The Dragon of Despair (61 page)

Herbalists report disturbing die-off of some medicinal plants. Mold seems likely culprit. What do they expect me to do? Botany wasn’t my line!

Sat through the dullest ritual imaginable, all the while my mind was spinning through how to deal with the Primes. Some members are showing disturbing initiative. This cannot be. We don’t want a repetition of what’s going on over south of the White Water.

Years later, as the First Healed One had come to realize that his fellow Founders were unlikely to return, the entries became filled with deeply sorrowful recollections of the homeland he would never again see. Even as he clung to those memories, the Healed One became more determined that the colony would not lose sight of its heritage.

Those were the years in which the ritual dances and choral performances were instituted, in which the cult for preservation of original architecture had become entrenched. Now the Healed One sought to establish a dynasty that could carry on his self-imposed deceptions. Soon, the reason for maintaining those deceptions became intertwined with the simple need for establishing an unbreakable hold on rulership.

He must have gone a little mad
, Toriovico thought sadly.
No wonder with his health so poor and his hope all but gone.

Whether for these reasons or others not mentioned in the portions of the First Healed One’s journal Toriovico had read, the First Healed One did not appear to have often ventured beyond a few sections of Thendulla Lypella. Certainly, he had not gone beneath the Earth Spires.

Toriovico placed more hope in the sections of the book written by the Second Healed One, a man popularly remembered as the Restorer.

In any other culture, the Restorer probably would have been known as “the Builder,” for he authorized the building of more structures in his comparatively short reign than did any other Healed One. However, the Restorer was his father’s son to the core. New buildings were constructed under his aegis, but they were built along old patterns—even to the perpetuation of design elements that Toriovico suspected had been practical when magic existed to whisk one up and down great heights or to provide light to secluded interior chambers.

It was during the Restorer’s tenure that Thendulla Lypella had gone from being a hodgepodge of related buildings to the dramatic Earth Spires, that Thendulla Lypella had become a living maze, that the scattered walls between structures had been connected into one inviolable fortification.

It was in the Restorer’s writings that Toriovico hoped to find some hint of what Melina had located beneath the city.

His hopes were not merely based on the Restorer’s reputation. He had noticed that the books Melina had been so absorbed with had been older volumes and had been naively pleased that she took such an interest in her adopted county.

After he had danced the curious swaddling from his mind, Torio had gone to Melina’s suite and noted as many of the titles as he could. Lest Tipi report his interest to her mistress, Toriovico had locked the maid in the bathroom and had dropped a few jealous comments that would make her think that what he searched for was evidence that his wife had taken lovers.

A large number of the books on Melina’s shelves were from the time of the Restorer. Rather than duplicate her labor and risk that the key volume or volumes were secreted elsewhere, Torio placed his faith in his predecessor.

It was a shaky foundation on which to build his own tower. The Restorer had been a practical man, even to his ink, which was a pedestrian brown rather than the more exotic blue preferred by his father.

After his initial shocked reaction to learning the truth about the Healed One’s plans for the kingdom, the Restorer had almost pointedly eschewed recording his personal reactions to events. Instead he had noted page after page of measurements and formulae for estimating stress, torque, and other such arcane engineering problems.

In the early days of his reign, the Restorer had recorded what was in essence his manifesto:

To build and preserve a city—a kingdom—so fine that when the mages from across the sea shall return, they shall see our wit and wisdom, and so rule us fit inheritors for those arts that have been taken from us.

Almost pathetically, the Restorer’s desire had been the same as that of the father he never mentioned in all his writings—to make of New Kelvin a place worthy of those who had abandoned both the land and her people.

Toriovico continued reading, skimming over charts and diagrams that were alien and incomprehensible to his way of thinking. It was not until Torio reached the later entries that the Restorer began to include text explaining what his current batch of sketches meant.

On a hunch, Torio looked at the dates and did some counting. Yes, these explanatory notes began to appear after the Restorer had contracted the cancer that would cut his life comparatively short. Although this dry engineering mind did not overtly state that this was the case—or maybe he had spoken of the matter more in person—he was no longer writing for himself but for the son who would succeed him.

Had Toriovico’s father done the same? Like the Restorer, he had known that his death was looming. Like the Restorer he had not avoided facing the reality. Torio put the thought from his mind as an unwelcome distraction. It did not matter what his father had done. What mattered was the current crisis.

It was among the Restorer’s notes that Toriovico found the first hint of what might have drawn Melina into the tunnels beneath Thendulla Lypella.

The words were cryptic and brief, not as if the Restorer were hiding anything, but as if he was writing about something he expected his reader would understand, and therefore he need not employ his flagging energy to explain. Even so, there were tantalizing fragments, a bit here and there from which Torio thought he could piece something together.

He reached for a stack of the paper he kept near for the sketching out of choreographic routines, hesitated, and then instead turned to the end of the book to the portion where he had been keeping his own journal.

Poking his finger between the pages, Torio took up a pen. Awkwardly flipping between the sections, he started taking notes, slowly building from the Restorer’s fragmented references a picture he found in equal parts intriguing and horrifying.

CITRINE SHIELD VENTURED
from Hasamemorri’s house with the hesitation of one who moves into utterly unknown territory. For her, the unknown territory was not the city of Dragon’s Breath, but the going out on her own.

