“What?”
“Did it have to be you who killed her?”
“I don’t know—believe it or not, that wasn’t the first question that popped into my mind. Mostly, I was wondering why she wanted to die.”
“If she does, you’re probably the last person in the fief she should ask.”
“Severn, no one would have done what she asked. Tara wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. The Arkon certainly wouldn’t.”
“True. And?”
“It bothers me. She seemed so desperate. I don’t know if she’s being hunted; seven corpses certainly implies as much. But something about it felt wrong.” Kaylin hesitated again. “I think she recognized Maggaron’s sword.”
“If Mejrah’s not wrong and if the woman’s appearance is not a coincidence, that’s not as strange as it could be. She’d recognize the sword because she was the one responsible for bestowing it on Maggaron.”
“I understand the theory,” Kaylin replied as they took the last corner and turned onto Garden Row. “But it’s clear that in Maggaron’s time—and experience—this sword was never sheathed. How did she recognize it, Severn?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she’ll be able to explain.”
Kaylin nodded. “I don’t think it mattered to her who killed her—but I think it mattered how. She wanted to be killed by
this
sword. I just happened to be carrying it.”
In the end, the question was to remain unanswered. Kaylin and Severn arrived at the doors of the Tower; they rolled open slowly. Tara stood in the doorway. She was still winged, and her eyes were ebony. She bowed to Kaylin, which was awkward, and not just because of the wings. Kaylin waited until she rose before speaking.
“How is she?”
“She did not survive.”
Kaylin uttered a brief word in Leontine. “Was she alive when you arrived?”
“Yes.” Tara hesitated. “The Arkon, Tiamaris, and Sanabalis are with her now. They do not wish to be disturbed.”
Kaylin was all for not disturbing upset Dragons.
“They did not wish you to leave, however.”
This, on the other hand, was less welcome. “What exactly did they want us to do?”
“Wait.”
“On the doorstep?”
Tara’s expression rippled. “Oh. No, I don’t think that’s what they meant.”
“Do you think we could wait with Maggaron?”
Tara frowned. “You wish to ask him about Bellusdeo?”
“I do. I know this is going to be bad, but do you think you could pry Sanabalis out of that room? We need him to get our memory crystal back.”
“I think it will have to wait. You wish to show the crystal’s image to Maggaron?”
“Yes.” Before Tara could speak, Kaylin hastily added, “But I don’t want to show him her corpse.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“He’s already completely wrecked, Tara. If she’s indeed Bellusdeo—or one of a dozen spitting images of her—I think it could push him over the edge.” The words left her mouth before her second thoughts could kick in.
“What edge?”
Glum, Kaylin resigned herself to explaining yet another metaphor as Tara stepped out of the door. But Tara was on her own ground now, and she caught the thought before Kaylin could pick out better words to express it. Tara seldom found Kaylin’s frustration annoying.
“So you are afraid that you will upset him so much he will not be able to be helpful?”
“Yes.”
The Avatar, her eyes like the void, smiled brightly. It was jarring. “I can help.”
Maggaron was still sitting by the window. He’d probably only been seated there for a few hours, but they were long damn hours by this point. Kaylin’s stomach rumbled; it was like a clock, but embarrassing.
“Are you hungry?” Tara asked.
Since she knew the Tower already knew the answer, she nodded.
“I’m asking,” Tara said gravely, “even though I already know the answer because my Lord says this will be important. There are other questions to which I know the answer that I must nonetheless learn to ask.”
“Really? Like what?”
Tara frowned. “How is the weather?”
Kaylin snorted. “Tiamaris is teaching you this?”
Tara nodded.
“Do you think he’d teach me at the same time?”
“Tiamaris says this is what Lord Diarmat is teaching you.”
“Yes, but there’s a difference. Tiamaris doesn’t hate the sight of you.”
“I’m certain Lord Diarmat doesn’t hate the sight of you, either.”
Severn cleared his throat, and Kaylin reddened. Maggaron was so silent and still it was almost easy to forget he was sitting right there. Kaylin let the rest of that conversation drop as if it were molten.
“Maggaron,” she said softly.
He looked up at the sound of her voice, but his eyes were still empty.
“We need your help.”
“I cannot leave this place,” was his bitter reply. “You understand why.”
“I do. We don’t need you to leave. We need you to accompany us.”
Maggaron looked at the walls, the floors, and the ceiling without really seeing them. The only thing that drew his attention—and not in a good way—was the scabbard that hung at Kaylin’s side. He didn’t ask, and she didn’t offer the information; there wasn’t any point in upsetting him any further.
