“Patient as ever, I see.”
“Fourteen years, Ayliss...”
Her brows dipped into a V. “Try counting that in lion years.”
There you go, thinking about no one but yourself again, said the Voice in his head.
Be still! It’s time she explained herself. “Where were you...all that time?”
“Watching. And waiting.” With the back of her hand, she flipped her hair over her shoulder.
The gesture, so truly Ayliss, made Durren’s throat swell. Dear Koronolan, she was his flesh and blood, and despite everything, he loved her. “What for?”
“Her, for one. I had to wait for your dream woman.”
Mirianna flushed, her already high color deepening. “I can accept that you’re Durren’s sister and you’ve been trapped in a lion’s form just as he’s been trapped in the Shadow Man’s form all these years.” She paused, rolled her eyes skyward and blew out a breath. “Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have believed any of this, and here I am talking as if I know something of magic.”
“You do,” Ayliss said. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”
Mirianna quirked an eyebrow. “It’s the dream, that’s all that’s magic about me. Anyway, how do you know about the dream? And how did you speak to me from your lion form? Can you read minds?”
Good questions. Durren squeezed her hand to tell her, and she cast him a brief smile before refocusing on Ayliss.
His sister sat up straighter and carefully rearranged the drape of her cloak over her legs. “I know about the dream because I put it there.” When they gaped at her, she said, “Not the particulars. I didn’t know precisely who your ‘dream woman’ would be, Durren, or when she would come, but you needed to recognize each other, so I gave you both the dream. It was all I had time for after you burst into Drakkonwehr and fell for Syryk’s illusions.”
“Wait—” Mirianna put up her free hand. “You knew I was coming—even back then?”
Ayliss tilted her head. “More or less.”
“No. Not more or less.” Mirianna’s eyes narrowed and Durren recognized the fierce expression that had jolted him only days ago. “I want to know—just what are you? A…mage?”
He read in his sister’s eyes the same struggle for patience he’d undergone days earlier and squeezed Mirianna’s fingers. Keep pressing, love. Make her tell us.
Ayliss smoothed the fabric over her knees. “All of us have power. Even your portly friend outside. We’re born with it. Some of us have more gifts than others. And some of us are better at using the powers we have. I happen to be rather good at reading Shadow Speech and unlocking ancient mysteries, both of which told me a woman—who turned out to be you—was coming.”
Mirianna’s hand lowered to her lap. She chewed her lower lip. “So…you’re not a mage?”
“If a mage is someone who has knowledge and power, then, yes, I suppose I could be called a mage.” She gently brushed hair from Gareth’s face. “But I would much rather be known as a Drakkonwehr because everything I am and do comes from that lineage.”
“You…betrayed us!” Durren spat out.
“You weren’t supposed to be there for the Chant!” Her eyes flashed green fire. “Contrary to what you seem to think, I was trying to protect you by keeping you out of Drakkonwehr. I knew Syryk would try to kill you if you came, and what I meant to do required all my concentration, but somehow you managed to get inside the chamber anyway. When he went for you, I intended to stop his spell, to shield you, but then you broke his crystal in the middle of the Chant and”—she shrugged one shoulder—“well, the spell energy rearranged everything. I tried to cast both of us out of the chamber, to safety, but I must have taken some of Syryk’s curse because I came to in the body of a lion, and I couldn’t change back. You had disappeared. Syryk had vanished. The fortress was a smoking ruin.”
“And…Errek?” He hadn’t wanted to know, but the words were out before he could stop them.
Ayliss contemplated the hand she’d turned palm up in her lap. When she raised her eyes, they were dark and full. “That was no illusion, Durren. But you knew that anyway.”
He did. He’d known as soon as the knife left his hand. But the acknowledgment intensified the shame, the guilt, the sorrow. If only his heart would stop beating so he could lay down the pain and simply die.
He must have clenched Mirianna’s hand, for he became aware of the gentle stroke of her thumb across his knuckles. There was such tenderness in her look the iron band around his heart loosened a little and he breathed again.
“Who’s—?” said Gareth, but Ayliss touched her finger to his lips, and the boy leaned into her shoulder once more.
