When the Rider named the Elhim who sat an arm’s length from me, I almost lost the thread of my questioning. Davyn—the name Narim had given me to find help on the Vallior road. Coincidence. Of course it was coincidence, I thought ... until I handed him the Rider’s gauntlet and found his pale eyes fixed on my own. By the Seven Gods ... He knew who I was. But I had no time to dwell on it. I was rapidly running out of things to ask about the Rider’s garb, and I’d scarcely begun working up to what I needed to know.
“It doesn’t upset them, then, when strangers are about ... doing things they’re not used to? Even if I were to start ringing bells, say, or yelling or screaming?”
The Rider spit into his firepit and dipped another goblet of wine from the cask, sucking it down in a single breath. “Upset? Do you think these are Senai ladies? There’s nothing in the world can upset a dragon. Can you upset a volcano? Can you disturb a lightning bolt? Can you offend a whirlwind? They do what they do, and lucky for you and everyone like you, I and my brothers don’t let them do it unless we tell them.” He turned his spit once again, then settled himself, still naked, on his bed of furs, sucking down yet another cup of wine.
I wanted to scream at the man. I wanted to ask him why Callia lay dead, and Gerald and Gwaithir and Alys, and all the rest. Nothing made sense. I’d never been closer to a dragon than the rim of this very valley. I’d never touched a Rider until my feeble attempt on Callia’s attacker. I’d never done anything they could consider a threat. Anything.
“Aye,” I said. “The Riders protect us all ... even the vile Florin spawn who sits out there in the center of all this.” I pulled on my boots as if to go, then stood up waving my hand at the wintry desolation. “How is it done ... to keep a hostage alive out there with the dragons?”
Zengal belched and shrugged. “We make another ring,” he said, his words slurred with drink. “Three of us with the brat every hour of every day. Damned waste of time playing nursemaid. They always end up dead, after all.” He stroked the golden cup in his hand and turned it so the firelight made the jewels gleam. “But the rewards are fine enough.”
“I heard a story once that a hostage escaped from a dragon camp, right past the beasts. How could—”
In a move so light and quick as to belie his size and state of drunkenness, the naked Rider pinned me to the stone wall with a callused hand about my neck. Sparks flew in the deepening gloom, stinging my face and neck, and the thick, sweet odor of wine fouled what breath I could get. “It’s a lie!” he screamed. “All lies, those stories. There were no kai in the lair, no Riders. They’d all been sent away. Ordinary soldiers were guarding the hostages ... paid by spies for their treachery. No black-tongued singer could make the kai let hostages go free. It is impossible!”
“Of course not,” I squeezed out, gasping and choking, my neck starting to blister with the touch of his hand. “I would never believe it. Just wanted ... Just curious. That’s all.”
The Elhim backed away, fumbling at the knife sheath at his belt.
Zengal shook me as if to make sure I was paying attention. “The devil set out to shame us because his father was burned by the kai. He bribed, tricked, lied, let everyone think the Twelve Families had grown weak. But we saw it stopped, didn’t we? Taught him, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” I croaked. “You taught him. Silenced him forever.”
The Elhim had a dagger raised to strike, but whipped the weapon behind his back when the Rider let go of me and stumbled toward his wine cask again.
“I should go,” I said, trying to will strength into my knees and flatten myself against the wall to keep my distance from the Rider. “You’ve been extremely helpful, Excellency, but I’ve taken far too much of your time.”
Zengal grunted, staggered past me, and fell onto his fur-lined bed. The wine cup dropped from his hand, the spilled wine soaking eagerly into his fine carpet.
I would not have been human if I did not look on the bare, exposed back of the drunken Rider, thinking of the dragon whip on the wall and the moment’s satisfaction it promised. It wouldn’t even matter that I would be dead in the next moment. But my hands could not grip, and I had no strength, and nothing would be changed ... except perhaps myself.
I carried with me the image of Goryx and his beatific smile as he left me broken and bleeding in my cell after a day’s beating. He would touch my wounds, then lick his fingers and his lips and groan softly, his small eyes bright with unholy pleasure. When I had looked in the glass at my cousin’s house, my face bore no resemblance to the one I had worn for my first twenty-one years—only death and emptiness where Aidan MacAllister, beloved of the gods, had once looked back at me. But I knew the face of evil, and the face of death was preferable. I pulled on my boots, tightened my cloak about me, and stepped out into the storm.
Chapter 9
I wanted to ask the Elhim how he had come to be employed at Cor Neuill, but I had no wish to linger in the valley, and the long trek up the steep path took all of our concentration. The footpath into the lair had been purposely left difficult to discourage casual entry, but the storm had made it even more treacherous. Snow and sleet had accumulated in dangerous, outsloping patches packed hard by the wind and the falling temperatures. The clouds closed in, forcing extra caution, as we didn’t want to walk off the cliff at the end of a traverse. My foot slipped twice, but I managed to keep my balance, left with only a sick lurch in the belly as I looked into the bottomless, swirling clouds beyond the edge.
We were on a particularly steep portion of the path when both of the Elhim’s feet slipped off the track. He scrabbled for a purchase on the icy rocks, all the time sliding sideways, downward, and outward. Knowing that my hands could not hold him and my shoulders had no strength to haul him up, I threw myself across his body, hoping my weight could hold him to the ground until he could find a foot- or handhold to pull himself to safety. I wedged my feet in a shallow depression in the rock and locked my arms around a protruding boulder, so that we wouldn’t both slide off the edge. Against the howl of the wind, he grunted and strained in quiet desperation. It seemed an hour until he squirmed back onto the path and out from under me, but it likely took me longer to get my arm unstuck from the crack between the boulder and the cliff wall.
Sitting with our backs against the rock, we let our heartbeats return to a normal rhythm. The Elhim grinned at me. “The dragons may think you’re too bony, but I think you have exactly the proper balance. Any heavier and I’d be flat. Any lighter and I’d be dead.”
I smiled back at him, then nodded my head up the path. It was too cold to stay still. We got gingerly to our feet and trudged upward.
Not long after that near disaster, I became horribly disoriented. Faint stars peered at an unlikely angle through whipping clouds and encroaching night. Sure I had missed the path and was ready to walk off the edge, I halted, flailing my arms to find the anchor of the cliff face. Once my hand touched the rock and I crept forward a few more steps, I realized that the displaced stars were actually glimmers of lantern light leaking out from around the shuttered windows of the headquarters building. We hurried up the last pitch to the rock platform.
Despite my anxiety to be away from Cor Neuill, I laid a hand on the Elhim’s shoulder as he reached for the door handle. “What are you doing here, Davyn?”