The halls were familiar; they were wide enough—and tall enough—to allow a Dragon in flight form easy access. The doors at the hall’s end were just as wide. They began to open well before anyone had reached them, and they opened into a familiar room.
Maggaron stopped on the threshold, staring at the walls, his eyes wide. They were a shade of emerald green that in Barrani would have been a good sign; Kaylin wasn’t completely certain what that color meant in the Norannir. She thought it was surprise. He turned to her. “Those words—”
Kaylin nodded. She lifted an exposed arm.
“Do you understand them, Chosen?”
“No. I’m sorry, I don’t.”
He deflated, losing about three inches of his height, which was still considerable. Before she could find anything comforting to say—and comfort was, sadly, not her strong suit—he walked to the edge of the shallow pool that served as Tara’s mirror. There, he knelt, his knees on the lip of the stone circle. He bowed his head until his chin touched his collarbone, and rested the palms of his hands flat against the tops of his upper thighs.
Tara looked down—barely—at the top of his head. The black drained out of her eyes, leaving them oddly human in the warm light of the room. Lifting a hand, she pressed her palm gently against his head, as if offering a benediction. Or absolution. The line of Maggaron’s shoulders relaxed slowly, as did his breathing.
Kaylin wanted to ask Tara what she was doing; she didn’t because there wasn’t any space in which to wedge the question—not without breaking the very strange communion. She walked to where Severn stood and joined him in silence, waiting for either Tara or Maggaron to speak.
Tara moved first, breaking contact by slowly lifting her hand. She didn’t move away from Maggaron, but she didn’t have to move—she was at the edge of the still pool. Kaylin cleared her throat, but Tara lifted a hand, demanding silence by gesture alone.
The water began to glow. It rose as Tara nodded, building a familiar image, inch by inch, starting at the feet—or rather, at the edge of blue skirt—and continuing upward until the woman they’d found in the fief stood facing Maggaron.
He whispered a single word. “Bellusdeo.”
Kaylin glanced at Severn; Severn was watching Maggaron’s expression with something that looked suspiciously like pity.
Tara left the former Ascendant’s side and came to stand beside Kaylin. “He recognizes her,” she said, although it wasn’t necessary. “But, Kaylin, I don’t think now is the time to question him.”
“No, it probably isn’t,” was the soft reply.
“He’s seen a room very similar to this one before, Kaylin. I believe part of his training occurred in one. She taught there. She chose him.”
“How do you know?”
Tara lifted a brow. It was very similar to the expression Kaylin used when someone asked her a question to which the answer was obvious.
“Never mind. Does he have any idea why she wants to die?”
“No; that’s not part of his memory.”
“What is?”
“She chose him,” Tara replied. “And she left him. It is not clear how; it is not clear—to me—why. I believe he understood it.”
“You can’t touch that?”
“No. I can touch the pain, but the cause is protected. I am reluctant to press him.”
Kaylin, remembering her first walk through the Tower at its awakening, flinched but nodded. “It hurt,” she said, as if speaking about the weather. “But it helped in a way. It helped me.”
“I didn’t intend to hurt you.”
“I know. You wanted to tell me that you understood what had hurt me in the past. That you understood the pain I was in.”
“Yes. I no longer think that’s an effective way to communicate understanding,” she added. “But it would be that, or nothing; it’s buried too deep.”
“You could let me ask him a few questions.”
Tara shook her head. “Not yet. Look at his expression.”
While they’d been conversing, Maggaron had started to cry. He didn’t sob; the tears fell in utter silence. He lifted only his face; his hands remained in his lap. The image of Bellusdeo shifted as he gazed at her. Shifted, walking from the center of the pool to the edge. His edge. She knelt on the other side of the pool’s lip; only an inch or two of rounded stone separated them. She was taller than Tara; taller than Kaylin.
Kaylin glanced sharply at Tara; Tara nodded, her attention absorbed by what the pool revealed. Or by what Maggaron revealed. Kaylin felt distinctly uncomfortable watching him now, as if she was intruding on something intensely, personally private. The image of Bellusdeo began to speak.
Kaylin recognized the voice. She knew Tara was concentrating, but spoke—quietly—anyway. “Tara—what are you doing? How do you know what she might have said?”
“I don’t.
He
does. This is not my image, Kaylin; it is taken from him; I am merely giving it a shape and form that we can also witness.”