“When I finally found you again, months later,” she continued, “you’d become this Shadow being and I couldn’t reach you. Not until something changed. I could feel it coming, but I couldn’t reach into your mind until that day the Krad attacked you at the stream. And you,” she said to Mirianna, “you had to enter the Wehrland.”
“That was—that was two weeks ago,” Durren said, recalling the matter at hand. “What happened…last night?”
With a cat-like smile, Ayliss glanced at Mirianna, who blushed bright red but met her gaze. “Apparently, with the spell energy unraveling, a great many things,” Ayliss said, “most of which were exactly as I’d hoped when I used the piece of crystal Gareth found down by the pool to return to my own form.”
“You…made us—I mean—we were enchanted…” Mirianna trailed off, looking aghast.
“Hardly.” Ayliss smiled and patted her hand. “You simply did what your hearts had already chosen to do. No spell can change true hearts.”
‘True hearts and no fear, against a mage’s power, hold dear.’ The words from Owender echoed in Durren’s mind.
Ayliss looked directly at him, meeting his eyes through the weave of his face covering, and he knew she’d heard his thoughts. “All I ever asked of you was to trust me, Durren, to let me help you, but you wouldn’t hear of it.”
“You were jealous…”
“For a time. Who wouldn’t be? Especially since you kept flaunting it.” She looked at Mirianna and explained, “The Sword of Drakkonwehr, which Durren has and which has always been intended for him. It’s his destiny, and I’ve never disputed that.”
Durren sucked in air, struggling for speech.
Ayliss’s gaze drilled into the hood, finding his eyes as easily as if there were no barrier. “Yes, I know I needled you about it. I’m the elder child,” she told Mirianna, “and the Sword always passed to the firstborn—”
“Son!” Durren rasped.
“The firstborn, which just so happened to be sons until my birth.” She looked down her nose at him, so much the thirteen-year-old of his memories again his eyes welled. “Despite what you may have thought, I’ve always known my destiny lay in the scrolls. No one seemed to realize their significance. Grandfather may have read some of them—once—but I don’t think Father ever did more than poke around.”
“Like me.”
“Yes, like you. The dust was that thick. Anyway, I started reading, realized they were in a jumble, and spent weeks putting them in order.”
“Dragon Chant...you weren’t supposed to—”
“Find it? Yes, I was. You had the Sword, Durren. I had the Chant. That’s why there were two of us, and why I was the firstborn, not you. I was meant to find that Chant.”
“Not to—to give it away!”
“All I’ve ever asked of you, Durren, was to trust me, just once, and to let me help you.”
“Giving Syryk the Chant was…helping me?”
“If you’d read the scrolls, you wouldn’t be asking that now.”
“Syryk?” Mirianna said. “Is that—?”
“The mage,” Ayliss said. “He came to me because he’d been chasing the Chant. Some of his ancestors were Black Mages, and he’d found bits and pieces of their scrolls, enough to know that what he wanted had to be buried in that dustbin deep in Drakk
onwehr.”
“Syryk is evil—”
“Syryk is selfish. He wants to control the Dragon for his own purposes. Don’t you think I know that?”
“Why…did you help him?”
“Because he had something I needed, a power source. Crystal columns concentrate great spell energy in the hands of the user, but they’re very rare, and rarer still are those who know how to work them.”
She paused, looked off in the distance and seemed to compose herself. When her focus returned, the emerald eyes gleamed like twin beams, as if some power shone through them. “There’s more to being the Dragonkeeper than you think, Durren. More to it than everyone since Koronolan knew about how to keep the Dragon. There’s been an unbroken line of sons who needed to know only the Sword, because all they had to do was make sure the Dragon stayed entombed, so that’s all they read about, all they spoke about. But the Dragon wasn’t meant to be entombed forever.
“The Black Mages used the dragons, enslaved them. Koronolan didn’t know this until he defeated the Black Mages and broke the spell. By then there was only one dragon left. Koronolan didn’t want to kill the beast since it and its brethren hadn’t participated willingly in the carnage, but he knew his people wouldn’t accept giving the beast its freedom without some penalty.”
