The Floating Islands (27 page)

The young man glanced quickly at Araenè, away—back, with a sudden intensity that made her hesitate. But then Master Tnegun took a step forward, and the young man turned sharply to him and said, with an odd mix of deference and exasperation, “Though I appreciate everyone’s concern, I hardly expect—”

“Prince Ceirfei,” Master Tnegun overrode him, “I find myself in sudden pressing need of a kajurai. Will you assist me?”

Prince
Ceirfei? Araenè thought, shocked. This was
Prince Ceirfei
? Araenè had certainly heard the name, she now recalled she’d even heard he’d auditioned for the kajuraihi, but she certainly hadn’t expected to find any
prince
waiting on the other side of Master Tnegun’s door.

The young man took a quick, startled moment to reassess the situation. Then he said simply, “Of course. Whatever you require.”

Master Tnegun inclined his head. “The Tolounnese have pressed the living winds far out to sea,” he told Prince Ceirfei. Out here on this craggy peak, this was more obvious than ever. The air hung heavy and still; it seemed to weigh down upon them. It was impossible to imagine any breeze breaking the brooding quiet. Even the leaves of the white tree drooped limp and still in the heat.

Prince Ceirfei gave a little nod, waiting.

“I believe I can free the winds from the control of the Tolounnese mages,” Master Tnegun said then. “The Tolounnese lost some of their strength some time past. I think I can give you … perhaps a quarter-bell.”

The prince tilted his head attentively.

“So. I will free the living winds. You must bring a sky dragon to this place; I have no affinity for the winds, so if you do not know a way to do this, I cannot advise you. The dragon must go to Teraica. There it will find a hatchling fire dragon, quickened by the heat of the Tolounnese furnaces. But though the heat of the furnace was sufficient to quicken the fire dragon’s egg, it is not enough to sustain the young dragon. The fire below the earth must be freed, but it is buried deep there along the Tolounnese coast and the hatchling cannot break the earth above it.”

Araenè blinked. So that was what had gone wrong; she had not known exactly what the trouble was, only that there was trouble. How stupid she had been not to ask Master Tnegun in the first place—she should have asked him about dragon eggs and furnaces—only she hadn’t thought of a discreet enough way to ask, and she’d been so certain she understood what the dying fire dragon had wanted, and then it had been too late.

Master Tnegun did not seem to notice Araenè’s dismay. He continued, still speaking to the prince, “If no adult dragon breaks open the deep rock to let out the fire, the hatchling will die. Do you understand? There is little time, so ask only what questions you must.”

Prince Ceirfei said quietly, “Do I understand correctly: this is a young fire dragon in the furnace? All I can bring you—if any dragon at all will answer me, it will be a wind dragon.”

Master Tnegun gave him a brief nod. “Wind and fire are more closely allied than you perhaps realize, Prince Ceirfei, and we may be glad this is so, as I have no one to summon a fire dragon for me. Think of the storm winds that bear lightning at their heart: so the wind may bear fire.”

“You must call the wind, and the wind must become fire,”
quoted Araenè, startled, and then blushed as both prince and mage looked at her. “That’s what the fire dragon said. When it gave me the egg.”

“Then we may indeed hope that fire and wind are close allied,” said Master Tnegun. “We shall hope that from the first, our fire dragon intended—or guessed—or hoped—that a wind dragon would favor this call.” He turned gravely back to the prince. “Nevertheless, though my knowledge of wind dragons is limited, I believe it must be a great thing to ask the wind to yield to fire, yet this is precisely what you must persuade the dragon to do.”

“Very well,” the prince said slowly. “Give me a living wind, then, and I shall try to call a dragon down out of the sky.”

Master Tnegun turned at once to Araenè. “I will use your strength to do what I must,” he told her. “An experienced adjuvant would be better. But all the adjuvants have spent their strength.” He paused, then added, “You will inevitably fight me, Araenè—fight what I must do. I cannot support the effort I must make if I must battle you as well as our opponents.”

“I won’t fight you,” Araenè said. She wanted to sound matter-of-fact and assured, like the prince. But to her own ears, though her words were brave, she sounded weak and frightened. She was immediately furious—with herself, but anger of any kind was much better than fear. She jerked her shoulders back and looked Master Tnegun in the face.

