The Assassin King (45 page)

“Gerald! Gerald Owen! Come at once and rid me of this monster!”

The chambermaid stared wildly at him for a moment longer, then buried her face in her hands and ran from the room, weeping loudly.

As she departed, something in the air of the room around Ashe seemed to shatter; the Lord Cymrian could not be certain it was a spell of some sort, a twisted snare like an invisible spider's web that has been woven from evil power to deprive him of his sanity.

Or if it was the shattering of his sanity itself.

Ashe felt every clattering step as she bounded down the stairs, absorbed the slamming of every door in the course of her exit in the nerves of his skin. He was oddly grateful that her mourning appeared to cease very quickly; her calm returned almost immediately, judging by the beating of her heart in a normal rhythm, the slowing tides of her breath, and the deliberation with which she hurriedly packed her belongings and dashed out into the night by the back door, not even waiting to be shown out by the chamberlain. He closed his eyes, hoping for the same return to calm himself, and monitored her leaving until he could no longer feel her presence within his lands, no longer smelled the scent of vanilla and sweet soap, wood smoke and meadow flowers in the upper reaches of his sinuses. He did not realize how badly his hands were shaking, or how rapidly his heart was thundering against his chest, or how, when the chamberlain came to him in a calmer moment, he would reconsider his tantrum, be swallowed by remorse, and need to rectify his actions.

He did realize, however, how close he had come to a mistake that would have cost him more than the whole world.

ortia ran out into the night, her heart pounding, but with calm of one who had survived many such evictions. She wandered the cold paths of the forest under the moon until she came to a shady glen, where the budding leaves cast black lacy shadows on the ground in the ghostiy radiance all around her.

She shivered from the cold; her body had never been well padded, and the chill of the night air sank into her skin, leaving her trembling.

He will come for me, she thought. Already he regrets what he has done, and when the remorse takes over, he will come out into the night for me.

And bring me home with him again.

Tonight it will finally be consummated, she thought in delight, rubbing her hands quickly up and down her arms to warm them with the friction of it. Tonight he will finally take me in his arms, and to his bed. I will have all of him; I will ride him to the ends of the cliffs of pleasure, and as he drives himself into me, I will drive myself into his soul as well. I may not be able to evict the shadow of his wife, but she will find mine within him when she returns.

And then it will all begin. It only took a few moments for the remorse to set in and take hold.

Ashe stood up from the table and went to the speaking tube again.

“Come, Owen,” he said, summoning the chamberlain. “I've been an ass. I didn't mean to drive her out into the night, alone and without protection. Saddle up; we have to find her and bring her back. And then Tristan can make certain to take her with him when he returns to Bethany tomorrow.”

The hals of Canrif, Ylorc

As Ashe had predicted, the nightmares did return.

All the while they were traveling, Rhapsody had not really noticed them. There was too much occupying her mind as she, Achmed, and Grunthor made their way in haste out of the west and into the desert. When she had left the security of her husband's arms with the baby in tow, the fear she felt at the thought of eyes above and below the earth searching for her child was nightmarish enough. Bad dreams were hardly noticeable in that time; reality was worse.

When they were encamped, she and Meridion had slept on Grunthor's massive chest, much as she had when traveling along the Root through the belly of the earth itself. The bad dreams had been especially strong then, and while Grunthor had not been able to chase them completely away, in the manner that Ashe and Elynsynos had, he had provided a large, gruff, and wide surface on which to sleep that proved to be surprisingly warm and comforting.

He had also gotten good at jostling her from her dreams, talking her through the night terrors, and providing distracting conversation should he decide what she actually needed was to waken. He had not lost the knack, and especially had enjoyed cradling the tiny baby, curling up with the infant near his neck.

But the baby was gone, and now they were back in Ylorc among the Firbolg, who looked at her suspiciously as someone who had gone away and left them, the king's harlot, or just a source of food.

Rhapsody was alone again.