Maggaron spoke. Even the acoustics of the room failed to magnify his words enough to make them audible to Kaylin. But Bellusdeo was standing inches from where he knelt; she didn’t have that problem. She laughed. The sound was a shock of warmth that traveled up Kaylin’s spine to her ears, poking her insides on the way there.
“She’s beautiful,” Kaylin whispered, seeing it clearly for the first time. She would have said more, but the Bellusdeo of Maggaron’s memory threw her arms wide and spun in a circle, as if she were a child. No, Kaylin thought, seeing her expression, not a child. The movement was ebullient, but it was deliberate, as well.
Her eyes were perfect gold.
Bellusdeo stepped away from Maggaron, who continued to kneel; when she stood once again above the pool’s center, she bowed. To him. Then she laughed again and said something that Kaylin would have paid a week’s salary to understand. Two weeks’.
Maggaron’s tears had stopped; his face was wet with their tracks, and his eyes were shadowed by both wonder and apprehension.
Bellusdeo began to transform. Kaylin had seen such a transformation only a few times, because it was, strictly speaking, illegal in the Empire without the Emperor’s express permission. If she’d had any questions about the Arkon’s visceral reaction, she forgot them: Bellusdeo stretched and elongated, taking at last the shape and form of a Dragon Queen.
CHAPTER 17
She was golden. Her scales were the color of Dragon happiness or Dragon peace; they shone in the room like contained lights, as if she were translucent and had swallowed the sun in her flight. Her wings were folded across her back, and her tail swept past the pool’s edge, brushing through the three witnesses like a visible breeze.
“Tara,” Kaylin whispered, unable to take her eyes off the Dragon. “Did she speak before she died?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“I didn’t understand it,” Tara replied. “Did they?”
“I…I’m not sure. I find Lord Sanabalis and the Arkon very, very difficult to read or understand. The Arkon was upset, if that helps.”
“Not really. These days, he’s always upset.” Kaylin squared her shoulders and left Severn and Tara. She approached Maggaron alone, her hand touching the hilt of the sword she carried. It was cool against her palm; it caused her no pain, no tingling, no itch.
“Maggaron.”
He nodded, still staring at the Dragon that Bellusdeo had become. A starving man would have looked at food on a distant table with less longing.
“Is that the Dragon known as Bellusdeo?”
She felt his shock—and his disapproval; he mastered both quickly, remembering that foreigners were allowed to be ignorant. “Yes.”
“Is there a reason that she would want to die?”
She expected shock, horror, anger; what she saw instead was sorrow. Sorrow was harder to deal with. She retreated into quiet professionalism instead. “I assume the answer is yes.”
Maggaron said nothing.
Kaylin took a deep breath and made a decision. “Maggaron, I think she’s trying to reach our world.”
He continued to stare at the Dragon. Thankfully, the Dragon’s image was silent. “I think she’s tried eight times now.”
“Chosen—”
“I know this is hard for you. I don’t know
how
hard, no. I’m not Norannir, I’ve never been trained to be an Ascendant. I don’t really understand what an Ascendant is. But I know it’s hard. I don’t want to make it harder—but I don’t have much of a choice.”
He nodded, but this time he looked away; she could almost see him straining to do it. “Chosen, there are matters that Ascendants do not know. Why do you think that Bellusdeo has attempted to reach this world? And why eight times?”
“Because she’s been seen. There were witnesses.”
“Were they of the People?” he asked a little too quickly.
“No. One of them,” she added as he opened his mouth to speak, “was me.”
Clearly the Chosen were considered impeccable witnesses, at least in comparison to unknown outsiders. He glanced once at the mirror’s image of his beloved Dragon, but he was torn between agitation and a strange excitement. “Where, Chosen? Where did you see her?”
“In the streets of this fief.” Technically, this wasn’t entirely accurate, but as Kaylin wasn’t writing a report or being debriefed by a cranky Leontine, it was good enough.
“Where is she?”
This was the tricky part. “She wasn’t well when we found her. Tara brought her directly to the Tower—and the three Dragons who are currently in it—but she didn’t survive. I’m sorry.” Watching hope die was difficult; being the one who killed it was worse. Kaylin had been trained to deliver bad news to nervous parents and distraught spouses, but it had always, always been gut-wrenching.
“Was she injured?”
“No. I think she was ill.”
“Impossible.” He turned away. Turned back. “But it’s impossible that she be here at all. You said this was her eighth attempt to reach your world?”
“…Yes.”
“She told you this?”
“No, not exactly. The Arkon, a visiting Dragon—and the oldest Dragon in the Empire, as far as we know—implied that there would be nine attempts.”
“Nine?”
