I heard a moan and looked down to see Frain shaking with strain and beaded with sweat. “Vieyra,” he panted, “old hag, let go!”
I knew then that it was no use; Grandfather was gone. Once that mighty crone places her chalky grip on a man she never loosens it. But Frain would not give up. He would not. He knelt there with one hand on Grandfather’s forehead, the other on the old man’s bony chest, and though he did not move I could see that he expended every dram of his strength and will for the sake of Daymon Cein. He struggled until I could have shrieked just from watching him. I don’t know how long I stood watching, waiting for a moment of defeat that never came. Finally, without any giving in at all, Frain simply toppled, unconscious, taut and drenched with sweat. I caught him before he hit the hard stone, wrapped him in my cloak, and laid him down. What inexplicably good fate had sent this marvel to Melior to be my brother?
There had been no sense of victory, but a movement caught my eye. Grandfather lay breathing deeply, easily, and he stirred in his sleep.
I turned away. I had to turn away from joy. I had forgotten about the dragon even in that short time, regarding it as only a useful piece of furniture that made light and heat. But it woofed at me sternly, a warning rumble, and I stopped, almost laughing. I had forgotten about Frain’s dagger, still clutched in his hand. I sheathed it and started to smooth the stiffened fingers that had held it, but I found I could not bear to touch my brother so tenderly. What a coward I was then! I dropped Frain’s hand and stumped off to find Fabron.
Poor Fabron! He had fled the cave sometime; I am not sure when. I found him with the horses just outside the entrance. He stood weeping into the mane of his roan. “What ails you?” I grumped. “Everything is all right.”
He wouldn’t answer me.
“Get in there,” I told him. “Frain is going to need you, and I must find us something to eat.”
“Frain needs you far worse than he will ever need me,” he retorted in a muffled voice.
“That’s not my fault,” I shot back. Truth, but I was sorry as soon as I saw him wince. We tethered the horses, and he went in without another word, dragon or no dragon. I realized later what an ordeal that must have been for him. I roamed the mountain for hours, glad to be by myself, but I am afraid I made a sorry hunt of it. I returned near dark with nothing to offer except a few wrinkled crab apples. But near the cave entrance I found a fire, and roasting over it the carcass of a stag.
“Glory be to Eala, you’re back!” Fabron exclaimed when I found him. “I’ve been running back and forth all afternoon tending the meat and trying to keep an eye on these two.” The invalids in question were still sleeping. Fabron disappeared within an instant, off to look after his dinner. He had not been able to build the fire any closer without filling the cave up with smoke. I flopped down, and the black beast came and lay by my side. While I had been off wandering, it—he—had stayed by Frain. Odd—the creature had no gender that I could see, but in those days I thought of it as male. An extension of myself. I know now that it was far more, but then my mind was taken up by other things. In particular, that night, by my empty belly.
“Did you shoot the stag?” I asked Fabron when he returned.
“No, a dragon brought it.” He looked sheepish. “A blue one with Wings. A smallish one, but still quite big enough to scare me—ah—witless. I thought I was done for. I drew my sword, but the thing just dumped the deer at my feet and left. They don’t look friendly. Why are they feeding us?”
I didn’t know and I didn’t care. We ate until we bulged, and we tried to get some broth into the others without any luck; they were both too deeply asleep. Fabron and I watched by turns that night in case Frain or Daymon needed us. Neither of us feared our resident dragon anymore. I even offered it a haunch of the meat, but it just laid its great head down on its claws and blinked at me. I slept deeply when it was my turn to sleep, deliciously warmed by its breath. There was no stench; why will people say that dragons stink? Ours was a comely, shining monster with scales the color of wisteria except where they faded to a pearly hue on its breast. Peculiar colors for so large a beast; they seemed more appropriate for a bird. I had not noticed its wings then, tucked up against the very roof of the cave, or realized that it was a flying creature. All the flying dragons were the colors of sky and sunset.
