Elegy for a Lost Star (40 page)

She gave a quiet cough now, a subtle verbal sign Ashe had learned was her way of informing him that his noon-meal repast was warm and would chill unpleasantly, then took hold of the door handle again.

Just as her hand began to turn the handle, the dragon in Ashe's blood caught the slightest hint of a scent on the wind, a fragment of cinnamon and a drop of vanilla, mixed with the strange and intoxicating aroma of woodland flowers. It reached down into his brain, into memory so deep it did not even need consciousness to be evoked.

Rhapsody's scent.

He shook his head infinitesimally, and the scent cleared. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a golden flash, like the movement of a fall of hair. He looked up quickly, turning in time to see Portia's tall, dark form start through the door.

Not a sign of golden hair anywhere.

He ran a hand through his own metallic red-gold hair, then called out to her just as she was closing the door behind her.

“Portia?”

The chambermaid turned, her dark eyes wide with surprise.

“Yes, m'lord?”

Now that she was there, staring at him in confusion, anything Ashe would have asked fled from his brain, and he found himself speechless. He gestured clumsily with his hands, trying to think of a way to phrase a question that didn't sound utterly insane, but no words would come into his mind.

He wanted her to explain how suddenly her presence, fleeting as it was, had reminded him, in a primitive sensory way, of his wife.

And realized in the same instant that she would think him unbalanced if he told her such a thing.

He smiled awkwardly, then shook his head as he rubbed the back of his neck.

“Sorry,” he said. “I—I don't remember what I was going to ask you.”

Portia dropped a curtsy.

“Ring for me if you remember, m'lord,” she said pleasantly. “Good evening.”

O
ver the next few days it happened several times more.

At first Ashe suspected trickery; his upbringing and nature did not allow for an easy application of trust, and so he began to watch Portia carefully,
noting her movements, keeping track of her out of the corner of his eye, and when she left the room, with his innate dragonsense.

Each time he felt a twinge of shame afterward.

The human side of his nature had granted him his father's ability at cool, detached assessment and equanimity, so after a week or so of noting her movements, he began to look elsewhere for an explanation of what he had noticed. The new servant was discreet, modest, and kept to herself. She rose early, kept her quarters straight, worked hard, was prompt when summoned, eschewed after-hours gatherings with others who worked in the keep, and rebuffed the advances made by a young man who had come to deliver foodstuffs to the buttery from Avonderre. She was tall, broad-shouldered, and dark, with deep brown eyes and an olive complexion, a physical opposite of Rhapsody's slight Lirin frame, rosy skin, blond hair, and green eyes. Her behavior appeared to be above reproach; since Ashe could not read minds or look into people's hearts, he had little other choice but to assume she was not responsible for his odd inclinations.

Once Portia herself was ruled out he began to muse, almost to the point of melancholy, about why he was seeing aspects of his wife in a serving maid. Certainly he missed her, had always missed her in her absence, and had been driven to the brink of insanity when she was missing the last summer, taken by an old nemesis and hidden in a sea cave where the water, normally an element over which he had power, clashed against the rocks, hiding her from his inner sense. The kidnapping had loosed a wild ugliness in him, a desperation that felt uncomfortably close to the madness of dragon blood that he had seen in some of his other relatives.

I am distracted at best, going insane at worst
, he thought glumly, blotting the ink on a new draft of the harbor code he was writing.
If she knew, she would come home
.

The thought kindled in his second nature an interest that took a while to extinguish. Almost as much as the man craved her company because of his love for her, the dragon sought it as well, but for different reasons. There were gemlike qualities to Rhapsody—her eyes a clear emerald, her hair like golden flax—that had been imbued in her both by nature and by her rather life-changing experience of walking through the fire at the Earth's core. It was as if all physical flaw had been burned away, and perfection was something that appealed to the avarice in the dragon's nature.

