by Melanie Rawn
“Don’t you dare pay meek and obedient with me,” she told him severely. “I know you, little brother. If you don’t want to marry a particular girl, you won’t, no matter what Father and Mother have to say.”
“But sooner or later I’ll have to play stud to some girl or other. Are your clothes dry yet? Father will be back with his dragon.”
“This one should have been yours.”
“No, thank you. I’d rather watch them than kill them. There’s something about their flying, Tobin, and listening to them roar when they’re hunting. . . .” He shrugged. “Oh, I know they’re a nuisance. But the Desert would be poorer without them.”
Tobin frowned. Everyone knew the dragons had to be killed off. They were more than a nuisance; they were a threat. Radzyn had lost six good mares and eight promising yearlings this spring to dragons, and caravans crossing the Desert were never safe. Dragonwings had swept destructive winds from Gilad to the Veresch Mountains for centuries, dining off livestock and crops.
“I know you don’t agree with me,” Rohan said with a smile, correctly reading her expression. “But you’ve never been interested in watching their dances or finding out about them. They’re so beautiful, Tobin—proud and strong and free—”
“You’re a romantic,” she said, and brushed the drying hair from his eyes. “The dragons have to be killed off, and we both know it. Chay says that once they get down past a certain number, nature will do the rest of the work for us. There won’t be enough dragons to repopulate the flights.”
“I hope that never happens.” He got to his feet and patted the damp material of his shirt. “I don’t think we’ll drip too much. We should get back inside and get ready for the come-home feast.”
“And to sew up the rents in Chay’s hide.” Tobin grimaced.
“He only takes a few scratches so you’ll have something to yell at him about. I never saw a man more willing to accommodate his wife’s temper!”
“I have a very sweet, docile, placid nature,” she protested sententiously.
He nodded, blue eyes dancing. “Just like the rest of the family.”
Right on cue, the twins came squabbling through the garden gates, calling for their mother to settle an argument. Tobin sighed, Rohan winked at her, and they went to bring some order to her unruly offspring.
Lady Andrade, having soothed her sister’s fears after purposely provoking them, had suggested a game of chess to while away the time until Zehava’s return. The two women left the solar for the family’s large, private chamber, elegantly furnished and currently decorated with Jahni and Maarken’s toys. For all that the fortress was said to have been carved out by dragons in ages past, Stronghold was remarkably civilized, even beautiful. Andrade knew this to be Milar’s doing. Windows that had once been set with crude, smoky glass were now filled with fine, clear, beveled panes. Floors that had been either bare or awash in frayed carpets now boasted rugs thick enough to sleep on. Carved wood was everywhere, its natural fragrance enhanced by the oils used to keep it shining and protected from the ravages of the climate. Decorations of gold, crystal, and ceramic abounded, the more precious items displayed in glass-fronted cases. Milar enjoyed free run of Zehava’s wealth and was forever receiving merchants eager to sell her even more luxuries; these merchants carried away with them tales of the magnificence of a once comfortless keep. Certainly it would be no hardship for Rohan’s future wife to live here.
Andrade was engaged in a tactful loss to her sister at chess when shouts outside turned their attention from the game. “What’s all that racket?”
“Zehava is back with his dragon,” Milar replied excitedly, rising to her feet, her cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling like a young girl’s.
“He made short work of the beast. I didn’t expect him back until nightfall.” Andrade joined her twin at the windows.
“If he drags the thing into the main courtyard like he did last time, the stink will invade the halls for weeks,” Milar complained. “But I don’t see any dragon—or Zehava, either.”
Stronghold was built in a hollow of the hills, reached by a long tunnel through the cliffs. Riders were emerging from the passage into the outer court, and the gates had been flung open in the wall guarding the main yard. Spotting Chaynal’s dark head and red tunic, Andrade wondered whether Zehava and his dragon were following more slowly. “Let’s go down and greet them,” she said.
“Highness! Highness!” Milar’s chamberlain accosted them on the stairs, his shrill voice grating on Andrade’s nerves. “Oh, come at once, please, please!”
“Did the prince take hurt while slaying his dragon?” Milar asked. She hurried her steps a bit but was not overly alarmed. It would have been miraculous if Zehava had escaped without a scratch.
