Song of the Beast (44 page)

Narim crouched over me and put a hand on my shoulder. “I've had word from one of Davyn's runners. Lara is as yet untouched,” he said, somehow sure that I would hear him. “MacEachern is at Cor Neuill, so they've taken her to meet him. If we're quick and you help me, we'll have her back before they can harm her.”

I had no time to take comfort in his assurance. Desperately I crumpled the letter in my hand as they stood me up—my knees about as useful as soggy dumplings—and half walked, half dragged me into the stableyard. The motion got me all jumbled up again, and I wasn't even sure who was who.

“By the gods, Narim, what's going on? What's happened to Aidan?” Someone was standing across the gulf of the stableyard.

A minnow swam by my eyes in the circling world. It mouthed words at me and insisted I repeat them, but I couldn't do it. Just felt seasick.

“He's been in contact with the dragon again, and it's about done him in. He almost set fire to the house. Says he doesn't dare speak with Roelan in that fashion again, but he'll come to the lake and try it the easier way. So I didn't have to do much convincing after all.”

“But what about—” The speaker stopped himself abruptly, and a face that was not a minnow appeared in front of my own. It had blond hair falling over one of its unfishy gray eyes. “Aidan, are you all right? Are you sure? What about the things you wanted to do before going to the lake?”

Narim urged Kells and me toward the horses. “I don't think he can answer you. We'll take—”

I lurched forward out of Kells's hands and lunged for the worried face, mustering all the words I could find and willing them to my useless tongue, trying to make them loud enough that someone could hear. “Roelan ... understands. Elhim always do ... everything ... I ask. I count ... on it.”

Hands dragged me off of him.

“Don't worry, Davyn. We'll take good care of him.”

While Kells and his cohorts draped me on a horse, I caught a glimpse of a puzzled Davyn standing alone in the stableyard. I squinted to see if he held a crumpled paper in his hand, but he swam out of sight too quickly. But my hands were empty when they tied them around the horse's neck so I wouldn't fall off, and with only such precarious security did I set out on the journey to the lake of fire.

DONAL

Chapter 32

As I was growing up, I never thought it strange that my best friend was a legend. An heir to a throne is never sure of his friends—a lesson learned when I was five and a playmate stabbed me with a poisoned dagger. It was in the three weeks I was confined to bed recovering, alone because all my playmates were banished or executed, that I was introduced to my father's cousin—my cousin—Aidan MacAllister.

My nurse first spoke of him as I continued to make her life miserable with my incessant complaining: my stomach hurt, my head hurt, my bandages itched, I was bored, I hated broth, I wanted to go riding, why wouldn't anyone come to play with me, and why couldn't I do whatever I wanted. “It's the gods' own wrath on my poor head that they took Aidan MacAllister from the world,” she said, after threatening to tie me to the bed if I would not be still, as my father's physicians had commanded. “He's the only one ever made you civil. Had you singing like a nightingale, he did, on a day when you had me in worse misery even than this.”

Of course I demanded to hear the story, especially when she plopped her hand over her mouth and cursed herself for mentioning a name my father the king misliked hearing. “Well, His Majesty never forbid the gifts to be here,” she said. “I've even seen him stare at 'em himself as if maybe the answer to the mystery was in 'em. So he couldn't mind too much me saying who it was gave'em to you.”

Such words did nothing to cool my new fever. I was very persistent.

So she told me of my anointing day, and from a high shelf she pulled down a bell, a flute, a drum, and a painted music box. “He sent you these in the years before he disappeared.” I was fascinated and made her tell me more while I watched the tiny mechanical soldiers march around in a circle as the music box played its tune. So I learned of Aidan MacAllister, beloved of the gods, a musician who could transform the hearts of men, my father's cousin who had vanished from the earth when he was but one and twenty.

To hear one has a relative on such terms with gods is a profound experience for a five-year-old, and I would not rest until I learned everything that any servant, groom, chamberlain, or tutor could tell me. Everyone older than ten had a story about him. For half a year, I pestered them ... until the day I asked my father if he knew where his cousin had gone. “You were his only family and his king. Didn't he tell you?”

I'd never seen my father so angry—and he was not a soft-tempered man. His fury wasn't so much directed at me as at the courtiers and servants who were listening. “It is no matter where he's gone. He was nothing like these foolish stories that make him out a magician or a god. I'll not have him spoken of. He's gone and forgotten, and that's the end of it.”

Well, that was not the end of it for me. I would admit that perhaps the legend was not wholly accurate, because my father said so. My father was the king, and I believed he was never wrong. But I was still obsessed with Aidan. On that same afternoon, as I groused and mumbled about my studies, old Jaston, my tutor who had also been my father's tutor and so had met the legendary Aidan, brought me a small, brass-bound box along with my lesson books. “Here's something as may interest you, Prince Donal. Yours by right, but perhaps best kept private, as you'll see.”

In the box were some thirty letters, seals unbroken, all addressed to me. Jaston helped me sort them by the dates marked on them and helped me read the first one, as I was not a precocious reader.

Those letters became my most precious possessions, read over and over again through the years until the paper was as soft as cloth. They were filled with adventure and wit, and an education about people and places and all manner of things a man could learn from them. I knew Aidan MacAllister far better than I knew anyone, for my father had little time for me, and no one else dared speak so freely to the crown prince of Elyria. Some of the letters had drawings or sketches on them, and almost all of them had snippets of musical notation attached. Aidan said he composed them especially for me.

