The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “Rose, poor Rose!” Erde wraps her arms around her chest and rocks back and forth miserably. “The dragons will know what to do! We’ll ask them immediately!”

  But then a glad cry rings out on the other side of the garden wall. Raven sits up. “Oh, listen! What a lovely sound! I haven’t heard laughter in a long, long while.”

  Lily runs up through the arbor. “Come quickly! Come see!”

  Raven’s eyes move to the still figure at the stone table.

  “You go,” Erde says. “I’ll stay with Rose.”

  She follows Raven to the end of the arbor. From there, she can keep an eye on Rose and also have a clear view down the bright green lawn. She sees the women gathering near the dragon’s crossed foreclaws, in the shadow of his huge head. As many as can walk or be assisted are huddled in excitement around Margit and her twins: three redheads, all three, alive and well, tearfully embracing.

  A life saved! Well done, dear dragon.

  THERE WERE OTHERS I COULD NOT SAVE.

  May God rest their souls.

  Erde repeats the usual benediction by habit, but she can’t help but notice how empty it sounds, how inadequate. What kind of god would create a good and beautiful world, then let it be overrun by such evils as Fire and the hell-priest? She can’t see the sense in that.

  She’d much rather put her faith in dragons.

  NOW THAT WE’VE FOUND OUR FRIENDS, MY SISTER SAYS WE MUST GO AFTER N’DOCH.

  Yes, we must, of course. But first, there is one more rescue here to attempt, dear dragon.

  Water has been listening in. AND AFTER THAT, THERE’LL BE ANOTHER DISTRACTION, THEN ANOTHER AND ANOTHER, UNTIL FIRE’S DONE HIS WORST EVERYWHERE! DON’T YOU SEE THE PATTERN? IT’S HIS MEDDLING, I TELL YOU!

  BUT STILL, WE MUST DO WHAT WE CAN FOR LADY ROSE.

  As if to prove Lady Water’s prediction, a new and louder commotion breaks out at the stone arch leading to the city. Part of the dog pack streams in, howling an alarm. They sweep around and pile back out again, setting up such a racket in the outer castle yard that it echoes through the gate like the baying of a thousand dogs. Margit abandons her celebrating immediately. She kisses her daughters, grabs her bow, and sprints for the opening with Lily quick behind her. The other women pull back toward the house in a protective circle, shoving the weakest into the center.

  What could cause the dogs to raise such a ruckus? Erde fears the worst. She shrinks against the arbor entrance, praying that Fra Guill hasn’t found a way to bring his fiendish army through the portal in the Grove. For surely, then, all will be lost.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The sofa is soft and deep. Paia sinks into it as into warm bathwater, giving in to its soothing, enveloping suspension. But her sleep is restless. She’d hoped for oblivion, the luxury of not thinking. Instead, she gets dreams.

  She dreams of all the baggage she’s left behind, way too heavy to carry on this perilous journey. Her habits and life in the Temple fill several sets of matched leather luggage. The longings she’s denied barely fit into a giant trunk. The fears she’s buried, so as not to be a burden in this crisis to those around her fit neatly into a metal attaché case, but it’s so leaden, she can’t even lift it. Stepping around the mountainous pile, she’s back in the closed safety of the Citadel, pacing its red-lined corridors, walking the cool stones of the Temple floor. She dreams of the routine of ritual, which she’d chafed at in boredom, and which now seems alluringly secure. She dreams of sheltering darkness, and of the rich comforts of her personal chambers. She dreams of being clean and fed and dressed and petted and cared for by a legion of servants and acolytes.

  Her dream is a nostalgic review of her life with the God.

  “You could have it all back again, my love. Exactly as it was before.”

  His voice purrs in her ear, rough velvet sliding over steel, the most intimate of whispers, as if he lay next to her. It thrills her to hear it again. Despite all, she has missed him. Paia tries to turn her head, to look at him. She can better gauge his true mood by what form he has taken. But this dream is the sort that prevents speech or movement. In her dream paralysis, she can only listen.

