Wyvernus loosed one hand and pulled her close, and she cried into his golden robes until her eyes were dry and her throat was raw and her heart was empty and numb. He burned, he burned, but the heat was good even as it hurt.
“I love her,” he said at last. Sulema sniffed and pulled away, embarrassed and drained.
“I have loved her from the moment I first laid eyes on her, when she stepped down from that ship. She came to me a stranger from strange lands, across the wide and deadly sea, and we knew nothing of each other but what we had been told…” She heard a smile in his voice. “I had expected her to be taller, for all the stories. Oh, but she was lovely, she was all that was gentle and lovely and good. She was precious to me from the moment she saw me and smiled, and she has been precious to me every moment since.”
“Gentle, and lovely, and good?” Sulema dashed the tears from her face with the back of one hand, and shook her head. “Are you sure you are speaking of the same woman?”
“Even so.” The mask turned toward Hafsa Azeina, and the eyes behind it lingered on her still, slack face. “Even now. The people loved her, more than they ever loved me. She was the Heart of Atualon, and we never really recovered when she left us.”
Sulema could not reconcile the image of a sweet moonslighthaired princess with that of the woman she had always known, sharp and brittle and deadly as cold flint.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“I did this,” he replied. “Someone was killing the ne Atu, someone was murdering my children.” His voice broke. “My princess, my beloved, was the only one among us wise enough to see, and I was not smart enough, not man enough, not king enough to listen to her. I was consumed with my duties and brushed her concerns aside, and so she had no one to turn to. I was not there the night she fled Atualon, and we may never know what happened that night on the Great Salt Road. I believe that whoever was killing the ne Atu came for you and she fled, and turned to dark magic in order to save your life, because I was not there for her.
“As I was not there for you.”
Sulema clutched her mother’s hand, horrified. All those years, and she had not known. “She became this… for me?”
Sulema realized in that moment that truth could hold sorrow as well as beauty.
Wyvernus squeezed her hands in his. “Yes, child, I believe she gave up the life she had in order to save yours. Would that I could call back the sands of time and fix this. I would do anything—”
“Can you?” Sulema asked in a rush. “Do anything? Can you heal her?” She bit her lip.
Wyvernus turned his head, and the Dragon regarded her. “I cannot put her back the way she was,” he answered. “All the magic in the world, all the power a king may hold in his hands, cannot do that. I may be able to spare her life, though it is possible that I may fail or, at best, buy us no more than a little time in which to say goodbye.”
“There is hope?”
“There is hope. But, Sulema… the cost will be high, for both of us.”
“For both of us? I do not understand.”
“Atulfah can do great things, Sulema, but as with all such things it demands sacrifice. If I demand so much of atulfah, so shall much be demanded of me. This will leave me weakened, and we are at the brink of war with the Daemon Emperor. If I attempt a healing of this magnitude, I will need you to take your place as my heir and lend me your strength in the days to come. Are you willing to do this thing? To leave your Zeera, the people you love, and all you have worked to achieve?”
His eyes burned into her, demanding truth.
“I am.” Sulema clutched her mother’s hand, willing her to live. There was blood caked beneath the broken fingernails. She would want warm water, and soft cloths, to clean away the blood and filth. “She gave her life so that I might live, and I will do no less for her.”
“This will not absolve her of any crimes she may have committed. There have been disturbing rumors.”
Sulema had heard the whispers, as well, but she refused to believe them. “Shadows and lies,” Sulema insisted. “My mother does not treat with traitors and assassins. If she wants someone dead, she kills them herself.”
Her father turned to face her, and she could see that he smiled. “Such a daughter we have made, my love. Such an heir you have brought to me.” He removed Hafsa Azeina’s hand from hers, and gently pushed her away. “Do not stand any closer than this,” he warned her. “You may get burned.”
