The Weaver's Lament (21 page)

“The order has not yet been given for the braziers to be lit,” he said. “What are you doing here, Commander?”

The soldier was struggling to contain his visible wrath in the presence of the king. “We are ready to ride, sir.”

“By whose command?” Achmed's question was not demanding, but rather wryly amused.

“The Sergeant's, sir.”

“Hmm. He commands you even in death?”

“And ever will, sir.”

The Bolg king nodded, pleased. “Very well. Light the braziers. Come, Rhapsody.”

They were bustled into the tower built inside the mountain peak and hurried to the stairs, ascending as quickly as each individually could. Achmed took the steps two at a time and disappeared, despite Rhapsody's best effort to keep up with him, out the door that led to the giant cliff from which the reports had been sent.

A series of mounted spyglasses stood along the edge.

Rhapsody pushed her way to one and peered into it, as Achmed took up a taller one beside her.

At first all she could see was the night in the western part of the Krevensfield Plain. She kept watching, trying to see through the shadows cast by the thousands of torches planted about the inner circle of the peaks, and carried by soldiers gathering along the edge of the steppes, until finally she caught sight of four horses with riders atop two of them, pulling a wooden wagon behind them.

It was flying a flag of truce, and the standard of the Cymrian Alliance.

She gasped as she found the mechanism on the spyglass to adjust it, and sighted it on the riders.

Then she swore silently.

“As I suspected, it's your accursed husband,” Achmed said, stepping away from the spyglass. “Call the captains of the regiments to me—we will send a welcoming committee.”

“No,” Rhapsody said, seizing his arm. “Meridion is with him.”

Achmed's eyes narrowed. He turned back to the glass and looked through it again, swearing profanely after a moment.

“Where is the cwellan?” he demanded of his guards.

“On way, sir.”

“Ring the ground below us with torchlight,” Achmed instructed, “and form an alley of infantry between the tower and the riders. Let them come through soldiers on both sides. Then have the troops withdraw so that they are alone below. Train the crossbows on them both from a distance of one hundred yards, but have the archers forbear—I only want them for backup.” He turned to Rhapsody, who stood beside him at the dark ledge, her arms wrapped tightly around her flapping dressing gown.

She was looking west, shaking with what appeared to be unsurpassed anger.

Her rage matched that of every other soul in the Bolglands, including his own.

Suddenly, atop every mountain in the range, and on the largest ledges and balconies in the edifice of Ylorc, wide braziers roared to life, making the night almost as bright as day, flames dancing and casting shadows across the steppes and the Krevensfield Plain.

The two riders approached down the alley of infantrymen, the wagon behind them driven by a nervous-looking human soldier in a breastplate, with an armed footman on the back.

They stopped at a distance of two hundred yards, approximately three hundred feet below the opening on which Rhapsody and Achmed stood.

Ashe was atop a gray gelding, wearing no armor and carrying no weapon save for Kirsdarke, the elemental sword of water, belted at his side. Meridion rode a black mare beside him, dressed also in traveling clothes, his chest protected by a padded vest, his cape flapping in the wind behind him.

They rode to the area at the base of Grivven Peak and drew their mounts to a halt.

*   *   *

Ashe looked up to see that Rhapsody had stepped to the edge of the ledge on which she, Achmed, and a small coterie of Bolg soldiers stood. Achmed stood behind her, at her shoulder.

All around him the dragon could feel the static in the air, the palpable hatred of an entire populace, all of it aimed directly at him and his son.

The Bolglands are burgeoning, itching to ride down on the two of us,
Meridion thought sickly.

Ashe looked up at his wife as once he had from within the Bowl of the Moot, at the first Cymrian Council, his heart in his eyes, but addressed Achmed.

“Permission to declare, Your Majesty, under the laws of peace to which we both are signatories.”

The Bolg king exhaled but said nothing.

Ashe swallowed, maintaining his sight on his wife from within the shadows of the enormous circle of braziers behind him.

“The perpetrators of the unspeakable crime against the Sergeant-Major are chained, hand and foot, and locked in the wagon behind me,” he said. “Here is the key.”

