Verlain clapped his hands, delighted. “Her mother was like that,” he said, signaling servants to heap salmon and lamb to overflowing on Cyan’s plate. “She knew everyone’s name, down to the boy in the cow barn who forked out the stalls.”
“She did everything equally well—she hunted, she judged poetry, she danced—”
“She loves to dance.” He picked a fish bone out of a bite, still beaming. “My bard taught her. We are so far from Gloinmere that dances change, she said, between there and here, passing from court to court.”
Cyan ate fish he did not taste, watching, in a flicker of candlelight, shadows appearing and vanishing on the cloth. “How did your bard know the court dances of Yves?”
“How do bards know anything? Will the king be kind to my daughter?”
Cyan looked into the sagging, sky-blue eyes, in which the hope of dragons flew. “Will she be kind to him?” he asked softly. “He has given her his heart.”
Verlain drew breath, loosed it in a long, surfeited sigh. “Then I can live without her. Thank you. Now. Tell me everything you remember of the wedding. Every tiny detail.”
Cyan sighed, too, soundlessly, and did his best to pick a harmless path around the nightmare wedding.
After supper, Verlain took him to the tower on the cliff. Servants followed them to the roof with torches and wine, dried fruit and cakes, and left them there alone at the boundary of two vast plains of darkness. One sang with the voice of water, the other with the voices of trees. Dragons flying at night could best be seen against the moon, Verlain explained, aiming his tube on its stand at a cluster of stars as thick as bees around their waning queen. Cyan searched the night, saw mists sharpen into stars, and stars bloom into impossible fires. He saw the dark and pitted hollows in the moon. But he saw no dragons. Verlain watched one distant, glowing eye shoot past the moon; he swore that night wings had opened, their bones patterned with stars, to catch the wild currents above the sea so effortlessly that they did not seem to move as they flew. Cyan, giving up on dragons, swung the tube toward land and found, among the windswept trees, stars that burned and moved but did not fly.
He raised his head after a moment. “You have company.” The Lord of Skye applied his eye to the tube while beyond him the slow tide of stars flowed raggedly toward his gate.
Verlain gave a cry. “They’re back! My house is back from Gloinmere.” He leaned precariously over the edge and shouted down into the yard. Then he snatched a torch from its sconce and spiraled back down the tower steps. Cyan, smiling, watched the torch fire tumble across the yard below to stop beside the gate.
He turned to go down himself, and saw the eye of the dragon tube flash suddenly, a molten, heart-stopping gold. He stepped toward it, his lips parted in wonder. The lens flashed again, this time with darker fires. Breathless, not daring to touch it, he looked into the opposite lens.
He saw the dragon.
The broad plain it lay on was ringed with barren hills. The ground was so parched it seemed to shed flakes of gold.
The tower of flame-red stone the dragon protected had no windows, no visible door. Both the dragon’s eyes had opened. One burned gold; the other, in shadow, fumed iridescent blazes of blue, green, black. The arch of one folded wing rose as high as the middle of the tower.
Cyan stared at it, stunned. A single claw looked longer than his body; he might have ducked into the glowing fires of its eyes. That was the deadly, gorgeous monster Thayne Ysse dreamed of unleashing at Regis Aurum. It looked impossible. The dragon could kill Thayne like an insect with a flick of a claw. If he could even find it. There were legends, Cyan remembered, of magic in the North Islands. But they were as threadbare as an islander’s cloak. And there had been nothing at all magical in their desperate, ill-fated battle with Regis Aurum. Thayne, eaten by passion and delusion, could do nothing more than add his bones to the dead on the plain. So Yves could hope. But if, in seven years since that battle, he had learned to harness and unleash such power, the dragon would rend Yves like a tattered banner on its flight to Gloinmere.
Someone spoke behind him. He whirled, his muscles locking, his hand trying to shape the air at his side into the sword he had left below. The Bard of Skye waited patiently until he remembered his own name, and wondered, for the first time, about hers.
“Verlain told me you were here. You are a brave man, Cyan Dag, and true to your king.” Her face was in shadow, but her hair gleamed white as the moon behind her. “I’m sorry I cannot help you. I must go back soon to Gloinmere. The queen asked me to return. I think she does not trust me out of her sight.”
“Did you—” He stopped to swallow, still shaken by his vision, and the fierce, overwhelming urge to battle. “Have you seen that?”
“What?”
“Thayne Ysse’s dragon.”
She was silent; he felt her gaze, intense and unyielding as the night. “What dragon?”
“The dragon guarding its tower full of treasure. He wants it to—”
She shook her head quickly, impatiently. “Cyan, that is not the tower you are looking for.”
“But—”
“You must keep your mind on the Lady of Skye. You have no time for dragon hunting.”
“I’m not. It’s Thayne Ysse who wants—”
“Never mind Thayne Ysse. I know you’ve had a hard journey, and you don’t know where to go, that’s why I came up here in secret. I must go down again. Verlain will be looking for me.”
“Please—”
“Listen to me. You’ve said nothing about this to frighten Verlain. I can telclass="underline" he is still smiling. You must leave soon. At dawn and ride south—”
“I’ve just ridden north.”
“South,” she said firmly. “Until you see three hills to the west exactly even with each other, so that they seem reflections of one another. They are called the Three Sisters. Ride west into them. They may be farther than they look. Skye is sometimes imprecise. But you’ll find it.”
“What—”
“The tower you need to find. Be very careful there. It will be dangerous for you, and for Gwynne of Skye. I must go. I don’t,” she added, moving toward the stairs, “exactly know how you can rescue her. Only that there will be a way. Farewell, Cyan Dag.”
He felt her cool, strong hand on his cheek. Then she took the torch and left him in the dark.
Nine
Thayne Ysse, following the wind, rode west to the edge of the world and watched the sun burn out like a candle flame in the sea.
The sound of the waves was different in Skye. They boomed down a long, endless boundary of land, broke against high cliffs and broad stretches of white sand longer than some of the North Islands. A village in the crook of a bluff to the south had begun to burn its evening lights; the tiny fires looked frail as insect wings against the vastness of sea and the night flowing toward it with the tide. He would find shelter there. But he lingered on the cliff, watching waves below curl and burst into butterflies, feathers, fingers beckoning from the deep. He wondered where Skye hid its dragons. Crossing it, he had scented for sulfur on the wind, for charred earth and bone, for gold. Words, Craiche had said. They could change into themselves. If he said the word for dragon, the word would become dragon. He whispered it slowly, let the wind drag it out of him like flame. Nothing happened. His mouth crooked. In what world could he bring words to life? Not even in Skye, apparently, where the wind, insistent, chilly, everywhere, in his ear, up his sleeve, down his throat, seemed to want to knead him out of the shape he knew into something other. He let it blow him off the cliff, finally, toward the distant lights. Words were what people gave even strangers for nothing. If there was a tower full of gold in Skye that no one had managed to plunder, then truth would have turned into many tales, by now, and tales cost nothing either, especially in a tavern.