlam intruded a sound so magical it might have been the speech of stars, a brief, haunting breath of music ... no words that I could understand, yet the melody penetrated the chaos and settled in my soul, bringing peace and clarity to order my confusion. I was no longer afraid, but neither would I yield my last breath if I could help it. I could see the path that lay before me, and slowly I began to climb out of the darkness.
The smell of rain and green grass. Somewhere bacon was cooking. The roaring had fallen silent. I heard only random snapping against a background of insect sounds— swarming locusts perhaps. The cold weight had been lifted, and I carefully cracked my eyes open, shoving aside the fearful thought that I was about to look upon the world beyond the last crossing. My clan loremaster had never taught that one might find bacon in the warrior’s encampment of the afterlife.
I was confused at first. I saw clouds and blue sky and birds high above my head, but the birds were not moving and the clouds did not change shape as I watched. No sun beat down on my face though the sky was bright like noonday. I glanced to the left and was startled to see walls. And I was on the inside of them, so the sky—I looked up again—was painted on a ceiling. A very high ceiling. Between me and the wall lay an endless spread of dark green carpet. The room was as big as a kai’s cavern, brightly colored and strangely furnished. A long yellow couch with a gray wool blanket thrown on it, two lumpy shapes—chairs?—shrouded in white. More shrouded shapes sitting on the floor or hung on the pale yellow walls. I was tucked up in what must be a bed, though it was far too large, and I had felt nothing so soft in all my life. I shifted my head very slightly. A dark-haired man in a blue shirt and black vest was sitting in front of a white marble hearth, poking at something inside it. The insect sounds were only raindrops, falling on a flagstone terrace beyond two doors thrown open to a gray day.
“Am I dead?” The very asking was a comfort, for I could hear my own words through my ears and not just inside my head. And what dead woman is unsure enough to ask?
The dark-haired man whirled about, wielding a long-tined fork with a thin slab of half-cooked bacon skewered on it. On his lean face blossomed a smile to win a kingdom. “You tried,” he said, “but you weren’t very good at it.” He propped the bacon fork on the fire grate and came to help me sit up on a bed as large as the tent where I was born, supported by more pillows than I thought existed in the world. The bedsheets were fine linen, and clean. I’d never been in a room so grand.
MacAllister poured wine into a crystal goblet and pressed it into my hands. “Until I can get you something more substantial.” He wore no gloves. “How are you feeling? Limp as plucked weeds, I’d guess. Can you really hear me?”
I shifted my position and got a mild but reassuring twinge from my left leg. I’d seen many warriors left limbless by dragon venom, and I remembered my maddened begging. My cheeks grew hot. “Of course I can hear you. What are we doing in a place like this?” I tried to focus on the present. He must have done something stupid; this was not some abandoned hovel by the side of the road. “What if someone finds us here? We’ll have our hands cut off for thieving if the owner catches us.”
“No need to worry. The owner hasn’t been home in a very long time”—he didn’t look at me—“and he doesn’t mind.”
“Yours ...” Though I knew of his childhood, I’d never actually connected him with a place ... a house ... such a grand house.
“Mmm.” He returned to the hearth, dipped a cup of something from a copper pot, then set it beside the bed on a table that had legs carved in the shape of birds. Seating himself on the edge of the bed and biting his lip like a five-year-old child, he slowly and awkwardly lifted a spoon to my mouth. When the spoon slipped a little and he spilled half the contents on the sheets, he sighed, then laughed in exasperation. “This was easier when no one was wa
tching.”
I took the spoon from his gnarled fist. “How about if I do this, and you tell me what in the name of Vellya we’re doing here?”
“If you’re sure ...”
I showed him that I could hold the cup with a steady grip and maneuver the spoon much better than he, and he relaxed a bit.
“Well, our activities in Fandine set up quite a noisy party, and we had to get out of the way pretty fast. One of Tarwyl’s cousins found us a wool cart, but we needed someplace to take you. We were only half a league from here, but I wasn’t sure ... Well, it seems my cousin hasn’t given the place away even after all this time.”
His cousin. The king of Elyria. I had never really believed it.
“Tarwyl found caretakers about the main house, but I knew they wouldn’t bother to come back here. It’s pretty deep in the park. No one’s lived here since my mother died.” He poked one of his horrid fingers through a tiny hole in the sheet. “This is a guesthouse—the place where she would stow discreet friends and unpleasant relatives. She’d be horrified to see it so dusty, insect holes in the linen.... She always wanted it comfortable and welcoming.”
All my life I had scorned those like Aidan MacAllister. I knew more of life; I was stronger, harder, closer to the world. I understood their soft, decadent lives, but they could have no concept of mine. But in an instant I saw how impossible it was that I could understand anyone who had grown up in a place like this. I had never thought of Senai as people with bacon forks and insects and unpleasant kin, with beds and couches and hospitable mothers. Perhaps there were reasons beyond his own nature that Aidan MacAllister did not belch and throw his cups on the floor or strike me when I said something to hurt him. What was I, who had considered the Elhim cavern a palace, doing in such a place? I looked down at my clothes, expecting to see the shabby reminders of my own life. But I was clad in a soft white shift, high-necked and plain, made of embroidered linen so fine it felt like silk. Nothing underneath it. I glanced up quickly.