The Book of Earth
Authors: Marjorie B. Kellogg
THE DRAGON QUARTET:
BOOK ONE
THE BOOK OF EARTH
Marjorie B. Kellogg
Also by Marjorie B. Kellogg:
The Dragon Quartet
THE BOOK OF EARTH
THE BOOK OF WATER
THE BOOK OF FIRE
THE BOOK OF AIR
By Marjorie B. Kellogg with William Rossow:
LEAR’S DAUGHTERS
(The Wave and the Flame | Reign of Fire)
Copyright © 1995 by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg.
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-101-66453-7
Cover art by Jody Lee.
DAW Book Collectors No. 974.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).
All characters in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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Version_1
TO SEATHRÚN ÓCORRÁIN
poet, sibling, old soul—but not necessarily in that order:
In addition, a very special helping of gratitude and appreciation to my editor,
Sheila Gilbert
, for her great faith, bright ideas, and patience well beyond the call of duty.
Burnt offerings also on the altars of other friendly deities of perseverance and good advice: Lynne Kemen and Bill Rossow, Barbara Newman and Stephen Morris, Antonia Bryan, Vickie Davis. Thanks to you all.
“Mythology is psychology misread as biography.”
—Joseph Campbell
PART ONE: The Summoning of the Hero
PART TWO: The Journey into Peril
PART THREE: The Call to the Quest
PART FOUR: The Meeting with Destiny
I
N
T
HE
B
EGINNING
:
I
n the Beginning, four mighty dragons raised of elemental energies were put to work creating the World. They were called Earth, Water, Fire and Air. No one of them had power greater than another, and no one of them was mighty alone.
When the work was completed and the World set in motion, the four went to ground, expecting to sleep out this World’s particular history and not rise again until World’s End.
The first to awaken was Earth.
C
HAPTER
O
NE
B
alanced on the sill, she watched the distant jagged crest of rock where the road climbed up out of the forest. Finally the riders appeared. Banners at first, ghostly white and limp in the dank mountain air. Horses next, also white, cloud horses etched pale against the distant gray of the upper peaks, puffing vapor that rose like departing spirits past the night-black firs.
Erde shivered. She dreaded this priest’s coming, this stranger with his entourage and his dire prophecies, even though it meant ceremonies and feasting and the chance for news from outside her father’s isolated mountain domain. The news would be bad, she knew it would. It was always bad these days. But fresh faces would be a welcome relief. At the ripe old age of nearly fourteen, Erde already believed it was true that a young person could die of boredom.
A cry caught at her ear, thrown up from the cobbled yard below. The apple-cheeked crone who watched the chickens with her one good eye and pressed card readings on anyone who’d listen, stared up from her perch on the stone wellhead. The gray light turned her rheumy gaze to silver. Erde hated the chicken-crone. The old woman always seemed to be expecting something of her and would never say what. Erde looked away and pulled the casement tight.
“My lady?”
Forehead tight to the rippled glass, Erde let the cold seep into her furrowed brow, and contemplated the novelty of an unfamiliar face—how gratefully you noticed the peculiar arch of an eyebrow, the odd shape of a lip, how the color
of an eye surprised you because maybe no one you’d known yet had eyes exactly that color. She had seen her own eyes in a shard of polished steel that her grandmother kept in a robing trunk. They were very dark, almost black. Her mother’s, she was always told, though Erde could not remember. She cracked open the window for another stare across the battlements.