She shifted in the linen sheets that dressed her large bed in her quiet chamber within the inner hallways of Canrif. She'd never particularly liked staying within the cold mountains, and in her time in the Bolglands, she had always chosen to remain in Elysian, alone, in the tiny cottage Gwylliam had once built for Anwyn in the days when they were in love, or at least pretending to be.

Rhapsody rolled over in her sleep and sighed brokenly. She missed the little house on the island in the center of the grotto's lake, a place of hidden magic where she had first felt safe upon coming to the new world. She and Ashe had fallen in love there, or at least had admitted that they had for the first time. They had spent a short but sweet spring there, exploring the purple crystalline caves, swimming in the dark water where filaments of stone formations and underwater stalagmites formed lazy cathedrals of beautiful muted colors beneath the surface. The firmament of the cave had been carefully bored through with dozens of holes, allowing spots of sunlight to shine down upon it, making gardens possible. Rhapsody had passed many happy hours tending to the baby trees, planting flowers and herbs, and generally reliving her childhood, in a simpler time on a farm in the middle of the Wide Meadows of Serendair.

Now, alone and frightened in the darkness of Ylorc once more, she was defenseless against the demons of the night that lived in her own mind. As long as she could remember she had been prescient, had seen the future and sometimes the past in her dreams, and so she did not drag herself into a deeper stupor or consume the herbs that might have made her slumber so intense that her mind could not process what it had seen, for fear that she should miss something that was important, the need to be known in order for those she loved to remain safe.

And so she submitted to the dreams, to the horrid sights of burning ships in a harbor alight with flames; the images of terrified villagers running from soldiers with swords, attacking from horseback as they passed through, riding down anyone they saw; of great winged shapes that streaked through the night sky, raining fiery death down on the thatched roofs of houses below. But mostly she dreamt of Ashe.

Except for the times when she employed her skills as a Singer, reaching out to him over the waves of time with the musical lore she had studied, most of her dreams of her husband were terrifying. Night after night she saw him in her sleep, cold and wandering, sometimes adrift in the waves of the sea, lost without the family that the man treasured, that the dragon considered its own. She could feel, even hundreds of miles away, the unraveling of her husband's mind, of the ascendancy of the dragon in his soul as the broken-hearted man receded back into the shadows.

Each night she wept, often losing sleep and lying in exhausted numbness throughout all the hours of the long night until the morning finally came, when it was time to return to her work on the Lightcateher. One particularly brutal night, she dreamt of her old home in Merryfield,

of the Patchworks in the Wide Meadow where she and the boy she had called Sam had fallen in love beneath a starry sky, beneath the willow tree, alongside a meadow stream. The pasture, the stream, and the tree were all still there, all burned black to ashes in the aftermath of the Seren war. The bones of those she loved lay strewn in the field around her, and at her feet a tiny skeleton lay, its skull graced with the traces of flaxen curls. Rhapsody began to weep as if she was seeking empty herself of every tear. And then, just as her mind began to fill with scenes of terror and destruction, she felt a soft musical vibration surround her, fill her ears with gentle music, chasing her dreams into the darkest corners of her mind again, as if it were opening a window in her soul, allowing sunshine in. She recognized the vibration.

It was the one emitted by both of the dragons she loved in her life, her husband and Elynsynos.

Though exhausted, Rhapsody struggled to awaken. It can't be Ashe, she thought drowsily, fighting the dark cobwebs of sleep. / know he is not here, but I can feel the song which he used to chase my dreams away, settling me down to dreamless, restorative sleep again. It must be Elynsynos; she's here somewhere, not dead.

Fighting the heaviness of her eyelids, Rhapsody struggled to find the vibration and opened her eyes, looking for the dragon that had chased her nightmares away.

There, on the coverlet beside her, she was greeted with the sight of tiny, twinkling blue eyes, scored with vertical pupils expanding in the dark, taking in the sight of her. Porcelain hands and feet moved about in the air amid soft cooing sounds, coming from a head crowned with flaxen curls.

Her baby.

