Offspring (The Sword of the Dragon) (19 page)

“Please, please let me finish.” He swallowed. “It has taken me a long time to work up the nerve to approach you about this.”

He hesitated, and in that moment she smiled shyly, lowering her gaze. “Then you feel something for me?”

“No.” He watched her eyes well with tears. How heavy his heart felt. But the truth had to be told. “I’m so very, very sorry.” He touched her hand, and she glanced down at it. A few of her tears splashed onto his skin. “Please understand. It is not you. In fact, if I were inclined to remarry, you would make a wonderful wife. And I’ve seen how my little girl looks up to you.

“But for me … for me there was and always will be only one woman. I loved her with all that I had. My heart is and always will remain empty where Dantress once filled it.

“I don’t want to deny you happiness, but neither will I deceive you. I am still grieving for your sister. And my grief is as fresh—as painful—as the day she died.” Suddenly the memories of Dantress flooded his mind, and his heart ached. He bent over in pain, weeping as he clutched his chest. Tears spilled from his eyes, and every tear spawned a new pain in his body until he felt small and childlike.

Evela stood, tears running down her own face. “Y … yes,” she sobbed. “I do l … love you. But you have hardened your heart to the world. You cannot see and cannot allow me to love you because you are unwilling to let go of your pain. You are unwilling to heal. I pity us the joy we will never know because of your scars.” With that she kissed his cheek and ran her soft hand down his face.

He instinctively closed his eyes. Her hand comforted him.

She withdrew it, cupping her hands over her face, and fled out the door sobbing.

As he sat there, miserable and heartbroken, Oganna opened her door and came to him. “Father? You are crying.” She hugged him, burying her head in his chest. Such tenderness washed over him. He clutched her to himself, wishing that somehow the pain would vanish.

When he thought his sobbing had ended, he released her. But looking upon her, little beauty that she was, his heart pained him again. Tears flowed down his cheeks.

“Father, don’t cry!” She gazed back into his eyes and clutched his shirt with her hands. As he sobbed, he saw her chest heave, too. His tears slowed, but they rained from her eyes. Oganna clutched at her own chest, and his pain vanished. With a startled cry, she fainted in his arms.

“Help! Someone help me!” His pain had disappeared and his tears had stopped flowing, but he could not rouse his daughter. “No! I will not lose you, too.”

Caritha watched Linsair drop his hammer on the broad side of the blade of a long sword. White-hot sparks splintered from the metal, and a wave of heat washed over him. Whereas sweat dripped down her face, the large man before her did not show a hint of moisture.

The walls of the deep underground cave where the smith worked had been hardened and singed by his tireless forging. He’d forbidden anyone else to enter the cave save for she, Ilfedo, and her sisters.

She gazed into the dark recesses of the cave. The firelight flared, revealing a portion of the one thousand identical swords leaned against the stone walls. She held her skirt off the dirt floor and moved toward the weapons, bending to keep from hitting her head on the sloping ceiling. Reaching out, she traced her finger along the engraved flame in the hilt of one of them, then followed the thin metal vine that wove down its hilt and around the arms of its guard. The three-foot-long blade extended to the floor. Its broad side mirrored her surroundings on either side of a thin fuller.

To each of these swords she or one of her sisters had sacrificed a drop of their dragon blood.

The hammer rang against the sword again, and she retreated to the smith’s forge. She pulled out a handkerchief and wiped her face.

Linsair’s biceps rippled under his rolled up sleeves as he clanged the hammer against the flat of the sword’s blade. The blade bent, and he flipped it, struck the other side, and flipped it again. The man cleared his throat, though she thought it sounded more like a growl. She fastened her eyes on his face.

“It is time, young one.” His pink eyes gazed back without blinking, and his chest heaved a deep breath.

She stepped deeper into the scalding air. The forge burned hotter. She wondered that the smith did not flinch in its heat. To her it was tortuous. But she had come to deliver a gift—one final gift.

Extending her arm, she hovered her wrist over the sword. Linsair’s last creation. “Do I proceed in the same manner as with the other swords?”

Linsair nodded.

“But I want this weapon to be special.” She pulled back her hand to wipe the sweat from her eyes. “I want Ombre to have a superior sword, something that will preserve his life as the sword of living fire has preserved Ilfedo.”

“Thou art certain of thy decision then?” He furrowed his brow. “In order for this to be done, thou must be willing to give up part of thy gift, part of the life that is in thy blood.”

Her mind flashed back to a moment not long ago when Ombre happened upon her alone in the forest. She’d tripped and he had caught her. Her cheeks flushed at the memory. “Linsair, I do know what it is I am asking you to do.”

“Then so shall it be.” Linsair grabbed her hand in his enormous one and forced her wrist against the searing metal.

