The Dragon of Despair (106 page)

THIS WASN’T HAPPENING.
It couldn’t be. Not after everything she’d done, after all the plans she’d made. Work hard and you’ll get your way in the end. That’s what her mother had said. That’s what Melina’s own experience had confirmed.

Somehow the only contingency Melina had never contemplated in all her plans, counterplans, and adaptation of plans was that in the end she wasn’t going to get her way.

But now it seemed as if she wasn’t. She had heard Grateful Peace reciting the words that bound the dragon to him. The Dragon of Despair had been bound, but it served her enemy. It shouldn’t be possible, but it was.

All around the cavern the evidence was there. The survivors among her servitors were either surrendered or captured. Even Toriovico had somehow escaped her control. The dry riverbed that separated them was nothing to the gulf of horrified realization that she saw on his face.

Her enemies all seemed to have survived, though they were in rather bad shape, sanded and bloodied by flying glass or fallen among the ruins of the bridge. She felt a vague dissatisfaction when she realized that one man still stood uninjured.

Grateful Peace.

Melina puzzled over the wreck of her expectations, gazing up at the magnificence that was the Dragon of Despair. With a clarity like truth, Melina realized that there was something still left for her to do. It was so simple that she laughed aloud.

She could win. After all, now she knew the dragon’s true name. To think that for a moment she had thought she could be defeated by a point of grammar!

Melina banished her earlier disappointment. First, eliminate Grateful Peace. Next, grab hold of the dragon. It was so easy. So simple.

She knew the dragon’s name now. Despairing Dragon! What did it have to despair about? She’d give it reason for despair once she had ahold of it. She’d whip it into shape. Then the dragon would know that those long years of obsidian-locked sleep had held nothing to despair about. She’d show it…

A tug on Melina’s sleeve slowed her forward progress just as she was stepping down the slope of what had once been a pool and was now only a mineral-encrusted sloping basin.

Melina glanced down, shaking blood from her face with an impatient gesture. The droplets splattered on the round-featured face looking up at her.

For a moment, Melina didn’t recognize who this was, so like a distorted reflection of herself did it seem—a vision of herself cast onto nonexistent waters. Then she knew it.

Citrine.

“Mother?”

“Not now, dear. I’m busy.”

She picked her way forward, across the level bottom of the pool. Bits of broken obsidian cut through the bottoms of her delicate embroidered slippers.

“Mother!”

Melina shook her sleeve from that annoyingly persistent grip. The fingers fell away but the voice persisted.

“You were feeding me to the dragon.”

Melina had no time for niceties. There was the upward slope to consider, slick with obsidian flakes, some as fine as glass, others keen-edged as razors.

“I suppose you could see it that way, if you wished.”

Melina pushed the child away, her gaze focusing on the one face in the room not hazed with blood. A dagger, very sharp, was one of the elements in the once beautiful costume Melina wore. She drew it now, seeing the steps to her success as clearly as if they were written on a page.

Grateful Peace. Can’t kill him at once. Must hold him. Threaten him. Make him name you heir to the dragon upon his death. Then kill him.

It was so easy. So perfectly easy. She saw her way so clearly that she didn’t even glance at the looming figure of the dragon.

It didn’t move to prevent her, and Melina knew that Grateful Peace was afraid to use it, afraid of the cost.

She laughed to herself, shock fading, her own clear calculation returning.

It was going to be so easy.

THE PAIN FIREKEEPER FELT
was like nothing she had ever experienced before, like nothing she had even imagined. Chunks of obsidian the size of fists had slammed into her torso, one narrowly missing her head. The tiny razor cuts covering bare arms, lower legs, neck, and face didn’t hurt at first, making the burn and sting when blood flowed from them worse for being unexpected.

Yet her own pain was nothing to her shock when she saw that the bridge had collapsed carrying Blind Seer, Edlin, and Derian down into the bed of the river.

She howled in desperation and Blind Seer answered, his voice weak, but alive.

“Get us out of here!”

“I will,” Firekeeper called, leaping to act and crumpling instantly as her bare foot was sliced by the myriad obsidian shards.

The razors buried themselves in her naked flesh and she fell onto one leather-protected knee. Tears flooded from her eyes as she realized she was afraid to move any further.

The frozen tableau that had held the others was broken as Melina stepped delicately down the slope. The woman’s eyes were focused tightly on two things—the dragon and Grateful Peace. Indeed, Firekeeper doubted she saw anything else. Certainly she did not seem to see Citrine, who followed her for a few steps, tugging at her, begging for attention.

Then the child fell back and Melina came on alone.

“Peace,” Firekeeper said urgently. “Peace!”

The Illuminator did not stir.

A familiar voice within her head said,
“He is yet with me, wolfling, unaware of what has happened without.”

“Tell him!” Firekeeper demanded aloud.

“And extend my own captivity?”
The dragon’s laughter was cruel.
“I think not. He has not ordered me to defend him. It was the Star Wizard’s rule that saved him from the breaking of my prison, not my wish. Dream on, wolfling. I scent my freedom coming to me, carried to me by one I once feared.”

In that instant, Firekeeper knew that none of them would survive if Melina killed Grateful Peace. Elise and Doc didn’t seem to realize what danger still remained. They were hurrying to assist those trapped by the fallen bridge.