Blessedly, it was the existence of flaw that the man cherished, the pigheaded stubbornness, the occasional inability to see the forest for the trees, the wild anger that exhibited itself at inexplicable times, all parts of this woman that he enjoyed as well, and so the duality of his nature remained in agreement and in balance, despite taking opposite sides of the debate.

But now, if the physical cues that reminded him of his wife were
beginning to manifest themselves for no reason, there could be more beneath the surface. Upon contemplating that possibility, Ashe felt cold.

Because it might be a signal that the dragon side of him was beginning to take over.

His desire to see her return grew stronger. He countered in by chanting under his breath, reminding himself that she was happier in the lair of the dragon than she was in Haguefort, and ultimately safer, but the diversion only worked for a short while. Then he would see Portia pass by, carrying linens or a tray to the kitchen; she would bow or smile slightly at him and hurry away, leaving in her wake a flicker of golden hair, a flash of rosy cheek and the scent of soap and vanilla.

He began to dream about his wife ceaselessly, fevered dreams that caused him to wake, sweating with unmet passion or the shivering chills of fear. Some nights in his dreams she came to him, pulled the covers aside, and settled down into his arms; from those dreams he awoke feeling lost and sick, his head pounding as if it were about to split.

After the worst of those nightmares Portia had come into his rooms, as she often did, delivering a clean basin and fresh, warm water for his morning shave. She bowed and disappeared, leaving such a strong image of Rhapsody in Ashe's mind that he pulled the covers over his head and groaned loudly enough to frighten the tabby cat in the corner into a frenzy.

Finally the last blow to his peace of mind was struck on an especially cold night.

Ashe was sitting before the fire again, warming himself by its flames and in thoughts of his wife, when the serving maid entered the room, carrying a tray with his supper. She placed it down on the table before him, uncovered the plate, and turned to go; Ashe caught the scent of spice and vanilla, and the faintest hint of summer flowers in the folds of her rustling skirts. But rather than leaving, she came slowly up behind him, the heat of her body far more intense than that of the fire on his back.

With the lightest of touches, she let her hands come to rest on his shoulders, then allowed them to run lightly over his collar as if she were smoothing it. Her hands closed gently on the heavy muscles of his shoulders, her thumbs dug deliciously into the tight bands that encircled his spine as her fingers gently massaged the soreness from his neck.

Just as Rhapsody had always done.

She had magic in her hands, magic that soothed his tension and brought warmth to the deepest places that were tight and sore. Against his will Ashe closed his eyes, surrendering for a moment to the blissful ministrations of her hands.

Then went cold with the horror of what was happening.

Rage began to burn in his belly, anger at the liberties this servant was
taking with him, but a deeper fury was building, directed at himself for allowing her to take those liberties.

And enjoying them.

He tried to keep his smoldering anger from igniting too quickly, reminding himself that it was a common practice in other keeps, other castles, for the servants to believe that servicing the master's needs, physical and sexual, was part of their indenture. When he was an adolescent his own father, a holy man widowed by Ashe's birth, had had a coterie of whores, each of whom had the countersign to open the secret door into Llauron's office. So he kept himself as steady as he could, despite his inner desire to fling the girl across the room.

He set his teeth and spoke in as calm a voice as he could.

“Portia,” he said quietly, “you have truly beautiful hands. Soft as milk, and gentle. It would be a shame if I have to cut them off, which I will, if you don't remove them from me immediately.”

A gasp of shock went up from the doorway. Ashe spun in his chair.

The serving girl was standing in the doorframe, the lid of the serving tray still in her hands. She began to tremble in confusion, tears forming in her large brown eyes.

Ashe looked wildly around him; his meal was still on the table before him, untouched. The nap of the silk carpet showed two sets of her footprints, and his dragon sense could immediately tell from the lack of heat in them that she had made her way directly to the door, rather than lingering.

His stomach clenched.

“Forgive me,” he stammered. “I—I thought—”

The young woman burst into tears.

