“Mmm.” He returned to the hearth, dipped a cup of something from a copper pot, then set it beside the bed on a table that had legs carved in the shape of birds. Seating himself on the edge of the bed and biting his lip like a five-year-old child, he slowly and awkwardly lifted a spoon to my mouth. When the spoon slipped a little and he spilled half the contents on the sheets, he sighed, then laughed in exasperation. “This was easier when no one was watching.”
I took the spoon from his gnarled fist. “How about if I do this, and you tell me what in the name of Vellya we’re doing here?”
“If you’re sure ...”
I showed him that I could hold the cup with a steady grip and maneuver the spoon much better than he, and he relaxed a bit.
“Well, our activities in Fandine set up quite a noisy party, and we had to get out of the way pretty fast. One of Tarwyl’s cousins found us a wool cart, but we needed someplace to take you. We were only half a league from here, but I wasn’t sure ... Well, it seems my cousin hasn’t given the place away even after all this time.”
His cousin. The king of Elyria. I had never really believed it.
“Tarwyl found caretakers about the main house, but I knew they wouldn’t bother to come back here. It’s pretty deep in the park. No one’s lived here since my mother died.” He poked one of his horrid fingers through a tiny hole in the sheet. “This is a guesthouse—the place where she would stow discreet friends and unpleasant relatives. She’d be horrified to see it so dusty, insect holes in the linen.... She always wanted it comfortable and welcoming.”
All my life I had scorned those like Aidan MacAllister. I knew more of life; I was stronger, harder, closer to the world. I understood their soft, decadent lives, but they could have no concept of mine. But in an instant I saw how impossible it was that I could understand anyone who had grown up in a place like this. I had never thought of Senai as people with bacon forks and insects and unpleasant kin, with beds and couches and hospitable mothers. Perhaps there were reasons beyond his own nature that Aidan MacAllister did not belch and throw his cups on the floor or strike me when I said something to hurt him. What was I, who had considered the Elhim cavern a palace, doing in such a place? I looked down at my clothes, expecting to see the shabby reminders of my own life. But I was clad in a soft white shift, high-necked and plain, made of embroidered linen so fine it felt like silk. Nothing underneath it. I glanced up quickly.
MacAllister’s fiery red face was averted. “The Elhim ... Davyn took ... takes care of those things ... private things.” He was about to break into a sweat.
Carefully I set down my cup and pulled a pillow to my mouth, trying to smother the sounds that burst forth unbidden. I needed to hide, lest I reveal the truth about testy, vicious Lara the Dragon Rider, who chewed up men with her fangs and spit them at the world. MacAllister’s embarrassment shifted to worry. Frowning, he dragged the pillow away. “What’s the mat—”
But I was not in pain, only laughing as I had never laughed in my life. He turned red all over again, then exploded into hilarity of his own. Did he know there was music in his laughter?
“Where are the little twits?” I said when I could speak again, knowing full well whose hands it was that had bathed me and combed my hair and drained my festering wound ten times a day for uncountable days. “And how long have I been here?”
“Ten days.”
“Ten days! And no one’s recognized you? In a place you’re so well known?”
“No one’s likely to know me anymore. Who would come looking for a singer presumed dead for seventeen years? Not much profit in that. But the Elhim bring supplies when they come back from a scout, so I’ve no need to go near the main house or the village.”
Back from a scout ... My laughter fell dead. “You’re not still hunting this phantom dragon?”
His sobered expression was answer enough.
“You can’t mean to go on. We’ll not get ten steps into any dragon camp. The guards will be tripled. It’s madness even to think of it.” I could not bear to hear his answer. I begged the roaring deafness to return before he spoke it.
“I’ve no choice. But you—”
“Of course you have a choice. There’s always a choice. You had chains on your wrists in Fandine, and I had dragon poison in my veins. We could have died, or you could have ended up with your friend Goryx for the rest of your miserable life. And for what? For nothing. We learned nothing. Accomplished nothing.”
MacAllister looked stricken—as if I’d chained his hands again and left him naked for the wolves of winter. “Gods, Lara ... I thought you knew ... I thought you heard ...” He sat on the edge of the bed beside me. “The dragon in Fandine ... her name was Methys, which means ‘daughter of the summer wind.’ She had almost forgotten it. There at the end she sang to me, and it waked ... a spark. I don’t know. Just for a moment. And then you were hurt, and we brought you here. I thought you were going to die, and I ... I tried ... I can’t seem to do it again, but I believed you heard and that it made a difference.” His face was like those of the starving villagers who came begging at Ridemark camps.
He was mad. There was no other answer. I’d heard the “song” of the injured dragon in Fandine, and it was not the glorious melody Aidan had sung to me in my dying. There could be no connection between such horror and such beauty. But if I told him I’d heard his singing and that it had taken away my fear and made me choose to live, it would lead him nowhere but to the dragons. So I couldn’t tell him. I cursed Narim, then, and I cursed the Elhim and my own people and King Devlin, and I cursed the dragons and the universe that had created such monsters. They had robbed a good and innocent man of his life and his reason, and I could not tell him the truth he yearned to hear lest I be a party to their cruelty.
“I heard nothing. You’re a fool. You can’t go on with this, or you’re going to be dead.”
The silence was long. I could not meet his gaze while he sat so close. To my relief he moved away to stand quietly by the hearth. “Ah, well. Foolish. I’m sorry,” he said at last. He picked up a polished oak stick that was standing next to the hearth and twirled it idly for a moment. “The Elhim say your ankle was only sprained, not broken, so you can get up whenever you feel like it.”
“Now would be none too soon,” I said.
He forced lightness into his words. “You hate being down. I can tell that. Even worse than being dragged around by mad Senai.” The mockery in his smile was not for me but for himself. “Tarwyl even brought you a cane to start. From another cousin.” He tossed me the stick and grinned. “I’ll help if you need it, but I’m going to make you ask for it. I figure I can get myself comfortable for a long wait.” He flopped onto the yellow couch, stretched his long body, and closed his eyes.
Before I had made three circuits of the room leaning on Tarwyl’s cane, two soggy Elhim burst through the door from the terrace, dropping an armload of parcels on the carpet. “Lara!” shouted Tarwyl. “You’re awake!”
“I can hear very well, thank you,” I said. “Unless you keep up the yelling.”
“And ready to hike the Carag Huim, it seems,” said Davyn, smiling as he joined me on the far side of the room. “Healing well?”
“I’ll be ready when I need to be,” I said, “for whatever stupidity comes next.”
Davyn laughed uproariously. “I expected no other answer.”
Foolish Elhim. He offered his arm to escort me back to my bed, for which I was sorely grateful. I would have crawled on the floor on my belly before asking the Senai.