  “You’ve had your little adventure now, my sweet. Youthful rebellion, and all that. I’ve kept you too close to home, I see that now. But I knew I must guard my most precious treasure. I feared for your safety, my darling.”

  My darling. He’s never called her that before. Treasure. Paia can feel the warm stirrings of his breath on her ear, on the soft skin of her neck. Delicious. It distracts her from his casual dismissal of her soul-wrenching denial, from the accusations she should fling at him: liar, murderer, destroyer. How is he managing a true physical sensation?

  “Yes, my love, I am here beside you. You’ve missed me, come now, admit it. You know where you truly belong, don’t you?” His tone is endearingly unsteady, as if poised to say things he might regret, unguarded confessions of his need to have her back with him. “I won’t speak of Duty or the Devotion that you owe me as your God. I’ll speak of destiny. Our destiny, not the foolish plans of others. We are paired, you and I. Fated together. We have a kingdom to rule, once we defeat our enemies, and you shall rule it with me, not as my Priestess, but as my Queen.”

  Yes, but he talks to me as if I was still a child. And yet . . . his Queen. Images of pomp and splendor parade before her eyes. His lips enclose her earlobe. Paia cannot move away from or toward him. Her breath quickens.

  His laugh is boyish, boastful with delight. “Ah, did I not tell you I’d thought of ways for us to become closer? So much closer, my darling.”

  The long weight of his body moves against her, fitting its nakedness to hers. Broad hands touch her, a man’s hands, without scales. But she feels the delicate drag of curved fingernails across her skin. Poised between astonishment and delight, Paia wonders fleetingly if they’re gilded, as his always are in man-form.

  “It’s so simple,” he murmurs. “I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it before. In life, I cannot manage substance in any form that would . . . ah . . . fit with yours. But in dreams, ah, in dreams I can provide any sort of satisfaction. Unimaginable pleasures, my darling.”

  He begins his sensual ministrations with his mouth and tongue. Still she cannot move or return his caress. She can only respond with the rising clangor of her body, as he wakens it to ecstasy.

  How like him, she thinks, in the moment before delirium drowns out reason. How like my beloved, broken God, my Fire, to invent an idea of lovemaking that only works one way. In that moment, her most profound feeling for the great golden dragon, the scourge of the world, is pity.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Paia stirs, and N’Doch moves away hastily. He realizes he’s been humming faintly, under his breath. She shouldn’t know how close he’s been watching. Watching and humming. What’s that tune? He’s lost it now. He glances toward Djawara, snoozing in his straight-backed chair by the window. Old people and babies, he marvels. They can fall asleep anywhere.

  He folds himself into an overstuffed armchair. He doesn’t recall there being any furniture like this at the Rive. The upholstery is a maroon cut-velvet, like some rich matron’s boudoir. Big, soft cushions—supposed to be comfortable, but if you’re as tall as N’Doch is, they make your arms and legs stick out all over the place. He plants his elbows on his knees, which feel too close to his chin. He feels gawky and aroused, a combination he’s not at all happy with. He’s humming again. Is this some new nervous tic? Paia’s eyes open. She blinks at him, still sensuous with sleep. In the dim, shuttered light of the café, she is unbearably lovely.

  “Musta been one hell of a dream you had,” he says for openers. He adds an evil grin to hide his self-consciousness.

  “Dream. Yes.” She seems to be struggling to remember.

  “Dreaming of Dolph, I bet.”

  She looks away, down, then back at him. Despite her moist aura of slaked desire, her regard is bleak. N’Doch might almost say, tragic. “It was
n’t.”

  He laughs and wriggles his eyebrows, trying to cheer her. “Maybe it was me, then.”

  She smiles sadly, as if he’s offered the sweetest sort of false compliment, and then the smile is gone. She sits up, brushing back her damp hair, straightening her clothes as if surprised to find them there at all.

  “Okay, I give up. Who’s the lucky man of the hour? Was it . . . Papa Dja?”

  She will not be jollied. He can see there’s a war going on in her head, and his questions are a distraction. But maybe not entirely unwelcome. “Not a man at all.”

