Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

“They cannot fail,” he said in panic. “I couldn’t stand it if she were to—I couldn’t bear it, not again. Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t they send word? I have a right to be there!”

Oelendra’s eyes opened wide in anger, and she rose to face him, unbridled rage in her voice. “A right? Ton have a right? What right? If anyone has a right to slaughter that damnable beast it is me! I have endured more of its evil than anyone living. If I can pass up the right to slay it, who are you to claim it?”

His voice shook. “That’s not what I meant,” he said frenetically. “I don’t care who kills the blasted thing, as long as it dies. The right I meant was my right to be at Rhapsody’s side when she faces it, in case—in case she fails.” His words trailed off into a whisper.

“Why?” Oelendra asked incredulously. “What claim do you have on Rhapsody or her choices? You gave up those claims when you married another.”

He shook his head, burying his face in his hands, trying to calm himself. “I have not given up those claims.”

The Lirin champion’s voice grew cold. “I believe I now have my answer to the second half of the question. You are more like your grandmother than I feared. Do you expect Rhapsody to be tied to you forever in spite of your marriage to someone else, someone highborn?” Ashe looked up at her. “Obviously she would never tell you, but you have hurt her as much as the loss of your father, the loss of Jo, perhaps even as much as the loss of her home, her life before this. She loved you, and you threw that away for power; your own or your father’s, it matters not. You are right; you didn’t deserve her. You have driven her into a loveless marriage; that is really what I came here to tell you.”

His face went white. “What?”

“You do know she is Queen of the Lirin now, don’t you?”

“ What ?”

“You didn’t hear? You didn’t know?”

Ashe shook his head. “No; I have been hunting down Lark, and Khaddyr’s other followers, all the way to the far border of the Nonaligned States. I heard the Lirin had crowned a queen; I always hoped Rhapsody would take the crown, but I also heard—” His voice choked off. “Heard what?”

“That the queen was accepting suit. I knew Rhapsody wouldn’t do that. It’s against everything she believes.” He closed his eyes in the pain of memory from a sweet summer night, a lifetime ago, in the old land. He could still see her, barely more than a child, crouched behind a row of barrels, hiding from the farm-lad suitors who were stalking her, hoping to win her in the village marriage lottery.

Doesn’t this all seem, well, barbaric to you? Well, yes, actually. Tes, it does. Well, then, imagine how I feel.

Oelendra smiled grimly. “What did you expect, that she would pine away for you, alone and unwed, forever? She has no choice but to marry, despite her wishes, just to placate the armies of her neighbors. Come, Gwydion, you know this drill; you were born into it. She needs a strong mate, and she has been left with a fairly grim choice, Anborn or Achmed. She has made that choice.”

The woods had grown very quiet. The air turned from chilly to cold. Oelendra looked into Ashe’s eyes and saw an unnatural glint, a light she recognized as the soul of the dragon, but it did not appear angry or ready to strike.

It was frightened.

She allowed her eyes to wander over the rest of his face, and saw the devastation of the human side of him as well. She had seen that look before; it was the face of a man who just realized he had lost everything.

Ashe stared blankly ahead of him, trying to drive the unbearable image of Rhapsody in Achmed’s arms from his mind. It was a picture that had haunted him every time she had made even a casual reference to the possibility.

You would never, well, mate with Achmed, would you? The thought has been churning my stomach for the last three hours.

You know, Ashe, I really don’t like your attitude. And frankly, it’s none of your business.

His stomach turned violently.

You never did answer my question about you and he.

What question?

About whether you would mate with Achmed — I mean marry him .

Maybe. As I told you, I don’t expect to marry anyone, but if I were to live that long, he is probably my best prospect.

“She—she cannot,” he said, trying to keep from retching.

Oelendra looked at him ruefully. “You have left her little choice. She needs an ally, a husband that none would dare to question. She has already spoken to Anborn and he has agreed. It will be a marriage with little love, a marriage of convenience. Unending agony for a woman like Rhapsody. Still,’twill solve her political problems, though it might add to yours. After all, Anborn has as clear a claim on the Lordship as you do, at least the Lordship of the First and Third Fleets. With Rhapsody thrown into the mix, he might feel more eager to press those claims.”

“Anborn can have the blasted Lordship! It’s Rhapsody I care about.”

Her voice was blistering. “You should have thought of that before you married someone else.”

“I didn’t marry anyone else.”

Oelendra blinked. “You told Rhapsody you were married, why would you lie about something like that?”

Ashe began to pace in a frenzy of anxiety. “I didn’t lie. I couldn’t lie, not to her. I just didn’t tell her who I was married to. I couldn’t, knowing that I was going to face Khaddyr. Not with the F’dor still out there, still knowing the taste of my soul. I have been using myself as bait to lure it into the open. What if I were to fail? What if I died? They could use that bond to find her, and they would take her. As long as Rhapsody doesn’t know, the bonds of wedlock are not binding. If I am captured or killed, they can’t use them against her. She will be safe.”

Oelendra put out her hands and stopped him in front of her. “Are you telling me that the woman you are married to is Rhapsody?”

Ashe fought back tears. “Yes. That night, that night in Elysian, when I told her of my father and his plans, that night when we discovered who we were, who we had been—we married that night. We stood together in the gazebo and took our vows and joined our souls forever. That was the other memory, the one I told you she had a right to know before others did. The memory of our marriage, our union.

“I have had to remain silent about it all this time, knowing that no one else alive knew of it, not even my wife, while all the time I was longing to tell the world. No one else knew. And now you tell me she has gone to face the F’dor? That she might never know who I am? What we were? That she might die, thinking that I wed another? That I abandoned her again? That I might lose her again? ”

Oelendra shook him gently. Gwydion’s eyes cleared slightly. “What are you talking about?” she asked, a hint of compassion in her voice for the first time that night. “What do you mean, abandon her again? Lose her again?”

He sat down disconsolately on the log and ran a hand over his shining hair, wet with frantic sweat. Oelendra sat next to him, gently patting his forearm to calm him. When he finally had control of himself again he told her the entire story of their meeting in the old world, of his grandmother’s deception, and all that happened since. He related the tale in excruciating detail, with the minutiae that only a dragon could remember, the aspects that only a man deeply in love would care about. Oelendra listened sympathetically until suddenly realization came over her face. Her hand, resting gently on his wrist, became a clutching claw. Gwydion’s tale ceased immediately, choked off by the look on her face.