Elegy for a Lost Star (51 page)

Perhaps dragon sense is limited by water
, he thought, knowing that the element obscured his own ability to track heartbeats.
If I can get Rhapsody into the river, we may be able to hide from her inner sight
.

Even as his mind planned it, his better sense told him he was fooling himself.

In the distance they could hear the crashing of trees and the ripping of the earth as the two dragons sought to divert their rampaging kinswoman, moving earth, opening chasms, diverting streams, tossing large branches into her path, exercising their elemental power over the earth, each action followed by a bellowing roar of anger and an audible eruption of flame. The ground trembled beneath their feet; Achmed glanced behind him at Rhapsody, whose hand was clutching his gloved one in a death grip, to find her face white and bloodless but set in a grim aspect as she climbed over deadfall and rotting trees, beneath bowers of thorned berries and around forest glades, panting as she ran.

On the breeze that whipped through the forest they could hear the voice of the dragon, screaming, howling, bellowing in rage.

Rhapsody! Rhapsody, you cannot hide from me
!

The wind howled around them with the onset of dusk; there was snow on its gusts, icy from the water of the river, and it stung as it pelted their skin and eyes. There was not a sound from the bundle in her arms; Achmed wondered dully if the child was even alive.

Each moment the fire approached ever closer.

Finally, as the heat was beginning to lick his back, he felt Rhapsody's grip falter, then slip from his.

He turned to find her, pale as he had ever seen her, doubled over, her
child clutched against her stomach. With the last of the strength in her arms, she shakily held the bundle out to him.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please—take him—Achmed. Take—him and run. It's me—she's after.” Her voice faltered in exhaustion and weakness. “Take him.”

Achmed hesitated, then slung the cwellan at his side, snatched the bundle from her arms, tucking it under his own and grasping her hand again. The baby remained silent, unmoving.

“I'll carry him, but you must come as well,” he insisted, dragging her over a moldering tree stump, pulling her along as she stumbled. “The brat will die without you anyway; I can't very well be his wet nurse. Come on.”

Together they struggled, around impenetrable brambles, through half-frozen streams, until the sound of the river could be heard in the distance.

“Not too much farther, come on, Rhapsody,” Achmed urged, feeling the grip of her fingers loosen again.

Under their feet the earth began to sunder in long, thin cracks. The bellowing of the dragon had gone silent; now the only sounds they could hear were the screaming of nature, protesting in reply.

“Leave me,” Rhapsody panted. “The—sword I carry—protects me from—flame—”

“But not from acid, nor from claws,” Achmed muttered, pulling harder on her arm. “Come on.”

They crossed the last field of highgrass, ran along the floodplain, and were in plain sight of the Tar'afel when suddenly the riverbank split with a great tremor into a yawning crevasse, ripping open before their eyes as the dragon reared up, rampant and solid, hatred darker than the fires of the Underworld blazing in her glowering blue eyes. For a moment her face contorted in rage, a hideous anger so palpable that it caused the air around her to stop moving in that instant.

Achmed's reflexes reacted, bracing for the attack.

Then, without warning, his body lurched as Rhapsody shoved him from behind with all her strength, pushing him and the infant away and falling herself into the dragon's line of sight.

Shakily she drew Daystar Clarion, the elemental sword of fire and ether; the luminous blade trembled for a split second in her hand, then stopped as Rhapsody drew herself up to her full height, her own eyes blazing with fury.

“Direct your wrath at me, Anwyn, you coward,” she said, her voice ringing in a Namer's commanding tone.

The beast's nostrils flared, and she rose up, her torn wings spread wide, blotting out the light of the sun. The air crackled and hissed with malevolence.

She inhaled deeply.

Achmed fired.

Three whisper-thin disks, forged of blue-black rysin-steel, sliced into the dragon's underbelly as she reared back, each driven more deeply in by the force of the one that followed.

The recoil, and the impetuous shove from Rhapsody, left him off balance and he stumbled; he dropped the cwellan, clutching the bundle under his arm.

