“No.” He laid his hand on my wrist. “No one is going to die tonight.”
“Except you. Is that it?”
“If that’s the way of it. But I have no wish to be excepted. Wait for them to pass.”
Three clansmen clattered down the steps just above our heads. We climbed up onto the stair and ran recklessly downward after them. My back crawled with the certainty that Driscoll would glimpse us from the terrace wall above, but we reached the lower stair without discovery. A glimmer of lantern light told me we were nearing the bottom of the steps, a likely place for a guard posting. At this point one side of the stair hugged the cliff wall, and the other side dropped off into the pit.
I grabbed MacAllister’s coat and his attention, pointing down off the side. He nodded and went first, supporting himself with his forearms and stretching his long legs into the sheer darkness, craning his head to see how far was the drop. One muffled groan as his foot slipped and his damaged shoulders bore his full weight. I dropped to my knees and locked my arms with his as he fought to find a foothold. Lying down on the step, I stretched my arms and lowered him over the edge to give him a little more extension; then I felt his fingers tapping rapidly on my arm. I let go. A quiet thud, not too far away. Then a soft whistle. As I scrambled over the edge, preparing to let go of the warm stone and drop through the darkness, a wave of dizziness and terror almost stopped my heart. Stupid. We weren’t yet in the fire.
Aidan kept me from hitting the ground, though rather more in the way of allowing me to fall on him than catching me. We ended up in a ridiculous heap of silk and satin, dirt and rocks. My bare back was on his face, and his arms were wrapped about me. While grunting to catch his breath, he murmured, “We’d better find your armor or I’m going to have the devil of a time keeping my mind on business.” I shoved his arms away and stood up, digging my elbow into his gut hard enough to make him clamp off a groan. We had no more time for teasing nonsense.
Tarwyl had told us that the cookshed was fifty paces left from the bottom of the stair, and without checking to see if MacAllister was behind me, I set off, creeping along the cliff wall. Three men rushed past us, their torchlight flattening us against the rocks for a terrifying moment. But their eyes were straight ahead of them, and they didn’t see us.
We ran the rest of the way to Tarwyl’s hiding place, a waist-high shelf where the broad, outsloping cliff wall broke away from the back wall of a ramshackle shed. My bag was stuffed in the corner of the niche, which was littered with bones and rotting scraps from predators who preyed on stray herd beasts. We dared not stay long enough for me to change into my armor, for the Elhim might have been forced to reveal our plan. I grabbed the bag, and we hurried away from the herd pens and the lamplit sheds toward the center of the lair.
Unlike Fandine and Cor Neuill, the floor of this valley was not flat. At the base of the cliffs was a broad shelf ring on which they had built the herd pens and barracks, the serving women’s shelter, and the smithy. At the inner edge of the shelf ring was a steep, rocky border where the land dropped away into the heart of the lair. The Riders’ huts would be down below, butted against the rocky slope.
The farther we went, the worse I wanted my boots. An afternoon rain had turned the blasted wastes into thick, black muck, and every step was a small panic lest I slice my bare foot on a stray dragon scale. Shouts rang from every direction, and twice we had to cram ourselves into some narrow shadow to avoid Ridemark patrols. There seemed to be five hundred clansmen in the lair to guard the three dragons of Aberthain.
After a third close call with a search party and a moment’s pause to let MacAllister recover from a dragon’s bellow that had him staggering, we streaked across a deserted area of the shelf and scrambled into the rocky perimeter of the inner lair. From a sheltered niche in the rocks we peered into the vast pit, and just below us, not five hundred paces away, was the kai we’d come to find.
The beast was immeasurably old: the brow ridges as gnarled and thick as old oak trees, the neck folds so deep you could hide an army in them, layer upon layer of jibari encrusted on its scales. And its right shoulder was not a long, smooth taper into the bulging haunch, but sharp and angular, as if a giant had broken it and set it improperly. The right wing sat higher than the left, yet the twisting deformity was not a new thing. Jibari grew thick in the shoulder crease, and there was no slackening of the beating fury of the wings when it tried to escape the binding that kept it earthbound.
“The birds,” whispered MacAllister in awe, his hand on my shoulder. “Look at the birds.”
Indeed there must have been five thousand small, dark shapes hovering about the kai, picking its leavings from the blasted earth, settling on its back and shoulders, twittering and chirping, yet never getting caught in the streams of fire that poured from the beast’s mouth. But this beast was no gentle companion. The kai lurched in its half-walking, half-flying way toward a penned cluster of no less than fifty bawling sheep. An arc of orange fire shot from its mouth as it let forth a raging bellow loud enough to split one’s skull. Its eyes were windows on the netherworld, and its massive tail whipped and pounded until the very earth shuddered. With little more than a flick of one taloned foot, the kai left the sheep a bloody, writhing wreckage. After another blaring trumpet, its jaws closed around the gory mess, slavering blood and spitting fire.
Aidan drew back and sank to the ground, leaning against the rocks in shadows neither the growing moonlight nor the sallow glow of dragon fire could reach. I could feel his eyes on me, the dark eyes welling with tears of blood for his lost god. “Lara, how am I to do this?” His voice was filled with anguish and fear, and I was on the verge of such weakness as I had never imagined. But any answer was precluded by another blaring wail from the dragon, and like the herald summoning me to battle, it reminded me of where and who and what I was.
I dumped out the contents of my bag—the articles that were the proper focus of my life. “You will be silent,” I hissed, as the flesh-tearing screech died away. With no heed to his shyness, I stripped off my false skin of mud-fouled silk and pulled on my own life: coarse wool and leather and russet, the stinking armor of my clan. I twisted my hair until my scalp ached and jammed the stiffened helm on it, and I arranged the coils of my whip and snugged its sharp steel tips without regard to the watching eyes that were revolted by it.
The treacherous moon had crept over the cliff wall and invaded our hiding place, throwing MacAllister into deeper shadow and glinting off the tin box that lay at my feet, where it had fallen from the armor bag. It was time. The singer was going to die, and he deserved to know the truth before he screamed his mind away in a dragon’s breath. I wished that hatred and revenge might deter him from his course, but I knew better, so I would not dally while he read what I would show him.
“This is how we shall proceed,” I told him. “I’ll say all the words as they are spoken for the binding rite in the clan—the seven invocations that I should be damned forever for revealing. When the kai is ready, at the moment the Rider would step forth with the kai’s bloodstone, I will raise my left hand. You’ll have perhaps half a minute to do whatever you imagine will save your life.”
He tried to speak, but I would not permit it. One word and I would crumble.
“Before you address this creature, you should review a few bits of dragon lore,” I said, pulling Narim’s journal from the box and opening it to a page written almost eighteen years in the past. I thrust it into the white-gloved hands, then strapped the bloodstone about my neck and left him sitting in the cleft of the rocks, reading the account of how I had stolen his life.