Moth and Spark (34 page)

She spoke, her voice pitched normally but very even. “Tam Warin.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“Where were you tranced?”

“In the palace in Caithenor.”

“Who was with you?”

“Prince Corin, his captain, a guard. You.”

Liko looked up at Corin. “All’s well, my lord,” he said. Behind him, Joce nodded slightly, confirming.

“Go on,” Corin said.

Liko looked back at Tam. “Are you there now?”

“No,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Someplace dark.”

“What can you see?”

“Nothing but darkness.”

“Is it a building?”

She said nothing at first. Her face screwed up a little. Then she said slowly, “No. It smells like stone. Somewhere outside. I think maybe it’s a cave, or the bottom of a canyon. The walls are so high, so dark. It’s night, maybe, but I don’t see stars.”

Chills ran along Corin’s back and arms. The Dragon Valleys. He looked up at Joce again, who made a hand-sign.
Nothing wrong.
He wanted desperately to touch Tam but knew he could not if this was to proceed. Bron was tensed like a hunting cat.

“Are you alone?”

She did not answer for a long time. Finally she said, “I think so.”

Corin exhaled slowly. He had not realized he was holding his breath. He had to remind himself that she was here, in this room, safe.

“Can you hear anything?”

Tam shifted on the chair. “There’s wind,” she said. “It’s blowing very hard, I can hear it whistling. Nothing else.” Then a long pause. Her face wrinkled with concentration again. “No, wait. There is a different noise. A scrape. Something scratching. It’s like metal on metal, it hurts my ears. Piano. Someone is playing the piano. The air is moving around me. It’s cold.”

He did not need to see Joce step forward to know that meant trouble. Instantly Corin said, “Bring her back.”

Liko snapped his fingers. She sat bolt upright. Her eyes sprang open. “Corin,” she said urgently, “the dragons. The roof. Now. Run.”

“Tam?”

“I’m all right. Go, hurry. It’s Tai.”

This was what would free her. He said over his shoulder to Joce, “Question him some more, then let him go,” and ran. He heard Bron stop to say something to Teron but ignored it. The captain would catch up to him.

The stairs on the last two levels were steep and narrow and not well lit, and he was forced to go more slowly. Bron was just a few steps behind. They made enough noise with their coming that the men in the guardroom at the top were ready and attentive, not slouching and talking the way they would be again as soon as he was well gone. Roof-watch was a tedious and mostly unnecessary duty. Last night it hadn’t been. There were two men stationed here and two at the other end. He ordered Bron to send them all down a level.

It was still morning, but heat rose from the stones around him. Sun blazed on the pale granite and made him squint. There was no wind. In the west a line of greyness might have been gathering clouds or might only have been heat haze. He hoped a storm would break the heat. The air felt heavy.

The spot where dragons came, when they did, was quite noticeable. The stone had been scored by claws and darkened with fire and ash. It glittered from thousands—millions—of bits of crushed dragon scales that could not be seen alone but had accumulated and compressed over the centuries. The blood left last night had been scrubbed off, and the unnaturally clean stone was brighter than that around it. He shielded his eyes with his hand.

Electricity crackled along his skin, raising the hairs on his arms. Everything went silent. He thought it had been quiet before, but now he knew what silence was. The light changed into that heavy tinted stillness he had seen once before in the garden. He walked toward the dragon stones, not even hearing his footfalls. Bron stepped toward him; Corin waved him back, a dread that he had gone deaf growing in his gut. If everything else had been still and motionless that would have been easier to accept than this sudden total quiet.

He knelt beside the stones. In the strange light he saw the bloodstains that were forever part of the stone now. Heartsick for his sisters,
he touched one of the stones. It seemed to yield. He flattened his hands beside him and leaned forward, looking. The stones began to ripple with light.

It quickened and silvered, until it was as shiny and bright as new-minted plate. The ripples continued, iridescent, like oil on sunlit water. Like a dragon’s wing. He could hear them, the faintest hums, in his head and not his ears. He was no musician, but Tai was, and she had tried to tell him how she could hear the notes before she played them. Now he understood.

The sounds increased in volume until he could make out distinct hums and whistles and clicks. Like birdcalls, but more complicated and within the mind. The dragons were talking to one another, but he did not understand the language to speak back, to ask.

Images. He tried to make images, but he could not keep them from dissolving into one another. He stared at the shining stone, listened to the whistles. His sister’s face would not stay fixed in his mind. I need her to be safe. He was mired in words.

Carefully, very very carefully, he put one fingertip on the stone again. He felt it ready to give beneath him, to open up and swallow him whole. The sounds shifted, were clearer, sharper, more distinct. They seemed straighter and less wobbly, as though he had been hearing them through a distorting liquid that was gone. The dragons were aware of him. Some of the sounds were directed to him.

You wanted me, he thought. I am here. You wanted me. I am here.

Over and over, until they had no meaning for him, he did not know who was you or I or am or here, they were just a rhythm of sounds, a beat like surf. His body was absent. Fire roared. He was at a still point, and the world and time spun around him, streaks of light and motion.

Blackness spread, and he thought he looked down a passageway or a well, a curving endless darkness. It was bitter cold. I could step through, he thought, though he did not know where he would go.