  N’Doch takes about a half a second. Then he gets it. Uh-oh. No wonder her eyes looks so haunted. “You have dreams like that about him?” he blurts before he can stop himself.

  Her glance slips toward Djawara. She’s clearly relieved to find the old man sleeping. “Was it so obvious?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Now it’s his turn to look away. “Oh, yeah. Phew. Complicated relationship.”

  Paia stares down at her hands, lacing and unlacing her slender fingers, soft and well cared for but no longer so clean. “It was his dream, really. He’s trying to woo me back to him.”

  Again, it takes him a while. He’s not usually so slow on the uptake, but often Paia speaks as if, since her history has been revealed to him in the Meld, her moment-to-moment thought process will be equally apparent and understood. “You’re saying the Fire dude sent this dream? Ordered it up and sent it?”

  “I could never have invented it on my own,” she murmurs.

  He tries his grin again. “Lot of women have told me their dreams are way better than the real thing.”

  “But I know nothing of such things!” Her cry is raw with both shame and regret. Her hands wring themselves into tightening knots. “He never let me have real lovers. In this dream, I wasn’t even allowed to participate! He just did things to me!”

  “Hey, every once in a while, that’s a nice way to go.”

  She glares at him. He sees his attempts at humor are coming off as insensitive. He tries to figure out how he could gracefully slide over onto the sofa next to her. But it’s the wrong time to take advantage of a girl, when she’s so worked up and vulnerable. He reaches over to untangle the furious maze of her fingers and ends up holding her hands instead. “Easy, now. At least it was only a dream.”

  “But that’s just it!” She grasps his hands as if she could force a fuller understanding into him by the strength of her grip. “I don’t know that. I could feel him . . . touching me. I could really feel it!”

  “Dreams always seem real while you’re dreaming ’em.”

  “No, at first it was like it always was. Like putting your hand in a flame. Heat, no substance. Then it seemed that the more I wanted him to touch me, the more real he became. In the end, he . . .”

  N’Doch frees his hands, holds up both palms. “Whoa, girl. I don’t wanna hear the details. I’m no kinda saint, y’know.”

  “N’Doch, please, don’t you hear what I’m saying?” She leans toward him as he pulls away. Beneath her soft shirt, her breasts mound invitingly between her hunched shoulders.

  “Yeah,” he retorts. “The Fire dude made love to you long-distance, and you feel bad ’cause you liked it.”

  “No! Well, not only. It’s . . . what if it’s my desire that makes him real?”

  “Okay. Lemme think about that.” N’Doch is struggling to master his own desire. He knows it’s making him stupid. He wishes she’d sit back and leave him alone. “Why should it matter, as long as it’s still a dream?”

  “But what if it isn’t?”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “Just a dream.” Not only does she not sit back, she slides to the floor in front of him with her hands on his knees. “What if my desire acts as another kind of . . . portal? Allowing him to physically manifest in human form? He’s never been able to do that before.”

  N’Doch doesn’t move a muscle. There’s a song rising in the back of his brain, for the first time since he left his dragon behind. “So what you’re saying is, Fire comes to you in a dream, transports you to the heavenly spheres, then when he’s done, he gets out of bed and wanders over to the bar to have a beer with me.” And all I get to do is watch, he thinks, but doesn’t add.

  “Except that having a beer is not what he’s most likely to do with you!”

  N’Doch remembers the gilt-scaled giant in his cloak of fire up on the mountaintop, his scimitar claw aimed at Köthen’s neck. “No, I suppose not.”

  “And he’d be able to do it this time. He wouldn’t need a proxy hit man like your Kenzo Baraga.”

  Now there’s an image that’s a real turnoff. N’Doch feels his lust seeping away, allowing room in his brain for the fuller implications of what she’s said. The inner music he’s been hearing fades. He scrubs his face with his hands. “That might not be good.”

  “No.” Paia slumps back against the base of the sofa as if she’s spent herself in struggle. The bleakness is back in her eyes again. “Maybe you should make love to me. Then I won’t be so lustful anymore.”

  N’Doch stares at her through the web of his fingers.

  “I mean, of course it should be Dolph, but he’s not here and . . .”

