“My thanks,” Icelin said, turning to Garn and the others. “But there are things we must do. We must see the king.”
Garn exchanged a look with Joya and Obrin. “He’s declared he won’t see anyone,” Garn said. “You’ll be wasting your time.”
Icelin shook her head vehemently. “He will see us.”
At the doors to the king’s hall, Icelin gave her name to the guards and told them to relay it to King Mith Barak. After only a few moments, they returned and ushered her, Ruen, Sull, and the three members of the Blackhorn family inside.
Mith Barak was not seated on his throne, but rather paced the floor in front of it. When he saw the group, he scowled.
“All come at once to badger me, have you?” he said testily.
“The king’s absence at the wedding feast is conspicuous,” Joya said, ignoring Mith Barak’s deepening scowl.
“The king’s absence from his city is conspicuous,” Icelin said. The dwarves tensed, but she had no more patience for dallying around the subject. She barreled on. “Your city and your people need you, yet you hide in this room-”
Mith Barak stopped pacing. He turned a black glare on Icelin. “Have a care how you speak to me, little one. I am not your butcher or your man, that you can tame me with a tongue lashing.”
“She’s right,” Ruen said. “Your people need their leader. Why don’t you go to them?”
“I will lead them!” the king cried, rage and anguish twisting his features. “To death, to annihilation, whatever the gods will, but for this last night, leave me in peace! Gods, you don’t know how I’ve longed for just one moment of peace in a century.”
“They don’t understand, my king,” Joya said gently. She went to the king and tried to take his arm, but he shrugged her off with an incoherent cry. “Your people don’t know what you have suffered. You must tell them the truth.”
“What right do they have to the truth?” Mith Barak roared. “What right to rip open the wound, to pour through my mind and heart?”
“Because they have shed blood for you,” Garn said. He gazed at the king with hard eyes, and his voice was not gentle like Joya’s. “Your people have endured torments of their own. They will not see their king as weak for having his own share of scars.”
“Scars, aye.” The king let out a bitter laugh. “Claw marks raked into stone.” He stood before Icelin. “Is that what you want, then? To see into the abyss?”
Fear surged through Icelin, but she didn’t back down. “I want to understand,” she said.
“And you to heal,” Joya said, laying a hand on Mith Barak’s shoulder.
“Very well,” Mith Barak said hoarsely. Silver flecks swirled in his eyes, a hypnotic light that snared Icelin and wouldn’t let go. “I’ll go with you to the dark places. I hope neither of us gets lost.”
Icelin opened her mouth to reply, but an icy gust of wind cut off the words, filling her mouth and making her chest ache. The world fell away, and she was flying, soaring high above dozens of mountain peaks. In and out of the cloudbanks, she dived and reeled. Terror and elation filled Icelin as she soared upward to even more dizzying heights.
“What is this?” she cried. She expected the wind to steal her voice, but instead a mighty roar split the air and shook the snow from the mountain peaks. Above her, the sun broke through the clouds and bathed the mountains in gold light.
“Look below you.”
Mith Barak’s voice reverberated in her mind. Icelin recognized it, and yet the voice was different, bigger, and full of an immense, mind-shattering power barely kept in check.
Icelin looked down and saw the shadow of a massive serpentine body on the unblemished snow. A pair of talon-tipped wings unfolded from its body, and its frilled neck ended in a thick, horned head.
By the gods, Icelin thought. This can’t be happening. If she’d possessed a body in this strange vision, she’d be trembling, weeping with the wrongness of what she saw.
I can’t do this. I can’t ride a dragon’s mind.
“You’re not seeing the worst of it, girl. If you can’t handle a simple flight, you’ll go mad with what’s to come.”
“You’re not a dwarf at all,” Icelin said. The mountains fell away, and they flew over a vast pine forest just as a flock of crows broke from the trees and surrounded them. The birds screeched loudly in Icelin’s ears and flew away. “For centuries, you’ve ruled Iltkazar, yet you’re-”
“A dragon,” Mith Barak finished for her. “I came to the dwarves over fourteen hundred years ago. When their ruler died, he appointed me, Mith Barak the Clanless, his successor, knowing what I was, because he knew I could protect his people.”
“But why?” Icelin exclaimed. “I see your mind.” Images of open spaces and fresh, cold air blasting her in the face-it couldn’t be a coincidence that these were the memories Mith Barak had sought first when he let her enter his mind. “You don’t belong underground, in the dark.”
“Neither do you,” Mith Barak said, his booming voice full of an unexpected humor. “Yet here we are. Suffice to say, the dwarves needed me, and I needed them. Don’t doubt that it was a fair exchange.”
“How?” Icelin asked. The dragon’s shadow rippled over the treetops. She couldn’t stop staring at it, couldn’t reconcile the dwarf she’d known these past several days with the creature whose mind she rode.
“Why? How?” Mith Barak echoed. “Do you really want to know, or are you still dumbstruck?”
“Can you blame me?” Icelin cried. “You could have warned me!”
“I am warning you,” Mith Barak said. All traces of humor disappeared. “Where we’re going next won’t be pleasant. If you want to know how it was a fair bargain, I’ll tell you. You’ve heard the stories of the king who becomes a mithral statue for decades, leaving his people to fend for themselves.”
“Do you sleep for that time?” Icelin asked. “Is it something unique to … er … dragons? Some kind of hibernation?”
“In a way,” Mith Barak said. “It allows me to travel. When last I went to the stone, I was gone a very long time.”
“Where did you go?” Icelin gasped as the forest dropped away. Suddenly, thousands of glittering lights surrounded them.
“I came here,” Mith Barak said, “to the Astral Sea.”
Gods, Icelin thought, the dwarf-dragon-had been right. She wasn’t ready for this. Part of her wanted to close her eyes, to shut away the scene, but if she did, she might miss something extraordinary.
A vast ocean of darkness enveloped them, broken by starlight and misty threads of cloud. On the horizon, the darkness lightened, reminding Icelin of the times she’d watched the light change over Waterdeep harbor, or the early mornings when she sat on the roof of her great-uncle’s shop and waited for dawn. The dragon swam in an ocean of starlight, and Icelin rode his memories, tasting each image as if it were alive.
I’ll never forget any of this, she promised herself.
“Your people say you weren’t the same when you came back from here the last time,” Icelin said, struggling to focus. She could lose herself in the beauty of this place if she wasn’t careful.
“I was delayed,” Mith Barak said, “by that.”
Icelin looked ahead, and a scream welled up in her throat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ILTKAZAR, THE UNDERDARK
27 UKTAR
"What’s happening to her?” Ruen demanded.
Icelin and the king stood facing each other, no more than a couple of feet apart, with their eyes closed. Ruen had assumed Mith Barak was using magic to show Icelin a vision, and up until a breath ago, all had seemed well. Then Icelin screamed and clutched her head as if seized by a terrible pain.
Ruen rushed forward, intending to pull her away from the dwarf. Obrin and Garn got to him first, restraining him by the arms. He set his weight against them, but they were immovable. Sull’s face reddened with anger, but Joya clutched his wrist.