“Tell the quartermaster to hurry with that coach,” he said.
The jolting ride through the rocky outskirts of Yarim Paar was sheer agony. Every rocky rut the coach contacted brought on another spasm, another bout of nausea, leaving Rhapsody sallow and trembling. By the time they reached the foothills above the city, she was unable to remain upright and lay, curled under a heavy blanket, on the coach’s bench, jostled violently with each lurch of the carriage.
Ashe was growing frantic, though he fought to keep his panic from his wife’s notice. He kept repeating the words of the Seer over and over again in his mind, struggling to draw comfort from them but finding none.
Rhapsody will not die bearing your children. The pregnancy will not be easy, but it will not kill or harm her.
If you have lied to me, Aunt, I will come for your blood, he thought bitterly, endeavoring to remember the primordial mandate that the Seers could not do so, but failing to be consoled by it. After all, his own grandmother, Manwyn’s sister, had deceived him about Rhapsody’s survival more than a hundred years before.
When they reached the summit of the promontory that overlooked Yarim Paar, Ashe glanced out the window, then rapped on the window that opened onto the driver’s perch.
“Stop here, please.”
“Yes, m’lord.”
As the call to halt traveled fore and aft of the carriage in the caravan, Ashe knelt on the floor next to Rhapsody’s seat and ran a hand gently over her hair and face. Her body was still cold and trembling, her eyes still fleetingly glassy. He lowered his lips to her ear, kissing it, then spoke softly.
“Aria? Can you hear me?”
She nodded distantly.
“I’m going to stop here and take you outside for a moment to get a breath of air.” Rhapsody didn’t respond.
Carefully he gathered her in his arms and kicked open the carriage door, carrying her out of the darkness of the coach, down the steps and out into the blinding summer sun.
The wind at the top of the bluff snapped his cloak of mist behind him, spattering droplets into the hot air, as it blew her hair in front of her face. Rhapsody’s eyes remained closed, but her grip on his arm tightened slightly.
He carried her to the edge of the rocky promontory and came to a halt there.
“Aria—look if you can.”
At first Rhapsody did not respond, but after a moment of the wind in her face she opened one eye, then the other, and gazed out at the city of Yarim Paar stretching out on the flat red plain below.
In the center of the distant city, a glorious mist of blue and white was emanating forth from the tiny gleaming obelisk that yesterday had been dead, shriveled in centuries of heat and loss. The light of the summer sun caught the water droplets and refracted them into a glorious spectrum of color, reaching from the ground into the air above, disappearing in a shaft of gold from the sunlit clouds.
The water that was flowing now from Entudenin had spilled over the fountainbed and was coursing through the streets, turning the dry red clay to dark mud. The sound of merry laughter, of celebratory music and clamor could be heard, muted but unmistakable, in the distance; it echoed off the rocky hills on which they stood, a joyful vibration in the normally silent desert.
Rhapsody lifted her head, then slowly slid down to a stand, bracing herself against her husband, and smiled. She inhaled deeply, but said nothing, staring at the rainbow in the desert.
Where the skycolors touch the earth.
Ashe drew her closer, steadying her.
“See, Aria? See what your faith has wrought here?”
Rhapsody leaned against him, resting her head against his shoulder, and watching the combined celebration of humans and earth in the Fountain Rock’s life-giving spray. Reveling in the song of it.
“Our faith, and the Bolg’s knowledge of the right way to proceed. And Achmed’s refusal to be deterred by the bigotry of the Yarimese.”
“Perhaps that is all that a miracle is—faith and the knowledge of what is right in combination with refusal to be deterred.” His hand came to rest on her abdomen. A moment later hers came to rest atop his.
“I am sure you are right.”
He led her back to the carriage, leaning on his arm but walking on her own. Once she was settled inside, he took a final glance at the ancient wonder on the windswept plain below, then called to the coachman.
“Take us back to Navarne—gently, now.”
Easy, Shaene—the glass will shatter before it anneals; it’s not sufficiently cooled.”
“Bugger yourself, Sandy,” Shaene growled, clutching the giant pincers with the leather rags, his thick arms trembling with the effort. He shifted the cylinder of just-melted frit, the earliest stage of glass, to the edge of the forge and brought it to rest above the slab where it would be flattened into a sheet.
Achmed struggled to contain his impatience.
“The color is wrong already,” he said through gritted teeth. “The red is too light; it’s almost pink.”
“Give it a few hours of heat,” Omet suggested, interposing himself between the king and the craftsmen who were standing near the kilns that had been built near the iron forges; the men and Bolg were uniformly dripping with sweat and exhaustion. “The color changes in the curing. It will darken.”
Achmed turned away in frustration and aimed a savage kick at an almost empty pot of powdered cobalt ore that sat at the brink of the open fire. A streak of blue light erupted in the flames as the mineral ignited, then extinguished a second later.
Shaene started at the sound, dropping the pincers and bouncing the glass cylinder off the rock slab. The resounding crack echoed through the cavernous chambers around the forge, followed by the dispirited sigh of the glassworkers.
“Enough of this!” Shaene shouted, heaving the metal pincers against a nearby stone wall where they fell onto a wooden scaffold, sending pots, tools, and smalti flying. His demeanor melted before their eyes, like the glass in the kiln. “I cannot bear this anymore, not for all the gold in Gwylliam’s treasury! This project is cursed, cursed!”
“Calm yourself, Master Shaene,” Omet said, glancing between the livid craftsman and the narrowing eyes of the Bolg king.
A gruff cough drew their attention. Achmed turned around to see a Firbolg guard standing off to the side of the forge overhang, signaling to him.
“Get back to work, Shaene, or I will tell your mother you are having tantrums again,” he spat, then strode over to the soldier.
“What is it?”
“Messenger, Sorbold.”
“A messenger from Sorbold? From the mail caravan?” The soldier shook his head; Achmed scratched his own, slapping the sweat away. “Very well. I will be right down.”
The man was waiting in the Great Hall when the king arrived, dressed in the livery of the empress and the armor of the mountain columns, staring at the domed ceiling above the hall. He turned immediately upon hearing the king enter and bowed perfunctorily.
“Majesty.”
“What do you want?”
The soldier eyed him with a mixture of nervousness and contempt. The Sorbolds were not a naturally courteous people; rudeness was so much a part of the national character that special regiments, like the one to which this soldier belonged, were trained in the politics of etiquette, so that messages could be delivered across borders without international incidents being started. He stood at straighter attention and cleared his throat.
“The Blesser of Sorbold, the benison Nielash Mousa, greets King Achmed of Ylorc, extending to him the salutations of—
“What do you want?” Achmed demanded impatiently. “I am busy.”
The messenger, caught up short, swallowed the words he had painstakingly prepared, then met the king’s eye.
“Her Serenity, the Dowager Empress, has passed from this life in her sleep,” he said shortly.