  Her gaze lifts to meet his, veiled by shining hair and luxurious lashes, sultry with promise. N’Doch drops his hands, struck breathless by the hot flush of desire racing through him, searing away his will. Then he sees the bright tongues of flame leap in her eyes. He’s not so stupid after all. He understands who he’s really staring at. Like a dry wind in the desert, the presence resonates in all the hollow spaces his own dragon left behind.

  “Whoa,” he says. “No way.”

  Her face twists. The flames flare defiantly and die. He knows he’s had a close call, but there’s no struggle. N’Doch senses the shadow departing, like a whiff of smoke, and understands another, more puzzling thing. The bleakness in Paia is not her own. It’s Fire’s.

  Paia shakes her head as if she’s just dropped off to sleep again and waked with a start. “What?”

  “You’re asking me?” Suddenly he’s glad that his friend, his hero the good baron, is a time warp away from this woman. She could eat the man alive. She carries a dragon within her. N’Doch should know. So does he. At least, he hopes to, soon again. But there’s a difference. Paia’s dragon feels he has nothing left to lose. “Didn’t quite leave him behind, did you.”

  She flicks a wary glance around the café. She doesn’t ask who. “Why? What happened?”

  “An interesting little sleight of hand. Well, sleight of body’s more like it. He tried to woo us both at once.”

  “He?”

  “The Fire dude.”

  She starts, convincingly. “He was here?”

  “Don’t you remember?” He’s sure she does, but he humors her, to spare her pride. “Seems he convinced you it might be a bright idea to seduce me.” He sees her whole body recoil. With shame, he hopes, not with horror. Maybe she really doesn’t remember. “Hey, don’t worry. It didn’t go far. He gave himself away too easily.”

  She looks like she’s afraid to ask. “How?”

  “He was in your eyes. Did you know he could do that? I mean, you know . . . use you that way?”

  “I, ah . . . he never has before. At least, not that I . . .”

  N’Doch watches what’s left of her self-possession collapse. Body, face, her entire being goes limp. All her actions, past and present, are suddenly up for question.

  “How . . . how will I ever know?”

  How will any of us know, he wonders. Not just about Paia. About ourselves. Four people bonded to mythical creatures driven by alien agendas and protocols. He recalls the exact instant he let his dragon into his soul. The song he sang then wasn’t an act of love or selflessness, though he did it to lend her his strength. It was more like surrendering to an inevitability. “You’ll know ’cause I’ll tell you,” he says. “That’s why there’s four of us, I guess. So we can keep each other
honest.”

  He’s grasping at straws, but Paia seems grateful for the effort. She stops shuddering uncontrollably. “I can never be alone, then.”

  N’Doch has a leap of intuition that skews his take on things abruptly enough to leave him faintly dizzy. And hating it that once more he has to buy into all this mystical symmetry of events. “And that’s why Dolph came along. So you don’t have to be.”

  She smiles wanly. “I wish he was here now.”

  “He probably does, too.” He says it to reassure her, but it makes him nervous again for Köthen, who has no dragon to protect him. Then he takes another leap. It’s like a lyric writing itself in his head. Part of the epic he could sing about the dragon renegade and his beautiful priestess. Colorful. Dramatic. Even, in a perverse sort of way, romantic. Villains have been some of his most inspiring subjects. “He’s not real happy, your man Fire.” It sounds silly, now that he’s said it, talking that way about a devious, inhuman, fire-breathing murderer. “I mean . . .”

  “I know.” Paia seems eager to talk about her dragon. She hasn’t had much of a chance, N’Doch realizes, to download how she feels about all of this. “He’s never been reasonable. He’s angry all the time. I just took it for granted.” She looks up, caught in an insight of her own. Her tears reflect the gray daylight. “An angry god. I guess it just seemed fitting, after all the horrors of the Collapse. What other kind of god could you believe in, after that?”

  “He’s like the black sheep younger son, maybe?” A little like me, N’Doch admits privately. “The one who’s sure the older ones got something he didn’t get, so he figures he’s got a right to go out and take what he wants to make up for it.”