“Like…going to sleep?” Gareth asked.
“Yes, going to sleep until there would come a time when his people would accept the return of the dragon. Koronolan wrote it all down, so that those who came after him would know of the bargain he made with the Last Dragon, but his sons were afraid. Memories of the Black Mages’ treachery and the dragons’ destruction were too vivid in their minds, so they hid the scrolls of Koronolan, and soon those scrolls—and Koronolan’s promise—were forgotten.”
She leaned forward and her eyes intensified. “Tell me, Durren, you hear a voice, don’t you? Ever since that night you broke the crystal, you’ve heard a voice?”
She means me, the Voice in his head said.
Durren swallowed, hard. You’re not—
Oh, but I am. And I have been patient a very, very long time.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Syryk drew his cloak tighter around his shoulders. It was an expensive cloak, well made, befitting the Master of Nolar’s status and fortune. Such a cloak kept out both the cold and damp that came with the twilight pressing in on him from all sides as the horses plodded ever upward into rougher and rockier terrain. Pity it couldn’t ward off the growing sense of dread that pooled in the pit of his stomach and turned the dry-cake he’d demanded from Rees into a burning lump in his stomach. He shifted again in his saddle, attempting to find a position that hurt less, but nothing availed. With each bone-jarring, stone-crunching step, they came inexorably closer to the truth: the old man and his fat companion were headed to Drakkonwehr.
What could possibly be drawing them there? The Dragonkeeper had no such power. With the girl and the bloodstones, though— No, the fool had no idea how to use them. Syryk had the only crystal. He’d banked on it, the bloodstones, and Master Brandelmore’s bride being enough to complete the Chant and raise the Dragon wherever he wished. There was no need to go back to the gatehouse of Beggeth. No need to traverse this place that reeked of sulfur and—he sniffed—urine?
Rees halted and stood in his stirrups, head turned like a hound scenting the wind. “Krad,” he said. “There’ve been Krad through here.”
An unearthly howl rent the air. Stones cascaded down from above, pelting the ground, the horses, Syryk’s head. He reeled in his saddle and saw stars before Rees grabbed his reins and shouted, “Ride!”
****
There was a rumble, and the floor of the chamber heaved. Mortar showered from the lintel over the door. Mirianna leaned over Durren, covering him, and Ayliss sheltered the boy. The paving stones rolled like a gigantic mole passed beneath them, raising and shifting years of dust. The groan seemed to well up from the depths, a great creaking of earth and stone as the fortress swayed all around them.
“I am awake!” said the Voice, and it seemed to have gained power. It reverberated in Durren’s head and even, he fancied, echoed in the chamber, but that was impossible. It was his own thoughts he heard, wasn’t it? It was his conscience. The Shadow Man and Durren had split. The Shadow Man had been overthrown and Durren had reasserted himself, and the voice should have vanished, been beaten into submission by the will of the warrior, but here it was and louder, and—by Kiros!—not his voice at all.
“The time has come. You must keep your bargain, Drakkonwehr. For I willingly laid down to sleep for your ancestor. The Chant awoke me, my mind, before you broke the spell. Now you must finish what was started. Raise me and mine.”
Mirianna shuddered beside him, but her gaze darted into the shadows, as if seeking the voice she, too, could hear. Even Gareth’s eyes widened, but Ayliss smiled the cat’s smile he’d come to thoroughly detest.
“Ayliss,” Durren demanded, reaching out his free hand and seizing her ankle. “What in the name of Kiros is happening?”
She looked down her nose at the contact, the first between them in years. She’d made no previous move to touch him, either as lion or woman, and he wondered why until he saw the red glow shining between his black-gloved fingers as if the leather could barely contain it. Shocked, he let go, looked at where he held Mirianna’s hand under the blanket. The glow through the weave had intensified, no longer like banked coals but a log about to burst. And not just there—everywhere his skin had been bared for Gareth’s sponging pulsed anew with red fire, matching the beat of his heart. Dear Koronolan!
