“You know,” May said slowly, looking distracted, “something has just occurred to me. Ambassadors have diplomatic immunity, don’t they?”
Lightbulbs seemed to go off in many heads at that moment. I looked thoughtfully at May.
“Yees,” Aisling drawled. “What a good idea. The weyr needs an ambassador, and Ysolde needs protection from Dr. Kostich.”
The latter glared over the table at her as he helped himself to more champagne.
“If Ysolde was ambassador, he couldn’t touch her, and voila! Two problems solved at once. What a perfect solution.”
“No, it isn’t,” Kostya said, in the process of consuming a mound of food piled high on his plate.
“Oh, stop being so obstinate,” Aisling told him. “We know you don’t like Baltic, but Ysolde hasn’t done anything wrong. There’s no reason she couldn’t be the ambassador for the weyr. She certainly will do a better job of it than Fiat.”
“She’s not a member of the weyr,” Kostya pointed out.
“I’m not?” I asked, feeling somewhat adrift, both conversationally and emotionally. “I thought I was a silver dragon.”
“You were silver, then black, but now you are neither, and as such, you are not a member of the weyr,” Drake agreed with his brother.
“There’s an easy solution to that,” May said.
Everyone turned to look at her.
“Baltic’s sept will have to join the weyr.”
Kostya snorted. “That would never happen. The weyr would not tolerate the blight dragons.”
“Light,” Baltic snarled, starting toward him. “We are
light
dragons. You are the blight.”
Kostya leaped up, his hands fisted.
“Oh, lord, there they go again,” Aisling commented to the table. “And I thought it was bad with Kostya and Gabriel. You’d better get your bananas ready, Ysolde.”
“No,” I said.
“No?” May asked, watching as Baltic and Kostya both turned surprised gazes upon me.
“No. If they are so hell-bent on fighting, they can fight.”
Kostya smiled. Baltic shifted into dragon form.
“Definitely overweight,” Kostich said, eating a bacon-wrapped scallop.
“But in human form,” I told the two dragons. “And with no weapons. Just fists.”
A little puff of smoke escaped Baltic, but after a moment’s thought, he shifted back to human form, eyeing Kostya. “Fisticuffs, eh? It’s been several centuries since I’ve had that pleasure.”
Kostya tossed off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “The pleasure is going to be all mine, Baltic.”
“Over there, not here,” I said, pointing to the other side of the pasture that was mostly dirt. “I don’t want any more of this crystal broken. You can have five minutes to beat the living daylights out of each other, and after that, you have to behave in a polite, decent manner. Do you both agree to the terms?”
Kostya’s gaze was shifty. “Define decent.”
“No more leaping up at every little thing you perceive as an insult. I’m tired of you two being at each other’s throats, and I imagine everyone else is tired of it, too.”
The women nodded. The men avoided meeting my eyes.
“You wouldn’t mind if their sept was in the weyr, would you?” Aisling asked Drake as Baltic and Kostya moved off about sixty feet, Bastian and Jian going with them, whether to referee or to cheer Kostya on, I had no idea.
“It’s not quite that simple,” Drake said. “There are rules to admitting a sept. I’m not even sure that Baltic actually has one.”
“But if he did, they could join, and then Ysolde could be ambassador, and Dr. Kostich could—” Aisling bit off what she was going to say as the mage looked at her.
Baltic, with a yell, flung himself at Kostya, who answered by twisting to the side and landing a nasty kick on Baltic’s thigh.
“Could what?” Kostich asked, his pale eyes intense.
“Leave us alone?” she asked sweetly.
Dust rose from the field where the two men were now circling each other, periodically lashing out with arms and legs.
Kostich made a derisive noise. “I have never sought anything from dragons other than the sword that rightfully belongs amongst mages, a fact you should well know, Guardian.”
“There is no place in the weyr for a sept that slaughters members of another in times of peace,” Gabriel said, watching interestedly as Kostya head butted Baltic, who roared in outrage. The two men went down in a cloud of dust.
“Baltic didn’t kill those blue dragons.”
