Rhapsody smiled slightly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, a tone of loss echoing in her words. She stared out over the all-but-bottomless canyon, where seemingly frozen Bolg soldiers stood endless, meaningless guard, buffeted by the whining wind. “Within me I hear a tone sounding, the song of a child waiting to come through into this life from the other side. I have heard such a tone each time Ashe and I conceived one of our children, unique unto itself as each of our children is unique. Now, it will be a namesong I carry until my death, unborn. It will haunt my dreams, and grow within what is left of my heart until it shatters.” She exhaled. “Now, at last, I can feel my life finally having corners, limits, as if I am approaching the wall at the end. Thank God, the One, the All. Immortality has worn out its welcome with me.”
Achmed put the bottle to his lips and imbibed, then wiped his mouth on the back of his arm.
“There’s a multitude of cocks out there, primed and waiting for you, Rhapsody. Once the buildup to war winds down, any street in any city on the continent would present you with a thousand or more options. If you want to have another child, walk into any town square, take down your hood, or lift your skirts, and smile. You’ll have endless choices of potential fathers within moments.”
He passed her the bottle, and she took it, examined the label, then drank deeply.
“I know you’re drunk, or just being vile, or both, but I cannot explain to you how encompassing what I am describing to you is for me. I don’t want to bring a child into this world anonymously. There must be love present. Children are conceived without it every day, in horrible ways, but I would fight to make certain that would never happen. I lived through enough of that in my life in the old world, thank you.”
“Are you willing for it to be a voluntary Bolg? They all love you, First Woman.”
“Shut up,” Rhapsody said, stinging bitterness in her tone. “I know you are celebrating this night, but my heart is broken.”
Achmed looked at her sharply, then took another drink.
“I’m not celebrating,” he said.
“Hrekin. You may not blame Ashe for Grunthor’s death, but you’ve hated him for as long as you’ve known him.”
“I know you won’t believe me, but I do not hate him, nor have I ever hated him. Even if I never understood what you saw in him, I know he loved you. I just don’t understand why you have ruled an Alliance when all you wanted was to live simply and in peace, just because he had to rule; why you gave up so much of what you are to be his other half, and, more importantly, why he would allow you to; why you would risk your life to have his children. I guess I just don’t understand why being yourself alone wasn’t enough. I don’t understand why you couldn’t have him for protection, for amusement, for sex, for company or sharing parental chores, but still have maintained what is you without having to be half of someone else.”
Rhapsody’s world was spinning violently in the throes of grief exacerbated by wine.
“What you actually don’t understand is the concept of sharing a soul. It doesn’t make you less of a person; I believe I was whole, before and after I married him. But in completing each other, you become another entity as well. Half of another whole.”
“You’re drunk, and you never were particularly good at math.”
“As for children, they have never seemed an option for me—I can hear them before they are even undertaken, like this one that is calling to me, haunting me even now. I have shared a soul with Ashe for a thousand years; more, actually. I have been his other half for so long that I could impart to a child not only the lore of humankind and the Lirin, but that of the Seren and Wyrmril that was his legacy as well. But without his love, without the love of a father, willing to share a part of his soul, his life, to bring a child into being, I am forced to know that the soul of this child exists, but that its life was denied.”
“Fine,” Achmed said irritably. “If it really is bothering you that much, I will father your child, especially if it means we never have to have this inane conversation ever again.”
KREVENSFIELD PLAIN, BETHANY
Meridion ap Gwydion was sick at heart.
He had stopped to camp for the night, having ridden his horse as far as his conscience would let him without feeling he was abusing the animal, but as fast as he rode, and as far as he went, he could not outrun the guilt for convincing his father to appeal to his mother and the Bolg king.
His words had left his mother broken and his father dead.
He had taken shelter beneath an elm tree, struggling to fall asleep and failing, so he let his mind wander through Time to the last moments of his father’s life.
He had not witnessed Ashe’s death directly, having been on the stairs when Rhapsody summoned the starfire, so he stepped back to the moment just before it happened.
The passage of Time slowed, then paused, as he went back until he was standing on the field directly in front of his father, who was frozen in between moments, his eyes elevated, watching the one woman he had ever loved on the tower ledge.
He was surprised, therefore, to see that just as the name of the star, Prylla, was pronounced, his father had closed his eyes, let his head fall back, and had smiled as broadly as Meridion had ever seen him.
This makes no sense, he thought, letting loose of his place in the Past and returning to the Present.
He was trying to fall asleep again when he heard his father’s voice next to his ear, not in his memory or in his travels through Time, but in the air around him.
Your mother told you the truth, Meridion—you do not know what really happened.
Meridion sat up.
“Papa? Father? Father, where are you?”
The voice spoke again, lightly, as if there was very little of him present in the air.
In the place she sent me into with the starfire from Daystar Clarion—in the ether. I have been begging her to consider doing it for more than a score of years now.
“You—you forsook your human form to—enter a fully draconic state? Like—like Llauron did?”