“I think so, your grace, I—”
“Andrade!” Chay’s voice bellowed from the foyer below. “Damn it all, find her at once!”
Milar pushed the chamberlain out of her way and flew down the stairs. Andrade was right behind her. She caught at Chay’s arm while Milar raced outside into the courtyard. “How bad?” she asked tersely.
“Bad enough.” He would not meet her gaze.
Andrade sucked in a breath. “Bring him upstairs, then. Gently. Then find Tobin and Rohan.”
She hurried back to Zehava’s suite and busied herself making the bed ready to receive him. He would die in it, she told herself sadly. Chay was no fool; he had been in battles enough to know a mortal wound when he saw one. But perhaps with careful attention, Zehava might survive. Andrade tried to hope, but when they brought the prince up and placed him on the white silk sheets, she knew Chay was right. She stripped the clothes and makeshift bandages from the big frame, unable to hold back a gasp at the hideous wound in Zehava’s belly. She was barely aware of Tobin beside her, Milar standing silent and stricken at the foot of the bed. She worked furiously with water, clean towels, pain-killing salves, and needles threaded with silk. But she knew it was all in vain.
“We thought the dragon nearly defeated,” Chay was saying in a hoarse voice. “He’d scored it many times—there was blood everywhere. He came at it for the killing stroke and we thought—but between the teeth that got his horse and the talons that ripped him open—” Chay stopped and there was the sound of liquid being gulped. Andrade hoped the wine was strong. “It was all we could do to beat the dragon away from him. We got him onto my horse and—after three measures we had to stop. He’d been holding his guts in with his hands, pretending he wasn’t too badly hurt.”
Andrade cleaned and stitched the wound, knowing her actions to be useless. Now that the blood had been washed away, she could see the fearful work of the dragon’s claws: through skin and flesh right down into muscle and the thick looping strands of the guts themselves, which were not only exposed but sliced clean through in places. She could make Zehava comfortable and free him of most of the pain, but Rohan would become ruling prince in a few days at the most. She glanced around at the thought of him, noting that he had not yet arrived.
“We cleaned him up and bound him as best we could,” Chaynal went on. “Then we came back as fast as we dared. He hasn’t spoken or opened his eyes once.” At last the young lord’s voice cracked with grief. “Tobin—forgive me—”
The princess looked around briefly from her work at Andrade’s side. “You did everything you could, beloved.” She knuckled her eyes with one bloodstained hand.
Andrade was nearly finished sewing the skin together. She did so very quickly, without thought to how it would heal, for she knew it would not matter to Zehava how it healed. Dressings soaking in a pain-numbing solution were applied, and at last she wrapped clean bandages around the prince’s midsection. Her back ached and her eyes stung with the strain of so much fine work done so fast. Straightening up, she turned to her sister. The blue eyes saw nothing but Zehava’s ashen face. Andrade washed her hands in a basin of blood-clouded water, dried them, and flung her long braid back over her shoulder. “Mila,” she beg
an.
“No,” her twin whispered. “Just leave me alone with him.”
Andrade nodded and ordered everyone out with a glance. In the antechamber, she closed the door and gestured to the frightened servants, who scurried away.
“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” Tobin asked softly, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. She wiped them away, leaving thin stains on her face.
Chaynal made a strangled sound low in his throat and strode off down the hall. Andrade said, “Yes.”
“Poor Mother. And poor Rohan.”
“I need your help, Tobin. Grief must wait. You know that what I possess, your mother does not. These things sometimes skip generations, the same way you bore twins but Mila did not. What is within me is also within you.”
The princess’ eyes went wide with shock. “You mean I’m—”
“Yes. I’m tired, and I need the strength you have but were never trained to use.” She led Tobin down the long hallway to the rooms kept for her, and locked the door behind them. Sunlight sloped in, gilding the furniture and bed hangings. Andrade stood with her niece at the windows that faced the slowly dying sun. “Perhaps I ought to have told you, shown you how to use what the Goddess gave you. But you were content as you were, and faradhi powers are not taught to those who have no need of them.”