No, said the dragons. It is not for you.

His breast thrummed with the force of their words.

A memory. Tai played an elaborate, lively, beautiful melody, and he stood leaning over the edge of the piano, listening, knowing he had heard it before and unable to say where. She looked at him and saw that he was puzzled, and she sang a few words, so softly he had to listen
several times to understand them. When he did—
Oh, the barrels are full, let’s set them to roll
—he began to laugh so hard he could not stop. He sank onto the piano bench beside her. She finished a chord triumphantly and started laughing herself. It was a common and crude drinking song, one that became more and more vulgar verse by verse until it dissolved into incomprehensible thieves’ cant, and she had dressed it up and beautified it so that it could be sent out into the highest society.
I didn’t know you knew that
, he said to her.
Guards have their uses
, she said. She began to play again, this time in a minor key and very slowly, with low notes.
Now it’s a dirge
, she said.
I think I prefer the other version, Corin, shall I make that one your coronation march?
He said,
If you will play the dirge at my wedding
, and she elbowed him off the bench, flexed her fingers, and started something else.

“My lord!” Bron shouted, and he lost his balance, fell, as darkness rushed over him with the force of a waterfall, stinging, pressing him to the ground, filling his nose, his eyes, his ears, his mouth, and then came the dragon sounds again. He reached toward them, desperately. Please.

She was there, in the darkness, hand extended to him. He got to his feet and reached for her. Ice crystals glittered on his arm. He could not feel her hand, though he saw it clasped in his. He pulled.

He got his arm out, saw her wrist, her face. She was almost through.

Then something tugged at her, jerking him forward into the darkness. He pulled but his arm was cold, his face was cold. He tried to shout her name and felt ice forming on his lips and in his nose. Her fingers slipped out of his grasp. He lunged for her and was blocked. He heard her cry out, but it was very distant.

He tumbled backward onto the roof, landing with a painful jolt, and the darkness vanished. There was no Tai. The ice on his lashes melted and ran into his eyes. His face tingled. He sat up, felt light-headed at first but steadied. His fingertips were stinging. Oh God, he thought, please let her have made it back to Mycene. Damn you, dragons, damn you. Whatever Hadon might do now was not as bad as what waited in the darkness.

He tried to rub some life into his white cold hand. Bron knelt beside him and rubbed it methodically between his own until Corin shook it free, feeling the blood moving again.

Only then did they look at each other. “What did you see?” Corin asked.

“A dragon. A black dragon. It came and was gone like that. It was cold.” He was obviously shaken.

“They move faster than our eyes can see,” Corin said. “That’s all.”

“Yes, sir.” The captain did not sound convinced. But he probably would not want to pry too deeply. There were things men preferred not to know.

Corin stood up. He thought that he smelled fire. He knew what uncontrolled fire looked like, long smears of brownish-grey along the sky, pillars of smoke seeming as substantial as stone. Nothing. The sky was clear. He went to the wall and stared down at the garden. Yesterday it would have been full of gaily dressed people. Now the only color among the different greens was the flower beds.

He longed for Tam. She was going to have to wait. It was time to go and report failure to his father.

It was dark when he finally went to his rooms. He sent one of the guards to let Tam know he was free, then shut the door and sank tiredly into a chair. Aram was sending his mother and sister off tomorrow, someplace he would not reveal. Bron was to go with them; when Corin went, he would go alone. Corin wanted Tam to go too, but he knew she would be happier at home, and safe enough with Joce. He had seen her briefly at midday, long enough to tell her what had happened, but no more.

Tam took longer than he expected to come. When she did come in, she smelled of the stables. She wore a knife in a plain leather sheath, as well as trousers and a peasant-style shirt that was too big for her. She had her hair in two girlish braids and looked about fifteen.

“What,” he said, “have you been doing?”

“Making friends with a horse. That is your father’s fault. Should I go bathe?”

The trousers showed the shape of her buttocks, hips, and legs as no skirt ever could. There was a lovely curve at the top of her thigh. “You can bathe here,” he said. “But your boots go in the hall. Sit down. Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” she said. “Riding isn’t the only thing I’ve been learning. Look.” She handed him the knife. He drew it and looked at the blade. It was light for his hand, the sort he had carried when he was a dozen years
younger. The steel was good, not the very best Cylician but much better than the blades worn by most men.

“Is someone teaching you?”

She struck a pose. The position of her arm brought her breasts forward temptingly. “Joce,” she said.

“Good.” He was not sure he would have trusted any other man to do it, not when she looked like that.

She flopped into a chair. He knelt and pulled her boots off. She wiggled her feet. He resisted temptation, took the boots out into the hall, gave a few orders to the guards. There was a curtained alcove farther down the hall where Joce could sleep. When he shut the door he bolted it. Then he went to the bathroom and began to fill the marble tub.

Tam came in. There was still a scent of hay and sweat about her, but that was almost pleasant. “I don’t have anything to change into,” she said.

He stood behind her and cupped her breasts. “You can wear something of mine,” he said. He ran his hands down her sides and then back up under the shirt. He kissed her neck. “Silk, velvet, the finest royal robes.” He squeezed her nipples.

She turned around and kissed him for a very long time. “I love you,” she said. She leaned over and felt the water. “Now go away.”