“So you say.” Gabriel’s silver gaze switched to me. “But we have only your word to that effect. It is hardly enough for the weyr to dismiss the charges.”
“If you are going to go through that argument again, I shall go watch the combatants. I believe a little spell increasing the black dragon’s speed is in order. . . .” Dr. Kostich rose from the table, tossed down his napkin, and strolled off toward the fight.
My chin went up as I addressed Gabriel. “I see now why Baltic has been so resistant to meeting with you. Your mind is already made up.”
Silence fell . . . silence tinged with the grunts and muffled cries from the two men who were once again on their feet, dirty, sweaty, and dabbed with blotches of crimson.
“He had to have done it. He was working with Fiat,” Gabriel said, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself.
“So were you, from what Jim told me,” I countered, my ire starting to rise.
Gabriel looked startled. “I am not conspiring with Fiat!”
“Not now, but you have. Or did Jim lie when it told me that you helped Fiat poison Aisling and take her as his mate?”
The silence fell again.
“You bloody bastard! I just had that set!” Baltic yelled in an outraged voice, grabbing Kostya by the throat and flinging him a few yards. “That’s it! If I’m going to have a crooked nose, you’re going to have one as well!”
Both men disappeared again into the gently swirling cloud of dust.
“Oh, dear, I hope not. I like Kostie’s nose the way it is,” Cyrene said, not even looking at the two combatants.
“Well?” I asked Gabriel, who appeared very uncomfortable.
“She’s got a point, you know,” Aisling said. “You were working with Fiat then.”
“I was trying to stop him from doing worse than he did!”
“My point is merely that it’s possible that Baltic could have helped Fiat obtain one goal, but wasn’t wholly in accord with his plans. Which is what he did.”
“It comes down to proof,” Drake said slowly. “You have none that he is innocent of the crimes, and we have witnesses that say he was with Fiat in France during the time of the killings.”
I looked at them all sitting around the table, so frustrated with everything that I could scream. How could they not see that Baltic was innocent? How could they believe he could ruthlessly kill so many dragons? “Let me ask you this, Drake: have you ever known Baltic to kill dragons in cold blood?”
“He has killed many dragons, of all septs,” Drake said, avoiding the question.
“This is a waste of time,” I said, disgusted. I knew then that we would never get the wyverns to understand that Baltic was innocent.
“I am afraid continued arguments would be fruitless, yes,” Drake said.
I looked down at my hands for a few moments, my fingers clasped so tightly together that they were white. “Baltic will not allow himself to be martyred, nor will I.”
“You leave us no options,” Gabriel warned.
“You must understand that if Baltic refuses to answer for the charges laid against him, there will exist between us a state of war,” Drake said.
“No,” Aisling said, her face pinched. “Not another war?”
War. The word reverberated in my heart, tearing off little pieces of it. War again. With war came death and destruction, and suffering that would know no end.
“Not again,” I whispered.
“What war?” Cyrene asked, looking confused.
I wanted to explode into a million pieces and drift away on the wind. I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. I wanted to hide in Baltic’s lovely house that made my soul sing, and never leave it.
I wanted Baltic.
“The war between Baltic’s sept and the weyr,” May said sadly.
“They’ve declared war?”
“You’ve declared it on us,” I answered.
“You do not have to tread this path,” Drake said, his eyes dark.
“You won’t allow us to do otherwise.”
“A war is not to be undertaken lightly,” he said, taking Aisling’s hand. “It affects everyone in the sept. Those who are at war are considered viable targets for attack.”
A cold chill swept over me, piercing me with fear greater than any I had ever known. “Brom,” I whispered, a horrible vision in my head of him being used as a hostage. Or worse.
“We do not attack children,” Drake said stiffly, ire flashing in his eyes. “Mates, however, are a different matter.”
“Nothing has changed,” I said softly, despair filling me at the knowledge of what lay ahead. “There was a war then, just as there will be now. There was death and pride and the refusal to admit a lost cause then, and it’s all being repeated. I know how it will end, and I will not allow that, not again.”
“There has to be something we can do,” Aisling said to Drake.
He shook his head.
