Song of the Beast (21 page)

I had things I needed to say, but Davyn interrupted my hesitating speech, rolling onto his side and propping his face on his hand. “It was inevitable that it be more difficult,” he said eagerly, his eyes flashing in the winter sunrise. “Part of it is you, of course. The vileness done to you. The injuries you've suffered. But most of it is the dragons themselves. They've been captive for so long, held in this wild state, that we weren't sure it would be possible to reach them ... even for you. Even at the height of your power, right before your arrest, Narim worried that you'd not be able to reach them in the way that's necessary. Roelan, perhaps, but, of course, we can't know which one is Roelan.”

Roelan. My “god.” A dragon. Unbelievable. “But you said that I ... affected ... more than one.”

“That's true. Never all of them. Perhaps only Roelan and the other six eldest were changed by your music. We don't know. For a few years after you disappeared, certain dragons still showed the changes you had wrought, and so we had hopes that you were with them in some way, but over time ...”

“Ten years,” I said. “Roelan's voice grew fainter from the first day, and after a while there came a time when I couldn't—After ten years he didn't answer anymore.” I was only an instant's separation from that desolation; only the single word shimmering in my memory kept it away. Davyn gazed on me with sympathy, while Narim walked away, sat himself on the weedy hillside, and stared expressionlessly into the morning.

“We came to believe you were dead,” said Davyn softly. “We had no idea where they'd taken you. The One who guides us surely led Narim to Lepan.”

I needed answers. Clarity. “What of this dragon ... Keldar?” Even as I spoke the name, my intellect tried to convince me it was impossible. Denial would put me back in the prison of my despair, yet acceptance was surely the madness I'd fought so hard to hold at bay.

Davyn glanced at the woman who had shed her reeking leather armor and was packing it carefully in her bag, studiously ignoring us. “Ah, yes. Well, some eighteen years ago, not long before you were arrested, this dragon flew out of Cor Neuill, ridden by a brave and enterprising young girl of thirteen. She'd been determined to ride for many years, even following the legion into battle, where she managed to get herself a bloodstone from a fallen Rider. It was not this dragon's—Keldar's—stone, its dekai'cet, as they call it. The dragon linked to her stone had been wounded when its Rider fell. The clan had destroyed the beast, of course; they've never learned to link a new stone to a dragon. But Lara was convinced that with a bloodstone of her own, she could ride any dragon—as indeed she proved. Her courage and skill were indisputable. But the mistake she made was assuming that only the
bloodstone
enabled her to get the dragon out of the lair. In truth we believe that
you
made it possible. You'd been to Cor Neuill only two nights before. The lair was in chaos: dragons disobeying their Riders, threatening them, breaking through the Riders' Ring, when she decided to make her attempt.”

Lara stuffed the gauntlets into her pack quite savagely, and it struck me that she didn't particularly like this part of Davyn's story.

“She planned to take the dragon back to the camp to prove to her clan that she could control the beast, but the dragon refused her command to turn. To command a dragon with a bloodstone that is not the one bound to it from the beginning—the dekai'cet that its own Rider carries—is extremely difficult, which is why dragons without linked stones must be destroyed. And this dragon had another destination.”

“The lake?”

“We don't know. But he brought her into the Carag Huim, and she tried very hard to get control. The beast flew straight into a cliff. ...”

I could envision the drama played out before me: the child goading the dragon to madness with the hated jewel ... the struggle ... the disaster ... and the agonizing fire.

“Well,” said Davyn, seeing in my expression that I understood enough. “They both survived. Narim found Lara and brought her to Cor Talaith. Until about five years ago we didn't know what had become of the dragon. Lara searched through the mountains and eventually found him in this cavern, where he had gone to heal or to die. Since then she's—”

“Enough,” said Lara, hefting the heavy pack onto her slender shoulder. “I won't be talked of as if I were an ignorant beast like the one down below us. Hear this, Senai.” Her blue eyes flamed, and the terrible scars on her left cheek quivered red as she tossed her long braid over her shoulder. “I am a daughter of the Ridemark, and no matter what my people say of me, I've not betrayed them, only taken a kai'cet, as is my right. I do not believe dragons have minds. I do not believe they can speak. I do not believe that some cowardly Senai harp player ever has or ever will make them something they are not. All I want to do is ride one of them without burning, and since my own people won't allow it, this is the only hope I've got. Now, Davyn, I'll thank you to stop talking about me.”

