The first child in the prophecy was sheltered within Achmed’s kingdom in the mountains, an Earthchild, a being made of Liv-ing Stone, left over from when the world was born. For all he knew she might even be the last of this race, which the dragons fashioned out of elemental earth, considering them their progeny. The ribs of her body were made of the same Living Stone that comprised the Vault of the Underworld, the prison that held the demons in check, and would thereby act as a key to it were she to fall into the hands of the F’dor. And they knew she was there. The second child mentioned in the prophecy was the star that fell into the sea on the other side of the world, the same star that shattered the Vault. That burning star, which slept beneath the ocean waves for thousands of years, rose and consumed the Island of Serendair in fiery cataclysm fourteen centuries before. And for all the destruction that ensued, for all the lives that were taken, the middle child brought about far less damage than the other two could. The third Sleeping Child of the poem, the eldest born, they had seen with their own eyes in their journey along the Axis Mundi, the root of the World Trees that tied them together along the center line of the Earth. It was a wyrm of immense proportion, comprising nearly one-sixth of the world’s mass, sleeping in the cold dark wastes below the Earth’s mantle. Waiting for the day the F’dor would call it by name and awaken it. Whereupon it would consume the earth. “You have to change him now,” Achmed said as the horses danced in place. “The odor is burning the skin off the inside of my eyelids.” In the distance a flicker of movement caught his eye. Had he not twisted to get away from the stench of the child, he never would have seen it, but there it was again, the subtle indication that they were being followed on horseback. Grunthor had seen it, too. He clicked to the other horses that he was leading, the two light riding serving as pack horses, and began to trot away again toward the east. With a speed born of years of experience, Achmed silently vaulted off his horse’s back, surprising Rhapsody and causing her to sway in the saddle. “Keep going,” he said softly to Grunthor. “I’ll take care of these.” He waited until the horses had gotten a slight head start, then found a low clump of leafless ramble off to the side a way where he took cover. After a few moments he could feel the sound and vibration of approaching hooves in the ground. A moment beyond that, the handful of soldiers in Ashe’s regalia appeared behind them, traveling quickly and quietly, following closely but making no effort to catch up. There was something about the way they sat in the saddle that caught Achmed’s notice. He had seen Anborn training the retinue of the Lord and Lady Cymrian, and knew that his trainees were prone to sit forward and up, the position that would best prevent them from getting quickly off, and most protect their viscera. But those coming down the road were sitting high in the saddle, in total contradiction to what he knew the Alliance soldiers’ training to be. And they were riding the gray mountain horses of Sorbold. The Bolg king crouched down and swore silently. There was a time when he would have felt them coming from a quarter mile away, and felt their very heartbeats in his skin, and could return fire accurately at that distance as well. But his blood gift, the ability granted him early in life as the first of his race born on the Island of Serendair, the first of Time’s birthplaces, had deserted him when he left the Island, disappearing through the root of Sagia, the tree of elemental starlight. When he arrived in this place, fourteen centuries later, his ability to unerringly follow the heartbeats of every living creature on the Island had vanished, leaving him, somewhat ironically, only able to do so still with those who themselves had come from there. Still, his skills were keen, his talents well honed. Achmed silently loaded three whisper-thin circular blades onto the arm of his cwellan, the weapon he had designed for himself a lifetime before. He set the recoil and waited. When the cohort had passed him without notice, he loosed the recoil arm into the backs and necks of the men on horseback, slicing through the seams of their armor. He reloaded and fired again and again, even before the first body hit the ground. In the distance he could hear the horses, now riderless, coming to a confused stop. Achmed trotted after them, stepping over the bodies, and quickly searched their supply packs. As he suspected, there was nothing to identify them as anything other than soldiers of Roland. He rifled their provisions, then turned the horses loose, finally checking the bodies also for marks of other identification. In the distance he saw Grunthor and Rhapsody reining to a halt and turning back. He started across the field to catch up with them again, bothered most by the fact that what alerted him to the presence of his stalkers had been an odious signal from a newborn, rather than his own sensitive network of nerves and blood vessels. “I’m getting too old for this hrekin,” he muttered. When they were encamped that night, the baby fed, changed, and asleep for the evening, along with the two Firbolg, Rhapsody pulled a small flute from her pack, a simple reed instrument that she always brought with her when traveling. While Meridion dozed in her lap, shielded as always by the cloak of mist, she began a simple melody she had often played for Ashe before the fire in their days together. The clouds of the inky black sky sailed quietly overhead on the night breeze, unhurried. She imagined she was tying the notes of the song to them, sending them like a missive of love across the sky, hoping that her husband was standing beneath the same firmament, watching the same stars.
As she played, she was at first unaware of the tears on her cheeks. Loss, deep and strangling, roared up within her, choking her, making her song sour and thin. Rhapsody lowered her chin to her chest, remembering their days of journeying together, neither trusting the other, and yet comfortable in each other’s presence, falling slowly and inextricably in love all the while. She could not believe that once again they were parted. She cleared her throat, savagely brushed the tears from her face, then began the song again in earnest, weaving into it the musical pattern of his name. When the melody was complete, she sang softly behind it as it hovered in the air. Gwydion ap Llauron ap Gwylliam tuatha d’Anwynen o Manosse, I miss you, she intoned, directing the long waves of sound into the wind, attached by an invisible thread to his name. I love you—remember me. Then she curled up with their child, kissed him, and fell into a sleep of disturbing dreams. Far away, in the keep of Haguefort, her husband was standing on the balcony of the library, watching the eastern sky. The wind rustled through his hair, carrying with it a warmth that had not yet come to the winter-wrapped land. There was a song in that wind, a song he had heard long ago, when Rhapsody had summoned him to the grotto Elysian, to reunite him with a lost piece of his soul she had recovered. He could hear her voice in his memory. Gwydion ap Llauron ap Gwylliam tuatha d’Anwynen o Manosse, I miss you. Ashe smiled. “I miss you, too, Emily,” he said, knowing that she would not hear him in return. “But I will see you tonight in my dreams. May yours be sweet.”