Before the extended family retired for the night, they would escort Laurelyn and Syril with song to the guest suite across the glen that was reserved for visiting dignitaries, which many of the family members, young and old, had spent the early part of the morning decorating with rose petals, candles, muslin love knots, and wind chimes in the trees for the newly married couple’s wedding night.
The laughter at the end of the sunlit day, compounding that which had rung through Highmeadow for the previous week, had warmed every bit of his body and soul, enough to have pacified the dragon into blissful dormancy.
He watched, content with his world, as Rhapsody moved about in the center of the circle of family groups, helping with buttoning a cape, or pulling on a small pair of boots, tucking burgeoning hair into a hood followed by a kiss, just as she had done with their own children at the time of the year when the summer night wind was taking on a colder feel. He recalled her words to a Namer’s song she had once written about autumn, her favorite time of year.
Whatever your hopes are, catch them fast, the Earth seems to say as it dresses in its glorious funereal finery. Time grows short; winter is coming.
He smiled as Stephen lifted his own youngest grandson onto his shoulders, as Joseph and his wife Caryssa gathered a passel of Grands and Greats into a wiggling line, as Allegra clapped her hands and signaled to the door, followed immediately by the excited voices of her brood. Meridion began the caroling of the songs that would escort the bride and groom to their wedding-night bower, surrounded by the rising and falling of the tides on the sea of love that was his family.
The noise coming from them, laughter, gasping, good-natured argument, the teasing and the guffawing, the whispering and intellectual discourse, the squeals of delight and the sounds of young children’s joy, all one glorious symphony of life that had started long ago on the other side of Time in a windy meadow beneath a willow tree.
Ashe’s attention was drawn to the door.
The girl who had lain with him beneath that tree in the meadow, whom he had seen in the moonlight of just such a night as this, was watching him, smiling as she had on the other side of Time.
“Well, are you coming, Papa?” she asked.
Marigrace, Elienne’s youngest grandchild, reached up to him, her cheeks rosy with excitement. Ashe scooped her up, feeling the age of his joints, and rushed forward through the sea of laughing children and adults, toward the door.
“Light the way!” he shouted.
Lanterns in hands followed him out the door, winking like fireflies in the dark of the compound.
* * *
Later they stood together, the Lord and Lady Cymrian, on the doorstep of the main residence, watching the lights wink out in the family quarters, six individual houses that sheltered the families of each of their children.
Rhapsody looked up at him and smiled.
“Beautiful work with the wedding ceremony this afternoon, m’lord,” she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Laurelyn and Syril are well begun. The perfect day.”
Ashe kissed her brow. “Indeed. The music was lovely.”
“Thank you. I think I will go get ready for bed, unless you need my assistance with anything.”
“No, indeed. I have a few small items that need a moment’s attention, and then I will be up forthwith.”
“Good. See you upstairs.” Rhapsody kissed him slowly, then made her way up the winding staircase and across the open balcony beyond it, disappearing around the corner to the hallway that led to their bedchamber.
The Lord Cymrian sighed happily, then turned and headed for his suite of offices.
A knock sounded on the door.
Ashe turned in surprise. A moment later, the chamberlain appeared from the side hallway in his robe, nightcap, and slippers.
“Pardon, m’lord,” he said as he hurried past. “I had anticipated the keep to be closed for the evening.”
“As had I,” Ashe said.
“The guards are at their stations—I’m surprised they did not turn the visitor away.”
Another knock thundered against the door.
The chamberlain doubled his gait.
“Some decorum, please,” he said as he pulled the inner door open. “This disturbance is most unseemly.”
Reynard ap Hydrion appeared in the doorway. He smelled as if he had been celebrating.
“Is the Lord Cymrian to bed?”
“He is not,” Ashe said from the center of the antechamber, “but he is severely displeased at the interruption. What are you doing here? What do you want at this hour of the night, Reynard, that could not wait until morning?”