Lara marched furiously past Davyn and me without so much as another glance, but to my surprise, when she strode past the bemused Narim sitting on the hillside, the Elhim reached out a hand to her, and she clasped it firmly before continuing on her way. Narim put his chin back on his knees and went back to his meditation.

“He nursed her for over a year,” said Davyn softly. “Made her move her limbs so they would not be left unusable, every hour of every day, when she could not do it without screaming. He scoured the hills and the cities for remedies to ease her and heal her, and prevent as much scarring and deformity as he could. She cursed him for it, but now there is no bond deeper than theirs. She is torn apart by her longing to be accepted again by her clan, and her love for Narim, and her fear that he is right about the dragons and she is wrong. And she does dearly want to fly.”

The sun baked away the dew on the gray-green scrub, and we watched Lara's straight, slim figure dwindle as she descended into the valley. Then I saw no alternative but to get back to the truth of what had happened in the night. I had to accept it, and the Elhim had to know.

“I thank you for this,” I said. “What happened here was something marvelous, something unexpected. I'll never forget it. But now”—my conclusion had been reaffirmed as I had listened to Davyn and Lara, feeling Narim's expectant gaze on my back—“if you believe that I can speak to him again or regain ... anything else ... Davyn, I was dying. When I heard him and spoke his name and heard ... what I heard ... I was already leaving my body behind. If it had been more than a single word, even a heartbeat longer, I'd never have gotten back. I'm sorry. I still can't help you.” A crippling irony. They had given me something to live for, and I couldn't claim it without dying. Not a satisfactory conclusion, but perhaps enough to keep me going awhile longer.

Davyn sighed and gazed ruefully at Narim. “We should have warned you.”

“Narim was right,” I said, trying to ease his distress. “I wouldn't go back. I'm sorry—you'll never know how sorry—that I can do no more.”

“But that's the whole point,” said Narim, popping up from his reverie at last and standing over me. His gray eyes drilled into my soul. “You've shown us you can survive this kind of raw contact, however difficult it might be. The connection—your gift—is still there. And so we can try the next step. You see, I have a plan. All we have to do is keep you alive.”

My head was beginning to hurt. “Keep me alive?”

“I had hoped you could stay in Cor Talaith while you were made ready, but that's impossible. And we can't send you out where the Riders or your cousin might find you. Everyone seems to want you dead or captive.”

“I'm sure he's noticed,” said Davyn.

“So there's only one place I can send you. It won't be easy, but I'll convince her.”

Davyn rolled back onto the ground and groaned dramatically. “You can't be thinking it. She hates him more than Garn MacEachern does, and her temper is worse!”

“Wait,” I said, their words running together in a muddle. “Tell me what you're talking about. What plan?”

Narim crouched down in front of me. “This dragon you've named Keldar is injured. Fortunately an injured dragon keeps himself in winter sleep until his injuries can heal or he dies. But Lara has learned to rouse him, as you saw, and command him with her stone. She has driven beasts into the cave to feed and strengthen him, so we hope that when spring comes he might awaken on his own. Now that we've found you, we can give him the next gift we've prepared. We've built a sluiceway to his cave to send in water from Cir Nakai.”

“The lake water,” I said dumbly. “You think you'll be able to speak to him.”

“No. We think that
you
will be able to speak to him.”

Speak to a dragon. Not in the way I had thought of as speaking to my god, but as one natural creature to another. As in the tale from Elhim legend. I could not imagine it.

