The Black Raven - Katharine Kerr [162]
Where did they come from? he wondered. I never created any such. He found himself remembering other bestial faces, these snarling and dark, in the strange country just beyond his lands, where the old man sat endlessly peeling his apple and bringing life down from wherever it was that life sprang. The old man had redeemed those creatures, perhaps, and sent them off to live in the green fields.
“The wild things will endure,” Evandar said aloud. “That soothes my heart.”
Perhaps the land had lost its voice simply because it had returned to the wild. Yet as he walked in the eerie silence another reason suggested itself to him. Perhaps he had no future for the omens to reveal. Perhaps it was time for him to die, whatever “die” might mean to such as him. He found himself thinking of Jill, who had spent her life like a coin to ransom Cengarn from Alshandra. Must he do the same to stop his brother’s meddling?
“I’d best make some other provision for Salamander, then, if that’s true.”
On a sunny hilltop Evandar stood waiting. No voice spoke, no answer came to him from the future or from the green hills.
“Fade away and die!” He shouted it out. “Is that what will happen to me? Fade away and die?”
Not even an echo floated back on the wind. Finally with a shrug he turned away. So this, then, was what fear felt like, a bitterness in the mouth, an empty coldness at the heart.
In winter, dragons tend to their dreams. Even on short summer nights dragons are great dreamers; when they wake they consider their dreams well, then lay them up in memory for the cold time. Once winter comes they can brood them properly as they drowse deep within their fire mountain lairs. The old dreams hatch new ones, long elaborate visions and tales that often take several nights to complete.
All that winter Arzosah found the man she called Rori Dragonfriend woven into her dreams. At times she would relive the moment when he’d held up the rose ring and enslaved her with name-dweomer. From those dreams she woke shivering and hissing in fear. She would leap to her feet and stretch out her wings for flight until she remembered that she was awake and safe in her beloved home. She would lie back down on the stone ledge, and from her perch, high up in an enormous cavern, she would contemplate the steam rising from the hot springs far below until at last she felt soothed, ready to sleep and dream again.
At other times she would dream of the battles of the summer past: the stench of blood like perfume and Rori’s berserk laughter ringing over the slaughter. From those she woke smug, yawning and stretching her claws at the memory of dead horses. The remembered taste of those feasts would drive her out of her lair if the day were clear. She would soar over the snow, seeking out the valleys where she could find deer. In the deep snow they floundered, easy prey. Once she’d gorged herself, she’d return to her home mountain and the warmth of its gutted interior.
Slowly the year turned toward spring. When Arzosah flew she felt warmer air and saw the snow growing thin. Eventually the rains came, and the world turned to brown mud. On a day when the trees were putting out buds, Arzosah returned from one of these hunts to find an unwelcome guest. She entered her home cavern through a fissure high up on the side of a cliff, and as soon as she started crawling down the tunnel inside, she smelled dweomer. To her all things magical smelled like the air immediately after a strike of lightning—sharp and clean, tingling with power—a scent so strong that it could mask the accustomed stink of brimstone and old burning within the cavern. She backed out of the tunnel, clung precariously to the little ledge below the fissure, and considered what to do. The dweomer smell attracted her, but she remembered how she’d been mastered by dweomer in this very cavern.
“Once of that is enough,” Arzosah muttered—in Elvish. With a possible enemy so near, she refused to speak in Dragonish, a tongue the great wyrms keep