The woman once called Melina Shield might not have been a good mother—a concept with which Citrine was still struggling—but even at her most confused Citrine had no problem admitting that Melina had been addicted to control.

There were few places that Melina’s children were permitted to go unsupervised. Jet, as a boy and his mother’s favorite, and Sapphire, as the heir apparent to the family estates, had been granted a bit more freedom, but the younger three—all girls and all most useful in their mother’s eyes as potential marriage alliances—had been carefully supervised.

Indeed, the only reason Citrine had been permitted to roam in the gardens of Eagle’s Nest Castle with no more supervision than the omnipresent gardeners and guards had been because Melina took great pride in this expression of the king’s favor. Even so, Citrine suspected that if she had been a few years older that privilege would have been denied her. However, she had not yet “come out” as a marriageable prospect and children are permitted some indulgences.

That indulgence had led to Citrine’s friendship with Firekeeper—a friendship that had, Citrine thought, struggling with a complex web of cause and effect, led to her mother’s dishonor and eventual exile.

Blame as hot and heavy as the summer weather lay on Citrine’s heart, dragging her down, splitting her into fragments that argued with each other. One of these fragments took the blame for her mother’s fall. One—a thin, indignant voice—insisted that this was ridiculous. No one had forced Melina to enter into the intrigues that had led to her downfall. Only Melina herself was to blame.

But the blame voice, shame voice couldn’t agree. Certainly if Citrine had been a better daughter her mother would have been happier. Melina wouldn’t have needed the wonder and enchantment the artifacts promised. She would have been happy at home working, as her husband had done, for the betterment of her children.

Didn’t Citrine have proof enough that she had been a disappointment? Hadn’t her mother punished her by sending her to stay with the pirates? If she had been a better daughter, Mother would have taken Citrine with her when she went to New Kelvin. She would have taught her magic. They would have been together.

But Citrine had been a failure and a disappointment, good only to be used and discarded. The stumps where the two smallest fingers on her left hand had been cut off stung as if salt had been rubbed into them when Citrine tried to resist such thoughts. They were reminder enough that Citrine had ceased to matter to her mother.

Once she had sobbed when such thoughts filled her mind, but now Citrine let her heart weep quietly, imagining tears of blood leaking out and puddling in her body. Certainly she felt heavy and slow, wishing for sleep but unable to sleep when she tried. The oppression had become worse once they arrived in Dragon’s Breath. Everyone else had things to do. Citrine had nothing to do but occasionally run an errand to Oculios the pharmacist or go for walks about the city with one of the others.

Sometimes the arguing of the voices in her head made Citrine stand outside of herself, yet another person, witness to what went on around her. Those were the times she tended to say things that disturbed people—like her remembering the rut in the road and realizing that it must have filled with water.

Elise had been disturbed by that incident, as Citrine’s nurses and family members had been disturbed by similar incidents.

(Another voice—a hard, cynical one—laughed mockingly.)

Citrine hadn’t been able to explain, not even to Elise, whom she loved with an unguarded affection that she had never been able to feel for any of her blood sisters. The words came from the dull, watchful Citrine when they would. Afterward their content and form seemed to have come from someone entirely other than herself.

Citrine knew she had been brought to Dragon’s Breath in the hope that confronting her mother would make her realize how horrible Melina had been to her. It seemed impossible. The closer she drew, the more she longed to see her mama, to be cuddled up in those shapely, elegant arms, to hear Mother sing the lilting chants she had used for lullabies on those nights she was home to tuck her daughter into bed.

That longing was why Citrine had written her mother almost immediately after their arrival in Dragon’s Breath. Citrine had only blotted the ink a little, smeared it hardly at all. Later, Citrine had taken some of her own money—money she’d been given back in Hawk Haven by Sapphire and others who wanted her to feel less sad—and had paid one of Hasamemorri’s maids to post the letter for her.

But Mother hadn’t come to fetch her off to the palace, hadn’t even asked after her as far as Citrine knew. That had hurt and Citrine had almost believed that Melina was as bad as everyone said.

Then, like a cool wind blowing through her overheated brain, Citrine had learned how Thendulla Lypella was a city within a city, cut off from the residents of Dragon’s Breath.

Hope rode that discovery. Mother might not know about things happening in the city outside the Earth Spires. Hadn’t everyone else been worried that now that Elise and Edlin had gone to see Ambassador Redbriar Melina would know that they were here? Didn’t that mean they didn’t think she had known before?

Citrine knew this must be so, and that it was her duty to let Mother know that her very own Citrine was with Elise and Edlin and what her address was—just in case she didn’t see past the New Kelvinese boy-robe and the name Rios. She’d written another note. Today she hoped to send it.

The words played through her mind as she walked, going as briskly as her curly-toed slippers would permit.

Dear Mother,

I am here in Dragon’s Breath and staying at a house owned by a big woman named Hasamemorri. I think I have spelled her name right, but if I have not, she is very large and wears lots of pink. Ask for Jalarios’s son, Rios, there and you will have me.

I would very much like to come and visit you and see your new palace.

Your obedient daughter,

Citrine Shield

When Citrine could stop thinking about the letter and wondering if she had said the right things, she concentrated on trying to look like she was on an errand so no one on the street would stop her. Amidst all these distractions, her heart beat very fast.