Blood of Dragons (46 page)

Outside, the chill wind kissed her face roughly.

Rapskal lifted his face. ‘Smells like spring,' he said.

She opened her senses to the night. Yes, there was something in the wind, something more wet than freezing. It wasn't warm, but all threat of frost had fled.

He took her hand and she was grateful for his warm clasp. He ran his thumb over the fine scaling on the back of her hand. ‘You can't deny the changes,' he said, and before she could reply, he added, ‘Tomorrow, if you look up at the hills behind the city, you will see the birches and willows flushed with pink. On the taller slopes behind them, the snows are almost gone. Very soon, Leftrin will have to make a run to Trehaug to see if the seeds and livestock he ordered have come in.' He turned and smiled at her. ‘This will be the year we reawaken all of Kelsingra. Years from now, it will be hard to remember that there was a time when cattle and sheep didn't graze in the pastures outside the city, a time when only fifteen keepers lived here.'

The fullness of his vision astounded her. She let him lead her as they walked through the dimly lit streets. As always, he filled the silence with his talk. ‘Once this city never slept. Once it was so populated that people walked through it by night and by day. There are whole sections of the city that we haven't explored yet. All manner of wonders awaiting rediscovery by the new Elderlings. Places where artists wrought miracles and craftsmen plied their trades.'

She thought of the dry Silver well and how it would limit their future. But this was not a night to talk of that. Let him talk himself out and when his words ran down, she'd take him back to the baths and let him sleep. She thought of the morrow and all it must bring. She dreaded wondering how long Tintaglia would linger between death and life, and the child with her. She thought of Kalo devouring the dead dragon in the square and felt squeamish. She did not want to think of the arguments that would continue tomorrow over the fate of the Chalcedean warriors who had come here to kill dragons. She thought of the days before Tarman had returned, days filled with the simple work of hunting and trying to rebuild the docks and exploring the city. They had seemed so tedious, and now she longed to have that comforting boredom back.

She had suspected that Rapskal would try to take her back to the house Tellator and Amarinda had shared. She was relieved when he didn't. They walked through other streets, and he spoke of what he knew of them. A poet had lived in that house, and written epics on the walls and ceilings. This bakery had been renowned for its sweet berry pastries. Here was a street where weavers had made the sort of garments that they both wore now. She knew he spoke Tellator's memories aloud as if they were his own, but she was too tired to rebuke him. Let him talk them out and then perhaps Rapskal would come back to her.

He took her down a side street and she found herself in a humbler part of town. ‘A tinsmith had that shop,' he told her. ‘The pans he made needed no oven to cook the food put into them. And over there? The woman who owned that store hammered out wind-chimes that played a thousand melodies when the wind stirred them.'

‘They worked in Silver,' she guessed and he nodded.

‘Silver was the great secret treasure of the Elderlings and the tonic that made both Elderlings and dragons what they became.' He halted at a door hole. ‘Lack of it will kill us all,' he said conversationally, and stepped inside the empty doorframe of the shop. She followed him reluctantly.

‘It's dark in here,' she complained and felt his assent.

‘They did not use the Silver everywhere. Even then, it was a precious commodity. Where many might gather they used it for light and for warmth. For art that all shared. But in the small personal spaces, they used far less of it.' He reached into his pouch and drew forth light. He held something out to her, shaking it free. A necklace with a moon-face charm on it. It brightened as he shook it, filling the room with a thin silvery light. It looked oddly familiar.

‘Put it on,' he urged her, and when she did not, he stepped closer to push back her hood and loop it around her neck. The gleaming moon rested on her bosom and she looked around the shop. Little remained of the humble wooden furnishings, but there were things among the rubble that she recognized. An anvil of a kind she had never seen, yet she knew it for what it was. A stone table with grooves and drains in the surface: for working Silver. Reflexively, she lifted her eyes to where tools had once hung on a rack. The rack was gone, the tools a jumble on the floor near where they had hung. A battered ladle tangled with a pair of shears. A sudden urge to pick them up, to tidy her workspace came to her.

‘Let's go outside,' she said abruptly.

