Rage of the Dragon (26 page)

The mood was shattered by Wulfe, who came running into the palace with a couple of guards in pursuit. He was half-naked and wet and slippery as an eel. He raced up the stairs, his bare feet slapping.

“Hey, Skylan,” he shouted gleefully, “I’ve been running all over the palace looking for you!”

*   *   *

The Sea Goddess, Akaria, stood in a hidden alcove, covered by a decorative frieze, and looked down upon the group on the staircase. From her vantage point, she could hear and see all they did and said. Another goddess, wearing a dented breastplate stained with blood and chain mail whose links were pierced and broken, stood beside the Sea Goddess looking down on the mortals below.

“I do not think much of Torval’s Fish Knife,” said Akaria. “Any number of gods must want him dead.”

“As Skylan concedes, he has learned a lot, though his lessons had to be beaten into him.”

“So Sund is seeking to kill him. Why did no one tell me Sund had turned traitor?”

“If you had not been off sulking in your grotto, you would know what has happened in the world,” Vindrash admonished.

“I was mourning the death of my daughter,” said Akaria sullenly. “What has this arrogant and rebellious mortal to do with our future?”

“Sund was the only one of us with long sight. He could look into the future and see what was to come. Of course, since our wyrds are bound with the wyrds of men, Sund saw many futures, all constantly shifting. He chose among the many, finding the most probable, and relating that future to us. In the beginning, he chose wisely. But when we foolishly did not heed his counsel, Sund grew angry and embittered. The darkness in his soul caused him to see only those outcomes that are bleak and unhappy.”

“And what did Sund see that sent him running to Aelon?” Akaria asked.

“Sund foresaw that if Skylan Ivorson recovers all Five of the Vektia Dragons, he will use them in the battle against Aelon. The Five would destroy Aelon and save the world from the tyrant god.”

“And that is bad?” Akaria frowned.

“So it would seem,” said Vindrash somberly. “For if Skylan recovers the Five and drives away Aelon, Sund sees nothing for us.”

“What does that mean, Dragon Goddess?”

Vindrash gave a small shrug. “Impossible to tell. Perhaps the world is saved, but we are no more.”

Akaria stood brooding. “You want me to give them the third Vektia spiritbone.”

“Sund gave Aelon the spiritbone of the Vektia in the belief that Skylan and Aylaen would not fail to obtain the Five. Aelon’s ambition led him to use the Vektia dragon to try to defeat the invading ogres and strike a blow at his rivals, the Gods of Raj. Aelon nearly ended up destroying himself and in an ironic twist of the thread, the Vektia spiritbone fell into Aylaen’s hands. The very fate Sund had attempted to avoid came to pass. Your Sea Queen has in her possession the Vektan Torque, the second of the Five.”

“And you want me to tell them where to find the third,” said Akaria. She turned to face Vindrash. “If our doom and theirs lies in the Five coming together, why do you want to bring this doom about?”

“We are not very good gods,” said Vindrash.

“Speak for yourself!” Akaria snapped.

Vindrash shook her head. “I was wrong to hide away the power of creation. I did so because I feared other gods might seize it, use it against us. But that left a void, and creation’s opposite, destruction, rushed in to fill it. Once, long ago, the races of the world prospered and lived in peace. Now they are at each other’s throats.”

“There has never been war among the Aquins. Never has one Aquin shed the blood of another in battle,” Akaria said. “If Queen Magali refuses to give into the demands of Aelon’s followers, our long-time peace will end in bloodshed. This Fish Knife is expendable. There are always more where he came from.”

“The evil was slow in finding its way to you, Akaria,” said Vindrash. “But it has come. Turn Skylan and Aylaen over to Aelon, and we are doomed.”

“It seems we are doomed no matter what we do,” Akaria said, and she burst out crossly, “Why did you bring them here, dump them in my lap?”

“I did not,” said Vindrash. “I was trying to help them reach Vindraholm.”

“Aelon’s work, then.”

“Aelon sent the kraken to kill them. It was your people who saved them,” Vindrash pointed out.

“Force of habit,” Akaria muttered. “We are always saving land walkers, and small thanks we get for it! But if not you and not me and not Aelon, then who?”