“And what could they do?”
Firekeeper asked herself.
“They are farther than I. Doc would resist doing harm because he does not understand the danger. Elise lacks the skill.”

Her bloodied foot screamed at her to be reasonable, but Firekeeper was beyond reason. Even so, Melina was within stabbing reach of Grateful Peace before Firekeeper moved to intervene, not because the wolf-woman was being cunning, but because she dreaded the pain when at last she must move.

It was seeing that Melina’s slippered feet left red stains whenever she stepped that gave Firekeeper courage.

Am I less brave than she?

And as she leapt forward, Firekeeper answered herself.

No. Only more sane.

Stumbling slightly, Firekeeper thrust herself between the oblivious Grateful Peace and the all-too-focused Melina. It was only then that Melina seemed to register the wolf-woman’s presence—and the hunting knife she held poised.

Striking like a snake, Melina feinted with her own blade, but Firekeeper knocked it easily from her hand. Then at last did Melina seem to realize her danger.

“No!” she cried, cringing. “I am unarmed!”

Firekeeper stared at the woman, remembering another time, another place. Then she raised her arm and her Fang bit deep, and tore into the elaborate pectoral on Melina’s breast, biting through the metal and enamel as if it were tissue. Melina stared down at her chest and the dark heart’s blood that welled from the ragged hole.

She sunk to her knees and looked up at Firekeeper.

“I would have so liked to see the Old World,” Melina confided, and then she died.

Not even Citrine, dropping her gem-studded headband as a grave offering on her mother’s corpse, had tears to spare for Melina, once Consolor, once Lady, now nothing but cooling flesh.

XLI

TORIOVICO INSISTED THE HAWK HAVENESE REMAIN
within Thendulla Lypella, in the Cloud Touching Spire itself.

“I can’t risk you in the city proper,” he explained, “not until this is cleared up and the rumors die down. I’ll have all your property and livestock brought to you. In any case, all of you need waiting on—far more labor than Goody Wendee deserves thrust upon her.”

“We not prisoners?” Firekeeper asked from where she knelt near Blind Seer.

Neither wolf nor woman looked very strong. Blind Seer’s fur was matted with blood from injuries sustained when the bridge collapsed. Firekeeper had ruined the soles of her feet. Even so, Toriovico didn’t doubt that they would resist imprisonment.

“Not prisoners,” Torio hastened to assure her. “You have done myself and my realm a great service. Let us serve you in return.”

This seemed to make sense to Firekeeper, and she subsided.

“A question, Honored One,” Derian Carter asked from where he was testing his own limbs and seeming surprised to find them sound.

“Yes?” Toriovico replied, vaguely amused by the young man’s tone of conversational respect.

“How did you end up here?” Derian asked bluntly. “Last we spoke with you, you were free of Melina’s influence.”

“I don’t know precisely,” Torio admitted. “All I recall clearly is Melina coming in to see me. I remember thinking her attire was rather fantastic, even for her. Then everything sinks into a comfortable fog.”

“Melina may have needed,” Grateful Peace offered, “a certain number of people to help perform her ritual. Without you, she would have been one short. Perhaps in your eagerness not to let Melina know you had broken her hold, you accidently did something that enabled her to recapture you.”

“That,” Toriovico said, “is as good an explanation as any I can offer—better indeed. I wouldn’t doubt Melina told me to forget what she was doing and, sadly, I have done so.”

During this time, Sir Jared Surcliffe had completed his preliminary inspection of the wounded. Derian Carter was judged the least injured among those who could be spared, and so was sent to make the long climb to the surface of Aswatano and summon aid.

Among the survivors, Lord Kestrel had broken his left wrist. Idalia’s youngest daughter had suffered several blows to the head. The rest of the group had suffered varied degrees of cuts and bruises from when the dragon had broken free from its centuries-long imprisonment.

The rest of the group, that is, except for Grateful Peace. The former Dragon’s Eye was physically unharmed, but as they waited and Sir Jared did his best to treat the worst of the injuries, Grateful Peace told the Healed One his tale.

The one-armed Illuminator did so without either false modesty or overt self-praise, but as he spoke, Toriovico realized that Grateful Peace had truly been the hero in a night filled with heroic acts.

“And what will happen with the dragon now?” Toriovico asked, glancing to where the huge figure still lurked in the shadowy recesses of the newly revealed cave.

“I could command it to remain here,” Grateful Peace said, “and it must, but that would be a misery for it. It is not a kind creature. I am not completely certain that it is a creature as we understand such. What I am certain of is that if we treat it harshly we will make an enemy of it.”

“It isn’t already?” Toriovico asked, thinking over what he had been told.

“It is not our friend,” Peace replied, weighing his words carefully, “but it is not yet our enemy.”

Torio wasn’t certain he understood, but he was willing to take Grateful Peace’s word on the matter.

“And your counsel on the matter is?”

“The Star Wizard wished to keep it near as a weapon. Let me permit it to return to the wilds from which Kelvin inadvertently summoned it.”

Toriovico remembered the old stories, how the dragon had attacked the city and its people.

“Won’t it be a danger to us?”

“It is very willing to give its word that it will not trouble us. Indeed, it seems to hint that we will not even be aware of its presence—not unless I call it.”

“And if you let it free,” Toriovico asked, hoping that perhaps there was a way for Grateful Peace to escape the terrible price he had paid, but the Illuminator was shaking his head.