I am beginning to do so, yes. It is a process. Perhaps you have memory of him, and understanding beyond that of anyone else. Your mother said she thought you breathed in the essence of the last of his air lore when he Ended, protecting you, and her, from Anwyn.
“Yes. I have conversations with him sometimes in the Past,” Meridion said, shaking off the sleep that had been hovering over his head, trying to clear the confusing hum from it. “He frequently tries to give me a sympathetic view of Anwyn, his mother, but it doesn’t work even for him.” Meridion thought of the sound of that name in his mouth.
I thought Anwyn was evil, he had said. Compared to you, she was holy.
He could feel his heart pounding, on the verge of exploding. So this is the reason she told me not to say anything other than that their reign had ended, he thought, sick with misery. She did not want me to say that my father was dead—because he isn’t.
“She spared you?” he said to the air around him. “She—she helped you enter an elemental state?”
Though it must have shattered her heart.
“I thought she had never healed from doing the same to Llauron.”
She hasn’t. What you saw as my execution was the greatest sacrifice she has ever made for me. That others saw it the same way you did is the sacrifice she made to spare the continent.
“I told her she was dead to me. God, the One, the All, what will I do now?”
The voice in the ether was comforting.
Go and deliver the message as she told you to; the land cannot remain leaderless. Speak only the words you were given; to say anything else would dishonor the most innocent heart this land has seen in its history. I must begin my elemental journey now, and I do not know how long it will take. If you wait until I return in wyrm form, I will go with you to the Bolglands. We must both beg her forgiveness.
“Yes. But how can I ever unspeak the atrocity of what I said to her—my
own mother?”
She is very forgiving, Meridion, and she loves you with all of herself; those were her last words to you as you left. You can trust that she understands your pain and your misconception; she will be grateful to have you back in her arms.
Meridion rose from beneath the elm and begged silent forgiveness of the horse. “I cannot wait for you, Father; I cannot have this on my head, or in my heart, any longer than I must. I will go to Highmeadow and herald the end of your reign, and send the message on to Tyrian, but after that I have to return to Ylorc. If you are back, you can come with me. If not, I am going alone.”
So let it be done. I love you, my son.
“I love you too, Papa. Hurry back.”
Only silence echoed in the glen around him.
Meridion mounted up and rode off into the night for Highmeadow.
24
THE TUNNEL OVER THE CANYON, YLORC
“Now it’s you who’s drunk.”
“Perhaps.” The Bolg king rose and stretched sorely. “But I am also contending with my own loss, Rhapsody, and, at the risk of sounding unfeeling, I cannot bear hearing you talk about this anymore. So allow me a visit to the privy, since I know you have a long and well-documented objection to public urination, and we can get this over with. Take your clothes off, or at least your drawers, and I will be right back.”
“This is not amusing to me, Achmed.”
“I am not joking.”
“You think I would knob you? Now?” She looked around at the darkened hallway, heavy indigo fog hanging in the air of it and the black Heath beyond, and exploded into sharp, mad laughter. “Well, isn’t this rich? I can’t imagine a better ending to this simply wonderful day. Let’s see—we buried our dearest mutual friend, whose body was used as a latrine and a bunghole whore by men whose balls I should have ripped off with my hands rather than even imagine soiling my sword with their treacherous blood, though, now that I think about it, I wish I had let them experience Daystar Clarion in the same way Grunthor’s dead body accommodated their tarses. I feel so much hatred right now that I believe, were they here, I would do exactly what I just pronounced.”
“Interesting,” Achmed said. “I can arrange to bring them to you—it would be amusing to watch. Have to commend Ashe for delivering them; that was a nice touch. Sorry it didn’t make more of a difference in his sentence.”
“Then, because that just wasn’t enjoyable enough, I burned my husband alive with fire from a star that once lit the pyre of my only adopted sister, Jo, gone a thousand years now, whom I still miss. I traumatized my son, who called me a murderous bitch and not only told me that Anwyn was holy by comparison to me, but that I was dead to him, that he would be erasing me from his memory once he declares our reign to be over in his official capacity. This is the child who survived weeks in a tidal cave, floating within me, whom I have always communed with musically—the child who made me a mother. When he erases me from his memory, I will probably cease to exist, or at least I hope I will.
“I left my other children with their father, so I will not be the one to tell them of their loss—they’ll hear from their brother, who hates me. Then, to top it all off, I share with you that my soul is being hounded by the voice of a child that Ashe and I were supposed to bring into the world, who now will never know life, and you tell me to take off my drawers while you favor me with not having to watch you piss before you fuck me on the tunnel floor among the wandering, mindless Bolg and the rats. Unless, of course, I would rather make use of the multitude of cocks out there, primed and waiting for me to raise my skirts and smile in any town square. My goodness—how much better can this day get?”
Achmed just looked at her, amusement in his tired eyes.
Rhapsody sat heavily back against the tunnel wall and put her face in her hands.
“I sorely miss you talking like that,” the Bolg king said, sitting down again. “I don’t believe I’ve heard you let loose with good gutterspeak since Meridion was born.”
