The Hollow Queen (13 page)

I do not know if I believe you
.

Hrarfa's consciousness lapsed into silence. Finally a question.

Why?

The Faorina spirit did not answer.

Faron,
Hrarfa thought desperately.
Tell me what is troubling you. Please
.

She searched the blackness inside the titan's body, but could not even feel the other consciousness.

IN THE OPEN SEA

In spite of being in the middle of the moving, evanescent water of the ocean, Ashe had the distinct feeling of standing above an open grave.

The seafloor was littered with pieces of a broken ship, ancient but not rotten. The detritus was covered completely in barnacles and limpets, more than a millennium in residence on decking that had been built from trees of Living Stone in the shipyards of Serendair in the days preceding the great exodus long ago.

The pieces of that ship had been lovingly gathered and lay, carefully positioned, in the approximate places they would have occupied in the time when that ship was whole. Ashe could feel its name reverberating in his head, as if the shipwreck was singing it.

Lysandra,
it sang.

Though his body was largely vaporous, Ashe could feel the sensation of his throat constricting. It was a name from the annals of history, known to every Cymrian descendant.

The name of the ship of Merithyn the Explorer.

His great-grandfather, dead almost two thousand years.

The leader of the First Fleet and the expedition of the Cymrian populace fleeing the Cataclysm to what was then the new world, the continent they now inhabited.

The lover of the dragon Elynsynos.

In his thoughts, he whispered the dragon's name again.

This time, a flicker against his barely corporeal cheek answered him.

Quickly Ashe kicked down into the depths, holding the sword above him. Its blue blade cast ghostly shadows on the seafloor, bringing the shipwreck into better view. The parts of the
Lysandra
that remained in the ship's grave were long boards of decking and rails, with a broken mast amidships, wedged at an angle in the sand. A few random items, metal plates, wooden barrels, and the lids of sea chests, lay amid the skeletal remains of the vessel, like an exhibit in an enormous underwater museum.

Ashe willed his eyes to adjust in the darkness illuminated by the light from Kirsdarke.

He thought he could make out a form wrapped around the base of the mast, even more vaporous than his own, the copper scales of the memory of its skin striped with black ash. His eyes followed the line of deep metaphysical burns farther out into the sand at the depths of the sea and found that some of what he had assumed were swales in the ocean floor was actually a partially buried wyrm form, entrenched in the center of the reassembled ship pieces.

Elynsynos?
he thought, fighting back the panic charged with hope that now was threatening to consume his mind.

The drift pressed heavily around him, clogging his senses. He could catch no sign of life save for the infinitesimal song the ship was singing; there was no repeat of the flicker against his cheek.

Elynsynos?
he thought again.
Please—is that you? Please, please let it be you
.

After an agonizing moment, he thought he saw a slight shifting of the sand. A few grains rose into the heavy drift.

Then he heard, or more correctly
felt
a thought, weak and distant, almost dreamlike, in reply.

Begone
.

Ashe's mind felt as if it had caught fire. He held the sword closer to the mast, taking care to maintain as respectful a distance as he could.

Great-Grandmother?
he thought, trying to keep the impact of the vibrations gentle.
Are you there?

Nearer to him than he imagined, the sand shifted again, and in the gauzy light from Kirsdarke he saw what appeared to be a vaporous eye, closed and wrinkled, reveal itself from a barrel-sized mound that a moment before had been covered with sand and open slowly before him.

The filmy lid drew back, revealing a translucent blue iris scored with a vertical pupil.

Much as his own irises were.

A command, directly from the gaze of that eye, formed clearly in his mind.

Go away
.

Ashe recognized the threat in the thought. He let the heavy drift carry him backward a few yards.
Are you injured?
he asked as quietly as he could make his thoughts.
Tell me how I can help you
.

The lid of the filmy eye closed slowly, an extended blink. When it opened again, there was slightly more light and focus in it.

You can do as I ask. Go away—you are interfering with the song
.

Ashe felt a sense of exhaustion wash over him when the command was completed.

Do you remember me, Great-Grandmother?
he asked.

There was no reply.

The eyelid closed once more.

I am Gwydion, son of Llauron,
Ashe thought desperately.
Grandson of
—

He stopped short, remembering that his grandmother, her own child, Anwyn, who had attacked her with dragonfire, was dead.

By his wife's hand.

Then an idea occurred to him.

Pretty's husband,
he finished, naming himself with the title the dragon had referred to him by when Rhapsody had introduced him to her in the Cave of the Lost Sea, the wyrm's lair in the forest of Gwynwood.

The eyelid opened once more. The enormous pupil expanded noticeably.

Pretty's husband?

Yes,
thought Ashe eagerly.
Yes.

The seafloor shifted again, and the other eye and a large part of the dragon's ethereal maw rose slowly from the seafloor, shedding sand.

Is she here?

Ashe's throat tightened again.

No,
he thought, fighting back despair and focusing on the discovery.

The eyes took on a fond glow.