She nodded. “Is that number significant to you?”
“No.”
Damn. “Me, either. Maggaron, we assume there were eight attempts because she died today.”
He looked confused, and Kaylin honestly didn’t blame him. “This would be the eighth time she’s died in the fief of Tiamaris.”
Not surprisingly, this didn’t decrease the Ascendant’s confusion at all. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. The reason we know about her at all is because we discovered her body. And then we discovered her body again. And again. There are seven identical corpses in a magical preservation room in this Tower. I’m not sure where the eighth body is, yet—but it’s somewhere in the Tower, as well.”
“Chosen, my apologies, but are you certain?” he asked in the tone of voice generally reserved for accusations of insanity.
“Yes. If you want to look at them, we can take you there now.” Turning to Tara, she added, “We
can
take him there now, can’t we?”
“To the morgue, yes.” She lifted her hands; Maggaron shouted. It was wordless, but the meaning was clear. “Ascendant,” Tara said quietly, “I will need to use this mirror at some point. But I will leave the image as it stands until that time comes. Will that suffice?”
He lowered both his head and the line of his shoulders. “Yes, Lady. Thank you, Lady.”
“Do you fully understand that these images are taken from your memories?”
“Yes, Lady. But it has been
so long.
So long since I have seen her. I cannot now recall her so clearly and so perfectly as your mirror has done; she is buried beneath the weight of other memories.” He bowed deeply. When he rose, he smiled at Kaylin; it was a shadowed, fragile smile. “Please, take me to your morgue.”
It wasn’t her morgue, and she wanted to point this out, but couldn’t think of a way of doing so that didn’t sound childish or argumentative. She was certain Tiamaris could have done it, and was mostly certain that Maggaron would escape unscathed. It was never a good idea to misattribute ownership of something that belonged to a Dragon.
But the point was moot. Maggaron was led to the morgue and when he entered it, he froze in the door. When he started to move again, he moved slowly and deliberately toward the seven corpses. As Tara had guessed, the eighth hadn’t made its way here, yet. He walked from corpse to corpse, uncovering each in turn, but touching nothing except their eyelids.
At last he said, “My apologies for doubting you, Chosen.” He was quiet, and he was visibly jarred, but he wasn’t upset. “Seven. And you’ve said there was an eighth?”
She nodded. “When we found the eighth she was alive, but not by much.”
“You said your Elder thought there should be nine?”
Kaylin nodded again. “He’s not
my
Elder, by the way; he’s a Dragon.”
“What do you call him, then? What is his title?”
“We call him any damn thing he wants to be called. At the moment, that’s Arkon. The Arkon.”
Maggaron nodded gravely. “My apologies. The Arkon, then. He said there should be nine bodies?”
“He was slightly upset at the time, and he didn’t really offer much in the way of explanation. You have to understand something: she doesn’t look like a Dragon to us in this form; even her eyes—”
“Her eyes are wrong, yes. And no.”
“I want to hear more about the no; I’ve heard enough about the yes.”
“The last time I saw her, her eyes were this color.”
“I don’t understand. It’s magical—when we examined the corpses magically, the eyes were gold. But only then. We can’t dispel the magic.” She shook her head and continued. “We thought she was human. We thought there was a good chance that these bodies were originally seven very different corpses, and that they’d been transformed before death somehow.”
He shook his head.
“But the Arkon now believes that she is, in fact, the mortal form of a Dragon in some respects.”
“What are his concerns?”
“She has no subcutaneous evidence of scales. Her skin is much thicker than normal human skin, but that’s not the defining feature of a Dragon.”
“Chosen, you said she was alive when you found her this time.”
“Yes.”
“Did she speak to you?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
Kaylin hesitated, but it was brief. “She asked me to kill her.”
This, at least, Maggaron hadn’t been expecting.
“I didn’t,” she added quickly.
“You are Chosen.”
He might as well have said “You have blue spots” for all the sense it made. “I don’t think she asked me to kill her because I’m Chosen,” she told him with a bit more heat than she’d intended. “I think she asked me to kill her because she recognized the sword I’m carrying. She wanted me to kill her with this sword.”
“And you refused her?”
“Yes, I refused her. Killing helpless strangers isn’t in my job description. Would you have done what she asked?”
He looked at the scabbard that held what had once been a giant’s two-handed greatsword. “Did the sword not speak to you?” he finally asked. It wasn’t an answer.
Kaylin could guess what his answer would have been, and she didn’t like it much. “No. I’ve never heard the sword speak.”
“You aren’t trained to listen.”