‘We could,' he agreed. ‘But it wouldn't help. You can't run away from it. I don't want to force you, but time is running out. For all of us.'

Cold filled her. She turned to look at Rapskal and the reflected light from the moon-charm made his eyes silver. ‘What do you mean?'

‘You
know
,' he coaxed her gently. ‘I've been waiting for you to admit it. You do know.' He paused and looked at her accusingly. ‘Amarinda knew. And so you know.'

You know
, Sintara echoed his words.
And it is time for you to stop being stubborn.

‘I don't know,' she insisted to both of them. It hurt her feelings that they would join forces against her, and force her to this. Whatever ‘this' was. She spoke frankly to the man with the gleaming silver eyes. ‘You are scaring me. Tellator, go away. I want my friend Rapskal back.'

He sighed and spoke reluctantly. ‘The need is great. I love you. Then, and now, I love you. You know that. I have waited as long as I can, as long as any of us can. But we are Elderlings, and ultimately, we serve the dragons. Will you let Tintaglia die? Will you let Malta and Reyn and their baby die because you want to cling so strongly to who you were born? Thymara, I know you are frightened by this. I have tried to let you go as slowly as ever you wished. But tonight is our last chance. Please. Choose this. Choose this for me, for Rapskal. Because I would not force you. But Tellator would.'

She was shaking, fighting a battle inside herself as well as withstanding the crushing fear he woke in her. Memories were stirring, ones she did not want to acknowledge. She looked around her. ‘This was her little shop. She made things here.'

He nodded. ‘Not a shop, really. She sold the things she made, but she gave as many away. This was where she created her art. This was where you worked Silver with your hands.'

‘I don't remember it.' She spoke flatly.

‘Not easily, no. Silver was too precious. The memories of working it were not saved in stone. Some secrets are too precious to be entrusted to anyone except the heir to your trade. Those secrets were only passed from master to apprentice. The locations of the wells could not be kept completely secret, not when the dragons came to drink from them. How the wells were managed, season to season, that was a guild secret.'

He took her arm suddenly and she almost pulled away from him. But he was walking her to the door and she was too grateful to be leaving the building. Amarinda had worked there. She knew it now, recalled the busy little street of artisans as it had been. Not from memory-stone; it had not been used in this part of the city, but from the residue of memories that her time as Amarinda had left in her mind.

‘Ramose had his studio there. The sculptor. Remember?' His voice had gone colder.

She glanced at the empty sockets of windows in the wall. ‘I remember,' she admitted grudgingly. Something else popped into her mind. ‘You were jealous of him.'

Rapskal nodded. ‘He had been your lover before I was. We had a fight once. Foolish of me, not to know that a man who wields a hammer and chisel all day builds up an arm.'

She shied away from those memories. Too close, she thought, too close to something. And then they turned a corner and she was in a familiar place. There was the well plaza, just as they had left it, beams stacked to one side, broken mechanisms to another, tools in a third. The ship's crew had put some hours in on the chain. There was a mended length of it by the well's lip, the end fastened to the stub of one ancient post that had once supported the well's cover. Heeby was there, too, standing quietly in the darkness. A sense of dread rose in Thymara.

‘Why did we come here?' she asked breathlessly.

‘So you could get the Silver. So Tintaglia can live. So all the dragons can become all they were meant to be, and their Elderlings as well.' The light from the locket she wore did not reach his eyes here in the open. They were the lambent blue they had always been but the silvery sheen the jewellery gave turned his face to a ghost mask. She did not know him.

He spoke softly but firmly. ‘Amarinda, you have to go down the well. You are the only one who knows how to bring back the Silver.'

‘My love?'

Reyn spoke the words softly as if he thought she could be asleep. She wasn't. Couldn't be, wouldn't be, and might never sleep again. She huddled by her dragon's face, her baby on her lap. Her hand rested by Tintaglia's nostril where she could feel the slow sigh as the dragon continued to breathe. ‘I'm here,' she told Reyn.

He hitched closer to her. ‘I'm trying to make sense of what I'm feeling. When I was a boy and Tintaglia was a shadowy presence underground, trapped in her wizardwood case, I was fascinated with her. Then she all but enslaved me, and I hated her. I loved her when she helped me recover you. And then, off she went, and for years we heard nothing, felt nothing from her.'