“The Gods of Raj,” Vindrash suggested.

Akaria gave a bitter laugh. “Their ogres lie dead at the bottom of the sea.”

Vindrash was silent, then she said quietly, “There are those we have forgotten. The dragons.”

CHAPTER

25

Farinn Grimshaw had seen sixteen summers—barely. He had just passed his sixteenth on this voyage. He was an orphan and had moved to Luda to live with his mother’s sister’s family after his parents were killed in a forest fire. Caused by lightning, sweeping through tinder-dry underbrush, the fire had roared through the woods, consuming the house and his parents, trapping them inside before they could escape.

Farinn had not been home or he would have met the same fate. Unable to sleep, he had left his bed and gone out to roam the hills and listen to the song of the stars, the song of the night.

*   *   *

Farinn had been a disappointment to his parents. He was termed lazy, for instead of planting or weeding or minding the cattle, he was often caught staring dreamily at nothing. His father had taught him to wield a battle-axe and to hold his shield and to stand with other warriors in the shield wall because every man must know these things.

Farinn had joined the Torgun in the shield wall when they fought the ogres. He had taken his place, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow warriors, their shields overlapping, gripping his axe, waiting for the foe to attack. He had done the same, gripping his axe, when they faced the giants on the Dragon Isles. He had gripped his axe, but he had yet to strike his first blow.

He wasn’t a coward. He had been terrified, but he had not run away. He had waited with a grim and desperate courage for some enemy to attack him, but strangely, though the battle swirled all around him, the fighting never touched him.

It was then that he realized the gods were saving him for something larger. And when he began to hesitantly and tentatively string words together to describe the battle with the giants or to compose the lay for the death of Garn or sing of Skylan’s battle with the fury in the Para Dix, Farinn had thought at first the gods had spared him to tell the tale of Skylan Ivorson, the Chief of Chiefs of the Vindrasi. Later Farinn would come to realize the gods wanted him to tell their own tale, how the wyrds of men and gods are bound together. That knowledge would only come long after he had sung the final verse.

Skylan and the other men did not know what to make of Farinn. Because he was so quiet, they tended to forget he was around. Farinn liked it that way. When the men thought no one could hear them, he listened. When they thought no one was looking, he saw. Farinn did not judge. That was not his place. He crafted the song in his mind and repeated it to himself again and again and again, so that he would not forget. But this meant that if he died, the song would be lost, never to be heard. That was why he was learning to write down the song, so that others would remember, even if he was not there to sing it.

Caught up in his dreams and songs, Farinn did not pay much heed to girls, mainly because girls did not pay much attention to him. He had soft brown hair and mild brown eyes and once he’d overheard two giggling girls saying he looked like a cow. He was slender without much muscle, for when other boys his age were practicing their fighting skills, he would sit beneath a tree, his eyes closed, humming to himself. Girls thought him odd, as did boys.

The young Aquin guard did not consider him odd. She could not think he looked like a cow, since it was unlikely she had ever seen a cow. She walked up the stairs by his side, regarding him with an interest that even he, in his naïveté, could see was admiring.

“My name is Kailani,” she said. “What are you called?”

Farinn mumbled his name and was then forced to repeat it when she said she hadn’t heard.

Kailani was lovely. Her beauty was strange and exotic and she found him attractive, too, though he could not imagine why. Of all the marvelous and wonderful things in this amazing place, fish and flora and fauna and oceanaids and breathing air under water, the fact that this beautiful young woman had taken a liking to him seemed the most marvelous, the most wonderful.

Farinn had first seen Kailani when she had slipped into the palace to join the other guards. She was flushed from running and avoided the commander’s eye, leading him to believe she was late for duty. Kailani had been fortunate. The delegation from the City of the Fourth Daughter had arrived at that moment, distracting Commander Neda.

Farinn had felt Kailani’s eyes on him all during the meeting in the throne room. He was trying to pay attention to what was being said and done, trying to commit it to memory for the song. But Kailani’s gaze was distracting.

