Elizabeth Haydon - The Assassin King

It had only taken a few moments, long enough for the sound of the horses’ hooves to die away into the night. Then within his consciousness he felt rather than heard a deep caterwaul, the keening of a beast that had had something stolen from its hoard. Even deeper within, he could feel the tearing of his soul, in the fairly recently mended place where it had been sewn back together again when he was reunited with Rhapsody.

When the first night without her fell, Ashe took comfort in sitting before the fire that reminded him of his wife and looking back over the haze of time to a different world, a place where he had been happy. It was a time before the War, before the Cataclysm, even before the two Bolg who saw Rhapsody as belonging originally to them, and viewed him as an interloper by virtue of his marriage to her.

When he closed his eyes, he could still see her as she had been then, on the night before her fourteenth birthday, dressed in a simple velvet gown, her breast adorned by a corsage of simple flowers her father had given her. She had been thin then and slight, with long straight hair that hung down her back like a silken wave. Ashe smiled, remembering his first sight of her, crouched behind a row of barrels in the dark outside the fore-harvest dance, an event where the people of her human father’s farming community had held a marriage lottery, the traditional selection of marriage for the young people of their village. How he had come to be in that place he still did not know, even millennia later. He had been but fourteen himself, an awkward adolescent boy walking to town on a fine morning on the other side of Time, almost fifteen hundred years after Rhapsody’s birth. What had transpired was still unclear; the wind had been fresh, the morning birds had been in full song, the day had been beautiful. A day like any other day.

And then, the world had shifted.

Ashe could almost still recall the exact sensation of nausea and weakness that swept over him as he was plucked from the place he had been and deposited in the afternoon sun in a farmer’s pasture in the village of Merryfield, a simple farming town in the center of the Wide Meadows, in the eastern lands of the Island of Serendair. Raised in the presence of magic and beings with ancient powers, he had recovered his composure fairly quickly, and managed to discover approximately where he was in time, if not how he had come to be there. All of this had led him to the foreharvest dance, and to the side of the girl hiding in an alleyway, wistfully listening to the music as it played within the lighted grange hall, resisting every attempt to marry her off in the traditional ceremonies. He had fallen in love with her from the moment he’d seen her, not just because she was fair and because all the chemicals of his young body had begun to hum with life upon beholding her, but because there was something so ethical, so independent and intelligent in her resistance to being used as chattel that he could not help but respect her, even without having been introduced. Eventually he’d worked up his courage enough to tap her on the shoulder, to ask her to dance in the light reflecting from the hall, to walk with her to her family’s fields where the willow tree she had loved stood guard over a valley stream. Ashe closed his eyes more tightly, listening to the music of the water in his head. The extravagant capability of detail bequeathed to him by his dragon nature allowed him a heightened sense of memory; in many ways it was like reliving that night again, feeling the coolness of the breeze, sensing the brightness of the stars, physically recalling the way her hair smelled like morning, the glow in her eyes that sparkled brighter as she talked about things that excited her, unrealistic dreams of escaping the marriage lottery and traveling the world, seeing the ocean that her grandfather had plied as a sailor, something that she longed for but never had done. And above all, he remembered the way she talked about her dreams, of stars falling from the sky into her hands, holding them fast until one day she could hold no longer, and instead they dropped through her open palms into the meadow stream, glimmering up at her, beyond her reach in the depths.

He had resolved in that moment to fulfill those dreams for her, to marry her, with her excited consent, and to take her from the farmlands off to see the world. His reason for that was twofold. Whether or not he could ever get back his own time was of little interest to him; rather, he had determined that whatever force had brought him over the waves of time to be by her side had placed him in the time before the Cataclysm, just as the war that would tear the Island of Serendair asunder was beginning to erupt. If for no other reason, they had to go away in haste, lest his newly-found soulmate become nothing more than one more victim in two of history’s greatest tragedies. She had called him Sam, the common appellation by which unknown young men were addressed in her town. He had never been given the chance to tell her his real one; it was an endearment she still used. Her voice resounded clear in his memory. Sam?

Yes?

Do you think we might see the ocean? Someday, I mean.

He had promised her they would, had promised to take her wherever she wished to go, but before they could put their plans in place he was torn back to his own time by whatever unseen hands had placed him there to begin with.

Ashe winced in the flickering heat of the flames. The hollow pain of loss was with him still, even after four years of having her back, even having joined their souls together again. Even knowing that she loved him eternally.

Even sharing a child with her, a son he loved beyond measure and had barely been given a chance to know. That loss was one he consciously struggled not to think about, because his draconic nature was unpredictable enough, and suffering enough, that he could not risk it. In the back of his mind a tune was playing. It was a song that Rhapsody had often sung to him on their evenings alone together, a tale of a wanderer that her seafaring grandfather had taught her when she was a child. When she had met up with him again in the new world, he had been solitary, in pain and alone, just such a wanderer, so it had reminded her of him, and of the tree they had fallen in love beneath. Ashe pictured her before him, her harp or concertina in hand, singing the melodious tune in the voice that haunted his dreams.