Though I asked him repeatedly for one, my father refused to supply me a music master. But when I was nine I became friends with a squire who could play the lute and knew how to read the markings of music. I swore him to secrecy, and he spent a whole night playing my cousin's melodies. I had never heard anything so wonderful in my life. Even in my friend's awkward playing, I felt as if each phrase were plucked on strings right inside of me. It made me think my cousin knew me as well as I knew him, and I believed that if he walked into a crowded room, I would recognize him instantly, and he would recognize me.

I devised all manner of explanations as to where Aidan MacAllister had gone and what he was doing. Mostly they were things holy and mysterious and fine. Sometimes I thought he was playing a joke on everyone, and sometimes I wondered if he was just tired and had decided to rest for a while. Never, ever, did I believe he was dead. Too much of life was crowding out of his thirty letters.

When I was thirteen I came of age, and reading and writing and mysteries gave way to more serious matters. I had very little time to think about Aidan MacAllister, for I rode as my father's squire, apprenticing at warcraft and statecraft until at seventeen I was given a command of my own. I was good at it, just as my father was. I knew it, and my father said it—as directly as he ever said anything complimentary. He had been king at eighteen, and his father at twenty, so I had to be ready.

Only once did I ever hear my father speak of his cousin. It was the night he came to my tent in the training grounds south of Vallior to order me and my troops to the Gondari border. My musician friend, now my adjutant, was playing one of Aidan's tunes as my father walked in.

“Where did you learn that?” my father demanded.

“I've heard it was composed by a famous musician from long ago, sire,” said my diplomatic friend, keeping his head bowed and his knee bent.

“I thought as much.” It surprised me, as my father claimed to have no ear for music. He was not angry at the sideways reference to Aidan. Telling my friend to continue playing, he sat down on my cot and handed me the paper that would send me to our most dangerous frontier. Though he hated for me to venture into such a risky theater, it was time. I was eighteen, and he could afford to show no lack of faith in me. I had no doubts of his confidence, so I didn't make him search for words that were so hard for him to say. Instead, I knelt and kissed his ring, sat back on the cot, and decided that if we were to talk of something difficult on this night, it might as well be something more intriguing than war.

“I've heard that Aidan MacAllister could make people see visions with his music,” I said. “Was he as good as that?”

“Better. He could make you live his visions ... and be changed by them.” He paused and smiled a little. “But he couldn't look at a boat without heaving up his dinner, and he couldn't shoot a bow worth dirt. Quit hunting altogether when he was ten. Said his fingers were made for harp strings, not bowstrings. I called him a sodding Florin plant-eater who couldn't stand the stink of blood. He laughed and raced me back to the stables. He could run like a fox and ride like a horse thrall. I could never beat him in a footrace or a horse race either one.”

Aidan had told me the very same story in his tenth letter.

“What happened to him, Father? Why did he stop singing?”

My father did not look at me, but only shook his head. “Some things are not meant to be. There is an order to the world, not always pleasant, not always just, not always explainable. It is why you will be a king, and Vart, who sleeps across the doorway of your tent, will never be other than a slave. Aidan and his visions did not fit within that order. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know. ...”

I believed him and promised myself that when I returned from Gondar, I would find out the truth. But three weeks from that night my horse was shot out from under me by a Gondari bowman in a surprise attack. The horse—a very large horse—fell on my leg, which snapped in protest. At least eighteen soldiers died bravely trying to rescue me, but I woke up a hostage in Gondar Lair, facing the rest of my life in a filthy, squalid hut surrounded by dragons.

After three months of captivity, I could walk properly again. At six months, my left arm was burned off by a dragon, teaching me the absolute impossibility of escape. At a year I had lost hope that my father could find any honorable way to set me free. By the eighteenth month of my captivity, I had determined that the dismal chill and unending rain of Gondari winter were preferable to the mind-destroying stink of summer in the lair. But I had not yet learned to stay asleep when a dragon screamed. My days and nights ran together in fits of waking misery and too-shallow sleep.

Twenty-three dragons lived in Gondar Lair. I could recognize their different bellows, and I gave them names: Squealer, Volcano, Grinder, Devil ... Devil was the one who had taken my arm, and his throaty, malevolent screech would inevitably leave me shaking and sick. I laid wagers with myself as to which beast would roast me when I went mad and ran again. When that day came I would not fall back at the touch of flames as I had on the day I lost my arm. I would embrace the fire and free my father from the terrible position I'd put him in.

I thought a great deal about Aidan MacAllister in those dreary months. I recited his letters from memory, trying to imagine myself in the places where he'd been, instead of the place I was. He had written a great deal about dragons, how he was always trying to figure out their role in the world. They had fascinated him. It was perhaps the only place where our interests diverged. Mostly I wished my cousin would come sing to me, to make a holy vision to replace the muddy desolation that was everything I would ever see. I would have traded a month's rations for him to ease my wretchedness for even one short hour.

In some nameless hour of a nameless day in a sultry, stifling month of my second spring—I had lost track of the exact days in the hazy horror of the time after losing my arm—I was awakened by the bellow of an unfamiliar dragon. I did not seek shelter in the more protected corner of my hut, but lay where I was and prayed that my father had at last decided to sacrifice me and destroy the cursed Gondari. But it didn't sound like an attack. It would take a legion of at least fifty dragons to attempt Gondar Lair itself. The noise would be unimaginable: the murderous thunder of so many wings, the continual bellowing and roar of flames. I would have heard the Gondari legion take flight, leaving only three Riders to protect me from the two monsters left behind to hold me captive. And the Riders would have come to chain me up in case they would be given the order to execute me. But as I lay on the filthy straw and listened, I heard only the single, strange bellow and the torrent of fire that accompanied it. Then the Gondari dragons answered with a monumental trumpeting unlike any I'd ever heard. Screamer first. Then Volcano.