He tossed the ring on which the key was tied a good distance ahead of him.

Achmed took several breaths, his eyes still locked on Ashe. Then he glanced down to his left at one of the guards on the ground near the horses, and nodded.

The Firbolg soldier ran hurriedly to where the key ring had landed and scooped it up, then ran back into line. A second Bolg, this one mounted, rode to the wagon and directed it to follow him, which it did until both were out of sight.

“Appalled as I am at the treachery, the unspeakable savagery of this crime, I take responsibility for the leaders of the army of the Alliance,” Ashe continued.

“What are you doing here?” Rhapsody demanded angrily. “I told you not to follow me.”

The Lord Cymrian swallowed again, nervously this time. “I have come to beg pardon and forgiveness of the Bolg king and the Lady Cymrian, and to prostrate myself at their feet in surrender. I have resigned as commander-in-chief of the armies of the Alliance—our daughter Allegra now holds that post. Direct, therefore, your rage at me, but, by your leave, Your Majesty, do not hold the continent responsible for the actions of rogue soldiers, just as Roland has done with past atrocities committed by errant members of the army of Ylorc.”

The menacing anger radiating from Achmed was like the waves of heat from an inferno. Rhapsody looked down at her husband from the ledge, stepping even closer to the edge.

“You have endangered our son by bringing him here.”

Meridion sat up taller on his mount. “I came of my own accord, Mimen.”

“That was foolhardy.”

“Gained. But in my profession, I am often called upon to tell the story of your famous belief in forgiveness,” Meridion said, smiling slightly. “Are you not the one who, at the Council that named you Lady, told the broken Cymrian populace that ‘we must forgive each other, we must forgive ourselves'?”

“Don't even address that, Rhapsody,” Achmed warned her quietly from behind as a Bolg soldier came out onto the ledge from the tower, the king's cwellan in his hand. “I suggest you get Meridion out of the way. I am going to execute your husband now. The Bolg, and their king, demand it. I will not be swayed on this.”

Rhapsody raised her head higher. She looked into the sky, the stars hidden intermittently by the plumes of smoke rising from the brazier fires. A calm, severe, queenly expression hardened on her face before Achmed's eyes.

“No,” she said without a hint of emotion. “Allow me.”

Then she turned away from Meridion to address Ashe.

“I told you not to follow me,” she said again.

Ashe bowed humbly. “And as I have told you, I have come to beg forgiveness, to make amends.”

“You wish to make amends?”

“I do.”

Rhapsody nodded. “Very well. Gwydion ap Llauron, dismount and step away from the horse.”

Ashe's brow furrowed, but he did as she commanded.

“Give your sword to our son.”

The Lord Cymrian came to Meridion's mount, stripped off his sword belt, and obeyed.

Meridion's face lost its hopeful expression. He looked down at Kirsdarke in its sheath in his hands. “Father, I don't like where this is going. If we ride abreast—”

Ashe shook his head. “It's all right, son.”

Rhapsody's voice rang down from the tower ledge again.

“Meridion, bring your father's sword and mount to me.”

Ashe looked up to the ledge. Rhapsody stared down at him intently, her face solemn. She glanced at the sky again. Then her somber expression returned and she stared down at Ashe once more.

Ashe felt relief break over him like the splash of an ocean wave. He patted Meridion's leg.

“You may not believe this, my son, but at this moment, your mother and I love each other more than ever before.”

From atop his horse, Meridion looked doubtful.

“I hope you're right. She looks fairly cold and angry to me.”

“Go,” Ashe said, smiling. “Go to her.”

Meridion nudged his mare forward, and cantered to the base of Grivven Tower. One of the Bolg soldiers took the reins of both mounts from him, and nodded to the doorway that led into the tower in the mountain.

Meridion hurried inside and headed for the stairs.

*   *   *

“Tell them to stand back,” Rhapsody said to Achmed.

Achmed smiled slightly. Then he spoke the words in Bolgish, and the soldiers withdrew quickly.

Tears came into Rhapsody's eyes.

