Rhapsody waited until their footfalls could no longer be heard echoing in the tunnel before she gave in to the tears.
The air of the cave glimmered behind and around her; Elynsynos appeared, cradling her in the crook of her claw.
There, there, Pretty, the dragon intoned softly.
Rhapsody shook her head.
“Do not comfort me, please, Elynsynos,” she said weakly, brushing her fingers over her son’s downy hair as he returned to his sleep. “What he contemplates may assure that there never is a reason for any of us to feel comforted again.”
41
The dry bed of the Blood River was a deep length of sand above a layer of red clay, covered in a thin coating of snow. The dragon found the three strata to be the perfect place to cleanse the stench and remaining offal from herself; she bored up through the clay, spiraling, allowing herself the painful luxury of rolling in the sand until the snow finally coated her, cooling her angry flesh.
Any fury she had known before the assault on Ylorc had only been an irritation, an annoyance, beside what she felt now. Her anger had transmuted from the glowing hot rage of volcanic wrath to a far more frightening state, the cold, emotionless mechanisms of a dragon reviled. It was this same cold state in which she had planned the death of half a continent, had committed some of her most unholy acts, the unpardonable sins which she was grateful to have been born soulless, lest one day she should have to pay for them.
None of that mattered now. She did not remember her actions, her sins; her mind had placed but one goal into play, shutting down all other thoughts, all other desires.
She searched in vain for almost a day before she located the taproot of the Great White Tree her sister said she would find in this arid place. It had dried and withered to little more than an underground branch, but its power was still nascent in its fibrous radix. She did not directly remember the Tree itself, but somewhere in her memory there was a space where she believed those recollections should be, as if it had at one time been important to her.
The dragon steeled her nerve and concentrated, allowing her despised wyrm body to transcend material flesh and become ethereal.
Then she slid into the thin, dry root hairs, crawling along them as they thickened and grew moist, taking on speed, racing along the thicker root now, drawing the power of the tree her mother had tended so lovingly into herself as she passed from one side of the continent to the other in a beat of her three-chambered heart.
Gavin the Invoker had been summoned to Sepulvarta to meet with the Patriarch, the only religious leader on the middle continent of his stature. In his absence, his Filidic followers, nature priests who tended the Tree and the holy forest of Gwynwood, were clearing winter’s deadfall, harvesting the herbs and hardy flowers that had bloomed in the time of Thaw, making ready for the return of snow when the dragon appeared, hovering in the ether at the base of the Tree.
At first the Filids stopped in shock, believing they were witnessing an apparition. Three years before, Gwydion of Manosse, the Lord Cymrian, who was wyrmkin, had passed through their forest on his way to wreaking his vengeance on the apostate Invoker, Khaddyr, the thrall of a F’dor demon who had supplanted Gwydion’s father, Llauron. In his wake, much of the forest had been consumed in cleansing fire, though it was mostly the huts and settlements of the traitors that had managed to burn, while the rest had been spared.
One look into the hypnotically terrifying eyes of this beast, and any hope that such evenhandedness was forthcoming vanished.
The beast inhaled, then spewed her breath. It rushed forth in fire that burned black at the edges, glowing blue in the center as it left her maw from the sheer heat that was boiling in her belly.
Then she quickly closed her eyes and concentrated, so that she could enjoy the agony, drink in the pain and fright that was hanging in the smoky air when the fire diminished above the piles of charred bone and ash.
It was a delicious sensation.
The wyrm opened her eyes. Now that her murderous impulse was satisfied, she saw that she was looking out at a grassy meadow surrounding the Tree, whose glistening white branches rose above her for as far as the eye could see, and stretched out over the wide meadow. Beyond the sickening haze reeking of burnt human flesh she could see a settlement of huts, some longhouses, others tiny cabins, fairly newly built, each with a tiny garden or kraal, most decorated with strange hex signs above the doorways. The image was familiar; she looked to the edge of the meadow, trying to remember what was missing, but nothing resonated.
All around her was the song of the Tree; it issued forth in a deep, melodious hum, reverberating the tones of the living earth itself, achingly beautiful. The dragon felt it tug at her heart, or whatever vestige of one she possessed. On some level she knew this place had once been important to her, that if she tried hard enough, she might locate memories that would constitute pieces of her soul here, in this natural cathedral, where one of the five trees that grew at the birthplaces of Time still stood.
The holiness of it was unmistakable, impossible to deny.
The dragon steeled her will.
I choose to be unholy, she thought grimly. It annoyed her to see that the bark of the Tree had sustained no damage from her breath, that not even the leaves had withered or burned while the grass was scorched, the tenders of the Circle reduced to human rubble. It was yet one more defiance of her power which had just been laid low by a mountainful of demi-human Bolg, and served only to drive her smoldering rage into even greater fury.
She cocked her head, looking for signs of the woman, but there was nothing on the wind, nothing but the shouting of the Filidic priests and the foresters as they evacuated the area, fleeing the onslaught they believed was coming.
Deep in the forest of Gwynwood, on the western coast, beyond the Tar’afel River, Manwyn had said.
The dragon closed her eyes again, listening for the sound of the river. It was beyond her sense, but she could tell by the water table, the winding of the stream basin and the patterns of tree growth that the river must lie to the north, so she burrowed back into the ground and followed the sound of the water.
The voice of the Tar’afel was much easier to track than the ancient echoes of her own name. Like a beacon beneath the earth it sounded, rushing endlessly, unhurried, to the sea, in its low phase, carrying with it huge chunks of ice that had broken up and floated downstream with the advent of Thaw.
The winter was returning, causing the current to slow. The dragon could hear it from miles away; as she approached the riverbed, the earth through which she traveled grew ever damper, its silty strata unpleasant to ford.
Finally she could stand it no longer; she bored up through the ground again and traveled through the greenwood in the realm of air now, passing through the uninhabited wood unseen. The forest creatures had long since vacated the place, upon sensing her presence, even beneath the ground.
The river was flowing a league away; she made note of its depth, its speed, and then made her way to its muddy banks, frozen almost to the water’s edge. There was a chill to the air here; she was closer than she had been to her lair since leaving it, though it was still almost a thousand miles away. At the water’s edge she prepared to cross, hoping to return to the ethereal form in which she had traveled to the Circle, but without the power of the Tree, she found herself trapped in material form, her body heavy and stolid, a burdensome prospect in the attempt to cross the river.