“You’re fulfilling your destiny, Durren,” his sister said. “All these years you’ve been keeping the Dragon in the only way possible since you interrupted the Chant. Its consciousness has been living inside you.”
“No!” Durren gasped.
“Yes! You broke your sword in my flesh, and now it resides in your own side. You eased your wounds in the pool wherein my blood from that wound seeps. Your blood is mine, Drakkonwehr, and mine is yours. Now, set me free!”
The voice echoed off the chamber’s walls, and within Durren’s skull. His head pounded and he wanted to hold the voice inside where it had at least been contained. But now the voice was out and filling the air, it had a hiss he hadn’t noticed before, an ancient thickness of the tongue that caressed soft sounds. By Koronolan, this could not be happening! He could not now be sharing a body with a beast—the Beast!—he’d vowed to keep entombed. And yet here was the creature demanding release according to some ancient ‘bargain.’ And here was his sister telling him he had to give it what it wanted.
“Syryk’s spell is nearly unraveled, and we must complete the Chant,” Ayliss said. “If we don’t, you’ll die because the only thing that saved you when the spell exploded is being bound to the Dragon, and that connection won’t last much longer.”
He heard her but faintly, as if she spoke from the surface above the whirlpool he was drowning in. Was nothing true? Had his whole heritage been a lie perpetrated by fearful sons of Koronolan? Had he been so thoroughly wrong in his beliefs, his decisions that his life meant nothing? Amid the crush of incongruities and impossibilities, his mind grasped the one salient point that might still matter. “Then…kill me! I’d rather be…dead. At least I’ll have…discharged my one duty as a Drakkonwehr—keep the Dragon bound!”
Ayliss kicked him. With her bare heel, she hauled back and kicked him in the thigh. Her eyes flashed green fire as she thrust her chin forward. “You bloody, stubborn knucklehead! No one is going to die. Do you hear me? We are going to live through this, every last one of us. That is our destiny, Durren—to complete Koronolan’s promise and restore the world he once knew when dragons and the People lived in peace. I’ve been trying for years to get you to see the truth, but you had eyes for nothing but that Sword! Yes, we need the damned thing, and it has yet a purpose to serve, but right now what we need is for you to trust me, to believe what I’ve learned f
rom the scrolls is going to help us—all of us. Can you do that? Or are you going to lie there and bleed fire until you die from the inside out?”
Always so cool, so calm, Ayliss hadn’t lost her temper in his presence for…for longer than Durren could remember. He’d always envied that control, but her loss of it now, here, showed him more than anything she’d so far said that she loved him, needed him, and meant to save them.
“‘True hearts and no fear, against a mage’s power, hold dear,’” Ayliss said, her gaze full of the passion he’d once glimpsed so many years ago. “Have you seen my ‘true heart,’ Durren? Or do you need more proof?”
I’ve seen YOUR heart, said the Dragon, this time inside Durren’s head. Your ‘demons’ have cast a long shadow over your soul, but your heart is still intact—much as you’ve wanted to rip it out for the pain it’s caused you.
Be still! All these years he’d resented the interfering voice in his head, and now he knew why. It was not his conscience. Not even his at all! Hold your tongue!
Why? Because now you know it’s forked?
Treacherous beast! Get out of my head!
‘Treacherous beast,’ hah! Let me remind you, Dragonkeeper, this ‘treacherous beast’ is the very one who’s lived inside you for more than a dozen of your paltry human years, who’s listened to you endlessly bemoan your fate, who’s kept you sane those countless days and nights when you had no one else to talk to, who let you soothe your body in my pool—
“Trust her, please.” Mirianna’s entreaty penetrated his skull and overrode the Dragon, silencing both of them. “Trust her, Durren,” she said when she had his attention. “I do.”
“So do I.” Gareth held out his hand, palm up, and Ayliss grasped it. Her lip trembled, and she dropped her gaze before Mirianna reached across Durren's body and covered both of their hands with hers.
“We trust both of you.” Mirianna shared a long look with Ayliss before she let go and laid her hand on Durren’s heart. She looked deep into the eyes she couldn’t possibly see in the dimness and through his face covering. “Do you trust us?”
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