Now, alone and frightened in the darkness of Ylorc once more, she was defenseless against the demons of the night that lived in her own mind. As long as she could remember she had been prescient, had seen the future and sometimes the past in her dreams, and so she did not drag herself into a deeper stupor or consume the herbs that might have made her slumber so intense that her mind could not process what it had seen, for fear that she should miss something that was important, the need to be known in order for those she loved to remain safe.
And so she submitted to the dreams, to the horrid sights of burning ships in a harbor alight with flames; the images of terrified villagers running from soldiers with swords, attacking from horseback as they passed through, riding down anyone they saw; of great winged shapes that streaked through the night sky, raining fiery death down on the thatched roofs of houses below. But mostly she dreamt of Ashe.
Except for the times when she employed her skills as a Singer, reaching out to him over the waves of time with the musical lore she had studied, most of her dreams of her husband were terrifying. Night after night she saw him in her sleep, cold and wandering, sometimes adrift in the waves of the sea, lost without the family that the man treasured, that the dragon considered its own. She could feel, even hundreds of miles away, the unraveling of her husband’s mind, of the ascendancy of the dragon in his soul as the broken-hearted man receded back into the shadows.
Each night she wept, often losing sleep and lying in exhausted numbness throughout all the hours of the long night until the morning finally came, when it was time to return to her work on the Lightcatcher. One particularly brutal night, she dreamt of her old home in Merryfield, of the Patchworks in the Wide Meadow where she and the boy she had called Sam had fallen in love beneath a starry sky, beneath the willow tree, alongside a meadow stream. The pasture, the stream, and the tree were all still there, all burned black to ashes in the aftermath of the Seren war. The bones of those she loved lay strewn in the field around her, and at her feet a tiny skeleton lay, its skull graced with the traces of flaxen curls. Rhapsody began to weep as if she was seeking empty herself of every tear. And then, just as her mind began to fill with scenes of terror and destruction, she felt a soft musical vibration surround her, fill her ears with gentle music, chasing her dreams into the darkest corners of her mind again, as if it were opening a window in her soul, allowing sunshine in. She recognized the vibration.
It was the one emitted by both of the dragons she loved in her life, her husband and Elynsynos.
Though exhausted, Rhapsody struggled to awaken. It can’t be Ashe, she thought drowsily, fighting the dark cobwebs of sleep. I know he is not here, but I can feel the song which he used to chase my dreams away, settling me down to dreamless, restorative sleep again. It must be Elynsynos; she’s here somewhere, not dead.
Fighting the heaviness of her eyelids, Rhapsody struggled to find the vibration and opened her eyes, looking for the dragon that had chased her nightmares away. There, on the coverlet beside her, she was greeted with the sight of tiny, twinkling blue eyes, scored with vertical pupils expanding in the dark, taking in the sight of her. Porcelain hands and feet moved about in the air amid soft cooing sounds, coming from a head crowned with flaxen curls.
Her baby.
Rhapsody’s hands immediately went to her abdomen, once again flat beneath her palms. Then, tears of joy pouring down her cheeks, she reached out gently and caressed the smooth skin of his face, sliding her hands carefully beneath him and bringing her lips to the hollow of his neck, kissing him over and over again gratefully.
Meridion just lay on the coverlet, staring up at her in the dark, his eyes twinkling. “I should have known,” Rhapsody murmured, smiling down at her son. “I knew you would come back; I just didn’t know that you already have the power of dragons to chase away dreams. My, aren’t you a special boy.” The infant gurgled.
43
If Melisande had not seen two hundred foresters mount up and ride into the woods around her, followed immediately by another five hundred on foot who disappeared into the great forest behind them, she never would have known that she and Gavin were anything but utterly alone on their journey. The mounted men who had accompanied them from the Circle for the last several weeks had taken off in two cardinal directions upon crossing the Tar’afel River, riding north and west with the rising sun behind them to the outermost edges of the lands of the dragon. The Invoker had explained to her that only the scouts assigned to the farthest reaches would continue to ride; foresters could move far more quickly and quietly on foot than on horseback when traveling through the heavy glades of virgin wood such as those that comprised the lands of Elynsynos. His face had no hint of a smile as he fur- her explained that foresters would not wish to tempt a dragon with horse meat unless the distance made it necessary. The young Lady Navarne had listened to his explanation from atop her own mount, a thick-bodied forest mare with gray dappling. “Why are we mounted, then, if it is more easily done on foot?” she had asked. The bearded Filidic leader had smiled. “Do you fancy yourself a forester, then, Lady Melisande Navarne, as well as all your other accomplishments?” He turned away quickly as her face changed color, but the gentleness of his tone left her vanity intact even as she choked on her own foolishness.
As soon as Gavin’s contingent was out of sight, the Invoker mounted his own horse, a Lirin roan that had been given to him by the border guards of Tyrian in tribute, took hold of her mare’s reins, and rode smoothly into the greenwood. Melisande clung to the mare’s bridle at first, but soon discovered that the Invoker’s quiet vocal cues led the horses easily around deadfall and the deeper pits in the mossy floor of the forest, ensuring a reasonably stable ride. They traveled northwest in silence, following the path of the sun that gleamed through the budding leaves of the ancient forest, casting lacy shadows on the ground before them. Melisande struggled to stay awake in the saddle; the exhaustion of her ordeal was compounded by a dreamy lulling sensation that surrounded her thickly the deeper they traveled into the greenwood. Her eyelids grew heavier as the sun made its way down the vault of the sky, and by dusk she had drifted off to sleep, jostled awake only for a few seconds at a time, and only by the most egregious of bumps. She surrendered to the sensation of riding the spinning world, helpless in the force of its turning, and let her chin come to rest on her chest. For the most part she was able to doze, led by Gavin’s skilled hand and the horse’s gentle canter. She was dreaming of her mother, or at least a woman who looked like the painting of her mother over the fireplace in her father’s library, when she felt the world stop spinning around her. Melisande was startled awake; the light was gone from the sky, leaving nothing but the faintest hint of aquamarine peeking through the trees to the west, while clouds sped through the darkening canopy above her.
She looked around for the Invoker, and spied his horse a few feet beyond her own, but the saddle of the roan was empty.
“Gavin?” she called softly, her voice trembling a little.