“What are you babbling about?” the Bolg king demanded. “Anwyn? Anwyn is dead, as you well know, buried in the Moot these three years.”
So we thought, but we were wrong, Llauron said desperately. There’s no time for analysis and second-guessing; she is coming, and she will kill anyone and everyone in her path in her attempt to find Rhapsody. Is she with Elynsynos?
“Yes,” said Achmed shortly, casting a glance around the woods. The white trees, bare and gleaming in the cold winter air rustled as the wind blew through, seeming to shudder visibly. He looked back at Krinsel, who was trembling violently as well.
Get them out of here, Llauron commanded, his draconic voice ringing with authoritarian insistence. I will try to divert her. He faded into the wind again, leaving nothing behind a moment later but a sense of panic.
Achmed turned on his heel, snagged the midwife, and ran back to the lair of the ancient wyrm, muttering snarled Bolgish obscenities all the way.
Rhapsody had barely ceased weeping when Achmed and Krinsel appeared at the mouth of the tunnel again.
Your friends return, Elynsynos said, puzzled. She cocked her enormous head to one side; her prismatic eyes widened suddenly, sending rainbows of light dancing incandescently around the cave. Oh no, the dragon whispered over the sound of the Bolg’s footfalls. No, it can’t be.
In the warmth of her arms, Meridion began to whimper again, his cries rising to a howl of fear a moment later.
“What’s the matter?” Rhapsody asked nervously, glancing from the wyrm to the child, both of whom were now panicking without any visible reason.
Anwyn comes, the dragon said, rising from the floor of the cave, raising clouds of sandy dust in the process. And she is rampaging; the forest is burning in a wide swath between the river and my lair.
“Anwyn?” Rhapsody asked incredulously, struggling to her feet with the baby in her arms. “What—how can that be?”
Achmed appeared at the bend in the tunnel.
“Come with me if you want to live,” he said sharply. Rhapsody recognized the words; they were the same ones he had spoken to her a lifetime ago in Serendair, words that had begun their association and led them down the long, difficult road to this moment in time.
“Is it Anwyn?” Rhapsody asked, swaddling the baby more tightly and walking with difficulty toward the Bolg king.
“Llauron says so, and I don’t doubt him, even if he was a liar in life. Come on, we have to get out of here.”
“Wait, wait,” Rhapsody said, closing her eyes in pain and rubbing her hand across her forehead. “What good will running do? Besides, I’m safe with Elynsynos. And surely she will not harm Meridion.” She turned to the dragon who was hovering now in the air, ethereal, with a look of quiet despair on her gigantic face. “Did you not say that a dragon values its progeny over all other things in the world?”
Yes, Elynsynos replied quietly. But if she is rampaging, she is not thinking about anything but destruction, probably your destruction, Pretty.
“You are endangering Elynsynos by staying here,” Achmed said harshly, reaching for her arm. “Come.”
Rhapsody handed Meridion to Krinsel and began pulling on her boots, her face white, her arms shaking with the weakness that follows childbirth.
“Anwyn cannot kill her mother, even in a rampage,” she said, lacing quickly. “Isn’t that the Primal Lore, Elynsynos? Dragons cannot kill each other, worlds colliding, and all that?”
The great beast shook her head sadly.
Anwyn is not a wyrm, but wyrmkin, she reminded Rhapsody. She is not bound to the Primal Lore if she doesn’t choose to be. I cannot say what she might do.
Rhapsody’s face took on a harsh determination.
“All right,” she said seriously. “I will go—Achmed, Krinsel, leave this place now, head due west toward the sea, and hide. You need to get as far away from here, and from me, as you can.”
Elynsynos shook her head.
Bolg king, take my friend and yours, she said sadly. Save the child; he is more important than any of you know. Get her to safety; Llauron and I will do what we can to divert Anwyn, but you must go now.
Achmed nodded and seized Rhapsody’s arm. “Go west,” he directed Krinsel, who nodded and hurried up the cave tunnel. “Can you walk?” he asked Rhapsody, who nodded as well, though her face was ashen. “All right, then, come with me. We’ve done this before.”
Together they ran out up the tunnel. Elynsynos watched them leave, then disappeared into the ether.
Through the forest they bolted, Rhapsody following blindly behind Achmed, who was doubling back to the Tar’afel. In his mind he remembered something Llauron had told the Three long ago about Elynsynos and the explorer Merithyn.
If Merithyn had not loved Elynsynos as well, she would have known what befell him. He had given her Crynella’s candle, his distress beacon. It was a small item, but a powerful one, because it contained the blending of two opposing elements, fire and water. Had it been with him when his ship went down, she would have seen him, and perhaps might even had been able to rescue him. But he had left it with her to comfort her, as a sign of his commitment. Alas, such it is with many good intentions.
Perhaps dragon sense is limited by water, he thought, knowing that the element obscured his own ability to track heartbeats. If I can get Rhapsody into the river, we may be able to hide from her inner sight.
Even as his mind planned it, his better sense told him he was fooling himself.
In the distance they could hear the crashing of trees and the ripping of the earth as the two dragons sought to divert their rampaging kinswoman, moving earth, opening chasms, diverting streams, tossing large branches into her path, exercising their elemental power over the earth, each action followed by a bellowing roar of anger and an audible eruption of flame. The ground trembled beneath their feet; Achmed glanced behind him at Rhapsody, whose hand was clutching his gloved one in a death grip, to find her face white and bloodless but set in a grim aspect as she climbed over deadfall and rotting trees, beneath bowers of thorned berries and around forest glades, panting as she ran.
On the breeze that whipped through the forest they could hear the voice of the dragon, screaming, howling, bellowing in rage.
Rhapsody! Rhapsody, you cannot hide from me!
The wind howled around them with the onset of dusk; there was snow on its gusts, icy from the water of the river, and it stung as it pelted their skin and eyes. There was not a sound from the bundle in her arms; Achmed wondered dully if the child was even alive.
Each moment the fire approached ever closer.
Finally, as the heat was beginning to lick his back, he felt Rhapsody’s grip falter, then slip from his.
He turned to find her, pale as he had ever seen her, doubled over, her child clutched against her stomach. With the last of the strength in her arms, she shakily held the bundle out to him.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please—take him—Achmed. Take—him and run. It’s me—she’s after.” Her voice faltered in exhaustion and weakness. “Take him.”
Achmed hesitated, then slung the cwellan at his side, snatched the bundle from her arms, tucking it under his own and grasping her hand again. The baby remained silent, unmoving.
“I’ll carry him, but you must come as well,” he insisted, dragging her over a moldering tree stump, pulling her along as she stumbled. “The brat will die without you anyway; I can’t very well be his wet nurse. Come on.”