The Hollow Queen (57 page)

She was not certain why the thought made her so sad.

Anborn's voice echoed in her ears.

While your influence is evident in the more social aspects of the mountain, the hospitals and hospices, the schools and agricultural programs and whatnot, it is clear that military might and manufacturing are the priorities of the Firbolg king, and all resources are directed to those priorities. This cheers me more than I can say
.

Rhapsody swallowed hard as Harran came to a stop before a wooden door with a barred window in the center of it.

She opened it and stepped aside.

Rhapsody walked slowly into the dark room where but one candle burned.

The Firbolg king was sitting in a chair at the foot of an enormous bed, his elbows on his knees, his fingers interlaced and resting on his lips. He did not look up as she entered, his gaze remaining on the figure in the bed.

Rhapsody looked to her left, dread taking root in her heart.

The figure in the bed was blanketed in shadow, tall and thin, it appeared, by the hills and hollows its body made in the blankets that covered it, with gray hair and wide shoulders evident on the pillows. Rhapsody had never seen a being like it before, its long limbs thin beneath the covers. She looked back at Achmed, waiting for him to speak, but he did not acknowledge her presence. Finally, as the silence grew too heavy to bear, she spoke in a whisper.

“Achmed?”

The Bolg king said nothing, but turned his head toward her, his mismatched eyes glittering at her in the light of the candle.

“You sent for me?”

Achmed inhaled, then let his breath out evenly.

“Is this someone who is in need of a healer?”

The Bolg king's eyes narrowed, his gaze unrelenting. He shook his head.

“What—what do you need, then?”

For a long moment, the Firbolg king merely stared at her. Then, when he spoke, his voice was toneless.

“I felt you should have time with him, undisturbed by your husband and son. For his sake, as well as yours.”

“Him?” Rhapsody asked, her brows drawing together. “Who is this?”

“You don't recognize him?”

The Lady Cymrian looked at the figure in the bed again. Then she went to the table next to Achmed's chair where the solitary candle burned and picked it up. She held it aloft, then slowly made her way across the room.

The tall man's wide face was sculpted with great hollows along the cheekbones and chin, the eye sockets deep and dark. His skin was the color of parchment in the inconstant light, his hair coarse and almost white in the glow of the candle, his great jaw jutting forth beneath an enormous nose that looked strangely too large for the face. Wide, thin lips stretched across his mouth from side to side, from which a polished tusk protruded.

Rhapsody's eyes widened, and her hand went to her mouth.

“It—it isn't possible,” she whispered. “Grunthor?”

The Firbolg king's interlaced fingers returned to rest against his lips again.

Rhapsody's stomach dropped into her feet, making them heavy as lead. She moved slowly to the bed and shielded the light with her hand as she held it up to illuminate her beloved friend's face.

The man in the bed bore little resemblance to the affable Sergeant-Major, the giant soldier who had offered himself as her first protector outside of her family from the moment she had met him, the man within whose greatcloak and upon whose chest she had slept through the endless, excruciating trek through the Earth they had undertaken to come to this world.

She had not recognized him with the loss of color to his skin and hair, skin that had always had a greenish tone, the color of old bruises, that reminded her of the clay of the Earth, hair that had been a mossy red-brown and coarse like straw, wrapping around his jaw in the fulsome beard that Meridion had loved to sleep beneath.

That beard was gray now as well, thinner and damp, it seemed.

Numbly, Rhapsody sat down on the edge of the bed and set the candle down on the table beside it.

Gently she brought her shaking hand to rest on the long, bony one that rested on top of the covers. It was cool and damp, unlike the warm, wide paw it had always been, its carefully maintained claws dull and papery like his skin. She could feel his great heartbeat thudding in the vein that ran, elevated, from his wrist up his thumb; it seemed regular, at least, though diminished from the ringing tone that used to echo brazenly in his chest beneath her ear in the dark.

“I—I thought I healed him,” she said brokenly.

The Bolg king lowered his hands.

“You did,” he said.