The Dragon King stood at the head of Hafsa Azeina’s bed and raised his arms high, tipping his golden-horned head back. The Baidun Daiel formed a circle about them and raised their arms as well. With their blood-red cloaks billowing about them, they looked like carrion birds gathered for the feast. Their faces were fixed on Ka Atu, and when he clenched his upraised hands, they arched their backs and went stiff all over as if he were a puppet master with his fists full of strings.
Then Ka Atu began to sing.
The voice that bellowed forth from that mask could not have been torn from a human throat, not from a thousand human throats. The Song of the Sun Dragon swelled forth like the desert at high tide, it filled the room with bright sun and dark moons and the piercing stare of starlight.
The air became thick and sorrowful, full of the slow, soft, lonely notes of the Dragon’s Song, and Sulema fought to breathe. A single gasp escaped her lips. Akari Sun Dragon whipped his head about, seeking her.
His burning eyes lit upon Sulema’s face, and the song shattered into a million shards of colored glass as Akari Sun Dragon claimed Sulema for his own.
Mind, body, and soul.
* * *
Three days later, by the pale light of the sister moons, Wyvernus made Sulema his heir, and named her the Heart of Atualon. He placed the shining coronet of Sa Atu upon her brow, and kissed her on both cheeks as the crowd chanted:
“Sa Atu!
“Sa Atu!
“SA ATU!”
With the wash of voices came a pale shadow of memory, like the notes of a faded lullaby, the smell of a garden far away and long lost to the wild. There had been sorrow, there had been song, but now there was only the Dragon.
When Ka Atu knelt at her feet, the crowd erupted in cheers and laughter, and there was not a dry eye in the kingdom.
MIST AND SHADOW
If she had known that the afterlife was so like Shehannam, Hafsa Azeina would not have bothered dying. The mist that swirled about her feet, the shadowed sky overhead, even the flat nothing-smell of the air was the same. She sighed, and set foot upon the path that appeared before her, shining softly in the—
She froze, and looked down at her feet.
Her feet.
Her feet were feet, and her hands were hands. She clutched the staff she had held in life, and her wizard-locked hair was heavy and warm against her back. No claws, no fur… she tested her teeth with the tip of her tongue… no fangs.
Well, that was interesting.
The path split before her. One way led down and to the left, a dark road and choked with blackthorn. The other rose up and to the right, a wide and shining path, gently sloped and neatly paved.
I know this story, she thought, I know the way.
Then she thought, to Yosh with it. I am tired of pain. Life was hard. Let my death be easy. So she turned right and strolled up the path, taking her time, breathing deeply out of habit if not need, and thinking that the air should smell of roses. Would it be so much to wish for roses? It was not as if planting them would harm anything here, and a hint of color would be welcome. She smiled at the thought.
* * *
She had been walking for hours, for days perhaps, or had she only taken a handful of steps? She could not have said for sure, and she did not particularly care. The road had ended, and she had come to a small hill with two doors set into the stone. One was twisted, misshapen, and looked as if it had warped in the heat of a hellish fire. The other was round and green, and looked as if it might lead somewhere pleasant.
&
nbsp; I know this story, too, she thought.
But she was tired of fighting monsters, tired of trials and travails, and so she pushed against the green door and it swung easily before her. On the other side she could see a hall with a wooden floor, brightly lit and welcoming.
“I see you have grown wiser.” The voice was near her feet. “It took you long enough.”
Hafsa Azeina nearly dropped her staff. A small cat sat on the path between her and the door, sleek and black with enormous tufted ears set above a delicate face. Those eyes, more familiar to her than her own and more beloved, regarded her with bright and emerald amusement.
“No,” she whispered. “No. I killed you.”
“As a matter of fact, you killed yourself,” the cat said, and lifted one tiny paw so that she could clean between her toes with a bright pink tongue. “But I forgive you.”
“Basta—”
“You have chosen your path,” the cat interrupted. “Best get on with it. He is waiting for you.” Before Hafsa Azeina could ask any more questions, Basta faded away. The long green eyes were last to go and winked at her in the gloom like a pair of lost stars.
