The Hollow Queen (25 page)

He threw his head back and joined the swelling cry that was echoing throughout the iron mine, rattling the rock dome of the ceiling far above, laughing as the grit rained down on free men.

Free men, entombed by choice, within a molten mountain.

 

26

VLANE, MANOSSE

The streets of Vlane, the capital city of Manosse, looked almost exactly as they had the last time Ashe had walked them.

Vlane was a city on the water, one of the earliest built on the continent that ringed the western edge of the Wide Central Sea. It was sometimes also called the City of Sunrise for its eastern exposure and breathtaking morning views. Vlane had chosen to preserve its historic architecture of stone homes with neatly thatched roofs and a beautifully appointed waterfront where glistening white docks reached eagerly out into the thriving harbor toward the coming day. It was an amazing sight each morning as thousands of vessels, primarily fishing and crabbing boats, set off simultaneously into the rising sun, gathering the riches of the golden seacoast a few miles from shore.

Ashe stood for a moment, shedding the water from his clothes and allowing his lungs to adjust to the air of the world again after his long trek through the sea. He had arrived just as the fishing fleet set out as it always did, to the sound of joyful bells ringing tidings of wishes for good luck, fine weather, and plentiful catches.

The glistening sound caught in his throat; he could almost see Rhapsody standing before him, exactly as she had a little over two years before, watching the sunrise ceremony with a look of wonder so encompassing on her face that he thought his own heart had stopped at the sight of it. The sky had been reflecting the morning light very much as it was today, causing her golden hair to outshine the sun in its rising, making her smooth cheeks glow and her green eyes sparkle with life.

Ashe closed his own eyes for a moment, bidding the image in his memory to remain as long as it could. Over the last few years he had thought back to that moment many times, especially in times of great despair, because of the power it had to banish any sadness from his heart.

Rhapsody had always dreamt of going to sea; she had first told him so on the night they had met in their youth, the eve of her fourteenth birthday, outside a foreharvest dance in her hometown of Merryfield in the old world of Serendair. He still did not know to this day, almost two thousand years later, how he had come to be plucked from his own time, from the road to town he had been walking, a fourteen-year-old himself, and thrown back in Time to meet her in that place, that innocent farming village full of unknowing souls who could not have foreseen the tragedies of war and cataclysm that were to come upon them.

But nonetheless they had met, had instantly recognized in each other the other half of each of their souls, had decided to marry and had consummated that marriage beneath the lacy shadows cast by the willow tree near the stream that wound through the pasturelands of her family's farm. In those few sweet hours together, before he was ripped back in Time to what for him had been the Present, she had confided to him the desire she had always felt for leaving her little village, studying music, traveling the wide world, and, most of all, seeing the sea which her grandfather had plied as a sailor.

With his eyes closed, he could still hear the excitement in her young voice at the thought of being able to go there with him, calling him by the name he had been given by the people of her village, a name commonly used for an unknown stranger, and which she had continued to use when they met up on the other side of time and had fallen in love again.

Sam?

Yes?

Do you think we might see the ocean? Someday, I mean.

Of course. We can even live there if you want. Haven't you ever seen it?

I've never left the farmlands, Sam, never in my whole life. I've always longed to see the ocean, though. My grandfather is a sailor, and all my life he has promised me that he would take me to sea one day. Until recently I believed it. But I've seen his ship.

How can that be, if you've never seen the sea?

Well, when he's in port, it's actually very tiny—about as big as my hand. And he keeps it on his mantel, in a bottle
.

The screech of the ropes from the vessels in the harbor now, the cry of the gulls, the smell of the salt air stung his ears and nose as tears stung the corners of his eyes.

Generally, when he recalled her voice speaking those words to him, it was the sweetest of recollections. But now, in a more recent memory of the last time they had seen each other, just before he departed into this same sea but half a world away, the woman whose face graced his dreams had been entirely different than the one in his sight.

She had come to him through the power of the blue element of the light spectrum that was the central power source of the instrumentality Achmed had rebuilt from Gwylliam's Lightforge, designed and manufactured by the Nain of Canrif a millennium and a half before. The blue light, in concert with a musical note and the sounding of his true name, had given them a few moments together before she went off to war and he went into the sea to summon aid for that war.

He had barely recognized her, not because her face had lost any of its seraphic beauty, but because the name she had been given at birth, a name no one living beside himself had heard sounded, Amelia Turner, as well as the nicknames by which he, her friends, and her family had called her in the old world, Emily and Emmy, had been stripped away from her. She had given to their infant son, Meridion, to keep him safe, to keep him company, to comfort him in her loss when she left him with the beloved women who were her friends and adopted family in the Deep Kingdom, the place known as Undervale, tucked away in the northeastern mountains of the Nain of the continent, the safest place she knew to leave him, to hide him from Talquist, who sought to eat the baby's beating heart in a quest for immortality.

A wave of nausea, loss, and wrath so violent and all-consuming swept over him then, leaving him shaking as he stood, the clothing that clung tightly to the heavy muscles of his chest, arms, and legs all but dry now in the morning sun and the sea wind.

The woman he had last beheld before he went into the sea looked a good deal like his wife, whose aspect the dragon in his blood had memorized down to the tiniest detail. He had carried the picture of her in his heart across two lifetimes, and so when he saw the filmy image, the wyrm within him had panicked.