“No.”
“Unsheathe the sword, Chosen.”
Kaylin looked dubiously at the sheath, remembering just how much of a hassle it had been to get the sword into it the first time. “She’s not here now,” she replied, evading the request.
“She is not, no. But you will understand more if you hold the sword.” He looked at the sheath again, his eyes narrowing. “The sheath stills her voice. Where did you acquire it?”
“It was a gift.”
“It would have been considered a curse—and a great evil—among my kin.”
“I got that. Tell me why.”
“I…cannot.” He turned away.
“You can’t? Or you won’t?”
“I was trained as an Ascendant candidate. I was chosen to become one of the Ascendants. I was the last. Bellusdeo found me, and Bellusdeo chose me. I’ve never understood why. I was not the strongest, not the wisest, not the quickest. But she chose.”
“And when you were chosen, you were given this sword?”
“Chosen—”
“Look, Maggaron—if the Arkon is right, she’s going to arrive here one more time. Only one. I have no idea why he thinks there should be nine of her, but I’m willing to trust him—we have that much history.”
“And you and I do not.”
“I’m
also
willing to trust him because I don’t have any choice.” She hesitated and then added, “We don’t have a lot of female Dragons in the Empire. By not a lot, I mean none that I’ve personally encountered. My instincts are saying that none is pretty close to what the rest of the Dragon Court expected to encounter, and finding one as a corpse—seven times—is not making any of them any happier.
“But the Arkon is old, he’s a Dragon, and even the Emperor respects his advice and his opinion. I’m going to trust him; there’s a ninth Bellusdeo coming. She might already be here; we might already be too late. You can hide behind secrets all you want, but when you were controlled by the Shadows, don’t you think they learned what you know? They had your name.”
Maggaron bowed his head.
“If I don’t know what I need to know, if I don’t understand what’s going on, there’s a chance I’ll screw up. There’s a good chance I’ve
already
screwed up,” she added. “But I only get one more chance.”
“You have my name,” he said.
She flinched. “…Yes.”
“Could you not do as others have done, and use that name against me?”
“…Yes.”
“It would preserve what little self-respect I have, Chosen.”
Kaylin folded her arms across her chest; Severn came to stand beside her. “Can we just skip the part where we torture each other horribly and pretend we’ve already done it?”
His eyes widened slightly. They were green. This confirmed her suspicion that green was the Norannir version of surprise.
“I don’t have a lot of self-respect myself. What I’ve got, I cling to,” she continued. “And forcing the information out of you that way would destroy some of it.”
“Why, then, did you take my name?”
“You already know the answer.”
Green faded slowly into brown, a color that she seldom saw in the Norannir. “Yes, Chosen. I do. Bellusdeo spoke to you today. But in some fashion that you will not understand, Bellusdeo also chose you.”
“I had these marks—”
“Ah, no. You are Chosen for reasons that not even the Dragons can understand. I meant the sword, of course.”
She looked at its hilt dubiously.
“If the sword did not desire it, Chosen, you could not have lifted it. Believe that it was tried during my…captivity.”
“It was a gigantic greatsword made of Shadow, Maggaron!”
“Yes. It was. Because
I
was its wielder. It is part of me.” He looked down; Kaylin had never been so aware of the differences in their height. Somehow, the news she had feared would break him completely had given him strength instead. “Did Mejrah explain what purpose the Ascendants served?”
“More or less.”
“She also explained that only a handful were chosen?”
“And the rest were returned to their homes and their families and eventually became Elders, yes.”
“Did she tell you that the Ascendants became immortal?”
“Not in so many words, no. But she implied that Bellusdeo had promised to transform or change the children of the Norannir so that they might know a life as long as a Dragon’s—which is effectively forever.”
He nodded. His eyes had shaded from their unusual brown to a more familiar Norannir blue. “What she did not—what she could not—tell you was how that was achieved. Tell me, do you think the Norannir have true names?”
Kaylin shook her head. “They’re mortal.”
“Yet you now hold mine. Have you not wondered how it is that I have a name?”
“Well, yes, if you put it that way.”
“I was given a part of Bellusdeo’s name.”
Kaylin stared at him for a long moment. “I want to say that’s impossible.”
Tara, who hadn’t interrupted until this moment said, “It is impossible.”
“Lady,” Maggaron said, inclining his head to Tara. After a pause, he actually got down on one knee. Kaylin suspected this was less a gesture of supplication than a gesture of respect; it was
hard
to look down from that differential in height while still maintaining awe. “It is not impossible. I am proof of that.”