I looked up, tears bright in my eyes as I stepped first on the chair, then onto the center of the table. “I won’t have it!” I shouted, opening my arms up wide. “If you won’t end this now, then I will!”
“What’s she doing?” Cyrene asked as Drake leaped to his feet, grabbing Aisling and pulling her back away from the table.
I closed my eyes, allowing Baltic’s fire to swell within me, growing in intensity, building the familiar sensation of pressure as I summoned the words that would send them all far away from me.
“Kostya?” Cyrene said worriedly as she started to back away from the table.
“Run, little bird,” Gabriel told May as he hauled her to her feet, giving her a shove toward the house.
“What’s going on?” Aisling asked as Drake, having difficulty in making her follow him, bent down and scooped her up. “Drake! What do you think you’re doing?”
The air around me rippled, gathering in a circle with me at its center, the power swelling inside me as I shaped it, visualizing the only possibility left to me. “Taken with sorrow,” I cried, allowing the fire to consume every iota of my being as I used it to cast my spell.
“I thought she was under an interdict?” May asked Gabriel as he told her again to run.
“Kostya?” Cyrene asked again, her voice more strident.
“Kostya!”
“All I cast from me,” I said, my voice ringing like the purest bell. It must have reached Baltic, because suddenly he stopped pummeling Kostya and turned to face me.
Kostya tackled him, but Baltic simply flung him to the side as he started toward me, Dr. Kostich on his heels.
“Is she casting a spell? It sounds like a spell,” Aisling said.
“Devoured with rage,” I bellowed, the fire beginning to flicker along my skin as I raised my face to the sky, my heart sick with knowledge that nothing would ever be right.
Dr. Kostich ran toward me, flinging away his glass. “Stop her! That’s a banishing spell! You must stop her!”
“A banishing spell? Mages can’t send people to the Akasha,” Cyrene called to him. “Can they?”
“No, but she can remove us from this location. Just stop her!” he shouted.
“But her spells don’t work,” Cyrene said, turning back toward me.
Baltic sprinted past Dr. Kostich, reaching me just as I released his fire, channeled into the vision of what I wanted most. “Banished so you will be!”
For a moment, nothing happened. It was as if the world held its breath to see what effect the interdict would have on the spell. Baltic skidded to a stop next to me, his eyes shaded like dark pools of water glinting in the sunlight, and then suddenly, the air shimmered again, thickening, twisting, morphing itself into the shape of a dragon.
“The First Dragon,” I heard May gasp.
Heat shimmered on my skin like electricity, crawling up and down my arms and back as the dragon looked first to May, then to me, his eyes filled with infinity. Like Baltic, he was white, but more than white—all colors seemed to dance in harmony, illuminating the dragon, a soft glow wrapped around him that shifted and moved.
Baltic leaped up to stand behind me, his body warm and strong and so infinitely precious, tears burned behind my eyes. The First Dragon looked at him and smiled, shifting into a human form, that of a man . . . and yet, it wasn’t a man. Not even his human form could hide the fact that he was a dragon.
Around us, the other dragons stood frozen, staring at him, their expressions ranging from stunned disbelief to outright awe. I knew just how they felt.
“Why did you call me, Baltic?” the First Dragon asked, his voice as strong as the wind, but softer than the lightest down.
“It was my mate who summoned you, not me,” he answered, his arms sliding around me protectively.
“I . . . I didn’t know I was going to do that. I meant to do something else.” I was so shocked by what I had done that it was almost impossible to speak.
The First Dragon’s eyes, those uncanny, all- knowing eyes, turned from Baltic to me. I felt the impact of his gaze right down to the tips of my toes. He reached toward me, touching my forehead.
“Remember.” The word seemed to echo in and around me, a haze coming up over me that was like nothing I’d experienced before in either a fugue or the visions that I’d had of the past.
The haze turned white, whipping around me with an icy bite. Once again I stood on a snowy hillside, a blizzard raging around me.
But this time, the others were present as well. It was as if the First Dragon had simply lifted up everyone standing in the field and placed us in a different time and place. We stood in a circle around two forms, one fallen, scarlet still staining the snow at the First Dragon’s feet.