Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

Grunthor rose and collected the scroll from the king’s desk, and brought it to his bedside.

“Per’aps you should get some rest now, sir,” he admonished. “Oi’m sure you need it; Oi know Oi do, after be’olding you in all your splendor. In fact, Oi don’t expect to recover any time soon.”

For the first time since they had returned from the tunnels Achmed smiled.

“Just a quick scan, Sergeant,” he said, unrolling the scroll. Grunthor sighed and settled into the chair next to him; in his experience a quick scan lasted a minimum of two hours.

He had long since nodded off to sleep when he felt a change in the air of the room. He sat up immediately and turned to Achmed, who was sitting now at his writing desk, poring over the ancient parchment.

Grunthor stretched deeply. “Well?” he said in mid-yawn.

The Firbolg king’s eyes were bright with excitement as he turned around.

“I found it,” he said.

“And?”

“The horn—it is the Great Seal. It is the testament, the witnessing certification, of the covenant he forced all of them to enter in exchange for their new lives in this land.

“When the Three Fleets set sail, they did so with the understanding that they were traveling across the world for the purpose of keeping their Seren culture alive. This, presumably, in Gwylliam’s mind, was a culture that would maintain his birthrights. He didn’t want to just save his subjects, he wanted to save his own royalty in the process.”

He held the scroll up in the candlelight for Grunthor to see. The Sergeant peered over his shoulder at the illustrations of the horn and the docks of three port cities of Serendair.

“Apparently the price of gaining passage on the ships that left the old world ahead of the cataclysm was an oath, a promise to come in response to the call of this horn. Each refugee placed his hand on it as he boarded the ship, swearing fealty to Gwylliam, for himself and his heirs, throughout Time. The horn is the Seal of that promise. It must have been similar to Rhapsody’s Naming powers—the most solemn of oaths in the presence of unimaginable power, the rising of the Sleeping Child in the waters off the coast of the land where Time began, spoken by the high king of that land. That’s why the Cymrians, all generations of them, feel compelled to assemble in response to its call. All those ancient, powerful people, who have either sworn fealty on the horn, or whose ancestors did, will be tied, blood-deep, to the Summoner, with the most profound of loyalty oaths.” Grunthor nodded.

Achmed sat back in his chair and chuckled.

“And what’s so funny now, sir?”

The king rolled the manuscript up sharply and slapped it on the table.

“Rhapsody is going to sound it.”

From the earliest days of memory the legends told of the of the rampage of the wyrm Elynsynos, the tale of her laying waste to the western continent in her wrath upon the landing of the First Fleet.

When the Fleet disembarked, and Merithyn, the dragon’s explorer lover, was not among them, the stories said, Elynsynos gave vent to a great fireball of rage, roaring from inside her coppery belly, full of anger and destructive fury. The flames of that angry breath torched the primeval forest that surrounded the Great White Tree, igniting Gwynwood into walls of endless fire, destroying everything to the seacoast save for the Great White Tree itself, the upper branches of which were rumored to still contain the signs of soot and blackening fire.

The fire spread rapidly eastward, the legends recounted, until it reached the central province of Bethany, where it came in contact with the open vent to the center of the Earth, which ignited in a fiery geyser that roared into the night sky, visible for miles around. Blessedly, the elemental fountain also served as a firebreak, sparing the rest of the continent from the effects of the dragon’s wrath.

Khaddyr had always known the legends were lies. All of the Filids knew it as well; the forest of Gwynwood was a virgin wood, free of firestarters and other trees that would have sprung up from the ashes of so great a conflagration. There had never been a fire of any magnitude here, nothing that had even threatened a village or an outpost, just the occasional burning aftermath of lightning strikes and mishandled campfires and the destructive wake of attacks from Gwylliam’s forces in the Cymrian War. Only someone completely ignorant of woodcraft or forest lore would have believed the stories of the wyrm’s rampage.

He dreamt of the dragon’s fury nonetheless.

The keep of the Invoker was a strangely beautiful wooden palace that stood beneath, within, and above the trees at the edge of the forest that bordered the Circle. It was a living building, a place composed of both harvested wood and growing flora, an instrinsic part of the forest. The odd palace was one of the prizes of his new office, and Khaddyr had claimed it with relish.

The first time he had entered the ancient building as its master he had been filled with conflicting emotions—a heady excitement dampened intermittently by guilty dread. Like his father before him, he had grown up knowing this marvelous dwelling as Llauron’s home; his own visits to the keep were always at Llauron’s indulgence. There was something perversely satisfying about walking the twisting, polished hallways as its new lord.

Llauron’s longtime household servants, Gwen and Vera, had greeted him politely but coldly, refusing to meet his gaze but obeying his commands without question. On the first night, after he had ordered his supper, Khaddyr directed that the exquisitely carved bed in Llauron’s bedchamber be made up with fresh sheets of Sorbold linen, swallowing a chuckle at the undisguised expressions of horror that had beset the elderly women’s faces.

“Make certain the warming stones are between the sheets before I finish my after-supper cordial,” he had directed Vera. “The night wind is bitter. I want the bed to be cozy.”

To aid in achieving that end he had already selected a young acolyte, an especially comely woman he had instructed in the medical arts several seasons before, to help him celebrate his new freedom from the celibacy prescribed to him when he was still the Invoker’s Tanist. He had seen her ushered up the stairs before the meal began that first night, and was displeased by the resistance she had displayed. It appeared he would need to go over her lessons of obedience and servitude again.

Now each night when the weeping young woman was unbound from the bedropes and led away to her own chamber for the night, Khaddyr had settled back into deep, sated rest in the Invoker’s bed, silent and comforting. The voice of his master that had long haunted his mind was finally silent, no longer demanding the fulfillment of his instructions.

Everything had gone according to plan. Llauron was dead. The office of Invoker was his. The fornication was everything he had always dreamed it would be and more, coupled with the unexpected pleasure of power and victory over resistance. Khaddyr had discovered that pleading and cries for help only heightened the experience for him, and now slipped off into dark unconsciousness contemplating new methods to bring them about.

It was always after a particularly good climax that his visions of the dragon were especially intense.

In the darkness of his dreams the skies would turn bloody. He was at first convinced that this had been suggested to his unconscious mind by the stained sheets he had summoned Vera in the middle of the first night to change. But after that first delicious experience the image of the bloody sky remained in his nightmares, broken now with walls of flame reaching to the firmament of clouds that roiled with ash and smoke. His mind’s eye rose above the fire into the sky, fixing its gaze on a forest beyond the horizon.