The snow muted the sun’s light as it hung over the edge of the world, pausing as if reconsidering its descent.
With the last measure of her strength, the beast pulled herself up from the chasm, over the ice-covered battlements that scored the mountaintop in wide, frozen rings, to rest on the flat, cold ground outside the walls.
The word that had been driving her on, inspiring her to fight off the sleep that hovered on the edge of her consciousness and the numbness of her limbs, echoed in her brain, growing louder as she climbed.
Home.
She stopped and wearily inclined her head, her three-chambered heart thudding loudly.
Above her in the snowy air a castle reached to the clouds, formed of marble that had long ago been coated with so much ice as to appear chiseled from it. The three towers loomed above her in haughty splendor, unchallenged in the winter sky.
Home. Home. Home.
The dragon’s eyes opened slowly, widely, the vertical pupils that scored the searing blue iris contracting in the last of the afternoon light, drinking in the sight of the vast fortress and with the sight, the memory of it.
In her foggy mind the pieces of those memories were scattered in the dark corners, confused. Slowly, however, they seemed to crawl together and form a clearer picture.
The first memory that returned was an old one, the sight of the castle as she had first beheld it in her exile. She had come to believe she might have been a queen at one time, or a woman of some kind of import, because even as she had been walked to the edge of the icy slopes by someone whose face had not yet come into the picture, even as he had turned and left her in the blinding snow, alone for all time, her back had remained straight, her head unbowed.
As the wyrm stared up at the frost-covered crenulations, the icy windows glazed over so thickly that sunlight would never again pass through them clearly, the towers piercing the clouds above, the images continued to return. She could now recall years of being alone in the cavernous halls that lay beyond the gates, the silence of her marble prison broken only by the echoes of her own footsteps and the crackling of the fires that burned in the mammoth hearths. Each century, each year, each day, even down to the hour came slowly back to her, her dragon blood surging with each beat of her heart, recalling the infinitesimal details as none other than a wyrm could recall, obsessing over them as none but a wyrm could obsess.
They exiled me to this place, she thought bitterly, an anger whose source she could still not remember burning in her blood now. Left me alone in the cold mountains, alone with nothing but memories. And now someone has taken even those from me.
At that thought, another image began to form in her mind. It was of a face, a woman’s face, though she could not make it out completely. A woman with golden hair and emerald green eyes, though little else was clear.
At the edges of the dragon’s mind, the fire of hate began to burn again. She still did not know who the woman was, or why her own caustic blood boiled with fire at the thought of her, but she knew that the memory would return eventually.
And when it did, she vowed that all the unspent fire, all the contained hate, would be unleashed in a thunderous fury that would rock the very foundations of the world, cracking the endless ice into hoary dust and shattering even the marble walls of the prison that was her home, her lair.
The beast crawled on toward the castle, seeking shelter from the coming night.
4
Gwydion Navarne waited anxiously in the opulent hallway outside the doorway of the Great Hall of Haguefort, the rosy-stoned castle that was his ancestral home. His sixteen years had been marked by loss, first of his mother, then his father, and scarred by near-loss as well, so whenever the doors closed on the place where critical discussions were undertaken and decisions of great import were made, leaving him out in the corridor, it made him anxious.
He was particularly nervous now, given that his guardians, the Lord and Lady Cymrian, had gone to great lengths to include him in virtually every decision of state that had been made since his father’s death three years prior. That they had politely requested he remain outside during their discussions was upsetting, though he told himself there was no reason for it to be. He trusted both his godfather and his godfather’s wife, the woman who had adopted him as an honorary grandchild, implicitly. Somehow, despite that trust, his nerves were on edge this morning.
His anxiety deepened into genuine dismay as one by one his guardians’ most trusted advisors began to arrive in the corridor outside the Great Hall. Each was announced, and quickly admitted, while Gwydion continued to cool his heels on the thick carpet of woven silk.
Finally, when a familiar advisor entered the corridor, Gwydion intervened. That he chose to approach Anborn, the great Lord Marshal and General during the Cymrian War, was less because the man had been a mentor of sorts to him than because the Cymrian hero was lame. Anborn had to be carried in on a litter, there had been a delay in his announcement, and so Gwydion seized the opportunity to speak to him before he entered the Hall.
“Lord Marshal! What is going on in there?” he asked, coming alongside the litter and interposing his body between it and the doorway.
Anborn signaled to the soldiers who bore the litter to set him down and step away. His azure eyes, blue in the color of the Cymrian dynastic line, blazed beneath his wrinkled brow in a mixture of annoyance, amusement, and fondness.
“How would I know, you young fool? I haven’t even made it past the door, thanks to you. Move aside, and then perhaps I will have an idea.”
“Will you come back out once you do know and tell me, then?” Gwydion pressed. “If Rhapsody and Ashe have invited you to confer, the subject must be of great importance.”
The general shook his mane of dark hair streaked with the silver of age and snorted.
“Certainly, though I doubt I am going to stay for much of the discussion. Where you attend a trade apprenticeship is of little interest to me.”
Gwydion’s face contorted in shock as the icy horror took hold of his viscera.
“A trade apprenticeship? They are sending me away to be apprenticed? Please say it isn’t so.”
The general signaled to his litter bearers. “All right, then. It isn’t so. Now move out of the way, cur, and let me get this cursed conference over with so that I might get back to more useful pursuits—training my men, cleaning my boots, picking my nostrils, moving my bowels—anything other than this folderol.”
“Apprenticed?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, buck up, boy,” the General said as the soldiers lifted his litter. “Going away to continue your education is a necessary part of your training to be duke one day. Your own father was apprenticed to any number of different masters in his youth. You will survive and be better for it.” The doors opened; the General’s litter was carried into the Hall, and the doors shut decisively behind him.
Gwydion sank onto a bench of carved mahogany and groaned.
“What’s the matter?”
He looked up to see Melisande, his nine-year-old sister, watching him, concern in her dark eyes. Gwydion smiled quickly.
“Perhaps nothing, Melly,” he said reassuringly. Melisande had suffered many of the same tragedies he had suffered, but she was much younger. It had been an unspoken agreement between Gwydion and his guardians that her life be made as stable and free from worry as possible.
“You’re lying,” Melisande said evenly, tucking away a bag of jackstraws and sitting down beside him on the bench.
“No, I am not,” Gwydion said. He turned in time to see a man he recognized as Jal’asee, the ambassador from the distant Isle of the Sea Mages, enter the far end of the corridor. Both siblings watched in respectful silence as the elderly man walked past with his retinue of three. Jal’asee was an ancient Seren, born of one of the five original races of men that originated in the time before history. His race was unmistakable in his tall, thin frame, his golden skin and dark, bright eyes; the Seren were said to have been descended of the stars. Gaematria, the mystical island on which they made their home, along with other ancient races and ordinary humans who had come as refugees there centuries before, lay three thousand miles to the west, in the midst of the wide Central Sea. It was said to be one of the last places on the earth where magic was still understood and practiced as a science.