The dragon screamed in pain and in rage; the heat of her scorching blood was causing the disks to expand rapidly, tearing open the flesh below her throat and into her abdomen. Her first attack of breath went wide, lighting the trees above them and the brambles to an inferno of yellow-orange flame. As the forest caught fire she inhaled again, bleeding profusely, and aimed her acid breath directly at the golden-haired woman whose face had haunted her dreams.

In the fragment of a second before the immolating flames washed over Rhapsody, the air in front of her turned gray and silver with just the tiniest hint of glittering copper. A great translucent figure appeared from the ether before and around her, thin as a breath of the wind, barely visible, surrounding the Bolg king and Lady Cymrian with its body, interposing itself between them and the rampaging dragon.

Just as Anwyn exhaled, loosing fire so acidic that it melted the stones of the ground beneath her, Llauron loosed a lore of his own, letting go of the elemental earth that was within his blood and soul.

Going solid.

Forming a vast, ossified shell around the man, the woman, and the child.

Saving them.

Ending
.

T
he flames washed over Llauron's rocklike form, licking the perimeter, burning the grass beneath it. Rhapsody and Achmed could hear the blast, recognized it by the intensity of its hollow roar, could distantly make out the shrieks of wrath, then the silence.

Inside the shell it was dark; the palest of light remained, glowing ethereally. The Bolg king felt around in the darkness until he found Rhapsody's hand, and clutched it; she was shaking violently, watching the process of Llauron's Ending going through its terrible stages.

With the release of the earth lore came the dissipation of the starfire that was also his birthright; the cool light hardened the shell of his body, solidifying it. Her heart beat painfully against her ribs as the water within him
evaporated; she felt the tears and the rain both on her face, both drying as the lore vanished into the world from what had once been the soul of a man who had loved the sea. As the water left, the shell hardened further, tempered and cooled. Only the element of wind remained; it took the form of sweet, heavy air hanging in their midst.

For a moment, no sound could be heard inside the dark cavern of Llauron's body.

Then, quietly, Rhapsody began to weep.

Achmed's eyes, the night eyes of a Bolg, watched as she walked over to the wall, striated in the pattern of ribs, and reached out her hand to rest it there. She slowly slid down to the floor of the cavern, overwhelmed with grief.

In his arms, the baby began to whimper as well.

Achmed stood for a moment, unmoving, then slowly lifted the swaddled bundle up against his shoulder and rocked it, swaying awkwardly back and forth.

“Shhhhhh,” he said. “Hush now.”

O
utside the enormous shell of the dragon that had once been her son, Anwyn stood, frozen in shock.

At first her astonishment came from the immediacy of what had happened; a second before, she had the woman she hated in her sights, vulnerable, was anticipating the relief of her pain that would come with Rhapsody's death, was looking forward to breathing in the bitter scent of her ashes once her body was immolated.

Then the wyrm calling himself Llauron had intervened, had appeared from the very ether, had surrounded the woman and her child and the monster who was guarding them both, and Ended. Anwyn had forgotten much of the lore of her race, but even in her fragmented awareness, she comprehended the horror, the finality, the sacrifice of what had just come to pass.

And she resented it with every fiber of her tattered, bleeding being.

The rysin-steel blades were expanding in the heat of her body; she could feel them growing larger, compressed by their cold manufacture no longer. Each breath she took tore a little more at her muscle, rent her flesh by inches, as they worked their way toward her three-chambered heart. The wyrm willed her breath to slow, tried to compress her bodily functions as much as she was able, but she could not control the beating of her own heart, the circulating of her blood.

She wanted to scream, wanted to vent her rage in fire and blood, but the disks hovered within her thoracic cavity, threatening her life with every tiny movement.

Finally she decided that she had no choice but to slowly, cautiously make her way back to the frozen north, to her lair of ice and frost. She hoped that the cold would help contain the disks with her, allowing her to pry them
from her flesh, but knew that even if that were not possible, she would rather die in her lair than in this alien forest, this place where she should have memories and instead found only emptiness and denied gratification.

