Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

Gwydion looked her over thoughtfully, then took her hand and led her ° back into the bedroom and over to the bed. “Here, lie down,” he said soothingly, “let me see if I can detect anything.” She climbed on top of the coverlet and lay back on the pillows while he sat down beside her, resting his hand on her flat stomach. There was no hint of swelling whatsoever.

He took his time, checking her over carefully with every divining sense of his dragon nature, but it only confirmed what he had known from the beginning; she was unaltered. He had memorized every detail of her, to the core of her essence as only a dragon could, and knew irrefutably that she was not pregnant or carrying anything living inside her. There was, however, an infinitesimal trace of something tainted in her blood, growing less with each beat of her heart, as if the endless circulation of her blood was dissolving it. In addition, there was a glow within her that he couldn’t identify, a diffuse energy; perhaps it was her tie to the element of fire. He smiled reassuringly at her, hoping to dispel the look of uncertainty in her eyes.

“Tell me what the demon said when this happened,” he said gently.

She thought for a moment. “ ‘Virack urg caz,’” she said, shuddering at the memory. “Then he said, ‘conceive.’ After that, he said ‘ Merlus ,’ or something like it, and then said, ‘grow.’”

A shiver ran momentarily down Ashe’s back. “All right, darling, let me assure you, there is nothing growing inside you anymore.”

Rhapsody began to tremble. “Anymore?”

Gwydion stroked her arm. “Well, there never was anything real there at all. You know that there are various ways that the F’dor can possess someone, like the soldiers who only did its bidding once and didn’t remember?” She nodded. “The demon undoubtedly knew it was trapped, and that it was dying, so in a last effort to save itself it planted a seed, not the seed of a child, but the seed of a doubt. It had been priming you, talking to you all along; it knew the vibrations of your brain and what it would take to make you believe something; F’dor, as you know, invented deception. But you see, Rhapsody, because you are a Namer, you are particularly vulnerable to something like that. How many times have you told me that you prefer to believe what you want and then make it happen, rather than accept what is?”

It’s probably better if you don’t even try to understand it.

You’re probably right. I think it’s better for me to just decide how things are going to work out, and then they will.

“Yes,” she admitted reluctantly.

Gwydion caressed her face. “In a way, you invited him in, and you didn’t even know it,” he said gently, trying to ease the frightened look out of her face. “Once you believed he might be telling the truth, you gave him entry, and then, in a way, he was telling the truth. He possessed a small piece of you, and the more you believed it, the more he owned. The seeds of doubt were growing. Eventually, if you had stopped wondering and decided it was true for certain, he would have possessed your soul; you would have been his completely.”

He stroked her stomach as he saw it begin to clench. “The good news is, now that the belief has been eradicated, so has the possession. In a way, your hope, or faith, saved you. And ever since you’ve discovered the truth, each breath you’ve taken, each beat of your heart, has cleansed your body of the vestiges of that possession. Now you’re free of it. You belong totally to yourself again.”

Rhapsody smiled. She took his hand and kissed it. “Not true,” she said. “I belong totally to you.”

Gwydion grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said mischievously, leaning over her. “Why do you think I had you lie down on the bed?”

She pulled him to her and kissed him, encircling him with a slender leg. “Let me see if I can guess.”

Oven as far from the Moot as she was, she could still hear the sounds of shrieking and merrymaking, could still see the bonfire’s roaring flames flickering against the dark sky in the distance. The wind that blew around the rise of the swale on which she stood carried with it the smell of embers and the taste of a bitter Past made sweet again by hope.

Anwyn stared down at the horn in her hands. Even in the absence of the moon’s light it gleamed, like a luminous pearl in the darkness. Its metal was still warm, doubtless residual heat from the woman who had usurped its usage, had pressed her perfect mouth to it and summoned Anwyn’s own people to her feet. Of course they had been compelled to come. None that sailed from Serendair, nor those of their blood who came after them, could resist the command of the horn; Gwylliam had made certain of it.

It was no excuse, not for the betrayal she had suffered.

No excuse whatsoever.

She closed her eyes and held the horn aloft, stretching out her arms to the starlit darkness of the sky.

The words of the upstart wench came back to her now, blowing in the laughing wind of night, drunk with celebration.

Anwyn ap Merithyn, tuatha Elynsynos, I rename you The Past. Your actions are out of balance. Henceforth your tongue will only serve to speak of the realm into which your eyes alone were given entry. That which is the domain of your sisters, the Present and the Future, you will be unable to utter. No one shall seek you out for any other reason, so may you choose to convey your knowledge better this time, lest you be forgotten altogether.

The Seer began to laugh. At first the mirth came forth as a chuckle, then a gasp. Then she threw her head back and roared with merriment, maniacal as her sister Manwyn, but far more insidious. She laughed until it would have been impossible to tell if she were screeching with glee or shrieking in madness, though no living soul could hear her above the bellowing of the bonfires that still filled the Moot with dancing light.

Henceforth your tongue will only serve to speak of the realm into which your eyes alone were given entry.

Anwyn clutched the horn even tighter, her searing blue eyes gleaming in the darkness as they opened.

-

“Very well,” she said aloud. “As you command, Your Majesty.” need your memories , the demon-spirit had whispered from within the fire. Her own reply blended into the bristling wind. “I understand,” she said.

Anborn was in an unusually good mood as he rode west across the foothills to the broad expanse of the Krevensfield Plain. Considering the way the day had started, and what had transpired, it was a refreshing surprise to see how well things had turned out.

It had been many centuries since the Lord Marshal could remember feeling so free, so burdenless. The wind was high, the night clear and starry, the damp air of near-morning filled with the fresh scent of summer tinged with the sharp odor of smoke from distant bonfires. Anborn pulled the helmet from his head and set it before him, running his hands through his streaming hair. The smooth gait of the horse, the pounding against the earth beneath them—there were still things in life to be cherished after all.

After so many centuries of disillusionment, the vault of stone around his heart had shattered at last. Anborn had been an idealist in youth; he remembered the intensity with which he had once lived life, the deathless vows he had made early in his martial training to uphold the statutes of the Kinsmen, the ancient brotherhood of warriors to which he sought inclusion. All of that impassioned commitment had died on the battlefields of the Great War, along with his soul—or so he had presumed.

He remembered the words of his instructor in the sword, Oelendra Andaris. I serve no Lord, no Lady, only a people , she had said. When those that would lead would also serve, then shall I swear fealty to a crown. Only then . For both of them, Anborn and Oelendra, both Kinsmen, both irreparably scarred by a war, the time had come to believe again. Like the coming dawn, perhaps peace was on the horizon.