After half an hour of hard climbing, MacAllister broke his silence. “How old is Narim?”
I was surprised at the question, so surprised I couldn’t think of a convenient lie. So I revealed what Narim would rather have kept secret. “Older than you can imagine.”
“It was Narim who poisoned the lake and enslaved the dragons, wasn’t it? All those years ago. He had studied the dragons, and he was clever, and he figured out how to do it, thinking he was saving his people.”
“He was only sixteen. An infant by Elhim standards. They were desperate. He never meant it to be forever.”
I was ready to bring out all the arguments Narim had concocted over the years to explain what he had done, but I didn’t need them. MacAllister nodded his head and kept walking. “Whatever Narim’s guilt, it doesn’t matter. We all have our guilts. You can tell him I’ll do whatever I can.”
One more time I named him a weakling fool. But only in the front of my mind.
The day seared our eyes with its brightness, the drifts of dirty, ice-crusted snow scattered across the lower slopes of the Carag Huim receding even as we passed.
MacAllister was quiet as we walked. His face was hard, his shoulders tight, and I had to double-step to keep up with him. What was he thinking? He replied to my inane comments about the path and the terrain and the weather with the fewest possible words.
We stopped at midday to eat and rest, and I decided we’d best get clear on our plans before we came to settled lands. “Since this kai didn’t tell you what to do next, we’ll have to find Narim.”
MacAllister looked up in surprise. “Oh, but he did tell me.”
“The dragon? It spoke to you?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“The journal said they formed words—a variety of sounds that made a language—like men and Elhim do. I heard nothing like that.”
MacAllister frowned thoughtfully. “It’s hard to describe. You’re right; it was nothing like the journal said. I spoke as we practiced ... I asked what I had to do to set the others free, but his answer ... it was certainly not words as we think of them.” His wonder at his own telling erased the dour expression he had worn since Cor Talaith. “It’s just been so long ... he’s so wild ... his words have become mere patterns of tone and inflection. Only slight resemblance to speech. More like music. I had to shape the sounds into words myself, so I missed a great deal, I think.”
Easy to guess that his madness would take the form of music. He was so calm and sure of himself ... and it was all so stupid. I jabbed my knife into a slab of hard cheese and almost sliced off my finger. “What did he answer, then? Did he tell you a magic spell? Or perhaps he says you must ask each dragon politely what’s needed to set it free?”
“No.” His gloved fingers fumbled idly with a dried apple while his mind went back to that fetid cavern. “He knew all about what happened when I was in prison, as I grew ... weak ... and Roelan grew wild. He seemed to know I couldn’t sing again, though that part was confusing, and he kept saying something like ‘let the desert loose the wind.’ He said I must ‘find my own’—that I must hunt down his ‘brother bent with the sadness of the world.’ I think he means me to find Roelan.”
“It would make sense, would it not? Since you were such close friends.”
MacAllister laughed, an exasperated, hopeless laugh, but filled with good humor. “It might make sense to a dragon, but he didn’t tell me how to identify Roelan, or how to speak to him without the lake water, or what he meant when he said I had to become Roelan’s ‘third wing.’ ”
Shock had me on my feet. “Become his—” I choked before saying the words. No one outside the Ridemark was to hear them. No one. If any clansman spoke them carelessly, even in his own tent, his tongue would be severed instantly by his wife or his children or his parents.
“You know what it means,” said the singer softly, watching me stuff the cheese and my waterskin into my pack and throw the bag over my shoulder.
“You mustn’t say those words ever again. If any clansman heard you, it would be far worse than what you’ve suffered already ... and for me, too. They would think I told you. Damnation! Forget them.” I started down the path again. If I could have run from him, I would have done it.
He caught up with me quickly. “You’ve not said them. Keldar did, and I have, and if you tell me what they mean, I won’t have to say them again. If you don’t tell me, then all this is wasted.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I think I do.”
“It’s part of a ritual—the most sacred, the most secret of all the Ridemark rituals. It’s worse than death to betray the words. I can’t do it. I won’t.”
He stopped me, forcing me to look at him, at his dark eyes that had once been filled with holy visions ... at the mangled hands that rested so heavily on my shoulder. “I have lived worse than death, and my feet still walk the earth. You’ve done the same. You’ve forsworn your vengeance ... and I know what that means to one of the Ridemark. You’ve saved my life at the cost of your own redemption and your everlasting guilt, because you’ve sworn to do as Narim asks. You know he would insist that you tell me.”
Had Narim been with us, I would have broken his neck. I wanted to spit out the gall in my mouth. “It is the rite performed after a Rider dies, when a new Rider is mated to the kai and its bloodstone.”
“And the words?”
“The kai is surrounded by Riders with bloodstones. It is controlled and goaded to fury until it spews out its deadliest fire, white-hot fire that can melt stone and incinerate an entire forest in one breath. The words—the seven invocations—are said when the chosen Rider takes the dekai’cet—the bloodstone that has been forever bound to that dragon—and he walks into the fire, taking control of the kai, becoming one with it so that his will becomes the will of the beast, and his body burns with the inner fire of the beast, and the beast will bow down when he steps close and allow him to ride. Does that please you? Are you satisfied?”
Understanding dawned on his face ... and resignation. I wanted to hit him, curse him, anything to make that expression go away. He hitched his pack higher on his back and walked down the trail. I followed after, sick at heart, wanting to forget the conversation, to pretend I had never spoken. But I could not.
“You must understand that it’s impossible. You don’t have Roelan’s dekai’cet, and there’s no possibility, absolutely no possible way, for you to get it. You can command a dragon with any bloodstone, but to join with it, to step into its fire, you must have the dekai’cet, the one that has been bound to it since the beginning, since the Elhim first controlled them. We’ve never been able to bind a second stone to a dragon, whether we have its dekai’cet or not. The rite never works for a second stone. So you can’t do it.”
“I won’t need a bloodstone.”
“Of course you need a bloodstone. Without its protection, you’d burn. You’d—”
“The absence of the bloodstone must be the key to setting them free. To create the bond ... to become one ... without the stone. He said I must go as a youngling. In nakedness, he said, but I knew he wasn’t referring to clothes. He doesn’t understand clothes.”
By the time I recovered enough wit to close my mouth and follow him, his long legs had reached the bottom of the slope, and he had disappeared through a rocky tunnel that led into the wild western lands of Catania, toward Cor Neuill and the other dragon camps in Elyria and beyond, in search of the beast he had believed was his god.