This place where a dragon had Ended.

That alone was enough to terrify her. In her mind she heard dark chanting, voices of beings of a different elemental race, cackling as the lore of Earth was diminished by the loss of one of her kind. She no longer could stay; the sight of the massive stone statue, its wings extended forward, wrapped around the people it had died protecting, gave her chills that resonated throughout her body, made her tremble, though later, as she crawled into the Tar'afel and swam against its hardening current, she realized that her shaking was not only from fear, but from her proximity to death herself.

A
chmed listened in the darkness to Rhapsody weep. It was a sound he had hated from the first moment he had heard it, a harsh, horrific vibration, unlike the natural music she emitted that he found soothing. It tore across the sensitive nerve endings in his skin, making them vibrate with agony. He set his teeth against the pain and remained silent, allowing her to vent her grief; weak as she was from giving birth and from fleeing the dragon, she had little strength to keep it up for long.

Instead he was watching her child in the darkness. He had laid the little boy down on his back; the floor of the dragon's stone body was warmer than the ground of the forest would have been. The child seemed to like the position, waving his tiny arms aimlessly, breathing in the cool, sweet air that hung heavily above his head.

Rhapsody leaned back against the cavern wall, spent. She did not have the night vision that Achmed was blessed with, so, to dispel the darkness and cold from the place, drew her sword and rested it on the ground, allowing the cavern to fill with its warmth and light.

“The irony is threatening to choke me,” she said dully, watching her baby entertain the Bolg king.

“How so?”

“All Llauron wanted to do was to come to know this child, and to have the child know him. He made a sacrifice to save him, and us, that is unimaginable—like sacrificing your Afterlife along with your life. And here Meridion is trapped within the shell of his grandfather's own body, a grandfather he will never know now.”

Achmed sighed dispiritedly.

“Don't you Lirin Namers have something you are supposed to do when these sorts of things happen?” he asked pointedly. “Like singing a Song of Passage or something, rather than just freeform bemoaning? I find your current lyrics a bit tiresome. Llauron was a complicated man, a draconic man even before he gave up his human body for an elemental state. He never let
anything stand in the way of what he wanted or thought was right, not the well-being of his family, or the safety of his allies, or any small consideration such as that. That he was willing to do whatever this was may have been the first truly noble gesture the man ever made. Why don't you just do whatever you are supposed to do to elegize him, and leave your grief, and the grief you are borrowing for you child, out of it? Meridion may not even miss him.”

Rhapsody exhaled, then pushed herself up a little straighter.

“You're right about the elegy,” she said shortly. “As a Namer, it's the least I can do. But I don't want to sing the Lirin Song of Passage for him; I did that once, when he tricked me into immolating him with the sword, that he might attain his elemental dragon state. I don't think I could bring myself to do that again.”

“Fine,” said Achmed, shifting to find a more comfortable place in the dark. “Sing a bawdy brothel song, or one of Grunthor's lewd marching cadences; I'll bet Llauron would appreciate either of those.”

Rhapsody nodded, unable to smile. “You're probably right. For all that he had a very proper exterior, he did have a raunchy sense of humor. When I first was studying with him, he used to sing me sea chanteys every night, and some of those would have curled his followers' hair.” She stood and walked over to Achmed, then crouched down in front of the baby, who turned his tiny eyes in her direction. “Of course, my grandfather sang the very same songs.”

She hummed wordlessly for a moment, smiling down at Meridion, then wordlessly started to croon a song of the sea. After a few moments she added the words, singing one of Llauron's favorite chanteys, a lonely tale of wandering the wide world, never able to rest, looking for peace in the sea.

Maritime lore held no interest for Achmed, but it had been a long time since he had heard her sing. He sat quietly in the flickering light of Daystar Clarion, whose cool radiance reflected Rhapsody's somber mood, remembering their journeys together along the Root and overland on this new continent, just the two of them with Grunthor. He missed those times more than he realized.