She screamed in pain and tears streamed down her face, but through her tears she saw the smith raise her skin away from the blade. Large drops of her dragon blood remained on the blade and the sword began to glow with pure white light. Linsair released his hold, took up his hammer, and beat the blade with new vigor. A smile spread across his face and his pink eyes sparkled.

Caritha wept in the agony of her wound. She felt weak—too weak to use the power in her blood to attempt a healing. Instead she drowned her arm in the smith’s barrel of water. When the pain eased and she drew out her arm, she regarded the crisscrossing scars which remained. As she twisted her wrist, pain knifed up her arm.

The smith plunged the sword into the water. Steam rose in clouds around him. He reached out and caressed her wound. From his touch, a sensation of coolness spread through her arm. The scars vanished, and she looked into his eyes with sudden recognition. “It is you!”

Footfalls sounded in the cave. Though she peered into every corner she saw no one. Then a voice spoke from the cave entrance. “Hurry, my master, the child has collapsed.”

Linsair dropped his work. “Did you not watch over her as I instructed?”

“Indeed. It was not my doing. Her father returned home and Evela—”

“Say no more, Specter. Return to the hollow and wait for me there.”

In the dimness a gray-robed figure congealed and bowed in Linsair’s direction. Caritha thought her eyes were deceiving her, for the figure held a scythe blade in his hand.

The figure vanished, and Linsair rushed from the cave.

“Wait! Where are you going?” Caritha raced after him and up the slope, through the forest in the direction of home. She stumbled on a stone, but he raced ahead of her, flitting over bushes and around trees.

Not wishing to lose him now and eager to know what caused him to act this way, she picked up her skirt and ran with all her strength. Before long her breaths came with difficulty, yet she kept him in sight.

He slipped into the clearing before Ilfedo’s house and ran to the door.

As the door crashed open, Ilfedo looked up. Linsair stood on the threshold. The sword smith glanced around the house, then his eyes rested on Oganna. He ripped the hammock off the post, making a direct path to her.

“What hast thou done?” Linsair’s pink eyes flared as he pulled the child from Ilfedo’s grasp and tenderly laid her on the hearth. “Tell me now, thou Lord of the Hemmed Land. What hast thou done?”

Such fury burned in the smith’s eyes that Ilfedo shrank back. “I … I was distraught, and she came to me.” He strengthened his voice. “The next moment she collapsed, and I no longer had any tears.”

“Fool! Thy daughter’s veins are mixed with the blood of humanity and dragonkind. Thy need called out to her, and her dragon side answered.” Linsair rubbed Oganna’s chest and closed his eyes, whispering a prayer as he did so:

“Father, holy Father, tend now this child I pray.

Father, heavenly Father, now our fears allay.”

At that moment, Caritha burst into the room, her hair askew. Uttering a startled cry, she knelt next to Oganna. “Ilfedo, what has happened to her? Did she fall?” Linsair glanced at her with sharp eyes, silencing her.

“Too young, she is too young to manifest these abilities.” Linsair’s lips moved in prayer.

Ilfedo closed his eyes and sent up his own plea for his daughter’s life. Had he broken Evela’s heart and slain his own child in the process? He opened his eyes and found Linsair gazing back at him. “What did I do?”

“Nothing except plead for an easement of thine own suffering, Lord Ilfedo,” the sword smith said. “The power in thy child’s blood is beginning to manifest itself. I believe that when she touched you, she took on your pain; your sorrow, your grief, your tears all became hers. But it was too great for her tiny body to handle. And now I must take the portion of thy suffering or risk losing her.”

The man’s pink eyes brimmed with tears, and his chest quaked. He sobbed and wept until his tears sizzled on the hearth. Oganna sat up, her face red, yet a smile appeared on her face as she watched her rescuer. Linsair continued to weep. He caressed Oganna’s face and smiled through his tears, then glanced at Ilfedo. “How truly deep, how truly vast is thy love for both the dead and the living.” Then he rose and looked down at Caritha. Tears had formed in her eyes as well, and her lips started to form a word.

Linsair touched the side of her head. “Remember no more what thou sawest in me. Remember only my craftsmanship and this deed of healing. Pass this to thy sisters for me so that they will remember no more.” He withdrew his hand. “Farewell, child.”

Without another word Linsair fled the house.

Ilfedo didn’t know what to think of the man’s charge to Caritha. He clutched his child to his chest and laid kisses all over her head until she giggled and begged him to stop.

“Caritha, are you all right?” He watched the eldest sister rise to her feet.

“I think so.”

He frowned. “What did Linsair mean by all that?”

“What are you talking about?” She wiped her forehead with a cloth.