He tried to roll away from himself. Hands closed on his arms, held him still. He cried out against the pain; his voice sounded cracked, frayed. His mouth burned like metal in the heat.
“Cyan,” someone kept saying insistently. “Cyan Dag.”
He dragged his burning eyes open. Thayne Ysse’s face loomed over him, blanched, haggard, his own eyes smoldering with gold, luminous and inhuman. Dragon’s eyes, Cyan saw. The fire licked through him again. He twisted in Thayne’s hold, his lips so tight between his teeth he swallowed blood.
“Don’t die,” Thayne begged. “Craiche would never forgive me.”
“I thought,” he whispered when he could speak, “you wanted me dead.”
“I changed my mind.”
Cyan closed his eyes again, remembering the dark hillside, the boy crawling through the grass, the rain. The rain. He opened his lips, searching for it blindly; it fell everywhere around him but not on him, not in his mouth, though he turned his head frantically to catch it.
“There is no rain,” he said, his throat tight with despair. “Only gold.”
Thayne loosed him and stood up. Cyan watched the gold around him blur to his movements, move with him like wings, cling to him like armor, turn his fingers to long shafts of light. He saw the dragon then, in every stone of the tower; the stones rippled to its breathing, bright, scaly shades of green, bronze, copper, flame. The jagged profile of its nostrils and jaw were clear now; its enormous eye, staring at them, opened its slitted iris wide, like a door opening. One of Thayne’s burning fingers illumined the dark within it.
“Freedom,” said the gold-shrouded figure that was once Thayne, “lies in the dragon’s eye.” Or the dragon spoke, giving them a riddle: truth or lie? Cyan tensed, torn between the two words. Fire that was not fire swept through him, hollowing his bones, until he felt he would become like the forgotten dead on the plain, flayed by the sun, pared down to what could outlast the burning day.
Thayne or the dragon spoke again. A great, curved scythelike claw moved from the dragon’s side through the circle of its body toward Cyan. He gasped, trying to pull himself away from it. Its shadow harvested his heart before it reached him. The shafts of light that were Thayne’s hands gripped him, raised his body to meet the dragon’s claw. It touched the blackened, melted disk on his chest, and a sudden flare of silver cracked through the air, so bright it blinded him. He fell back against Thayne, and then into a rattling pile of coin as the floor rumbled and jolted under them. Silver streaked the air again. He dropped his arms over his eyes; his bones seemed to scatter in all directions at the sound the air made as it split in two.
And then he felt the rain.
It was as if a river in the sky had sagged through its bed, torn it open, and emptied its water endlessly onto the plain. For a moment he let it pour into his throat; he tried to fill his bones with it. Then he turned his back to it so he could breathe, and saw the river of mud he lay in. He lifted his head, trying to find Thayne through the flickering sheets of rain.
He saw the dragon rising.
It burned like a sun on the other side of the rain. Its vast wings seemed to span the plain; it could have caught the lightning in its claws. Its back seemed made of gold. As Cyan watched, something spun away from it, flashing as it turned through light and mist, a falling tear of gold within the rain. It hit the mud near Cyan: a coin with Regis Aurum’s face on it.
Lightning, or the fire of the dragon’s farewell, seared the sky. Thunder bellowed and bounced, echoing from hill to hill. Cyan dropped his face against one arm and closed his eyes, while the rain pounded against him, seeped beneath his skin, searched out the smoldering embers of dragon fire within his bones.
He woke smelling grass and wood smoke, and a breath of chill dark air out of stone as old as the world.
He rolled wearily onto his back, knowing without opening his eyes where he must be. He felt the sun fall on his face, gentle now, dappled with shadow from the trees. The wood smoke, the soft rustlings of fire, were puzzling. He opened his eyes finally. The tower stood where he had left it, in the little glade ringed by trees. Something else caught his eye: a flash of gold in the grass.
He reached for it, turned the small circle until the king’s profile rolled upright between his finger and thumb. Thayne Ysse had flown away with the dragon and its magnificent treasure; in Ysse, he would hammer Regis Aurum’s profile into the mask of war and give it back to him. Cyan tasted a bitter breath of smoke in the back of his throat, the taste of this failure. He dropped the coin in his boot and began what seemed an arduous challenge to get up.
Someone touched him.
He started. At first, glimpsing the long dark hair, he thought: Sidera. But this young woman with her wild, tangled hair, her eyes flecked with unusual colors, was a stranger. He struggled to rise; she helped him sit. She was lean and long-limbed, with what looked like a dusting of flour in her hair. Her clothes were simple, linen and wool, crumpled from riding. She was barefoot. The wary-eyed horse snorting at Cyan’s gelding wore neither reins nor saddle.
It was her fire he smelled, and her fish roasting on it. As if, he realized, she had been waiting for him beside the tower.
“Are you all right?” she asked, her eyes widening at his torn surcoat, the brand the disk had left on his chest. “Did you find the dragon?” Then the tarnished disk caught her eye and she blinked.
“How do you know,” he whispered, “the dragon?”
“It was in the mirror. So were you. The mirror told me where to find you.” She raised a slender, callused hand, touched the disk very gently, as if she were touching a face.
Cyan raised it, looked into it. Even within the clouds and veins of charred silver, he could see the midsummer blue of the lady’s eyes, the long, fine, white-gold hair. She was still there, he thought wearily. Trapped, but still alive. Then, stunned, he saw the recognition in the young woman’s eyes.
His breath caught painfully. “You know her?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. Her voice sounded plain as stone, eager as flame. “I’ve seen her many times. Are you hurt anywhere? What did you tangle with?”
“The dragon,” he said after a moment, still staring at her. “And a furious lord from the North Islands.”
“The man with the golden hair.”
“Yes. How do you—how—”
“The mirror,” she repeated, and touched the disk again, lightly. “It looks a little like this. Did you kill the dragon?”
“No. Thayne Ysse took it.”
She gazed at him, astonished. “Then he must have enormous power. A dragon’s power.”
“What is your name?” he asked, wondering at the way her strange eyes could so clearly and unflinchingly contemplate such power.
“Melanthos. You are a knight of Yves.”
He nodded. “My name is Cyan Dag.”
“When I first saw you in the mirror, I thought you were part of a tale. Then I watched you ride beyond the mirror, into Skye. I came here to ask you for help.”
“Help.”
“Yes. Knights help people. People in distress. Don’t they?”
He closed his eyes, slid his hands over them. The smell of roasting salmon blew his way; he was trembling, he realized, with weariness and hunger. But the pain had gone; the rain had put the dragon fire out. He dropped his hands and nodded, wondering what good he had done anyone in or out of distress since he had left Yves. But he promised her, “I will do what I can for you.”