The general grinned, then turned and signaled out the door. He stepped inside the antechamber and opened the door as wide as it could swing, then opened the double of it equally wide.
A cadre of men, several of them bloodied and torn, came laden through the opening, dragging an enormous bundle wrapped in ragged burlap and a smaller, though still substantial one, stained dark, in the arms of one of the broader soldiers.
Ashe’s dragon sense, lulled into abeyance with happiness, roared to life in panic.
“What—what is this?” he asked, shaking suddenly with a violence he could not control.
Primed with ale and excitement, the bloodied men tore back the burlap coverings proudly, revealing a gigantic, headless corpse, slashed open from the throat to the genitals, its limbs broken, its viscera gone.
“Dear God,” the chamberlain whispered at the side of the Lord Cymrian.
“A gift, m’lord,” said Reynard proudly, approaching Ashe with his hands open in blessing. He signaled to the broad soldier bearing the second bundle, who came before the trembling lord and tore off the burlap.
Ashe fought back the vomit that rose into his throat at the sight of Grunthor’s head.
The neck of the battered corpse had been severed with an ax, the dragon noted, clearly after death. From the corpse’s eyes and cheeks crossbow bolts jutted, some of them jammed in for effect, and a stripe of graying, horse-like hair and beard had been roughly shaved off, most likely as counted coup, leaving a swath from the bloody brow to the base of the neck where the spine had been separated. The stench from multiple sources of urine and feces was overwhelming.
Even as mutilated as it was, there was a nobility to the severed head, he thought sickly. The cheeks hung frozen in what almost seemed like a jolly expression in spite of the bruises that darkened them from the color they would have resolved into had they been allowed to heal.
Even the gaping mouth, which the dragon noted to be dripping human semen, seemed victorious instead of shamed.
The soldier seized the remaining hair atop the head and lifted it up for the horrified Lord Cymrian to better see.
“Your menace, m’lord,” Reynard said proudly. “Menacing no longer.”
His grin resolved to a look of shock an instant later as the air of the vast anteroom went suddenly dry to the point of igniting.
Gwydion ap Llauron turned in rage to him and belted him directly in the face, breaking his nose and sending him sprawling across the floor of the antechamber.
“You—you imbecile,” the Lord Cymrian hissed, the tones of the dragon boiling in his voice. “What have you done? What have you done?”
The smiles faded immediately from the faces of the soldiers. They stared at their bleeding commander, who was all but drowning in his own blood.
Arnald Goodeve alone was staring at Ashe.
“My lord, this—this is the Bolg scourge, the Sergeant-Major,” he said nervously.
From the open balcony above, a sound issued forth.
It was half gasp, half wail, a riveting noise of despair that rattled the bones of everyone in the anteroom.
The soldiers, the chamberlain, and the lord looked up to see the Lady Cymrian, attired in her dressing gown, standing on the balcony, her face colorless.
All sound left the massive room.
* * *
F
or a moment, Ashe thought he felt the world lurch to a frightening stop. This isn’t really happening, he thought as his wife, shaking violently, descended the stairs, her eyes locked on the gruesome body pieces littering the floor of the antechamber.
The end of the world was in her eyes.
“Aria,” he whispered, but she didn’t appear to hear, just came down, step by step, into the thundering silence of the round room.
The men in the antechamber had no choice but to hold utterly still as she crossed to the soldier holding Grunthor’s head, where she came to a shuddering halt. She looked into the Sergeant’s bolt-filled eyes, the expression in her own all but empty.
“Put him down,” she ordered tonelessly.
Shaking, the man obeyed, setting the severed head onto its wrapping.
Ashe’s voice returned in a slew of obscene draconic curses.
“Who ordered this atrocity?” he demanded.
The soldiers exchanged a glance.
“You—you did, m’lord,” Reynard whispered through his blood.
The Lady Cymrian, whose eyes were locked on the Sergeant’s head, turned slowly and looked at her husband, whose florid face went suddenly pale.