When the Queen abruptly left them and the guards were ordered to escort them to their quarters, Kailani latched on to him. Skylan and Aylaen were in the lead. Skylan always took the lead. He could no more have walked in the rear than he could have flown through the air. Aylaen, with her long strides, easily kept up with him. Wulfe joined them, the fae child, a constant marvel to Farinn, who wasn’t sure if he liked him or not, keeping close to Skylan, talking about his oceanaids. Farinn and his guard walked behind the three of them, while Legate Acronis lagged after all the rest, asking, observing, listening, taking it all in to, as the Legate would have said, “tell Chloe.” Farinn felt a wistful envy at the father’s love for his daughter, a love that not even death could conquer. A love he had never known.

Sometimes Skylan would glance back at Farinn to see if he was all right and give him a reassuring smile. Skylan had been touched when Farinn had chosen to stay with him instead of returning home with the others. Farinn had seen, with the keen eyes of the poet, that Skylan thought Farinn had stayed out of loyalty. Farinn loved and admired Skylan and he was glad to think that he’d pleased Skylan and that was why Farinn would never divulge the truth. He had stayed for the song.

Unfortunately, Farinn was finding it hard to think of the song right now. The staircase narrowed as it spiraled upward and Kailani moved close by his side, so close that they would bump into each other. When that happened, Farinn was keenly aware of the firmness of her hip, the touch of her fingers brushing his arm. The way she smiled at him, a secret, knowing smile, told him she knew what he was feeling.

When they reached the top of the stairs, a guard unlocked the door with the brass lock and then separated the “guests.” Each was given a room in the tower wing. His room was small, and contained a bed, a chair, and a table. Each room had its own door leading into a central area. The individual doors could not be locked. Once Farinn and the others were inside, the guard told them she would lock the outer door and she and her comrade would take up their posts outside it. She implied that this was for their protection, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they were prisoners.

Skylan offered to keep Wulfe with him. He and Aylaen parted with loving looks. Farinn was too busy with his own love song to notice. When Kailani escorted Farinn to his room, which was next to Skylan’s, Farinn was startled to feel Kailani’s fingers twine around his.

“I want to be with you tonight,” Kailani whispered. “If you want me, that is.”

Her hand squeezed his. Her eyes smiled into his. Farinn felt his heart swell with love. He longed to say something clever, something intelligent, but he couldn’t think of a single word. He was as giddy as the night he’d rashly joined in a drinking game with Sigurd and Bjorn.

Farinn must have made his meaning known, for Kailani smiled with pleasure. The guard yelled at her impatiently to come away. Kailani squeezed his hand again and then turned and ran.

Farinn sat down on the bed, but he did not see it. He was floating somewhere far above it in a dream of desire.

For once in his life, the song had gone clean out of his head.

*   *   *

Farinn watched impatiently for night. Darkness filled his room. He sat waiting eagerly, yet when the knock came on his door, he was paralyzed. He could not move until the second, impatient rapping. Farinn sprang from the bed and flung open the door.

Skylan stood there.

Farinn blinked at him.

“I came to see if you were all right,” said Skylan.

“Oh, uh, yes, I am … um … fine…” Farinn stammered to a halt.

“Are you sure?” said Skylan, regarding Farinn with a slight frown.

Farinn tried to look as though nothing was the matter and apparently failed, for Skylan suddenly laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.

“You sly dog! You were expecting someone else to knock at your door, weren’t you? Someone a lot better looking than I am. What is her name?”

Farinn flushed more deeply and thought he should deny this, but he’d never been good at telling lies.

“Kailani,” he mumbled.

Skylan said with a wink, “I saw her. She is a beauty. Have your fun, lad.”

Skylan left, still laughing. Farinn closed the door. He had never been so humiliated. Desire drained out of him and he thought he would simply crawl into bed and pull the blanket over his head and die of shame. When the knock came again, he almost couldn’t bring himself to answer it. Then he feared that would be rude. He opened the door.

Kailani stood there. She was not wearing her armor. She was not wearing much of anything, just the loincloth twisted around her slender thighs. Her skin was wet and so was the cloth. Her body glistened in the light. She reached out and took hold of his hand. “Come with me! Quickly, before anyone sees us.”

Farinn could not take his eyes off her. Yet he hesitated. “Where are we going?”