“The one who attempts it cannot be an Elhim,” Narim said, a forced patience in his voice. “We are anathema to the dragons and likely would not live past his first glimpse of us. Nor can it be Lara. She carries a bloodstone, and besides, she—”

“She doesn't believe,” I said.

“Exactly. How could she possibly reach him? You are the only person in the world who can get us the answer.”

“The answer for what?” I was numb. Uncomprehending.

“You must make Keldar tell you how we can release his brothers and sisters from their binding to the bloodstones. Then we can bring the dragons back to the lake so they can take their rightful place in the world once again.”

Davyn had been watching and listening, letting Narim's intensity carry the burden of revelation, but as I struggled to comprehend what they wanted of me, he broke in, the stray lock of hair falling inevitably over his soft gray eyes. “You must understand the risks, Aidan. We don't understand how you were able to reach them before or if it's possible for you to do it again after all that's happened. We don't know if it's even possible to speak to a dragon. It's been so long—five hundred years since the dragons have tasted the water of the lake of fire. There may be nothing left in them to be awakened by it. They are so wild, lost in their blood frenzy and hatred.”

Slowly I shook my head. My experience of the night told me that there was a mind and a soul in the being that was Keldar—buried impossibly deep—but I had touched it and I knew.

But Davyn would not let go. “You will have to walk into that cavern, stand helpless before a creature who has slain ten thousand humans without regret. If he does not wake with the change of season, then he will have been roused with the very device that drives him into madness. The chance of success is so small as to make me begin writing your epitaph the moment you agree.”

What choice was there to be made?
Beloved
. The echo of the word made me tremble with awe and wonder and the last hope of life.

“So where is it you want to put me?” I said.

A corona of satisfaction illuminated the pale Narim, while a tired Davyn rubbed his forehead, smiled wryly, and answered. “He wants to send you into a dragon's mouth even before your confrontation with Keldar. He thinks to have you live with Lara.”

Chapter 16

“Have the Senai harp plucker stay here? You're out of your mind!” A red-faced Lara stood in front of a low, thick-walled stone hut half-buried in the sparkling snow-drifts of a mountain meadow. From the position of her hands on her slender hips, Narim had made a singularly grave error in his carefully wrought calculations. The sharp-edged breeze that so belied the brilliant sunshine of the morning pulled curling wisps of brown hair from her taut braid and flicked them at the scarred left side of her face. But the chill of the wind was as nothing to the frost of Lara's tongue. “I'll not have it. I've few enough supplies laid in, not a single feather bed, no silk draperies or cushions, and no food fit for refined tastes. When I said I'd help you in this madness, I never, ever agreed to nursemaid any Senai popinjay.”

“Ah, Lara, was ever a woman so passionate in her loyalties as you?” said the slender Elhim, pale as snow next to Lara's angry flush. “Davyn laid me a wager that Aidan and I would be creeping into the back caverns of Cor Talaith this night with your boot print on our backsides ...”

Lara nodded as if Davyn were the only intelligent creature she'd known in a lifetime.

“... but I told him that, being the sensible person you are, you would agree that there is no rational alternative.”

“Not on—” Lara tried to interject, but Narim had a way of pouring out his words in a tide that swept all other conversation out of the way.

“If we send Aidan back to civilized lands, either your people or his own will take his head or his freedom, and if he stays in Cor Talaith, the Elhim will do the deed. For a man beloved of the gods, he is sorely in need of protection from those of us of lesser state, and nowhere is he less likely to be set upon than behind the security of your sword.”

Lara rolled her eyes. “Why do you believe anything he says? Thousands can witness to his lies. Ask those who've fled before the Gondari dragon fires. He once sang to them of peace and beauty, but have they ever witnessed anything like that? He gets only what he deserves.”

But Narim did not relent. “And, of course, my friend is not exactly accustomed of late to the privileges and comforts of his noble relations. Lest you've forgotten, your own clan has hosted him for seventeen years. And for the past two months he's had to put up with the poor hospitality of Cor Talaith. I think he'll be less of a burden than you believe.”