She had forgotten how annoying that could be.
I forgive you…
Hafsa Azeina shook her head, bemused, and stepped through the door. As she did so, she caught sight of her staff, and started so badly that she almost dropped it again. No longer black as charred bone, the wood had turned a soft gray-green with a silvery sheen, and in place of the hideous skull the carved and painted likeness of Basta’s head winked at her with emerald-chip eyes.
If she had a heart, it would have broken. If she had tears, she would have wept. But she was dead, ash and dust, and had none of these things.
The door closed behind her as she walked down the hall, ducking her head and peering about for cobwebs. Her hand gripped the staff—not a source of shame, now, but of comfort. After she had been walking for some time the hall narrowed, the wooden floor gave way to cold, rough stone, and she found herself in a confusion of low tunnels.
Ah hah, she thought, I knew that was too easy to be true.
But she had chosen her path, and the way back was always shut in these stories, and besides, she was dead. So there was nothing for it but to push forward and make the best of things.
Down and down she went, deeper and deeper into the womb of the earth, or so it seemed to her, a lost and comforting place out of time, out of mind. The walls grew warm and close about her and she trailed her free hand over the rock, enjoying the feel of it, and she could not help but feel that she was loved in return.
Eventually the walls fell away and she stood at the mouth of a wide, round cavern. The walls were smooth and round as the inside of an egg, or a bubble trapped in glass for all time. The better part of it was filled with a lake, and this lake glowed with a million million lights, as if it held a distant sky turned upside down beneath the still water. Stepping-stones as wide as tables led to a small island.
There was a figure waiting for her there, or figures perhaps, but who or what they were, she could not have said.
I know this story, too, she thought. This is the last trial before the end.
It seemed to her that it would be good to get this over with, and to rest, so she lifted her staff and gathered up her robes and stepped upon the broad gray stones. They were good stepping-stones, too. They did not twist under her feet, or sink into the starlit waters, or reveal themselves to be the knobbed back of a sea-thing child or a row of skulls. They were stones, nothing more, and stayed just where they were.
As she set foot upon the island, the waiting figure turned and revealed itself to her, and Hafsa Azeina knew then where she was. She had come back to the beginning of things, after all.
“I know you,” she whispered. “Nightmare Man.”
“Do you?” A voice like rotting parchment growled at her. “Do you really? You know nothing, Princess of the Seven Isles.” A dark light blazed from his robes, it crawled across his mask in a craze of black lightning, and filled his mouth with death. “And now you never will.” He raised his great war hammer in both hands, and as he did so his robes slipped back along the ground and revealed everything.
The island’s dull black rock had been broken away to expose an expanse of smooth scales the color of glass, of rainbows and waterfalls, the color of a hummingbird’s wing. Blue and green beneath the surface, swirls and whorls of white tinged with seashell-pink, the heartbreaking beauty of a dragon could be mistaken for nothing else in any time or place.
Hafsa Azeina lunged forward and swung from the hips even as his dark hammer fell, even as her heart broke. Triumph burned in his face like bloody coals as the weapon arced down.
It met the swing of her new-souled staff.
And all was lost in a blinding light.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to give a nod of thanks to…
My parents, who gave me life and then gave me a dog.
My first reader and best friend, Kristine Alden, without whom this book would not be here.
My awesome early readers, Martie and Bonnie, whose enthusiasm and encouragement were the fuel I needed to make it to THE END.
My rockstar agent, Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media, for taking a chance on an unknown author with a huge and rather weird story.
My Dark Editorial Overlord, Steve Saffel of Titan Books, Wielder of The Carrot and The Stick.
Nick Landau, Vivian Cheung, Paul Gill, Miranda Jewess, Ella Chappell, Lydia Gittins, Samantha Matthews, and Katharine Carroll of Titan Books, for believing in my story.
Alice Nightingale, for being my champion.
My high-school English teacher, Deane O’Dell, who against all odds kindled the love of literature in the heart of an ungrateful young barbarian.
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