The Yngulin mage gave her an approving nod, but he said, “You will. You will not know how to yield your strength to me. I will show you the technique by which you may do this. It is too advanced a technique for you. You must endure it.”

Araenè lifted her chin and said fiercely, trying to reassure herself as well as the master, “I will.”

Master Tnegun nodded once more. Then he knelt and drew a large sphere of blackish red pyrargyrite out of the air. Pyrargyrite, if Araenè remembered correctly, was closely allied to fire, to vision, and to magics of unmaking. Indeed, at the moment, that sphere seemed to be filled with dark embers and leaping flames. It tasted of cloves and also something harsher, something violent, something that belonged to the darkness and not to the living fire.

Master Tnegun handled this sphere gingerly, as though it actually was hot to the touch. He set it on the stone and beckoned to Araenè.

Now that it came to this moment, Araenè found she was not afraid. Master Tnegun looked so calm and assured and … not indifferent … detached. Araenè found she had no doubt that he knew exactly what to do and that he would do it. This surety gave her the courage to kneel down as he directed, the sphere in front of her. Prince Ceirfei stood attentively near at hand, watching everything but saying nothing.

“Araenè, I must go into your mind,” Master Tnegun told Araenè. “You will find you have recovered your shield; I will break it quickly and teach you the structures I need you to hold. Are you ready?”

Araenè clenched her jaw, but she nodded.

His mind touched hers, and as he had warned, her shield snapped forcefully into place between them. And shattered, under the relentless power of the master’s intrusion.
Iron,
Araenè thought: Master Tnegun’s mind was smooth and hard and remorseless as iron. Fight him? She could find no way even to begin to fight him … and then she did: an echo of what he had inadvertently shown her himself. Her mind hardened to match his, only her mind was something hotter than iron: something molten that burned and flowed and closed around his. She realized, dimly, that she was fighting him and that she shouldn’t, but she did not know how to stop.

Master Tnegun caught her attack with ruthless dispatch, crushing it as he had broken her protective shield. Stunned and momentarily helpless, Araenè spiraled toward darkness. But Master Tnegun caught her before the darkness could drown her: he forced her mind into a … kind of shape, a structure that she had never imagined. It was a strange and desperately uncomfortable shape: she felt as though he had handed her a complicated edifice made entirely of sharp knife blades; there was no way to hold it that would not cut her. But she saw at once that this pattern was actually a way of holding
herself:
it flattened her own defenses and left the reserves of her strength open.

Once Master Tnegun had forced her to understand this structure, he let her go. Drawing freely on her strength, he cast his own awareness out of her mind and elsewhere.… She could not follow what he did; it was too complicated and strange. But she knew that if she let her mind unfold from the pattern he had shown her, he would lose all access to her strength.

She thought of Tichorei, of Sayai, of Kanii, of little Cesei. Of Trei. Of spheres filled with fire and shattering with fine webs of cracks. And though the hot strength poured out of her like blood from a wound, she held the structure Master Tnegun had shown her with rigid determination.

Then—she could not have said whether a quarter of a bell had passed or a day—the terrible draining weakness ceased. Master Tnegun’s mind recoiled from unknown distances, striking hers so that she staggered and lost her hold on the pattern to which she had clung; at once a wild, rolling surge of half-controlled power struck against him. This time, his mind did not meet or counter her defense, only gave way and fled—gone, out—Araenè’s head jerked up and she would have fallen except she was already sitting. She fought for breath in gasps that were nearly sobs.

Master Tnegun still knelt across from her, darker than ever against the white gravel. He was not looking at her. His eyes were hooded and his head bowed. The light was harsh on his face; it showed lines of exhaustion and pain around his eyes and mouth. He looked older than she had ever guessed, much older than her father. Older than anyone she’d ever known.

Before Araenè, the pyrargyrite sphere had shattered into a pile of delicate, fine shards.

A breeze slid across the mountain, ruffled through Araenè’s short hair, scattered shards of black crystal, rippled capriciously along the edges of Master Tnegun’s robe. Died away. Returned.

