The tide of sound broke over my head as if the ocean itself had reared up in a single mighty wave and commenced to drown the history of humankind, only it was not an ocean of water, but an ocean of fire. I believed in that moment that my life had come to its ending, that my flesh had been scorched away, that my entrails had turned to bloody vapor just as the waterfall had vanished in steam, and that my bones lay burning on the hard-packed earth of our hiding place. Despair and grief and memory were erased, wonder and curiosity dismissed in a torrent of pain. I could not scream, could not pray, could not weep, for every part and fiber of my flesh quivered in the agony of burning. And yet it was only an instant—less time than the swinging of a pendulum—and I could look upon myself huddled on the now quiet ground, my spasms held in the steady grip of the two frightened Elhim, and I could read the word that had been seared into my soul with pain and fire.
For that single instant I hung suspended out of my life, and I formed that same word, whether only in my mind or on my tongue I did not know, and I reflected it upon the sender with my spirit’s whisper. Keldar.
And in that same instant outside of time, I heard his answer, so faint as to be unnoticed by any who had not lived in silence for seven endless years: Beloved.
Chapter 15
What words can describe that instant of contact? Lightning is too cold, majesty too weak, glory too dim, salvation too imprecise, devotion too impersonal. Whatever soul it was that spoke to me in that breathless moment, whether god or dragon, pulled me from the brink of disintegration, and I clung to its word as a drowning child to a father’s outstretched hand. So much grief and regret and tender concern was wrapped in it that I did not believe I could encompass all of it in a year of remembering. He knew me, called me by the name Roelan had given me when I was young, the name my god had sung when filling the world with music. All the horror and disgust I’d felt upon learning that the voice of my music was a murderous monster was swept away in the flood of this creature’s care for me. A being with such capacity for love was no beast. My soul was touched with the remembrance of joy, and my companions had no idea of it, for I could not tell them, could not move or speak without letting go of the fragile moment.
“In the name of the One, what have we done?” said Davyn, lifting my drooping head and raking his worried gray eyes over my face.
“Only what was required. If he cannot bear it, then best to learn it now.”
“Narim”—even as their faces flickered orange and gold in the reflection of dragon flames, Davyn stared at his friend with scandalized disbelief—“you’ve not told him any of it, have you?”
“We need to get him out of here.”
“Narim, my oldest friend, his life is not ours to use as we will. By the One, his very eyes bleed.”
“By the time he was in our hands, there was no way to tell him. A man in despair cannot choose rationally. And somehow in the past two days, for some damnable reason I cannot see, the others have guessed what we already know. They’ve tried to kill him once and will not give up now they’ve judged him a danger.”
“That doesn’t make this right.”
“Ordinary estimates of fairness or justice have no relevance when the survival of an entire race is at stake. As of this moment, Aidan MacAllister is either on his way back to life or he is truly dead. I cannot think he would prefer to be where he was. Now let’s get him out of here so we can judge which way he’s gone.”
All this was gibberish to me. They raised me to my feet, led me up the long tunnel, and sat me on the rocky hillside facing the rose-streaked silver of the dawn, letting the quickening breeze of morning sweep away the lingering stench of brimstone and decay. Though I struggled to hold on, the last echoes of Keldar’s voice began to slip from my grasp. Helplessly I felt it go, reaching after it with such aching misery and grief that I must have groaned quite audibly. Only then did the words of the two Elhim begin to filter into my head, and I began to wonder again who it was who wanted me dead and what in the universe I was going to do about what had happened.
“Dragon’s teeth, did he fall off the ledge?” Someone else had come up behind me, someone my mind told me ought to be dead.
“No,” said Davyn. “He’s not spoken since the dragon’s cry, and we don’t know but what we’ve killed him with it. Some of us are a bit more concerned than others.”
“Is he so afraid of a stupid bellow? Every child in Elyria has heard worse, though perhaps not in such close quarters and lived to think about it.” It was the woman Lara. Though I did not look up, I could smell the charred, stinking leather of her armor. Her blackened gauntlets dropped to the ground five paces away, next to the pack from the tunnel. “I told you it was a waste of time. If the beast is ever going to ‘speak,’ it won’t be when we wake it up from winter sleep. How do you know it even has a name or can remember it after so long?”
“Keldar,” I said softly, pricked to unwilling response by her casual dismissal. “His name is Keldar.”
“By the One! Keldar. We suspected as much.” Davyn rolled over on his back and chortled at the sunrise in un-muted glee. “Who could imagine it?”
“You heard him? He spoke the name?” Narim crouched in front of me, peering into my face, less ready to be excited than Davyn. “Was there anything else? Was it in the sound or in your mind?”
“He guessed it couldn’t see,” said the woman scornfully. “He saw the growths on its eyes and called it by the blind god’s name. He heard nothing but the bellowing of a beast, as we all did.”
“I’d never seen a dragon’s eyes before,” I said. “Is he truly blind?”
She snorted and did not deign to answer.
Narim ignored her. “Was it the same as when you would hear Roelan?”
I shook my head. “Very different. Just as clear, but it’s never been so ... painful ... so hard ... so intense. Narim, I ...” My voice was much calmer than I felt. My whole being was in chaos. My mind was a jumble of exquisitely sharp images, the sensations coming and going in flickering bursts: the eye-searing brilliance of the fiery rainbow, the feel of the warm dirt beneath my hands, the shattering cacophony of the bellowing, the choking fetor of dragon. Half a moment of breathtaking clarity—no more—and then the image would evaporate. But no sooner had I adjusted to the silence of the morning than it burst upon me yet again. It was as if someone repeatedly stabbed a stiletto into my head and yanked it out again. I had to force my attention to every word being said—even my own—or I would have heard or spoken only half of them.
I had things I needed to say, but Davyn interrupted my hesitating speech, rolling onto his side and propping his face on his hand. “It was inevitable that it be more difficult,” he said eagerly, his eyes flashing in the winter sunrise. “Part of it is you, of course. The vileness done to you. The injuries you’ve suffered. But most of it is the dragons themselves. They’ve been captive for so long, held in this wild state, that we weren’t sure it would be possible to reach them ... even for you. Even at the height of your power, right before your arrest, Narim worried that you’d not be able to reach them in the way that’s necessary. Roelan, perhaps, but, of course, we can’t know which one is Roelan.”