Finally, spent, he slumped onto the gold as if it were a pile of straw. Craiche, he thought numbly. He will never know what happened to me. That was his last coherent thought for a long time. He simply watched the little, skulking, ignoble idea of death skitter soundlessly through a row of collapsed ribs, duck beneath the outflung bones of a hand. He slept finally, or at least he dreamed. The tower grew so dark that the air seemed to take on density and weight; he felt the blackness that he breathed.
He heard harping.
He walked up the steps in the tower on Ysse, where his father waited for him. The harping surprised him; he thought the harper had gone. But her playing lingered, lovely and ancient as something spun out of sea and wind. When he opened the door at the top of the stairs, he found a room full of gold and the bones of lost princes. His father was not in this tower, only an old woman sitting on a hillock of coins, playing a harp made of bone.
She smiled at him above her harp, her sunken eyes as black as the shadow beyond the glow of gold.
“Thayne Ysse.”
“Yes,” he answered, wondering, in his dream, why he was not surprised to find her there.
“You have something I want.”
He laughed sharply, to hide his sudden fear. “I have all the gold in the world and nothing.”
“You have something I want.” She released a final, deliberate note with her thumbnail, and put the harp aside. She looked at him out of eyes as dark as the new moon within the ring of the old. “If you give it to me, I will show you the way out of here.”
He found the cloying dark suddenly heavy to breathe. He remembered the old crone he had dreamed about, trying to fish the horned moon out of water. He had spoken the word for dragon and she had turned into fire. He said again, “I have nothing to give you.”
She plucked another string with a fingernail, a high nick of sound, watching him. “I will show you how to become the words for dragon and gold.”
He whispered, “What do you want?”
“Give me Craiche.”
“No!” he shouted with such horror and fury that she seemed to blur in the force of it. Her hair streamed into the dark; a string on the harp hummed an overtone. “I will never give you Craiche!”
“Never is a long time.”
“I will die here first.”
“Yes. It is getting warm, isn’t it?”
“What do you want with Craiche?”
“I have my eye on him.” She rose then, a little taller than he had remembered. She smiled, her face like the cracked, dry waste outside. “I could take him anyway, while you are dying in here. You will go mad from boredom before you starve. A mercy, I think. The dragon sees you through those stones. He knows you are here. You brought him nothing but your golden hair; even that will not outlast your bones. If you do not return to Ysse, Craiche will rouse the North Islands against Yves again, and no one will be left on the islands but the birds.”
“He couldn’t—No one would listen—”
“I listen.” She smiled again, a skull’s smile, he thought, at everything and nothing. “He has already called my name.”
“No,” he shouted again, and woke himself.
The air had grown stifling; the noon sun, he guessed, was scorching the plain. He wiped sweat from his face, his mouth as dry as the hot metal mouths of the cups on the stones. He contemplated his dream, and thought dispassionately: she was wrong. I will go mad from thirst before boredom. He lay back on the coins. From that angle he could see, very far away, an oblong of blue where the tower opened to the sky. In the dream, he realized, there was a way out. What had the old crone said? I will show you the way out of here… “If,” he whispered. “If.” What would she do with Craiche, anyway? he wondered. It didn’t matter; he would never bargain with Craiche’s life, for anyone or anything. He would drink this molten fiery air and die first.
It took an exhaustingly long time. He counted coins, picking them out of the pile he lay on and tossing them against the wall, while he watched the oblong of blue narrow into a slit. Later, watching a sapphire mine itself out of the matrix of the night, he thought about the harper. She led him here, he remembered. She had told his father that the dragon existed somewhere in Skye. “Well,” he murmured, feverish with thirst, “all I have left to do is pick a crown and call myself King of the North Islands. She is ridding Regis Aurum of the gadfly family that challenged his rule… I didn’t bend my head low enough for his taste when we surrendered in that dreary rain…” His mind seized on the rain, the endless water falling as freely as words for anyone to drink. Rain changed to gold in the merciless crucible of the tower… He tasted a coin, searching it for the memory of water, and choked on dry metal. He closed his eyes, felt tears run down the side of his face, and tasted them. They were as bitter as the gold.
Craiche stood in his thoughts, smiled his wild, sweet smile that was afraid of nothing. Thayne, soothed by it, told him: I tried. That’d all. I tried. Then Craiche was crawling on his belly out of the dark rain into firelight, one leg pushing him, the other useless, bleeding from a sword slash that severed the tendon behind his knee. He wept silently when Thayne picked him up, his body shaking as he stifled the noise, so that his enemy would not hear him cry. “I carried you,” Thayne whispered to him, “nearly the whole way back to Ysse.”
He fell silent, dreamed a little, of cups of gold that turned to gold dust as he swallowed them. He dragged his eyes open after a while, thinking: There is a way out. She said there is a way. His thoughts slid to Craiche again, sitting on the tower steps with a book, trying to persuade Thayne that there was magic in what lay between his hands.
“Maybe,” Thayne whispered, “there is a way with words…”
He pulled himself upright, off the pile of coins, stood shaking, dizzy, wondering which portion of the dragon he might be addressing through the wall. He said finally, his voice worn so ragged he scarcely recognized it, “I don’t know how to talk to dragons. I came here to steal your gold and take you away with me to the North Islands, where it’s cold and wet and noisy with the sea. I wanted you to burn a path for the army of Ysse and the North Islands to march south down Yves to Gloinmere, to strike at Regis Aurum where he rules. I wanted your gold to buy bread and arms for the North Islands. I wanted you to fight with us for our freedom. I don’t know what you are, or what you want besides gold. I don’t have gold to give you. I don’t have much of anything. Maybe there is something I can do for you.”
He waited. The night beyond the tower seemed so still it might have been stone itself. The stars had vanished from the top of the tower; he could barely see the faintest line where dark separated itself from the deeper black of stone. Then a handful of coins slid down the pile where he had been lying. A cup overturned with a sudden clink. Thayne felt the vibration under his feet, the massive movement of dragon as it shifted a boulder’s weight of bone and let it settle.
He swallowed, or tried to. He said, “Is there anything? I’m an ignorant northerner in a land full of magic. All I know is war and work. And a little of love. No magic words. I don’t know what language dragons speak. I can say the words I see here in this tower. Wealth. Beauty. Power. Death. They’re what I want to take back with me to Ysse. I don’t know what the price for them might be.”