“You’re going to use me, the way you use everyone,” Tobin said, but without resentment. “What do you want me to do?”
“Listen to me. Don’t stare directly into the sun, girl, you’ll burn your eyes. Look instead at what it does to the land—the hollows filled by light, as Water fills hollow stones and Air fills the hollow dragon caves and Fire fills the hollow hearth. The light moves,” she whispered, “caresses the Earth like a lover, warms the Air, sparkles across the Water, finds its mate in the Fire. Of these four things, all is made. Touch the sunlight with me, Tobin—feel its strands weaving between your fingers, its colors like silk threads made of jewels . . . yes, that’s it. Now follow it with me. Become sunlight, flung out across the land. . . .”
Chapter Two
When Sioned was three years old, the death of her parents left her brother Davvi, her elder by twelve winters, Lord of River Run. Within a few years he married. His bride was a girl whose father had no other heirs, and when the man died, everything that was his became his daughter’s. Davvi found himself the athri of two fine keeps and lands that stretched for twenty measures along the Catha River. But the new Lady of River Run was the possessive sort, begrudging Sioned not only the share of wealth that would have been her dowry but even the fondness between brother and sister. Thus she purchased—at a price far less than marriage to a suitable lord—Sioned’s entry into Goddess Keep. Unhappy at home, twelve-year-old Sioned had gone gladly to the great castle on the cliff’s edge in Ossetia. There she found companionship among the other students and knowledge enough to feed her ravenous appetite for learning. The small oddities that her sister-by-marriage derided as “fey” turned out to be indications that she had the faradhi gift and could become a Sunrunner.
Not everyone who went to Goddess Keep became faradhi, and Lady Andrade did not tolerate arrogance among those who could or envy among those who could not. But there were certain distinctions involved in becoming a Sunrunner: the rings of earned rank and periodic visits to the grove of pines near the keep. In the year 693, when Sioned was sixteen and had earned the first silver circle on her right middle finger, she went to this place where, if her talents were strong and the Goddess was disposed to revelations, she might glimpse her future.
After a long walk through the woods, she emerged into brilliant sunlight that warmed her body and danced over the waves far below. Towering coastal pines formed a ring around a small rock cairn from which water bubbled up and splashed its way down to the sea. Sioned paused outside the circle, removed all her clothes, and stepped lightly across the carpet of blue and purple flowers to the spring.
Each of the five pines had a name: Childtree, Maidentree, Womantree, Mothertree, and Hagtree. Clad only in the cloak of her long red-gold hair, Sioned knelt beside the cairn and caught water in her hands, spilling a few drops for the first two trees before turning to the Womantree. She had come here twice before—first as a little girl to offer some water and a lock of her hair, then a year later when her first bleeding meant she was no longer a child. Now she was ready for the next step: declaring herself a woman. For the previous night she had known the embrace of a man for the first time.
She returned to the spring and knelt, facing the Womantree. The sea whispered against the cliffs at low tide, reminding her of the soft sounds of flesh against flesh last night. There had been no words spoken and in the total darkness she had not known who the man was, nor did it matter. No girl ever knew, for the spell woven was a powerful one. Care was also taken that no children would come of the woman-making night; when Sioned chose her husband, then she would come to the grove and ask the Mothertree for a glimpse of the children she might bear.
She could wait for that. It was some years off, and she was barely sixteen, after all. A smile crossed her face as she thought about the silent encounter, all warmth and excitement and potency in the darkness. But she also knew that something had been missing. There had been affection, learning, and joy, but it had lacked the communion her friend Camigwen told her she’d found with her Chosen, Ostvel. Sioned wanted the same thing for herself. Perhaps the Womantree would show her the man with whom she would find it.
Tossing her hair back, she gazed at the tree and wondered what the boys and young men of the Keep felt during their own rituals here. For them, the trees had different names: Child, Youth, Man, Father, and Graybeard. No one ever spoke of what occurred at such times, but she hoped that others heard the water singing and their names sighing through the pines. She smiled as she listened, then lifted both hands.