I am listening to the songs she found for me.
The thrum echoed in Ashe's brain.
Merithyn's songs.

Ashe's mind cleared. He recalled Rhapsody telling him, when he and Achmed had retrieved her from her imprisonment in a sea cave along the western coast of the continent, how, in her captivity, she had heard the songs that Merithyn had sung into the wind above the waves two millennia before, missives of love for the dragon to whom he had given his heart, who had invited the refugees of Serendair to take shelter in her primeval forest lands. The ancient sailor had left her reluctantly to return to the Island of Serendair and lead the Cymrians back to the Wyrmlands, only to have his ship sunder at the Prime Meridian in a great storm on the return voyage. Merithyn had apparently sent her love songs of farewell as he was dying.

He looked at the pieces of the ship around him.

Merithyn's grave,
he thought.
This must be the spot where he died. In all the vastness of the sea, she has located exactly where he met his end.

Indeed
, the dragon replied dreamily.
Here is where I lost him forever.

Ashe blinked in shock, having forgotten in the awe of the moment how thrum was carried in the drift.

I am sorry, Great-Grandmother,
he thought in the direction of the vaporous beast.

Are you?
said the thrum of the dragon.
For the first time in ages, I am finally not sorry. Pretty was right; she told me the key to finding peace is not where your body rests, but where your heart remains
. A rolling wave of bubbles washed over and through Ashe's body as the ethereal wyrm sighed.
In this place, both his body rests and his heart remains. And his songs—his songs are here as well.

Are you injured?
Ashe thought, trying not to disrupt her reverie.

For a long time there was silence. Finally the gleaming eyes focused on him. Had his body not been composed largely of thickened water, the light from those eyes would have burned his flesh away.

I had no bodily form for Anwyn to attack in the forest.
The beast's thoughts were stony.
But even an ethereal form, which is the closest thing a dragon has to a soul, can be damaged by an elemental attack—and dragon's breath can burn it. I was in agony when I fled Gwynwood, every nerve seared, on fire. All of my own child's doing.

Ashe closed his eyes, remembering the feeling of that kind of agony, having lived through it for twenty years himself.

In the beginning, when those who traveled with Merithyn came to my lands, my invited guests, they sang stories of their homeland, and of the exodus. But later, I heard the tales they told of
me
—not about the love that Merithyn and I found together, nor of my generosity, my hospitality offered to them in their time of need. No—they sang songs of lies,
The Rampage of the Wyrm, The Burning Fields
, all the epic tales of my evil nature, my destructive actions, every one of which was untrue. I loved the Cyrmians, so I forgave them. I assumed they manufactured those lies because they never knew the truth.

Pretty told me of the songs she heard that Merithyn had sent to me over the sea as he was dying. The people that landed on my shores had heard those songs too. They had sailed across the world with him, had been saved from death by him, heard him singing them as he was dying himself, and yet they still lied. The lore of my life is polluted by those lies.

I came here in search of my lover, looking as I should have long ago. And I found what remained—a few fragments of his ship that had not washed up on shore or been ground to dust, the place where his bones had fallen to the ocean floor, and the songs. Here, finally, I have found comfort. I have found my love. I have found home.

Ashe tried to keep the wildness out of his thrum.

Elynsynos,
he began quietly,
on the continent, you are thought to be dead. The Shield of the Earth is compromised. The Wyrmril are struggling to keep the Unspoken at bay—the Great Forest is vulnerable. I have done my best to maintain the Shield while waging the war, but—

The vaporous eyes narrowed menacingly.

Be on your way, Pretty's husband. Leave me in peace.

Caught in the chasm between joy at the discovery that the wyrm was alive and desperation at her intransigence, Ashe fell silent.

The ethereal beast stared at him a moment longer. Then the gleaming eyes closed, and the insubstantial form began to sink into the seafloor again.

Please.
The word rose, unbidden, from Ashe's viscera.
Elynsynos, please help me. My wife is in battle. My son—your great-great-grandson—is in the hands of strangers, being sought by those who would kill him. The entire coast is barricaded, on fire. Millions are at risk of dying an eternal death, the Afterlife itself in danger of extinction—

Enough.
The word was soft against the walls of his mind.
Enough, son of Llauron. I am sorry for you, for Pretty, for your son, for the millions who are about to die. But I am finished with this life, with this world. Unlike them, unlike you, I am pure wyrm, formed from primal Living Earth, born without a soul. I will never see my love again in the Afterlife, where his soul waits, forever alone. Perhaps you and those you love will meet again one day beyond the Gate. But I am done with all of you. I remain here, in the arms of the sea, at the last place where I can remember the man I loved. Be on your way. You are out of place here.

Ashe hovered in the heavy drift as the mounds of sea sand settled back into swales in the cold depths of the black ocean. The elemental sword of water trembled in his hand, its light diminished ever so slightly.

Then, when the silence began to echo in his ears and the hollow of his heart, he closed his eyes and kicked up to the Sunlit Realm again.

Leaving his forebear's grave, and the dragon who guarded it, behind him.

 

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