She crossed her arms in front of her and put her head on them.
“Do you feel better?”
“No. I’m not going to feel better.”
“That’s a shame. So, does that mean that when you were wishing for ‘one final loveless knob in a darkened alley,’ this place and present company were not what you had in mind?”
“Arrrgh,” Rhapsody moaned within her crossed arms.
Achmed’s mocking smile tempered into something vaguely sympathetic.
“All right,” he said, running his hand over the back of his neck. “You can’t say I didn’t offer.”
“Oh, thank you.” Rhapsody remained in her crouch, her head on her folded hands.
Achmed leaned up against the wall as well and lapsed into an accommodating silence. Finally, when all the sound in the corridor had been used up, he cleared his throat.
“As I said at the beginning of this inane conversation, I was not joking.”
Rhapsody raised her head. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face ashen.
“You want to fuck me on the tunnel floor among the wandering, mindless Bolg and the rats?”
“No.” Achmed paused. “Well, yes, of course, who wouldn’t, when you put it that way? But no, that’s not what I was offering.”
“What were you offering?”
“Sleep.” The Bolg king looked at her intently. “Now I’m offering you sleep.”
“I don’t believe I will ever sleep again,” said Rhapsody, putting her head down once more.
“That will be amusing to watch as well. I’ve known you a very long time, Rhapsody; I remember you trying to stay awake for extended periods on the Root, or when we were traveling overland, or once we got to Ylorc. Did you think I let you ride in front of me on horseback because I liked the way you smell or wanted to watch your breasts bounce when the horse cantered? Please. I was afraid you were going to fall, face-first, off whatever mount you were seated on when you passed out if you were alone.”
“Thank you. I guess.”
The Bolg king chuckled. “Which is not to say that I don’t like the way you smell, or to watch your breasts bounce—”
“I don’t have breasts, at least none to speak of. You and Grunthor always had a jolly good time endlessly reminding me of that fact.”
“I am willing to let you sleep in my bedchambers, rather than on the tunnel floor among the wandering, mindless Bolg and the rats,” Achmed said, smiling. “I think you may recall those chambers, having passed through them routinely on the way to the cavern of the Sleeping Child.”
“Yes. They’re enchanting. I love the way you decorated everything in black satin. If only it were red, it could be the whorehouse where I was enslaved in Easton.”
Achmed looked down between his knees.
“You haven’t made reference to that in a very long time.”
Rhapsody rubbed her eyes. “I can’t imagine why; it was one of the very best times of my life. And—at least I’m not being sarcastic here—even on its worst day, it was better than today.”
Achmed’s face grew solemn. “Even on the day when you were raped by Michael’s entire regiment?”
At first, Rhapsody didn’t respond. Then slowly, she raised her head.
“You remember that? I told you that?”
The Bolg king nodded. “You may not recall doing so, because it was a thousand years ago, during the war, when you had hidden Meridion away as an infant, and given him part of your name to comfort him and keep him company. You were very strange then, Rhapsody, sort of cold and distant and emotionless—”
“Of course I was. I had given the majority of my true name to my baby.”
“You don’t remember telling me about that day with Michael—the Waste of Breath? And his regiment of almost one hundred men?”
Rhapsody smiled bravely, but he could see her jaw and chin quivering.
“It wasn’t just one day, Achmed. It was many days, days that I can never forget, dearly as I wish I could. And ye
s—as physically agonizing and soul-destroying as those days were, each and every one of them was better than today.”
Achmed lapsed into silence.
“It was because of that—those—days that I went after Talquist, the Merchant Emperor of Sorbold, by myself,” he said at last.
Rhapsody rested the top of her head against the wall and stared at the ceiling. “Why?”
“I’m not certain. But something broke inside me when you told me that. Some of it was about Rath, and not assuming everything that needed to die was ancient and supernatural, that Talquist was just a pathetic, cruel, less-than-human bastard who had come upon an ancient dragon scale and used it to manipulate the entirety of the world. He had no magical talents of his own, no exceptional strength, or even brilliant men who lived to serve him; he was just a slug with power to torment people who didn’t deserve it, and he needed to die.”
He drew a long breath and let it out again.
“And, in the pursuit of immortality, he wanted to eat your son’s heart.”
Rhapsody winced. “Please, Achmed—”
“He needed to die, and I needed to kill him, because for me it was personal.”
“How? How was it personal?”
“Because I wanted Meridion to be my son.”
It was as if all of what little air was left in the corridor had suddenly vanished.
After a moment, Rhapsody shook her head as if shaking off a trance.
“I don’t understand.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean I really don’t understand. You—you hated Meridion when he was a baby. You complained about him ceaselessly, called him awful things, threatened to feed him to hawks—”
“I was angry that you had let Ashe be his father. Because I wanted to be his father.”
Rhapsody fell silent, her eyes wide.
“So if you hear a child waiting to come through, and Ashe now cannot give it to you, and would not give it to you even when he was still alive, I am willing to do so.” He looked away. “I would be honored to do so.”
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