Fire Dragon - Katharine Kerr [75]
“Ye gods! There are times when you're as stupid as mud.” Nevyn got up and towered over him. “Think, Marro! Not that it'll do any good. Now.”
He was the only man in the kingdom who could address the prince that way and live. The servants gasped and drew back a few steps, as if they feared lightning would strike Nevyn where he stood and they along with him. Maryn flinched and returned his gaze to Bellyra's body.
“I would have recalled her,” Maryn said. “Truly I would have. I told her so.”
Nevyn restrained himself from calling the prince a murderer. Instead he stepped back and let Maryn's men rush forward to tend him. Owaen threw himself down to a kneel next to his liege, and servants followed.
Nevyn strode across the ward, which was filling with servants and courtiers both, all talking, some weeping. In the darkness he stepped into a nook between two of Dun Deverry's random walls, sat down on the wet ground, and slipped into trance almost before his weight had completely settled. He summoned his body of light, joined to his midriff by a silver cord. First he imagined what it would be like to see out of its eyes; then with the ease of long practice he was indeed looking out of them.
The rainy ward smouldered with silver fire, or so it seemed from his viewpoint on the etheric plane, great columns of mist and drifts of smoke that were both naught more than the elemental force and effluent of the water in the physical ward below. Although none of the outpourings was strong enough to threaten his body of light with harm, they did make it very hard for Nevyn to see. In among the swirling water veils he could pick out the glowing auras of the people clustering around Bellyra's body, but nothing as frail as her etheric form. He rose up some twenty feet above the ground, then drifted over to the cluster of auras, pulsing yellow and red, stippled with dark grief. Inside each one he could see, dimly, the body of the person who wore it.
Bellyra's etheric double would be somewhere near her corpse, he figured, or near Maryn, who was kneeling next to it. The prince's aura wrapped tightly around him, a pale gold throb of light, as if he were frightened or puzzled. When Nevyn dropped down closer, he could see something much like a woman's shadow, fluttering around him. Its hands beat at Maryn's head and shoulders, as if it were trying to touch his warm flesh.
Nevyn sent out a thought, which sounded on this plane as words. “Bellyra, Your Highness! Where are you? It's me, Nevyn!”
In the drifting shadow a pale light shone, a strange ice-blue. Nevyn headed toward it, calling again. All at once her simulacrum appeared. The shadow thickened into the shape of a naked woman, her head thrown back, her arms flailing in panic. Nevyn swooped down and steadied himself in front of her.
“It is you!” Her thought voice wavered and threatened to disappear. “I thought I was dead.”
“You are. Come with me. Let's get away from all this wretchedness.”
Like a frightened child she grabbed at his hands, but hers passed right through them. She spun around and disappeared into a column of water-force, and for a moment he thought he'd lost her.
“Lyrra, come back!”
He raced after her and finally saw her drifting in midair, high above the dun. He flew up and joined her.
“Am I a ghost?” Bellyra's thoughts came to him on a wave of fear. “Must I stay here forever? Oh gods, forgive me! I thought death would end it. I thought I'd be free.”
“You will be,” Nevyn said. “You're not a haunt. Do what I say.”
“Leave Maryn?” She tossed her head this way and that with a swirl of spectral hair. “Leave Maryn?”
“You must! And in truth, you already have. Look down.”
Far below them the dun appeared in the silver mists as dark lumps of stone, dead things heaped up like charcoal near a smelter. Little puffs of light, the auras of those living persons in the ward, hurried back and forth.
“You have a choice,” Nevyn said. “You may stay here for some few days in misery and pain, desperately regretting what you've done, trying to make Maryn hear you,