Her first ring had been given the previous day, when she had formally proved her ability to summon Fire, and tiny flames burned at her call atop the rock cairn. The Air of her own breath fanned them higher, brighter, until they were clearly reflected in the Water. She plucked a single hair from her head to represent the special portions of the Earth from which she had been made, and floated the strand on the still water. Her own face was mirrored there—pale, big-eyed, soft with girlhood and framed in a tumble of bright hair. She slid her hands into the water and gazed at the Womantree, holding her breath.
The Fire leaped higher on the rocks, startling her, and her fingers clenched around silky water. Her face had changed: her cheeks were thinner, the high bones and delicate jawline in proud relief. The green eyes were darker, their expression more serious, and her mouth had lost its childish curve. This was the woman she would become, and her vanity was pleased even as she chided herself for the conceit.
Sioned memorized the face she would one day wear, eager to become this woman with her confident eyes and composed features. But while she gazed into the reflection of her future, the Fire flared again. Another face was next to hers in the water now, burning with a light of its own through the mirrored flames. It was a man’s face, fair hair sweeping across a wide brow to shade river-blue eyes, a face with strong bones and an unsmiling mouth. Yet there was tenderness in the curve of the lips, gentleness to balance the stubborn line of the jaw.
Fire slid down the rocks then, igniting the pool, and Sioned drew back her hands with a cry of fright. The single red-gold hair floating on the water writhed, became a thin rivulet of flame that crossed the man’s forehead like the circlets worn by princes—and then extended to form the same royal crown for her.
It was a very long time before Sioned rose from her knees. Even after the Fire died away and the picture in the Water vanished, after the Air had ceased to sing in the pines and the Earth was calm beneath the pool, she stared wide-eyed at the cairn and the spring. At last the chill of oncoming night wrapped around her naked body and she shivered, the spell finally broken.
The next day she sought out Lady Andrade,
troubled by what she had seen. “Was it true?” she asked urgently. “What I saw yesterday—will it come true?”
“Perhaps. If the vision disturbed you, it can be changed. Nothing is written in stone, child. Even if it were, the stones can be shattered.” The Lady gazed musingly at the brilliant sunlight outside.
“When I was about your age, I looked into the Water and saw the face of my husband. He was not the man I would have Chosen for myself, so I did everything I could to make the vision change. I know now that what the Goddess showed me was a warning, not a promise. Perhaps she did the same for you.”
“No,” Sioned murmured. “This time, it was a promise.”
A wry smile played over the Lady’s mouth. “Just so. But remember that a man is more than a face and a body and a name. Sometimes he’s a whole world within himself, even if he isn’t a great lord or a prince.”
“I think I saw the whole world in his eyes,” Sioned admitted, frowning. “Is that what you mean?”
“How young you are!” Lady Andrade said indulgently, and the girl blushed.
Now, five years later, Sioned knew her own face had changed until it was very nearly the version of herself she had seen that day. Only the royal circlet was missing, and her first real sight of the man. She had spent the last years looking carefully at every blond, blue-eyed man who came to Goddess Keep, but had not found anyone like him. Who was he?
The answer had come to her very suddenly as she’d helped Lady Andrade pack for her journey to Stronghold. Fair hair, blue eyes, certain angles of bone—Sioned had been amazed and appalled that she’d never seen it before. Then she had realized that “before” had not been the right time, not for knowledge like this. She saw at last the echoes of that masculine face in Lady Andrade’s, remembering the royal circlet and the fact that the Lady’s nephew was a prince. Though she had said nothing, Andrade had seen the shock in her eyes and nodded silent acknowledgment of the truth.
One thing still puzzled Sioned. The circlet had been formed of herself, the hair floating on the Water. Yet he was already royal, already the heir; how could his becoming Prince of the Desert have anything to do with her? She was thinking about it as she walked the sunswept battlements of Goddess Keep one afternoon. The sea was a placid blue beneath a cloudless sky, sunlight reaching deep into the water to warm the new life there, and around the cliffs otters laughed uproariously as they played with their young. Sioned was fascinated by water, whether it was the ocean below Goddess Keep or the Catha River where she had spent her childhood. But she had a Sunrunner’s wariness of it as well, for few faradh’im were able to set foot on anything that floated without becoming sick as a gorged dragon.