“But finally, one day, it was over; I felt the sea shudder with pain as the Sleeping Child rose, consuming Serendair and the islands north of it in volcanic fire, felt its depths burning.” The soldier ran the back of his hand across his eyes in memory.
“You know the order of the birth of the elements? How the older they are, the more powerful they can be? Ether was first; it is the only one not born of this world, but came rather from the stars. That is why the F’dor fear certain types of diamonds, by the by—they are crystal formations not of this earth, but that fell from the heavens in a blaze of light, cooling and hardening into a prison of fire.”
He held up his hand, not looking at it; on the index finger the ring he had taken from the hut blazed, brilliant, in the morning light.
“Ether is the only element that came before fire, so it is the one that holds more power. Water came after it, then wind, then earth; over those three elements fire holds sway.”
“But water quenches fire,” Ashe said.
MacQuieth turned on him like a badger on its prey, his cloudy eyes leveled at him.
“Tell that to the people of Traeg, or any of the other villages that burned to ashes along the coast of the sea,” he said scornfully. “Tell that to the islands of Balatron, Briela, and Querel, that melted in the heat of the fire that burned, unquenched, in the boiling waves. I may have burned my eyes, staring at the sun on the sea, fire on the water, to the point of being sightless, but it is you, Gwydion ap Llauron ap Gwylliam, who are being blind.”
“Ashe,” the Lord Cymrian said quietly. “Call me Ashe. Then you don’t have to utter the name you loathe. I am not my grandfather; I would hate to have my kinsman think of him when talking to me.”
The ancient warrior smiled then, his eyes seeming to clear a bit.
“
“Ashe,” he said, rolling the word around in his mouth. “Sounds like a version of the story of the cinder girl who becomes a princess. I am old; you will learn it in my tongue. ‘Aesch.’ ” The harshness of the sound scraped against Ashe’s eardrum like teeth on bone.
“And what am I to call you, Grandfather?”
MacQuieth shrugged.
“I could not care less what you call me,” he said. “I am not here to do your bidding. I will not answer unless I am moved to. I am only here to find the one you seek as well. But one thing—do not use my name. If he hears it on the wind, he will flee. Even as you see me now, old and wasted as I am, he would run rather than fight me.”
Ashe nodded. “You were telling me of long ago. What did you do?” he asked gently. “After you felt the death of the Island?”
The ancient hero stared off, still sightless, into the horizon at the waves rolling up the gleaming sand, over the fragments of shells and pebbles, rushing white to the end of the froth, slipping away, with the top layer of sand, back into the maw of the sea.
“I went to bury my son,” he said.
Above the crashing waves a seagull screamed; the shrill sound broke the thundering silence that rolled in, like the waves, on the warrior’s words.
“It is a strange thing, walking the world through the sea,” MacQuieth said, almost as if talking to himself. “There are wonders untold, great mountains that dwarf anything in the upworld, trenches and chasms that surely must reach to the center of the world itself; treasures of man, buried in the sand beneath wrecks of ships; treasures of the ocean, coral in colors never imagined, towering threads of spider-lace rock and creatures that defy description. More of the world exists down there, far from the minds of the ignorant masses, than ever will be known in the realm of land. There is magic unfathomable to be seen if a man’s eyes are open to it.”
He looked overhead as a flock of seabirds passed on the warm wind, following the shadow. His sight returns, Ashe thought. Thank the gods.
“But of course my eyes were not open to the sea’s wonder, but to its terror. I knew that I would find devastation there, but could not have begun to imagine how hellish, how truly terrible the sight of it would be. The towers of Tartechor, the great city of the Mythlin, once the jewel of the sea, gone, along with the rest, swept away by the roiling current. The hundreds of thousands souls that lived there gone as well, atomized, turned into vapor, foam on the waves. In breathing the water around the place where the city had been, I knew I was breathing the dead.
“It was a kindness that Tartechor went the way it did, however. For all that it was horrific to view the place where there had once been such opulence beneath the waves, and now was nothing but ever-shifting sand, it could not begin to compare to the horror of the sight that was once Serendair. Where there had been highlands, there was nothing beneath the waves but rubble and ruin, melted statues and stone gates jutting from great mountains of broken earth, the towers of Elysian castle now pebbles in the swirling current. They had built seawalls, levies, in the last days, in the vain attempt to hold back the inevitable.” MacQuieth shook his head, smiling sadly. “That must have been Hector. My son would have been filling bags of sand to the last.” The ancient soldier fell silent. Ashe stood alongside him as the sun crested the horizon and set sail for the pinnacle of the sky.
MacQuieth bent down and gathered a handful of sand, contemplating it for a moment, then allowed it to run through his fingers onto the ground again.
“If you know the ways of the Liringlas, you know that we bury our dead by committing their bodies to fire on the wind beneath the stars. We sing of the life of the dead, of their dreams, their accomplishments, their good works. There was much to elegize for Hector. He was a man of surpassing greatness; he was my hero.” The soldier exhaled deeply. “But there was nothing to bury, nothing to put on a pyre, just loose mountains of ruin that towered almost to the very surface of the sea. And ash; even in all the time it had taken me to walk through the sea to the other side of the world, when I came there were still clouds of ash swirling in the current, clouding the water, fouling it, despoiling it, with transient earth. How was I to find my son in all that rubble, all that thick, gray haze? I could not sing the requiem for my own son; how could I ever sing it for another?”
For a long time the two men stood, one lost in thought, the other in memory, listening to the whine of the wind. Suddenly MacQuieth looked up sharply to the north.
“He comes,” he said simply.
Basquela dropped anchor as the sun was at the pinnacle of the sky.
The seneschal’s face, even more drawn and thin than usual, hardened as the ship came to rest on a fallowing sea that was beginning to pitch with the winds heralding that a storm was coming.
He pulled the spyglass from his robes and fixed it on the pointed promontory, scanning once again the rocky crags, the jagged coastline.
“Where are you, Rhapsody?” he muttered, searching through the mist from the crashing surf, the haze of the misty sunlight darkening as clouds began to pass overhead.
Dead, the demon answered bitterly, or hidden far beyond your reach. One last time; abandon this madness and turn for home.
Defiantly, Michael clutched the rail and leaned into the wind, shouting her name at the top of his lungs.
In the depths of her tidal cave, working feverishly as she sat on the ledge to expanded the floating net of lava rocks, Rhapsody thought she heard her name in the whistle of the wind in the cave.
The salt is getting to me, she thought, desperately plaiting the strands of her hair she had shorn from her head with the broken crossbow bolt, eyeing the body that was swirling in the circular current, dissolving before her eyes. Tomorrow. We will get out of here tomorrow. It was a promise she had avoided committing to until this day.