“But—what happened?”

Achmed rose silently and came to the bedside, stopping behind her.

“The battle with the titan took more out of him than we knew,” he said quietly. “The shattering of his bones, the metaphysical assault was not the kind of damage you could sing back to wholeness, Rhapsody. You did heal him; he's not injured or bleeding internally, he's not sick or feverish. He's alive; he's just asleep most of the time—ironic, given his stalwart vigil of the Earthchild has made him more like her than ever could have been imagined.”

“Oh God,” she murmured, losing the battle to keep back tears. “It's as if he has aged all the years that our trek through the Earth seemed to hold at bay—as if Time has finally caught up with him.”

The Firbolg king exhaled.

“This is the cost of it all,” he said. His voice carried a little more of its sandy tone. “The wager that did not pan out, the bet that lost. You, he, and I have been thwarting Fate for a very long time now, and paying very little for it. I have almost lost both of you before, and yet somehow between us we have managed to haul each other back from the abyss, back from the brink of the unimaginable, to full health and vigor. The real tragedy is that death would have been a perfectly reasonable outcome for him. He has been facing it all of the time I have known him with no more fear of it than of falling asleep. But this—infirmity, this diminution, this is something he never would have wanted. You cried for the Earthchild when you first met her, and the Grandmother took you to task for it, telling you that her existence was what it was meant to be, that her path was nothing to be mourned. Perhaps that's true—but not for Grunthor. This loss is incalculable. I assume you agree.”

Rhapsody nodded, her tears now falling like rain.

“Has he been awake at all?”

“Yes,” Achmed said. “He is awake intermittently. If you want, I can wait until he has opened his eyes and seen you.”

“Wait?” The tone in the Bolg king's voice caused her face to flush hot while her blood simultaneously took on a chill colder than the frost that had coated the ground of the Bolglands that morning. “Wait for what?”

A bony hand, sheathed in a leather glove, came to rest on her shoulder.

“We made a promise to each other a lifetime ago,” Achmed said, his voice returning to the quiet state of a moment before. “We would never allow capture, or torture, or our own diminution—”

“You plan to
kill
him?”

“Well, when you say it like that, you make it sound like a bad thing.” There was a note of humor in the otherwise toneless voice. “No, Rhapsody, I could never kill him, especially not once he survived being dragged back from the abyss, unless he was in agony, dying, and begging me to do so. Or thinking he might have been possessed, or carrying the equivalent of a demonic pregnancy, like you were when you asked me to do the same thing for you.”

Rhapsody's terror of the moment before turned to cold shock.

“I—I never told you why I asked if you would—”

“You didn't have to. I saw your face when you were locked in a battle of wills with the F'dor in Bethe Corbair.” Achmed smiled slightly at the expression on that face now. “You forget, we are the opposite sides of the same coin. I know you far better than you think I do—better in some ways than you know yourself.”

The Lady Cymrian exhaled. “I do not doubt that.”

The hint of a smile faded. “I plan to take him down to the Loritorium, and put him beside the Sleeping Child. He can sit vigil of a sort, keeping her company; it will ensure that I see her more, as I will need to go each day to bring him sustenance.”

“But he's not an Earthchild,” Rhapsody said, her voice clogging with emotion. “He wasn't conjured into life, as she was; he has lived in the world, Achmed. He was born of parents, he has friends—troops, who love him—”

“What we
did
promise each other is that we would not allow the other to live in a diminished state in the sight of the rest of the world,” Achmed interrupted gently. “We witnessed that in the old world, and we each agreed, in a blood pact, not to allow the other to suffer that way.”

“Let me take him home to Highmeadow,” Rhapsody said through her tears. “He will have complete privacy, and care, and—”

“I know you think you are helping, Rhapsody, but you are not even listening to yourself. Grunthor is Firbolg—a son of the Earth. I know that you feel oppressed being inside the mountain, and you put a good face on being here, but you know how trapped you are in Ylorc. It is the same for Grunthor; being in the forest, in the loose air of the upworld, while not objectionable for a short time, can begin to make a cave dweller's skin itch after a while. Stop trying to make this better; it isn't going to get better. This is what it is. This, as I said, is the cost of war. Sometimes your card doesn't come up, and when it doesn't, the game is over.”