When I awoke in the morning, Grandfather was sitting up and staring at me keenly.
“You look poorly, lad,” he greeted me. “What has happened?”
I sputtered. “I am much the same as ever,” I finally managed to say. “What has happened to you, that we found you folded up like a broken wing?”
“Why, I crawled in here to die, as an old thing will.” He made that statement sound perfectly unremarkable. “So I cannot understand why I am sitting here talking to you now.”
I did not answer, only stood up and crossed to where Frain lay, noted his breathing, felt briefly at his face. He half roused from his slumber and turned away from my touch with a groan. “I have failed again,” he murmured.
“Frain!” Daymon breathed, suddenly agitated. “What have you done!”
“Frain, wake up,” I said, shaking him. He sat up dazedly, came face to face with Grandfather, and sobbed. The old man clutched him, and I was obliged to support the pair of them; one was as unsteady as the other.
“Frain,” the old seer demanded, “what have you given, what have you bargained away?” He looked more stricken than I had ever seen him. Tears trickled down his sagging cheeks and into his beard.
“Nothing!” Frain said. “Vieyra does not bargain.”
“I thought not,” Daymon exclaimed. “So why am I alive?”
“I don’t know.” Frain lay back on his bed, swallowing at his tears, grinning. I stood up and stared at him with veiled concern and something of awe. Grandfather sighed and gave in to joy.
“Frain, Frain,” he chanted in happy exasperation, “have you never been told that no mortal healer can cure old age?”
I turned to go out. But halfway up the passage I met Fabron coming down with a kettle of stew. “Get on back,” he told me with wicked satisfaction. “It’s snowing. Snowing hard.”
So I had to stay, hearing their talk, seeing their smiles, feeling their love for each other and their love for me—and I could not smile or speak. There was Abas yet to be attended to, and I hated him the more because he had made me what I was. He was in me, haunting me. He would have utterly ruled my heart and soul if it were not for the beast and Frain.
“The dragon was warming you,” Frain explained to Grandfather after they had eaten.
“Then I must be intended to toddle along for a while yet,” Daymon mused. “Well, it is very strange that so much trouble should be taken for a stray like me.”
“If you are astray, it is by Abas’s fault,” I said angrily.
“No, lad, it is by my own doing.” Grandfather looked at me with watery old eyes; when had his eyes changed? “I broke my trust when I breached the Wall.”
“But you did that to save me!”
“I know it, lad. What quaint creatures we mortals are! But all my powers seem to have left me since. The doom of Melior must have touched me in its advent.”
“Melior is still standing,” I scoffed. I was frightened, scarcely able to comprehend that he, the seer who had guided me as a child, had changed. Even though I was changing myself.… Frain seemed frightened as well.
“Grandfather,” he said sharply, “what do you mean?”
“Just what I said, lad. I am nothing more now than a silly old man who happens to be related to you. You should have saved your strength.” He smiled, but he was not entirely joking. I had never heard him say anything so harsh.
“He loves you,” Fabron remarked reasonably. I could not speak of love. I got up to pace.
“I don’t need you to topple Melior for me,” I barked at Grandfather. And that was the closest I could come to telling him that his worthiness to me did not depend on his lost
powers. But in my hidden depths I felt ardently glad to have him with me again, and frightened of that gladness as only a madman can be.
Chapter Two
We stayed in the cave for several days, until our meat was gone and Frain and Daymon were reasonably strong. The dragon left us after the first day, but another one slithered in to take its place—a really purple one this time. They changed off regularly all through our stay. One was columbine pink, one vermilion, one saffron, and they all were so big that they scraped their way through the strait passage that loomed like a catacomb to us. The horses would not come near them, but the black beast accepted them much as I had. It was usually to be found nestled next to Daymon or Frain.