“I—I did no such—”
“With respect, m’lord, you—said he was a menace that needed an—an end put to it,” Goodeve stammered.
Rhapsody opened her mouth and began to take slow, measured breaths through it. She turned back to the body of her beloved friend.
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean—” Ashe choked.
“Silence,” Rhapsody said, the tone of the Namer in her voice. “Let there be silence in this place.”
The room, and the men in it, obeyed.
* * *
Slowly the Lady Cymrian knelt before Grunthor’s head. She continued to breathe with her mouth open, ragged, painful breaths that came from the very bottom of her lungs. Finally, after an uncomfortably long while, she spoke.
“Chamberlain,” she said softly without breaking her gaze away, “summon the quartermaster. Have him provision and tack his largest, smoothest-riding wagon with a team of six fast dray horses and many soft blankets, and bring it to the door. Then, while he does this, go to the family quarters, knock quietly, and ask each of my six children to come here. Tell them to bring none else, no spouse, no child. When you return, bring the guards and some of the blankets with you.”
Still in shock, the chamberlain bowed and hurried off.
Ashe stepped forward until he was beside her. He knelt, and extended a shaking hand toward the head.
Rhapsody did not move, but her eyes flashed to the color of burning grass.
“Do not touch him.”
Ashe’s arm dropped heavily to his side.
They continued to kneel, side by side, in silence, Rhapsody’s eyes locked on Grunthor’s remains, Ashe’s on Rhapsody, until the keep door opened silently. The chamberlain peered in, then stepped respectfully aside as Meridion, followed by Allegra, Elienne, Stephen, Joseph, and Laurelyn, came slowly into the keep in the order of their birth, each of them aghast, emitting sounds of dismay and horror.
A coterie of guards came to a halt behind them.
“Look well upon him,” Rhapsody said flatly. “See what has been done to him.”
“They will hang for this,” Ashe said, his voice more growl than words.
For the first time since beholding the atrocity, his wife turned and looked at him.
“For the abuse and disrespect of his body after death, perhaps they should,” she said coldly. “Who will hang for giving the order?”
The sounds of shock dissolved into silence as the daughters joined hands, their brothers’ arms around each of them.
Rhapsody’s gaze returned to what remained of Grunthor.
“My beloved children,” she said quietly, “I beg your aid. Will you help me carry your godfather, in reverence and honor, to the wagon? No other hand in this keep save that of the chamberlain is worthy to do so.”
“Aye, Mimen,” Meridion whispered, followed a moment later by the same response from each of his siblings.
Rhapsody rose and turned to the chamberlain. “Bring me the blankets, please.” The trembling man hurried forward, bowed, and placed the large rectangles of soft cloth in her arms.
Silently the children took the cloth and wrapped Grunthor’s body under the eyes of the murderers and their father, avoiding their gaze. Rhapsody alone wrapped the severed head, lovingly swathing it in the blankets. When it was covered, she lifted it from the floor and cradled it in her arms as the children finished their abhorrent task. Then she went to the door without looking back.
Stephen nodded.
The siblings lifted the enormous body in its drapes and carried it, with the cadence and stepping of a military funeral procession, out through the doorway and into the night.
By the time they had borne him to the wagon, most of Grunthor’s godchildren were in silent tears. Only Allegra maintained a steady countenance, her jaw clenched tightly.
They loaded him carefully into the wagon. Once the body was in the wagon bed, and covered with more soft blankets, Stephen came to his mother and took the wrapped head from her, smiling disarmingly as he pried it gently from her hands. The other children surrounded Rhapsody as she took them into her arms, kissed them, and whispered words of love to each of them, leaving Laurelyn until last.
“I beg your forgiveness for disrupting your wedding night, y pippin,” she said distantly, as if she were fighting to remain in control. “I decided that you deserved to see your godfather one last time. I apologize if I’ve erred.”