Rhapsody's hands immediately went to her abdomen, once again flat beneath her palms. Then, tears of joy pouring down her cheeks, she reached out gently and caressed the smooth skin of his face, sliding her hands carefully beneath him and bringing her lips to the hollow of his neck, kissing him over and over again gratefully.

Meridion just lay on the coverlet, staring up at her in the dark, his eyes twinkling.

“I should have known,” Rhapsody murmured, smiling down at her son. “I knew you would come back; I just didn't know that you already have the power of dragons to chase away dreams. My, aren't you a special boy.” The infant gurgled.

In the northern forest of Gwynwood, past the Tar'afel River

If Melisande had not seen two hundred foresters mount up and ride into the woods around her, followed immediately by another five hundred on foot who disappeared into the great forest behind them, she never would have known that she and Gavin were anything but utterly alone on their journey. The mounted men who had accompanied them from the Circle for the last several weeks had taken off in two cardinal directions upon crossing the Tar'afel River, riding north and west with the rising sun behind them to the outermost edges of the lands of the dragon. The Invoker had explained to her that only the scouts assigned to the farthest reaches would continue to ride; foresters could move far more quickly and quietly on foot than on horseback when traveJing through the heavy glades of virgin wood such as those that comprised the lands of Elynsynos. His face had no hint of a smile as he fur-

her explained that foresters would not wish to tempt a dragon with horse meat unless the distance made it necessary. The young Lady Navame had listened to his explanation from atop her own mount, a thick-bodied forest mare with gray dappling.

“Why are we mounted, then, if it is more easily done on foot?” she had asked.

The bearded Filidic leader had smiled. “Do you fancy yourself a forester, then, Lady Melisande Navarne, as well as all your other accomplishments?” He turned away quickly as her face changed color, but the gentleness of his tone left her vanity intact even as she choked on her own foolishness.

As soon as Gavin's contingent was out of sight, the Invoker mounted his own horse, a Lirin roan that had been given to him by the border guards of Tyrian in tribute, took hold of her mare's reins, and rode smoothly into the greenwood. Melisande clung to the mare's bridle at first, but soon discovered that the Invoker's quiet vocal cues led the horses easily around deadfall and the deeper pits in the mossy floor of the forest, ensuring a reasonably stable ride.

They traveled northwest in silence, following the path of the sun that gleamed through the budding leaves of the ancient forest, casting lacy shadows on the ground before them.

Melisande struggled to stay awake in the saddle; the exhaustion of her ordeal was compounded by a dreamy lulling sensation that surrounded her thickly the deeper they traveled into the greenwood. Her eyelids grew heavier as the sun made its way down the vault of the sky, and by dusk she had drifted off to sleep, jostled awake only for a few seconds at a time, and only by the most egregious of bumps. She surrendered to the sensation of riding the spinning world, helpless in the force of its turning, and let her chin come to rest on her chest.

For the most part she was able to doze, led by Gavin's skilled hand and the horse's gentle canter. She was dreaming of her mother, or at least a woman who looked like the painting of her mother over the fireplace in her father's library, when she felt the world stop spinning around her. Melisande was startled awake; the light was gone from the sky, leaving nothing but the faintest hint of aquamarine peeking through the trees to the west, while clouds sped through the darkening canopy above her.

She looked around for the Invoker, and spied his horse a few feet beyond her own, but the saddle of the roan was empty.

“Gavin?” she called softly, her voice trembling a little.

A gentle birdcall that blended in with the night sounds of the forest answered her. Melisande knew immediately it was the response of the Invoker, and was reassured, but still she leaned forward in the saddle and peered into the growing forest shadows, trying to find him.

The Invoker stepped out of the darkness behind the horse,

“You really have a terrible sense of direction, Lady Melisande Navame,” he said pleasantly.

He extended his hand to help her down from her mount.

“Are we stopping here for the night?” Melisande asked.

“A little farther north, about a hundred paces. There's a spring-fed fairy pond there where the horses can drink.”

Melisande nodded and took hold of her horse's lead, preparing to follow Gavin.