Rhapsody’s face hardened, and she struggled to pull free of his grip again.
“So be it,” she gasped, her attempt to break his lock on her wrist futile. “If I was willing to die to keep you from disturbing the lore, what’s the sacrifice of a profession?”
Achmed released her arm with a violent toss.
“I repeat, you are keeping me from nothing,” he said harshly. “You are only missing the chance to keep the process from being haphazard. Let that be on your head.” He turned and started up the passage to the air again.
Rhapsody’s eyes opened wide with shock, the emerald green irises lightening to the color of spring grass. Achmed caught the change out of the corner of his eye. He recognized that look; it was the expression that came into Rhapsody’s eyes when she was afraid.
He stopped in the tunnel and opened his mouth to ask her what she feared more, his actions, or her inaction.
Then shut it abruptly at the sight of the bloody water gushing forth from her and pooling ominously on the floor of the cave at her feet.
Within a heart’s beat, the whole world seemed to change.
Rhapsody’s hand went to her belly, and her face contorted as she doubled over. She let loose a gasp of pain and shakily put out her hand to brace herself against the wall of the cave.
Achmed felt a sudden chill, an iciness as the heat in the tunnel dropped suddenly and dissipated. His anger melted away, leaving him dizzy; he seized Rhapsody’s arm and discovered that her body was cold, as if the core of elemental fire burning within her had been snuffed.
The air in the tunnel crackled statically; the dragon appeared, sliding over the pile of silver like liquid lightning. Her multitoned voice resonated in the water and walls of the cave.
“Pretty?”
Rhapsody struggled to remain standing, but her legs buckled beneath her, and she slid to the floor. She opened her mouth to form words, but then her face contorted in pain and she gasped again.
“Your husband comes,” the dragon said, her voice solid and resolute as the ages, but Achmed could see consternation glittering in the beast’s prismatic eyes. “I sense him at the stream’s edge, less than a league away.”
Rhapsody’s eyes met the Bolg king’s. “Krinsel,” she whispered. “Please.”
Achmed fought back the acid in his throat. He slid his hand down the length of Rhapsody’s arm into her own and squeezed it; he released it and bent to the floor, dipping the edge of his robe in her blood. Then he ran back up the tunnel.
He found the midwife at the cave’s mouth. The command to run and aid Rhapsody he gave in Bolgish, as it was a terse and guttural tongue that required little effort to speak. As the woman hurried into the glowing darkness, Achmed exhaled sharply, then stepped out of the cave and held the edge of his cloak aloft in the wind.
He waited impatiently, long enough for the scent of the blood to catch the wind, then turned and hurried back into the dark belly of the dragon’s lair.
Two miles away at the edge of the tributary of the Tar’afel, Ashe paused from drawing water and rose. He cast the droplets in his hand to the snowy ground, where they refroze into crystals of ice, and ran the back of his sleeve across his face to clear his nose and eyes.
Within him his dragon sense expanded, rising from its dormancy. The minutiae of the world around him became mammoth; suddenly he was aware of the tiniest of details, the infinitesimal threads of light and sound that made up all the individual things that existed beneath the sun, that stood separate from the wind that blanketed the earth. Every blade of frozen grass in every thawed circle below every leafless tree, every feather on every winter bird that flew above him, every ice-covered branch of every bush was suddenly clear to him, or at least to the ancient beast in his blood.
On the wind he could count the drops of blood he recognized more surely than he knew his own name.
And more—there was blood mixed with hers that echoed his own.
Ashe turned in that instant and surveyed the land between where he stood and the dragon’s cave. Two miles as the raven flies, he thought, forcing down the fear that was rising within him the way his dragonsense had the moment before. At least ten to ford the river at a low enough place and then circumvent the thickest parts of the virgin forest, where no path had ever been blazed, and where snow still lingered.
The woodlands around him appeared for a split second in his mind to be filled with obstacles that separated him from his treasure, snow-covered deadfalls and white hillocks, hummocks and knolls that barricaded the forest with thick frost that had melted to mere frosting at the onset of Thaw.
And then suddenly the obstacles fell into place as his dragon sense took on a new dimension. No longer confined to being just an awareness, his dragon nature took over, and that side of him rose, rampant, struggling within him no more, but rather asserting itself over nature and the earth around him. A path gleamed in his mind like a beacon, an ethereal guide to Elynsynos’s cave.
And as his wyrm nature took over, Ashe felt a loosening of the reins of control that he kept so tightly inside of himself, a calling to the power of the elements all around him.
His body remained human for the moment, even though his conscious mind was now draconic. He began to run, straight into the tree wall before him that kept him separated from what the dragon in his soul considered its treasure.
His wife and unborn child.
Bend to me; let me pass, the multitoned voice within his soul commanded.
And the earth obeyed.
Trees shrugged in the wind, their trunks bending at barely possible angles to clear the path. Mounds of snow-covered brush parted; the muddy ground hardened in places before him, all in response to the lore of the earth from which his ancestors had sprung. The forest, suddenly silent, seemed to hold its breath as the man who raced through it dragged power from the air around him, passing through the greenwood as if it were nothing more than wind.
Leaving it crackling, dry, a moment later, as if his presence had stripped the life right out of it.
As he ran, all of the thought went out of Ashe’s conscious mind, sinking deeper into the primal nature of the dragon in his blood, until the solitary thought—the need to get to Rhapsody—consumed his entire being. That primacy gave him greater speed, and before he knew it he was standing at the mouth of Elynsynos’s lair, panting from exertion and sweating in terror.
At the cave entrance his dragon sense was suddenly, rudely slapped away, forced into sharp submission by the greater lore that was extant in the place. Ashe blinked, then listened. From the depths of the cave he could hear a keening wail, the sobbing of pain and despair in a voice that he knew well. The sound of the agony made his blood turn cold; his skin prickled in sweat and nausea threatened to consume him.
Standing before him in the cave’s mouth was a Bolg woman, a dark and somber-faced midwife he vaguely remembered Rhapsody introducing to him years before. In Bolgish culture the midwives held a special place of power; the Bolg believed that infants were to be given the best of their crude medical care because they represented the future, even while Ylorc’s warriors of great skill and accomplishment might be left to bleed to death of their wounds. The midwives were an iron-fisted lot, a dominant political faction even in Achmed’s new order, a silent, stern-demeanored group of women who were rarely known to show emotion or distress.
So it was even more disconcerting to see the expression of stoic fear in the eyes of the woman standing before him.