“Thank you for making the right choice, Mimen,” Laurelyn said, fighting back tears.
“Go back to your families,” Rhapsody said to her children. “Take care of them first. Kiss them for me. My love remains with you all.”
“Travel well, Mimen,” Meridion said. “Our love goes with you.”
He turned and gave Laurelyn his arm, while Stephen walked with Allegra and Joseph escorted Elienne, making their way back to the now-dark guesthouses across the glade.
Ashe watched in despair as his children returned to their own families. He turned away to see Rhapsody as she climbed onto the wagon board and took the reins in hand.
“Aria—”
Rhapsody turned to him. Her eyes gleamed furiously in the dark.
“Do not follow me,” she said. “This was a Grievous Blow.”
The words seemed to slap him across the face.
Ashe fell back.
Rhapsody clicked to the horses and snapped the reins.
The wagon lurched off into the night.
She did not look back.
14
THE KREVENSFIELD PLAIN
She drove blindly, numbly, following the wind.
All around her, the ground shook madly, the Earth itself responding to the body of its child in the wagon. The wind screamed in reply, whipping violently in the darkness through which she was traveling.
Rhapsody kept to the forest road which led her, through the sunrise and the passage of the day, into the eastern lands, out of the forest and finally onto the Krevensfield Plain, the great open expanse of pasturelands that stretched the breadth of the continent.
She took the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare, the ancient roadway built almost three thousand years before by her husband’s grandfather in the days when hope and innovation still ruled. She was still shaking when the sun came up, trembling from loss and the knowledge that nothing would ever be right again in her world.
She only stopped long enough to water and rest the horses, during which time she paced around the front of the wagon, afraid now to be too close to the bed for fear the dam would burst, and she would become unable to move for weeping.
Finally, when the day had all but passed, she found herself in the province of Bethany, the capital of Roland, the area that had been the central seat of the Alliance in the days before she and Ashe had taken on the mantles of the lor
d- and ladyships. Soon the empty thoroughfare would become full, she knew, with the traffic of merchants and pilgrims, of traders bringing their goods to market in the other cities and provinces the ancient roadway connected.
She slowed her pace, feeling innately the gratitude of the horse team, until the sun set behind her, coloring the sky before her in the hues of mourning. Finally, when the light had left the clouds, she brought the wagon and the horses to a walking pace, then to a stop when the wind picked up with the coming of night.
She sat on the wagon board, alone beneath the emerging stars, in the darkness, waiting for the breeze to blast through.
And finally she allowed the grief to come.
The tattletale wind whispered past her.
“Achmed,” Rhapsody whispered back into it.
The name caught in her throat—the name of the only person in the world who would be more damaged by the loss of the man in the wagon than she was.
“Achmed,” she said aloud again, trying to catch an updraft. “Achmed the Snake!”
Her words seemed to fall heavily to the grassy ground beside the cobbled roadway.
“Fornication,” she muttered. She put the reins down on the wagon board and climbed down into the highgrass of the wide-open meadow. She spun around, trying to find the source of the wind.
“Achmed!” she shouted, letting her voice swell into the air; the wind seemed to catch the edge of it and lift it high.
Nothing came in the way of an answer.
The burgeoning grief that she had fought down in front of her children and the soldiers was rising again, like lava from a spitting volcano. Rhapsody swallowed, trying to keep it in check, but it overwhelmed her, bringing tears and fury and a need for release.
“Achmed!” she screamed into the wind as the water in her eyes burst forth, wetting her cheeks with hot rage and pain. “Achmed! Achmed!”
She let the wind, sturdy now, wrap around her, catching her howl and spinning it eastward.
“Achmed!” she moaned, sobbing now. “Achmed! Achmed—”
“Peace; I am right behind you.”
The familiar sandy voice spoke as if from the wind itself.
Rhapsody spun and threw herself into his arms, weeping as though her heart would break if she withheld the tears.
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