Rose laughs, brushing aside her tears. “You are welcome, good mage!”
HURRY! HURRY!
“Good-byes, then.” The human niceties are deserting the Librarian as well now.
The stray horses are commandeered, good-byes said with silent, fervent hugs and the pressing of wet cheeks. The women mount up. Passing on her way to her horse, Rose stops before Fire.
“Perhaps this time, Lord Fire, we will be better able to live up to your high expectations of us.”
He inclines his golden head. “Good lady, I wish you all the success in the world.”
“Satirical,” she scolds him gently. “You lack faith.”
“You’re right. I do.”
HURRY! HURRY!
Djawara declines a mount, swearing he has never yet ridden a horse and is too old to start now. He embraces Erde, then his grandson, then turns away quickly to walk toward the road.
“You be good, Papa,” N’Doch calls after him softly.
Hal sees the women onto their horses, then grips Erde’s shoulders with both hands. “I swear you’re a foot taller than when we first met.”
“That was barely a season ago, dear knight.”
He smiles, then sobers. “There is no other way?”
“You of all know the answer. It is what we are.”
He nods, looking quite at a loss. He brushes a ragged fringe of curl back from her brow. “If I understand this right, you’re saving all our lives with this new . . . arrangement. Lives that, like a million others, would otherwise cease to exist at the moment of the Change.”
Erde’s sad face clears in a wide, joyous grin, as bright as summer sunrise. “Yes! I hadn’t thought of that! I guess we are! All the more reason!”
Hal presses his lips to her forehead. “Our thanks to you, lady of the dragons.”
Then he flings himself on his horse and leads his little band down the dark road back to Deep Moor.
The Eight are alone. Paia sighs. The wind whispers in the branches. Sedou calls down a brief shower to douse the campfires.
“Don’t want the place catching fire, after all,” N’Doch quips.
They have no further need of light. They are as aware of each other as if they stood in an open field at noon. They feel eternity coming upon them, as the inevitability that haunted Erde from the beginning, as the annihilation that N’Doch dreaded, as the Librarian’s perennial sense of drifting unmoored in time and space. But fear, dread, confusion . . . all that dissipates before the anticipated coming together. Union. Reunion. The joy of oneness.
Paia slides her arms around Fire’s waist and lays her head on his chest. She thinks he might push her away, not yet released of his rage and frustration. Instead, he draws her tightly against him, his breath hot on her neck.
“Alas, my Fire,” she whispers, for his ears only. “I fear you would rather be human.”
HURRY! HURRY!
Earth, Water, Air and . . .
Fire?
I am here.
It will be easy, Erde tells them fleetingly. It will be just like the Meld, except that it will. . . .
EPILOGUE
He knows they’ve succeeded when the pair of Tinkers comes bursting out of thin air, breathless, grinning like fools. They’ve barely greeted anyone before they’re dragging him and Cauldwell out of the room and down the corridor to the Great Hall with its wide windows overlooking the valley.
For a while they all stare through the dusty glass, and nothing happens. Leif starts muttering about getting back to work. Stokes dances up and down on his crooked hip, insisting, “Yu’ll see! Yu’ll see!”
At the first hint of change, Köthen understands she isn’t coming back, or she’d have come with Stokes and Luther. She’d have wanted to see this for herself, if there was any way she could have. He’ll ask Stokes later what’s happened to her. He’d had visions of a life, children. He doesn’t want to think about it now. Right now, the only thought he’s got room for is wonder.
They throw open the windows and hang out in the hot, dry gusts, gawking, pointing. The hint becomes a fuzz of amber softening the hills, which cools into pale yellow, then an undeniable haze of green. Green! As he watches the hard red rock smooth over with a patina of new life—lichens, grass, wildflowers, leaves—in his mind he’s seeing the snow melting on the battlefields, along the rutted roads, on the ramparts of Castle Köthen. He hopes Heinrich is alive to see it. And the brat. The two of them. What a pair.
Though it pains him to admit it, he’s grateful to the brat for yanking him out of what Constanze Cauldwell calls his “narcissistic descent into suicidal despair.” He shakes his head. He likes talking with Constanze. It’s like talking to another man, but . . . not quite. And these people have phrases and elaborate explanations for notions he’s never even thought of.
The valley below has become a vast windswept meadow. The sky is losing its ruddy glare. Beyond the crenellation of mountains, he sees the rounder profile of approaching clouds. Perhaps it will even rain. Rain! That thought makes him smile, and once he’s started, he can’t hold it back. His jaw just keeps spreading, his eyes crinkling, his mouth curling up, of their own accord. He knows what it is. It’s joy.
Adolphus Michael von Hoffman, Baron of Köthen, has long been a stranger to joy. But Dolph Hoffman thinks he’s willing to let it into his vocabulary.
He sees what’s happening, but he’ll never comprehend it. He’ll accept the reality of it, but never be able to quite encompass the possibility. Why bust his head about it? Instead, he mutters something soft and obscene. It snags Stokes’ attention, and they share a winner’s grin.
“Das sumpin, yah, Dolf?”
“Yah. Das sumpin.”
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The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet Page 41