Ashe pushed the tray aside and rose; Portia froze, her body going rigid with shock.

“I am sorry, again, I apologize,” the Lord Cymrian said awkwardly. “You may go.”

Portia dropped a quick curtsy and skittered through the door, closing it behind her. She waited until she had gotten all the way back to her bedroom, had thrown herself on her bed and pulled the cover over her head, before allowing herself the pleasure of a grin.

By that time, the Lord Cymrian was no longer thinking about her, and was actively ignoring anything his dragon sense might tell him about her. He had bounded up the stairs, two at a time, to gather the provisions he would need for his trip to the silent lake in the forest of Gwynwood.

He did not even wait until morning to leave.

T
he silence of the forest was broken occasionally by the twitter of winterbirds.

Achmed stopped long enough in his trek to point a deadfall out to Krinsel, the Bolg midwife, before stepping over a rotten tree. He waited until the woman had nodded her understanding and had circumvented the natural trap before turning and continuing deeper into the forest.

They had been traveling along a tributary of the Tar'afel River for some time, knowing that the brook would eventually empty into a quiet lake near the dragon's lair. Achmed was listening intently, paying little attention to the glistening white trees, their branches dripping soft drops of snow in the heat of the morning sun.

He was following a sound that resonated in his ears as well as his blood; the namesong by which Rhapsody had called him. The song vibrated in his soul and resonated in his eardrums, through the sensitive network of veins and nerves that formed his skin-web, to the very tips of his fingers.

Achmed the Snake, come to me
.

It was both a welcome sensation, and horrific one, to be summoned thus by a Namer. While the melody being chanted in the distance was perfectly attuned to his brain and the natural vibrations that he emitted in the course of drawing breath, there was still something deeply disturbing to him about his name being on the wind, even if no other living soul could hear it. Achmed had been a solitary and secretive creature his entire life.

Some habits were hard to break, some natural impulses all but impossible to overcome.

Achmed, come to me
.

The winter had faded, as it always did in the middle continent during Thaw, for one turn of the moon. The ground at the base of trees was visible, dead or emergent grass in tones of pale green and gold drying in the morning wind. The snowcap, hard and frozen most of the winter, had softened to a thin, watery layer, and the breeze was warm, but did not carry the scent of spring, because the melt was false. In a few short weeks the cold would return with a vengeance, choking back any early shoots that might have come up in response to the cruel invitation the earth issued during Thaw, burying them securely under a resilient blanket of hard white ice until the turning of the season.

Still, he had to admit to himself that it was pleasant to hear Rhapsody's voice in his ears again. She had been away from Ylorc for so many years now
that he had almost grown accustomed to not hearing the morning messages she used to broadcast daily through the natural echo chamber of the ring of rocks that rose above her subterranean home in the grotto of Elysian, an underground lake in his lands.

Even though she liked living alone when she, Grunthor, and he had first come to Ylorc, away from the Firbolg who considered her a source of food and watched her hungrily when she passed by, Rhapsody was good at keeping in touch, and made of point of checking in with him each day. When she first married Ashe and moved to Navarne Achmed found to his shock that he missed her Lirin sunrise aubades and sunset devotions as well, the love songs of her people, sung to the heavens and the stars they had been born beneath, ceremonies she had marked daily all the time that he had known her. She had even continued to sing the prayers when they were traveling within the earth along the Axis Mundi, as far from the stars as it was possible to be, and so they were annoyingly ingrained in his mind, enough so that not hearing them had become even more bothersome than hearing them had been.

So it was, in a way, comforting to hear her voice again, singing his name, in the depths of his consciousness. Almost as comforting as it was disturbing.

He inhaled, allowing the air of the forest to circulate through his sensitive sinuses. Then he grimaced.

There was a taste of salt on the wind; Achmed rolled it around in his mouth, then spat it out on the ground sourly. They were a good way from the sea, and the breeze was blowing from the east, not the west, so that tang could only mean one thing.