‘I was as angry with her as you were. To leave us the care of the young dragons, to go off without a word. To send Selden off to Sa knows where, never to return to us.' She caressed the dragon's snout. She sighed. ‘Do you think he's dead, Reyn? My little brother?'

Reyn shook his head wordlessly.

The night had turned clear, the clouds blown aside, yet it was not as cold as it had been. Spring was in the air. Above them, the moon sailed on and the stars shone, heedless of mortals below. Their Elderling cloaks kept them warm. The stones were hard beneath her. She had her husband and their first-born son at her side and the dragon who had shaped all their lives. Life and death merged at this spot, an untidy tangle of endings. The dragon's breath flowed over their son. The smell of her infected wounds hung in the damp air.

‘She is still so incredibly beautiful,' Malta said. She willed her voice not to choke in her tight throat. ‘Look at these scales, every one a tiny work of art. It's even more a wonder when you realize she determined their decoration, every one of them. Look at these, around her eyes.' Her fingers walked to them, traced the intricate pattern of white, silver and black that framed the dragon's closed eyes. ‘No dragon will ever be as glorious as she was. The young queen Sintara flaunts herself, but she will never be as blue as our Tintaglia. Fente and Veras are plain as tree snakes compared to her. My conceited beauty, you had every right to be vain.'

‘She did,' Reyn conceded. ‘I hate that she dies like this, broken and flawed. Such a waste to lose her. I could feel the hope in the other dragons surge when she appeared in the skies. They need her, they need what she remembers.'

‘We all do,' Malta said quietly. ‘Especially Phron.'

The baby stirred in her lap, perhaps at the mention of his name. Malta lifted the corner of her cloak that covered him. He still slept. She bent close to study his face in the moonlight. ‘Look,' she said to her husband. ‘I never realized it before. The tiny scales on his brows? They are the same pattern as hers. Even without her presence, he carries her marks on him. Her artistry would have lived on in him. If he were to live.' The baby stirred at her touch as she traced his face and whimpered more strongly. ‘Hush, my little one.' She lifted him from her lap. His thin arm and scrawny hand sprawled from his wrappings. She put the little hand on the dragon's brows, held it there between Tintaglia's scales and her still-soft, still-human palm. ‘She would have been your dragon, too, my darling. Touch her once, before you both go. Imagine how beautiful you would have been if she could have guided you.' She moved the baby's hand down the dragon's scaling in a caress. ‘Tintaglia, if you must go, give him something of yourself first. Give him a memory of flight, give him a thought of your beauty to carry into the dark.'

‘I don't know anything about Silver or about this well. I'm not Amarinda and I don't know. And I'm not going down that well. Not now, not ever. I hate places like that, dark and small. Go down there in the night, alone? That's crazy.' Her heart was pounding at the mere thought of it. She crossed her arms, hugging herself. Tats. Why hadn't she wakened Tats and made him come, too? No one knew they'd gone out walking.

He insisted relentlessly, in such a gentle voice. ‘Tintaglia is dying. Now is all we have. Thymara or Amarinda, it doesn't matter. You have to go down the well. I'll go with you. You won't be alone.'

She tried to fight her way back to her own reality. He was just Rapskal, just strange Rapskal, and she didn't have to let him bully her. ‘I won't! I'm tired of this, Rapskal. And I'm tired of trying to help you. I'm going back to the hall to get some sleep. You are being too strange, even for me.'

She turned to go but he seized her arm in a grip of iron. ‘You have to go down the well. Tonight.'

She slapped at his hands and tried to twist free of his grip. Could not. When had he become so strong? He did not even appear to be making an effort to hold her as she fought his grip on her. She could not bear the gaze of the stranger looking out of his eyes at her. ‘Let me go!'

Wings flapped and a gust of air washed over her. The paving stones of the square shook as the dragon's claws met them and skidded to a halt. Sintara! Thymara knew her scent as well as she knew her mind's touch on hers
. Be calm, Thymara. I am here. All will be fine.