Long before the first week of our confinement was up I took to pacing the cave in vexation, striding up the long corridor several times a day to watch the snow piling ever higher outside. It looked as if we were going to have to winter in our cave—and why not, with a bunch of aloof but benevolent dragons feeding and warming us at no expense of our own? Still, I chafed and fretted, longing to be on my way toward Eidden to seek Oorossy’s aid against Abas. Inaction galled me, the more so because it left me time for thoughts I would rather avoid.
“A person would have to be mad to trek toward Eidden in that snow!” I fumed at our group one evening. They stopped their chatter and looked at me with mouths agape, as if I had indeed said something quite ridiculous. Only the dragon seemed to understand.
Take the inner ways, it said. Its voice sounded right inside my head. Certainly its mouth had not moved, but I knew it was the dragon just the same. I stiffened to attention, staring at it.
“What?”
Take the inner ways through the mountain roots. We will lead you and feed you, king that will be, it said. I walked straight up to it and gazed hard into its amber eyes.
“Why?” I demanded.
By way of reply the creature gave me the riddle again. I found my way out of it more quickly this time, albeit painfully. “I am what I am,” I said.
That is why.
“Because I can answer, you mean?” I scowled in exasperation. “And you could have talked to me all this time, and kept silence?”
Surely it was plain to see that you wanted no talk, scion of Aftalun.
True enough. But my companions seemed to be hearing only one side of the conversation; they were staring at me in consternation. “What is going on?” asked Fabron.
“The dragon says we are to follow it through the mountains. There must be more passages like this one.”
“Riddleruns, the people call them in these northern parts,” Grandfather said. “They go on forever, as twisted and tangled as those knotwork woods where I left you.” He shook himself mildly, shaking off folly. “Or at least they go as far as northern Acheron.”
“I only need to get as far as Eidden,” I muttered.
It was a hard decision to make. We had to leave the horses, steeds we had clung to even on the most absurd terrain, clinging to remnants of rank. But Grandfather was too old to ride, even if we had found a mount for him, and how were we to feed the animals through the winter? They would not come near the dragons anyway. So we ended up turning the horses loose, sending them off with a whack and trusting that they would find shelter, for they were valuable animals. I hoped the Boda would be puzzled by the strays.
The black beast did not leave, of course. “What about this one?” I asked the dragon of the moment.
Does it eat meat?
I shook my head doubtfully. The beast ate many odd things, twigs and thistles and all sorts of fuzzy moss and prickly things in addition to grass. But I could not imagine it eating meat.
We’ll feed it, said the dragon, reading the required items from the images in my mind.
So we spent the next two months, maybe more, winding our way through the incredible riddleruns of the Lorc Dahak. Our progress was slow, because the passages wandered up and down and in any direction and because Grandfather walked, as he did everything, sedately. We all had to walk, lugging our gear, following a dragon’s waddling hind end and flanking an impressive length of tail. But I did not complain too much about our crawling pace. At least we were not sitting still, and I had the dragons to thank for that.
We did not learn much about them, not even names, if they had names. They were even less talkative than I. Inscrutable, unpredictable, they were at once a threat holding itself at bay and a vital, useful ally. We trusted them out of necessity, and at the same time we knew we were insane, living in a madman’s world, to do so.
They were uncouth. They would do odd things without warning—flop down and go to sleep, or scuttle off to relieve themselves, leaving us stranded in the most profound of darkness. But they cared well for us in their offhand way. They brought us meat, even cooked it for us, scorched it rather, with blasts of their hot breath. They intuited that we also desired other food and brought us sundry offerings: bundles of hay for the beast, tree branches (not much use, unless they happened to have fruit on them), cabbages, a wicker basket of eggs, and once a freshly baked loaf of bread, delicately presented between two saberlike ivory claws. Grandfather frowned at all this.
“People will be more likely to shoot at us than welcome us in Eidden,” he said.
So I asked the dragons to please be discreet. But they could tell my heart was not in it; I had no desire to starve! They restrained themselves to the degree that they did not bring us domestic animals, only wild game. But I had to be careful not to think of chicken. One night—or, at any rate, on one occasion when we were sleeping; we all lost any sense of time—I dreamed about cheese. The next day a whole wheel of it appeared, skewered on a dragon’s spiny wingtip.
