As he turned to look back at the other four bards, his eyes lost their angry loneliness and his smile came quickly, with a terrible love for them—with a deep love for his sister, Camery. She was nodding between Nightraider’s black wings, trying to keep awake. Her long pale hair was tangled around her shoulders and around Marshy. The little boy rode securely in front of her, held tight and sound asleep.
The other white dragon, Windcaller, drew even with Seastrider. Kiri lay sleeping along Windcaller’s neck, her arms through the white leather harness, her mittened hands tucked beneath her cheek, her dark hair spilling out of her hood. The two dragons stared ahead searching for land.
Teb watched Kiri stir. Are you awake?
Just barely, she thought, looking across the wind at him, yawning. When she turned to look out across the sea, she rose up suddenly, to look. “There’s an island! A rock—there among the icebergs.”
The four dragons stared, embarrassed that they hadn’t seen it first. It was only a hump of granite nearly hidden by the tilting icebergs. Not much of an island, Teb thought, but maybe big enough for the dragons to rest. They headed for it, skidding across the wind.
The dragons dropped to the rock like four huge birds landing on a tiny nest. They coiled down together and began to lick the ice from their wings. Camery wiped sleep from her eyes and slid down from Nightraider’s back, holding the sleeping child against her. She stood pressed close to the black dragon, shivering. “Wouldn’t a fire be wonderful? And a roast salmon, maybe.”
Colewolf slipped down from the other black dragon. Might as well wish for a whole feast. He made a vision of hot meat and bread and gravies and pies that made the bards laugh. The older bard could not speak aloud. His tongue had been cut out by the dark leaders years ago. They thought that would prevent him from making visions, for the bard-visions were made by singing—they thought they had destroyed his magic, but they had not. Now, paired with his dragon, Starpounder, Colewolf was as powerful as any of the bards. Even before he had joined with the black dragon, he had been a formidable rebel spy. Colewolf and Kiri— father and daughter—had fought the dark well on Dacia.
Once the dragons had licked the ice away, they thrust their heads over each other’s backs, to sleep. Dawn began to lighten the sky. Marshy woke in Camery’s arms, shivering. She pulled her cloak closer around him and leaned back against Teb, where he sat in the curve of Seastrider’s flank. Teb put his arm around her comfortably. They had been parted for many years, until the war in Dacia had brought them together. She had been a spy for the rebels, working with Kiri and Colewolf. Now, she snuggled close to him. Her voice was hoarse from the cold wind.
“Can you find Mama’s diary in your pack, Teb? I want to see it; I can’t stop thinking of it; I want to read Mama’s words. To know that she’s alive—nine years since she left us.” She turned, in the circle of his arm, to look at him. “The journal of the Queen of Auric. Perhaps the only journal ever written by a dragonbard. And we never knew she was a bard—all our time together, we never knew.”
Teb opened his pack and rummaged among a change of clothes and leather packets of dried meat. He drew out the oilskin package and unwrapped their mother’s small leather-bound diary. Before they had begun their journey to Yoorthed, he had retrieved it from where he’d hidden it in the dragons’ lair. He had had to break the diary’s lock.
The first part contained memories of when the two children were small and comments about the dark invaders, how they were moving across Tirror conquering the small island nations. “The part about her leaving us is near the end,” he said. “But she thought about it for a long time; the entries are full of it.”
Camery thumbed through the pages, whispering Meriden’s words as if, by speaking them, she could touch their mother and bring her back to them.
“The wars are flaring across Tirror. Our island nations are being enslaved one by one. The dark invaders sow their seeds of forgetting, until we have no memory of our past. How easy it is for them. With the shape of the past driven from our minds, we are already half enslaved, and they can quickly defeat us. I bleed for my dear world.
“We have become a world of lost souls, without ties, without history. Soon we will all be slaves of the unliving. And the dark leaders use their slaves cruelly.
“The dragons have been driven out of Tirror by the dark, murdered by the dark, all the dragonbards they could find, murdered. If there are other bards, they have hidden themselves, as I have. I am not proud of hiding. But alone, without a dragon, what can one bard do? Alone, I cannot keep the past alive.”
Camery looked up at Teb, her voice catching. He took the diary from her and began where she had stopped.
“Teb and Camery, you may find this diary one day. You are only small children now. I have not told you that you are dragonbard born. I see the longing in you, that terrible restlessness, and I yearn to tell you. But haw can I? It would tear you apart to know your true natures, just as it has torn at me, for there is no dragon to join with.”
Colewolf sat with his arm around Kiri, his daughter’s cheek pressed against his chest, and little Marshy sprawled across their laps. They listened to Meriden’s prophetic words and were filled with sadness for her.
“I must leave this world,” Camery read, “and find my way into other worlds. It is the only way I can help Tirror. I know now that the Castle of Doors does exist—a way into those worlds. I have seen it in bard knowledge, though that knowledge is so often destroyed by the unliving.
“I believe the last dragon on Tirror has gone through the Doors, and I must follow her.
“Why has knowledge of the Castle of Doors touched me now? Why do I remember now? Am I growing stronger in what I am able to recall? Or has the dark revealed this to me, meaning to lure me away from Tirror? But why—what harm can one bard do to the powers that seek to destroy us?
“I dare not go into Aquervell to find the Castle of Doors. The dark holds that continent too strongly. I think there is another Door; my bard knowledge touches it faintly. So much knowledge seems just beyond my reach. I believe there is a Door beneath the sea, in a sunken city off our eastern coast. I believe it joins the Castle of Doors by a warping in space and time. I will sail into the eastern sea and leave word behind that I have drowned. If I can find the Door and get through, and find the dragon, perhaps together we can discover a way to drive the dark from Tirror. Together, we can try.
“What will become of my children? The dark will seek bard children; it will not allow one bard to live. Yet I must leave them. I am so torn and so miserable.”
Camery’s green eyes filled with pain. “She didn’t know—that the dragon she sought was here, asleep for so many years. She didn’t know that Dawncloud would wake and go to search for her.”
Teb shook his head. “Or that Dawncloud would leave a clutch of young behind—our four dragons—that there would be dragons on Tirror again.”
“And now there are six more,” Camery said. “And Mama doesn’t know . . . if . . . if she is still alive, to know.”
It was Colewolf who had learned of the six dragonlings, from a rebel soldier come recently to their own land from Yoorthed. The man had found a dragon nest atop a rocky isle and climbed to find the empty shells. Later, when Colewolf had given the four bards this information, in vision, his daughter’s dark eyes had been deep with yearning, for Kiri dreamed that perhaps her own dragonmate would be among them. And six-year-old Marshy’s face had held the same need.