The dragon stirred again. A sword angled against the wall slid and struck the stones; a jewel spun out of its hilt. A crown shivered away from a skull and rolled across the floor. Beyond the thick tower walls, Thayne heard the faint sigh of dragon breath blowing up dust storms, sending whirlwinds spinning across the waste. For an instant his head filled with gold, as if the sun had poured itself into his eyes and turned his thoughts to light. He found himself on the floor, arms pushed against his eyes. When he opened them finally, the world was drenched with gold; he wondered if he had been blinded by light.
Then he saw the vast eye staring at him through the tower wall. He got to his feet unsteadily. The words he had spoken seemed to echo through him. He had not spoken fear; he had no place left for it under that gold, unwinking scrutiny. In the stillness, he heard the dragon’s heartbeat.
“Thayne Ysse.” Its voice was a hollow hiss, like wind in a cavern.
He heard his own heartbeat then, slowing to match the dragon’s; his blood seemed to run in small rivers, secret chasms, burning like fire and the color of gold. He could fly, he felt suddenly; he could suck stars out of the sky with the powerful drag of his wings; he could spit fire at the sun.
He answered, aware of himself only as a reflection of the dragon’s eye, a thought in the dragon’s fiery brain. “Yes.”
“I will give you everything in this tower. Wealth. Beauty. Power. Death.”
“Yes.”
“I will burn the towers of Gloinmere for you.”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Give me one thing.”
He said one letter, then stopped, letting the word fade into breath. He heard his own heart again, faster now, a small, secret thing outracing the dragon’s heart. He answered finally, “What one thing?”
“Give me Craiche.”
He moved finally, after time had shaped his heart again, his trembling, parched body, his mortal thoughts. He turned his back to the dragon’s eye, slumped down on the floor against a pile of gold, and waited.
Thirteen
On a hillside in the northernmost parts of Yves, Cyan knelt within a thick line of vine and bramble and brush growing along a ditch between fields. The brush dripped endlessly with rain. The fields, thick with pasture grass, were sodden underfoot; they glittered, under torch fire, as if the stars had rained out of the sky, leaving the thick, blank black overhead. In the deepest part of the brush, Regis Aurum lay shivering beneath Cyan’s sodden cloak. The fields were quiet around them for the moment; the nearest torch had passed them, hissing and smoking in the rain. It was cresting the hill now, snaking out from side to side, searching for the dead.
Regis muttered something. Cyan felt for his shoulder. He could see nothing of the king’s face, but he knew that he was on a hillside in north Yves with a memory: a newly crowned king warring to keep his kingdom together, and, having won this battle, fighting under a bush in the endless rain for his life.
“Where is everyone?” the king demanded suddenly, furiously. “Tell them to bring fire! And why is it raining in my bed?” His voice broke with a hiss of pain; his flailing hand found Cyan’s arm. “Who are you?”
Who indeed? Cyan wondered, feeling the cold rain drip down his neck, smelling the sweet, sticky leaves of the underbrush, as he had years before. Why he had been plunged into this particular memory, he could not imagine. The king was bleeding badly from a stray arrow shot as the ragged army from the North Islands retreated. It had been almost the last bolt fired, as Regis’s knights chased them uphill into a wood, leaving a wake of dead and wounded in the grass. Cyan, leaping off his horse, had pulled Regis under the brush out of the deadly path of the warhorses. The knights and the North Islanders disappeared into the wood, leaving him alone with the wounded king, not knowing, as twilight seeped into night, that the North Islanders were scattering for their lives down the other side of the hill. They won a few parting arguments as they retreated. The king’s most valued adviser caught an arrow in his throat and was speechless for the rest of his life. The king’s youngest cousin threw up a palm to ward away an arrow and fell with his hand pinned to his eye. Fury over their own dead drove the knights to follow the retreating army farther than they had to. When they collected themselves and their fallen, in the bleak twilight, no one remembered when the king, in the midst of his victory, had disappeared.
“Who are you?”
All Cyan knew, in the underbrush with the lost king, was that everyone around them except for the dead and wounded had vanished. He tried to keep the king sheltered and quiet, while he watched for the returning knights. When night fell, he saw the first torches move slowly up from the bottom of the hill. They did not get far before the busy flames found what they sought in the long grass. They took the dead away and returned for more. Cyan heard their voices, hushed and cautious, as they called to one another across the field.
While the North Islanders were gleaning their own off the battlefield, Regis, making his unexpected complaints about the cold and the wet, was one more random voice among the cries and groans and weeping on the field. As the torches grew closer to them, Cyan tried to quiet him, whispering desperately, knowing that if the North Islanders found the king, he would die there, under a bush in the rain, victory or no victory. Cyan, though he might pull a few under the ground with him as he went, would fare no better.
“Who?”
“Regis,” he breathed, “you must be quiet. I am hurt, and they will kill me if you are not quiet.”
“Cyan,” the king whispered back, his fingers tight on Cyan’s arm. “Don’t be afraid. I will kill them before they harm you.”
“I’m very cold.”
“I know. It’s wet in here. Where are you hurt?”
“In my left side, above my heart. I think they may not find me if you stay very quiet. Very still. Now.”
Torch fire passed over them, searched into the leaves and vines and brambles with their tiny white flowers. The king made a noise and quelled it, his lips caught tight between his teeth. The torchbearers chose that place to gather, a dozen weary, muddy, bitter men searching the unfamiliar field in the dark.
“Who is missing?” they asked each other.
“Ean Muldar.”
“He’s dead. I took him down.”
“My brother,” someone said. Torchlight flared, swam across a face, and Cyan bit back a word. Thayne Ysse stood there with his yellow eyes and his gold hair, longer then, lank and streaked with rain.
“You mean your father,” a man answered. “They found him earlier in the wood. He’s been hurt, but he’s safe, now—”
“No,” Thayne broke in, the word cutting sharp as an ax into wood. “Craiche.”
“Craiche!” someone repeated incredulously. “You left him home to milk the cows, surely—”
“He didn’t stay,” Thayne said tersely. “I saw him earlier. I told him where to wait, but he didn’t stay there, either.”
“I saw a boy running with us through the woods,” someone said. “I thought he was from these hills.”
“Which woods?”
The torch angled, pointed overhead. “Up there. Thayne, he can’t have come with us! He’s a twelve-year-old boy; someone would have spotted him in one of the boats when we crossed—”
“He knows how to row a boat.” Cyan heard the familiar, leashed fury in Thayne’s even voice. “He followed us.” He turned abruptly, a flame torn away from the circle of fire and heading uphill. Someone breathed a curse onto Regis Aurum’s head. The torches separated, lined across the field, still searching as they moved toward the wood.