“They’re fattening us for the slaughter,” Fabron declared nervously.
“Why would they bother?” I grumbled. “There are villagers enough about.”
“They’re so remote,” said Frain. “Why do they bother with us at all?”
We all wondered that. I had only the answer the riddle had given me, that I was what I was. And the same applied to Grandfather, I surmised, since they were nursemaiding him when we arrived. He had been a seer, and I was of the royal blood … But, talking with the dragons from time to time, cautiously, I found that they cherished no great reverence for kings, seers, Sacred Kings, or Aftalun himself. More and more I came to believe that they tolerated me because I was, like them, a cramped, convoluted, and hidden thing, a wanderer of the inner darkness. With my black beast I was their brother in some sense, those dragons.
“If they mean us no harm,” said Frain morosely, “it is on your account, or Grandfather’s. They’d chomp me in a moment.”
He was right. Grandfather was a wanderer too, a stray, as he had said.
We never found out much about what had happened to Grandfather—where he had been, how he had become ready to die. He refused to pity himself or burden us with any guilt on his account. “Blood of Aftalun!” he would grumble when Frain questioned him. “It’s no more than I expected, lad.” There were no marks on him; I can at least say that. I could not bring myself to ask him any of the questions that lay nearest my heart.
And as for the rest, he could tell me nothing. Not why Raz had so willfully refused me entry, or how Abas spent his days, the number of his troops, the nature of his preparations.… He did tell me that Abas was thought to have invaded Vaire. That was the rumor in the countryside. He could not say whether my mother, his daughter, was alive or dead. Not that I asked. But he told me he could not say.
We plodded on. It must have been about midwinter when we reached the large, central dragonworks where hundreds of the creatures lived in a great chamber hollowed out of Lorc Dahak. Not all of them were flying dragons. Some were crimson delvers that seldom ventured out of the mountain roots. They treated us not ungently, but their courtesy held a quality even more forbidding than that of the others, as inexorable as the mountains themselves. Flyers and diggers alike, they lived lazily, amusing themselves from
time to time by melting a rock with their breath to see what was inside. If they found something pretty, they were likely to plaster it onto themselves somewhere. That and an occasional twilight foray into the outer air in search of venison seemed to be their only pursuits.
I decided I would not ask them for aid in my impending war. How could I ask such impersonal creatures for aid in a merely human affair? I might as well have hailed the wind. Still, they must have heard my thought. Or perhaps Daymon asked them. But I did not know that at the time.
We spent a while, perhaps a few days, in the dragon-works. Then we journeyed on toward Eidden. I am ashamed now that it took me so long to realize how hard all the darkness was on Fabron. I rather liked it, but he only bore it, and it wore him down. He started whimpering and thrashing in his sleep, and he lost his appetite. Frain started worrying about Fabron, which caused him to droop as well. Grandfather fretted about both of them, and none of the lot of them would bring their trouble to me. I marched along bullheadedly for a few days, letting them all be noble. But finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I spoke to our dragon of the day.
“Is it still snowing outside?”
Not snowing any longer, but no thaw yet, either. Still toothy cold.
“Well—” I frowned. I knew that if I took the others up to have a look around there would be no getting them back down. But maybe part of me was yearning for fresh air and open spaces too, by that time. “Lead us toward the outside,” I said at last.
It took a week or thereabouts to get out. When we finally saw a glimmer of light that was not dragon glow, each one of us caught breath and hurried toward it. Our guardian dragon left us without a word, slipping out of the mountain and taking wing into—what? We faced a black void aimlessly splattered with white. A patternless jumble of black and white loomed below. We all stared, wondering what had become of the world during our absence; then we all started to laugh. We had emerged into night, a frosty, moonlit and starlit night, and we looked down on snowy; wooded slopes.
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