“This will be the hardest thing I've ever had to do,” she said shakily to Achmed, to the assembled army of Bolg, and to Ashe, who stared at her intently, his face shining, love in his eyes. “But it must be done.”

She pointed her finger at Ashe's ear and spoke a single word.

Always.

Then, as her eyes overflowed and tears streamed down her face, she drew Daystar Clarion from its sheath with startling speed and pointed it at the sky in the direction of a star she knew well, Prylla, named for the legendary Windchild.

She spoke its name.

A crackle of lightning painted the sky, followed by the bright ring of a clarion call, a clear trumpet sound that blasted over the Krevensfield Plain and echoed off the Teeth, shaking the foundations of the mountains and of the buildings in the city of Bethe Corbair, seventy leagues away.

Finally, with a roar, a plume of starfire brighter than thirty suns descended, blasting the Lord Cymrian from the ground where he stood and dissolving him immediately into ashes in the air.

The blast ignited the grass of the field in a circle more than three hundred feet wide.

A moment later, darkness returned, leaving nothing in the place where Ashe had stood but the burning grass.

Rhapsody fell to her knees on the rocky ledge and bowed her head in grief just as Meridion appeared in the doorway.

He stared down at the ring of flames, dissipating already in the wind, then looked at Achmed, the man his mother had named as his guardian.

The end of the world was on his face.

 

21

“Mother,” Meridion whispered. “What have you done?”

Achmed held out his hand to Rhapsody's son, cautioning him into silence.

He looked around at the Krevensfield Plain, where jagged rivers of soldiers on horseback and foot were moving as though in shock, stunned by the nearness of the massive strike of starfire. Then he turned and looked at the mountains behind him, where the braziers were roaring.

On the ground below them, in the ring of steppes at the feet of the Teeth, thousands more Bolg soldiers were gathering, bristling with anger and unspent violence.

The very mountains were beginning to shake with rage as the war drums began beating.

His heart, pounding in time with the furor a moment before, had stilled its fury as his eyes had beheld the column of flame descend, swallowing the Lord Cymrian in its maw.

Leaving himself to be the only Firbolg not screaming for the death and destruction of the Alliance all the way to the western seacoast.

His gaze, suddenly less blurred by rage, turned to Rhapsody, kneeling still, looking down on the plain below the tower ledge.

She was trembling in shock, her face and hands colorless, her golden hair whipping around her in the wind that rattled the shutters at the top of the tower.

Achmed looked to Meridion.

“Your mother, as always, spoke the truth, Meridion,” he said quietly, his voice competing with the whine of the wind. “She did not have a choice. Had she not executed him, I would have, and with far more agony.” He held up his cwellan for purposes of illustration. “I would have pushed his heart out his back and left it beating for as long as it could. His debt is still not paid, but there's little else in the way of recompense he can offer now.”

He signaled to one of the remaining Bolg soldiers.

“Find Fraax, the Archon of the Lightcatcher, and tell him to fire it up,” he said. The soldier nodded and ran off as the Bolg king crouched down in front of the Lady Cymrian, who was lost in grief.

“Rhapsody,” he said gently, “meet me in Gurgus Peak. You need to help me make use of the indigo light spectrum, something I have not attempted before. The Night Caller element of the spectrum, the indigo light, may be the only weapon we have to quell the war before it takes down the continent. Do not tarry; the mountains are getting ready to move west.”

Rhapsody did not seem to hear him.

Achmed waited for a moment, then stood and left the ledge, walking past the wide-eyed Meridion as he did.

Meridion stared at his departing uncle, then shifted his gaze back to his mother, who had lifted her head and was now gazing west at the ring of fire from the strike, diminishing now into embers and ash.

He came to her, shaking in rage.

“Mimen! What have you done?
What have you done?
”

Rhapsody turned to look at him, staring down at her. She opened her mouth several times, attempting to speak, but no sound came out.

“I—I can't believe you would
do
this!”

She struggled to speak again, finally able to force out a whisper.

“Meridion—”

“You've
killed
the Lord Cymrian—my father, your husband—your epic love.” His anger flared as she rose to a stand, trembling. “How disgusting.”