A gentle knock on the door shattered the silence that followed.

 

68

Rhapsody lowered her head to the bed while Achmed crossed to the door in annoyance. He opened it a crack, then closed it again quickly.

“Your husband and brat are here,” he said angrily. “I may have to strip Harran of her Archon status.”

“Best of luck in training her replacement if you do—it took me three years to train her, and I'm a Namer. It will take you the rest of your immortal life.”

Rhapsody rose, wiping her eyes, and went quickly to the door, opening it wide.

Standing in the hall, wearing the same expression of mild shock on their faces, were her husband and baby son, the younger of whom was leaning back against his father's chest, chewing on his own hand. Rhapsody took Meridion quickly into her arms and kissed her husband, then turned back into the room. Ashe closed the door behind her, remaining out in the hallway.

“And, perhaps, rather than
brat
, a term you know I despise, the word you are looking for is actually Grunthor's
godson
.”

“Rhapsody, I told you I sent for you to have time with him alone, undisturbed. This is exactly what I was hoping to avoid.” The Bolg king's voice carried the unmistakable ring of threat.

“If you are going to shut him away where no one who loves him will ever see him again, the least you can do is allow those people to say goodbye.”

“I just told you, that was exactly what we both vowed to not let happen to the other.”

The Lady Cymrian caressed her son's curls as she carried him to the bed and sat down again, ignoring the Bolg king's exhalation of annoyance.

“You remember Grunthor?” she asked Meridion softly. “Our sleeping partner, when we came to this place? Your godfather? Do you remember curling up against his neck, under his beard?”

Meridion let out a soft squeal, followed by a series of babbling sounds as his arms bounced up and down in excitement. Even without looking behind her, Rhapsody could feel Achmed's eyes smoldering.

She swallowed hard and gently laid the baby on the giant's chest at his neck, under his chin.

The infant giggled. He stretched languorously and waved his tiny hands about, then curled slightly against Grunthor's throat, patting clumsily at the ragged beard.

“You really feel the need to torture him more, Rhapsody?” Achmed said acidly.

Grunthor sighed raggedly, but his eyes remained closed.

Rhapsody sat back down on the bed, put her hand on the Sergeant's shrunken paw, and cleared her mind. She hummed her Naming note,
ela
, then began to softly chant the closest approximation she had to his true name, a harsh Bengard appellation full of whistling glottal stops and the abrasive sounds of the desert in which he had been born.

She closed her eyes, trying to evoke the starry sky of Serendair; she sang of the twisting canyons and the dry rocks of his birthplace, sculpted by the wind and a long-dead river in glorious colors and amazing shapes hidden within thin chasms, of the joys of the gladiatorial arena that had been his mother's domain, of the Earth through which they had passed together, melding his name into the song that still resonated, forever, within all of the Three.

It was the same healing she had attempted on the Skeleton Coast, in the foam of the rising breakers, in the trembling of the earth beneath the sand, in the screaming wind and the rolling thunder, but this time in the dark quiet of the inert stone of the mountain, the caves that Grunthor had loved, the tunnels he had paraded his troops endlessly through, singing bawdy marching cadences enthusiastically and grotesquely off-key.

She opened her eyes and looked at him.

There was no change.

Struggling to keep the song going as her throat tightened in despair, she glanced over to her son, whose eyes were fluttering on the verge of sleep. She caressed the top of his head with her fingers as she sang, sick at the loss of the man who had been so vibrant, so full of life, the godfather that her son would never know.

Meridion sighed as sleep took him.

Rhapsody sat up a little straighter. She looked at Achmed, whose posture had stiffened as well, and as their eyes met, a thought passed between them.

The baby had sighed in the exact tone as Grunthor had a moment before.