She was sharper of feature than he remembered; the softness of her face, which had been burnished to perfection in the cleansing fires that raged within the heart of the Earth itself, through which she had passed on her way to the new world, gone, replaced by an aspect of severity that he did not recognize. And her glorious hair, a part of her he had cherished greatly, had been sawed off, shorn to the nape of her neck, leaving her with the face of a warrior.

She had warned him in an earlier visit through the Lightcatcher of her intention to separate her soul out this way, to wrap it around Meridion so that her love would remain with him as he was hidden away in the Nain kingdom. Her forewarning was a blessing, given that if he had not been alerted ahead of time, the wyrm within him would have rampaged at the sight of her now—stern, emotionless, and distant.

Hollow.

More than anything else, this image haunted him to the point where he had to push it from his consciousness and refill his thoughts with sweeter, older memories, lest the reality of the Present—and possibly the Future—drive him insane.

Ashe reached back again now, lighting on the memory he had been enjoying a moment before, from the trip they had made in the second year of their marriage to visit his family and holdings in Manosse. He opened his eyes again and took in the sight of the docks, now mostly empty of their vessels but brimming with foot traffic, and settled the nagging voice of the dragon again, a voice that had been largely silent during his time in the waves.

He found her easily, glowing in the light of a Manosse morning, smiling at him, laughing in the wind as it blew her long golden hair around her.

And, with that picture firmly fixed in his mind, he ignored the stares of townspeople at his odd clothing as he turned from the docks and made his way as quickly as he could to the city center, where the Council Hall stood.

*   *   *

The Magisterium of Manosse, the interprovincial body that was made up of representatives from each of the provinces within the vast nation of Manosse, held all of its meetings in the large columned building at the city center of Vlane.

Manosse was, in large part, a rural nation, with many country estates, forests, and conservatories of plants for both agricultural and ceremonial use in the Filidic religion, the faith in which Ashe's father, Llauron ap Gwylliam, had served in the position of Invoker back on the Middle Continent.

Ashe himself was Chief of the House of Newland, one of the largest and oldest of Cymrian houses, and therefore had many holdings in several of the different provinces that comprised the nation of Manosse. The variety of representation was interestingly diverse, and the numerous consulates that housed the diplomats from those provinces reflected that diversity in their architecture.

Ashe ran past small, tidy houses of one or two stories with blooming gardens that he knew housed Gwadd from the farthest reaches of the nation, small, gentle people who were very often of or descended from the First Generation of Cymrians, that stood next to the towering edifices of the consulates of Seren diplomats, an even older, rarer, and vastly taller race, as well as buildings of every shape and size in between.

His presence was gaining attention, he noted, as he sped by the citizens of Manosse on the carefully cobbled streets of their capital city. Whether it was his speed that caught their attention, his strange attire, or his red-gold hair that shone in metallic tones owing to his dragon ancestry and its dominance in his blood, Ashe neither knew or cared. He was mounting the wide marble stairs of the Council Hall when the interest finally caught up with him in the form of a coterie of armed sentries that appeared at the gated doorways of the Hall.

Armed and drawn.

Ashe stopped mid-stair and put his hands up, elbows bent in a nonaggressive stance.

“I am Gwydion of Manosse, Chief of the House of Newland and Lord Cymrian,” he said quickly, forestalling a demand for the information from the head of the contingent. “I have urgent business with the council.”

The first guard blinked. He turned to a soldier behind him and gave a quick incline of his head; the man ran off through the doorway behind him.

“Well, while I do not doubt your word, sir, and you certainly have the bearing that gives credence to your statement, I have to ask you to wait here until I can confirm your business.”

“I am come from the Wyrmlands, from the Middle Continent—from Traeg,” Ashe said, trying to keep the impatience that was threatening to explode in rage out of his voice. “No one knows that I am here, but if you summon Vincent de Malier o Serendair, he will vouch for me.”

The guards exchanged a glance among themselves.

“Please be so kind as to wait a few moments more,” said the head guard. Ashe nodded curtly, and the soldiers lowered their weapons, though they remained drawn.

After a maddening wait, the doors opened wider, and a man in the red- and gold-banded robes of the consulate stepped through them. Ashe had known he was coming, and so had allowed his rage to cool as it was someone within his acquaintance, a distant relative.

“Lord Ellsworth,” he said. “I must speak with the consulate.”

“Lord Gwydion?” the man asked, shaken. “We—we had no notice of your arrival, m'lord.”

Ashe gestured impatiently at the guards; Ellsworth nodded quickly in agreement, and they dispersed, looking relieved.

Ellsworth started down the stairs as Ashe hurried up them.

“What brings you here, m'lord?” he asked, still shaky. “Is all well with the continent?”

“By no means,” Ashe said, passing him on the stairs. “Please, I don't mean to be rude, but you must take me before the consulate immediately.”

Ellsworth nodded, struggling to catch up.

“This way,” he called after the hurrying Lord Cymrian, then gave up and ran behind him to the meeting room of the Manossian consulate.

 

27

The members of the consulate sat up uniformly in alarm as Ashe burst through the double doors of their chamber.

“What—what—” stammered the woman officiating the meeting, a half-Lirin landowner of considerable wealth he recognized as Cecelia Montagne.

“Pardon, Madam Chair,” he said hastily. “I beg pardon for this intrusion, but I bring news of the direst nature.”

Lady Montagne stared at him blankly, then rose in her place, quivering slightly.

“Lord Gwydion?”