“Did it work?” Araenè whispered.

The Yngulin mage shifted his hands across the stone, braced himself. Lifted his head. Looked up.

Araenè followed his searching glance.

Prince Ceirfei stood near the white tree and its pool. He was speaking, but Araenè could not see the creature to which he spoke.

“…  for which we may pray to the Gods,” he was saying, quickly and forcefully. “And is not all our attention bent to that very end? Let come what will, though the city drown in molten fire and iron and the very stone be broken against the sea.” He paused, evidently listening to some response. Then he said sharply, “Well, I am a prince of the Floating Islands, and I give you my word before the Silent God and the Young God and the Great God himself that this is my will and the will of the king, my uncle.”

Araenè stared up at Master Tnegun. The mage was studying the prince … no, she thought. He was studying the creature to which the prince spoke. He glanced down at her, however, as though her unspoken bewilderment had drawn his attention. He touched her hand, then reached to draw a fingertip across her eyelids … ginger and anise tingled across her tongue and the palms of her hand, and when Master Tnegun lifted his hand, she could … see.

It was as though layers of cloud and glass spiraled through the air: that was her first thought. A half-glimpsed wing, indistinct as mist, shifted across her vision. Once she discovered the wing, as though the immense size and odd shape of it taught her to understand the rest of what she saw, she made out the outlines of a long, graceful head, transparent as glass, and the elegant curve of the neck that arched higher than the head. Light slid, gleaming, through an opalescent eye larger than Araenè’s whole head.

And Prince Ceirfei was speaking to that creature. To Araenè, it seemed that he might as well have argued with the wind itself: there was nothing she could find in the great half-seen dragon to which a man might speak. But the prince seemed to have no such doubts. She whispered to Master Tnegun, “Can you hear it?”

The mage’s face was tight with weariness. “A word here and there, no more than that,” he answered softly. “Here, Cassameirin would do better than I. Even were I not …”

He meant were he not tired almost to death. Araenè nodded.

“You will find that magery such as you and I wield is very little like the natural magic the dragons share with their kajuraihi. You and I work out the mathematical framework of the world and form our spells with stylus and ink as well as natural power; we set our spellwork in stone or metal or glass because we must keep our working contained and, hmm, separate from ourselves. Dragon magic is not akin to magery: it is a magic of being, not of knowing. Your cousin would assure you that the kajuraihi do not fly by
understanding
flight, but simply by flying.” Master Tnegun paused, then glanced over and up at the vast crystalline dragon that had come down out of the sky to speak with Prince Ceirfei. The master added wryly, “Though I have dwelled here in the Islands for many years, I know little of your dragons of wind and sky.”

The dragon spoke: its voice was not at all like a normal voice. It was more like the ringing of chimes, or the notes of a flute. As she saw the dragon only in glimpses, so Araenè heard only scattered notes when it spoke. She could not understand it at all.

But the prince clearly could. He was saying now, “And thus all the winds above the Islands are at peril, yet still it is the fire that must be released in order to free the winds. Is that not so?”

A pause, sprinkled with delicate chiming notes.

“I am aware,” said the prince. And then, “If fire is the cost, we must pray you are willing to pay it. Is not the gain commensurate?”

Beside Araenè, Master Tnegun shifted. She looked up and found that his face had gone tight—with pain and exhaustion, she thought at first, but then she saw that it was more than pain; it was a tension born of indecision, maybe, or maybe simply an awareness of peril. His mouth firmed. He shook his head a little. Araenè thought he looked like he was settling himself for renewed effort. He gave her shoulder a little pat—
Stay here
—climbed painfully to his feet, and walked toward the white tree. Araenè dutifully stayed where she was. She was not at all sure she could get to her feet if she tried.

Once he was at the prince’s side, Master Tnegun bent to murmur to him. Araenè could not hear him, but she was almost sure he was saying something like,
There is no time left; get this done now.
Whatever he said, Prince Ceirfei listened attentively. His mouth tightened. Turning to the half-visible dragon, he said with flat decision, “For my part, I am not bargaining. Only tell me plainly what you would require. I swear before the Gods,
we
shall not protest to pay what cost we must.”