Bones of the Dragon - Margaret Weis [213]
Skylan took up four spears, two in each hand. He walked back to where Aylaen knelt in the sand, holding the spiritbone in her hands, turning it round and round in unhappy confusion.
Skylan thrust the spears into the ground between himself and Garn.
“You and I will guard Aylaen.”
The gods are afraid.
Their wyrd is bound up in ours.
The gods had once believed they were all-powerful, all-knowing. The gods had once believed they were immortal.
Nothing lives forever. Not even the gods.
Creation destroys. Destruction creates.
Fire burns down the pine tree, but the heat of the flames causes a cone bearing the seeds of new life to burst, scattering the seeds on the blackened ground where they put down roots and become the pine tree, which burns in the fire. . . .
Holding the spiritbone in her hands, Aylaen held the wyrds of them all: gods, men, dragons. Their threads woven together, the fabric stronger than a single thread. Her thread as strong as Torval’s thread. His thread as fragile as hers.
“The dragonbone game!” Aylaen murmured.
“What about it?” Skylan turned from watching for the enemy to stare at her intently. “What about the dragonbone game?”
Aylaen looked up, startled by his tone.
“I remembered something Treia told me! The ritual to summon the dragon is based on the dragonbone game. That’s how the priestesses remember it.”
The ground trembled, shuddered. Men were running for cover.
“The dragonbone game,” Skylan repeated. An odd, exultant light shone in his blue eyes. “The ritual . . . I wonder . . .”
“Wonder what?” Aylaen asked, puzzled.
He shook his head.
“We need the dragon,” he said curtly.
Aylaen did not know the ritual, but she knew the dragonbone game. She oftentimes won big. When she lost, she lost spectacularly, her pieces swept clean off the board. Though she was not reckless like Skylan, she was a risk-taker, not afraid to make bold moves.
Aylaen thrust the spiritbone into the sand and shut her eyes so that she would not see the giants and lose her concentration. Skylan and Garn, the two people she loved best in the world, were with her, guarding her, protecting her.
And the gods are with all of us. Our wyrds are woven together. . . .
CHAPTER
11
Treia felt the ground shake, but she paid little heed to it. If she had turned around and looked behind her, even her weak eyes would have seen the giants, striding with terrible purpose toward the beach. She did not look around. She did not look ahead. What was the use? It was all a blur anyway. She stared down at her feet to see the ground on which she walked, and even then she didn’t see that much for the bitter, burning tears.
Treia could not have said where she was going. She had left the camp for one reason and that was to escape: to escape her sister, of whom Treia had always been jealous; to escape Skylan, whom she loathed and despised; to escape the pitying stares of the rest of the Torgun, pitying the spinster who had lost her last chance for a husband.
Raegar was lost, drowned, dead. The only man she had ever loved. The only man who had ever loved her or was likely to love her.
Treia’s grief tore at her, shredded her. She could not bear the pain of her loss. She could not bear her sister’s attempts to offer comfort or Skylan’s triumph.
Pity for the spinster. Pity for the Bone Priestess of an impoverished clan, a Bone Priestess who must spend her days in lonely solitude, lancing boils on people’s asses.
Raegar had given her love and something more: hope for a better life. He had fanned the flames of her ambition, given her reason to dare think she might rise to heights she had never before imagined. And now he was dead and her dreams had drowned with him.
It was only when Treia at last raised her head to cast a dreary look about that she saw the Hall of Vektia, a large wooden blur for her at this distance. She thought wearily she might as well