She watched Gaven pick out fruit. He checked each piece over for bruises or rot, used his thumb to test its firmness, and finally brought it to his nose before deciding whether to buy it. They bought a small bag of plums, a block of sharp cheese, and a fresh loaf of bread, then started back to the inn. By the time they reached the corner of the building, Rienne scowled down at the dirt road beneath her feet, tormenting herself with thoughts of Gaven testing the fruit of that elf strumpet.
“Hey,” Gaven said, coming to a sudden stop just outside the door to the inn.
Rienne’s sword flew into her hand as she whirled around to face him; it whistled softly as it bit through the air-and neatly cut through the plum that Gaven had tossed at her. She caught one half in her left hand, and the other landed in Gaven’s outstretched palm. He laughed, and she couldn’t help but smile again.
“I see Maelstrom hasn’t lost its edge,” Gaven said, pulling the pit out of his half of the plum and holding it up to her. Rienne’s cut had divided the pit in half. His eyes found hers. “And you haven’t lost yours, either.”
She brought the point of her sword right under his chin. “And don’t you forget it,” she said, trying to scowl again.
He winked, and her face dissolved into a smile. She returned Maelstrom to its sheath, took a bite of her plum, and started up the inn stairs.
Back in the room, she sat cross-legged on her bed while he sprawled across his, devouring a plum.
“Where to start?” he wondered aloud, wiping juice from his chin and tossing the pit aside.
Rienne cut a piece of cheese from the block. “Perhaps at the point where you started acting like a madman?”
“Hm, no. I think I need to go further back.” He pressed his palms to his eyes and drew a deep breath. “All right,” he sighed. “Our last descent together, those caves in the Starpeaks. Remember?”
“How could I forget? I was so worried when you fell. I tried so hard to catch the rope! I was about to grab it, and then a swarm of bats came up from the shaft, thousands of them. I couldn’t see my hand, let alone the rope, and by the time they’d flown by, the rope was gone.”
Gaven let his hands fall to the bed and stared at the ceiling. Rienne waited, but he didn’t continue. She stood and leaned over him. His eyes didn’t register her presence.
“Gaven?”
His voice was distant, dreamy. “I fell. Down and down through endless dark. The pain…”
She sat beside him on the bed and put a hand on his chest. “You were so badly hurt.”
His head jerked up, and she saw his eyes come back to focus on her face. “You found me. But not until after-” He sat up, taking her hand in his.
“After what?”
“Did you look in that box that Krathas gave you?”
“No. What was in it?”
Gaven reached into the pouch at his belt and produced the adamantine box she’d given him in Vathirond, the one he’d left in Krathas’s care so long ago. As she watched, he opened it, his eyes gleaming as he peered inside. He stared so intently that she grew worried and started to push the lid closed. Only then did he turn the box so she could see its contents.
Her breath caught in her throat. A long time ago, a very different Rienne had made a career out of exploring the depths of Khyber, far below the sunlit world, searching for the dragon-shards that formed there. Legends held that Khyber shards were formed from the blood of the Dragon Below, one of the three primordial; dragons who had shaped the world at the dawn of time, the progenitor of fiends and the father of all evil. Those legends gave nightshards their other common name: demonshards.
Legends aside, nightshards were valuable-especially during the Last War. The dark crystals were suffused with magic, making them extremely useful in the creation of certain magical items. They carried a particular affinity for magic of binding, which made them essential for the artificers and magewrights who crafted elemental vessels for House Lyrandar: seafaring galleons early in the war, airships in more recent years. She and Gaven had made a small fortune procuring nightshards, because they had been good at finding them and good at selling them to the right people at the right price.
But she had never seen a nightshard like the one in Gaven’s adamantine box. It was larger than her fist, and the swirls of midnight blue in its heart pulsed with barely contained energy. She reached out and touched its hard surface, and it seemed for an instant as though her fingers might sink into the crystal to touch the writhing serpents of color inside.
“The Heart of Khyber,” Gaven said, and his hushed tone gave voice to the awe in Rienne’s heart.
She moved her fingers slowly over the smooth facets, then suddenly jerked her hand back, wrenching her eyes away from the crystal to Gaven’s face. The largest nightshard she’d ever seen-the largest demonshard. Her original suspicions about Gaven’s behavior resurfaced-could the exorcists have been wrong? A shard this large-perhaps it held a spirit powerful enough to hide its presence from their examination.
Gaven must have read the fear on her face, because he snapped the box shut and took her hand. “I’m not possessed,” he said, his eyes searching hers. “But in a way, you were right. Something was in the shard, something that entered me when I touched it.” Rienne tried to pull her hand away, but he held it tight. “Not a spirit, though-it didn’t dominate me, control me. Just knowledge. Memories. A whole lifetime of memories, incredibly ancient and wise.”
The mystery that had haunted Rienne for nearly three decades was starting to unravel. She felt dizzy. “But whose memories, Gaven?” she said.
“A dragon’s.”
A dragon’s memories. She tried to imagine the thoughts and experiences of a dragon’s long lifetime, and found that her mind wasn’t up to the task.
“So many memories, Ree. I still can’t keep them straight.” His eyes were staring, out of focus again.
“Which ones are really yours, you mean?” Sometimes, before all this happened, she would remember doing something as a child, or thought she remembered-it turned out Gaven had done it in his childhood. They had been that close, once. They had shared so many stories and memories that they had forgotten whose were whose.
He nodded. “At first, it seemed like the dragon’s memories were mine, and the memories of my life as Gaven were the figments. I knew you, but it felt like I knew you from a long time ago, like you were someone I cared about when I was young.”
Tears sprang to Rienne’s eyes. “You weren’t yourself. I thought I’d lost you.”
“You had. I became the dragon, in a way, and tried to live his life, pick up where he’d left off. It took me a while to figure out that time had passed, and I’ve only just got a sense of how long it had been.”
“How long was it?”
“I think somewhere between four and five hundred years.”
Rienne whistled softly, casting her mind to what she knew about Khorvaire’s history. Four or five centuries past-the Five Nations united into one empire of Galifar, Cyre alive and flourishing. A world that could barely imagine the horror and violence of a century of war.
“Twenty-nine turns of Eternal Day and Endless Night,” Gaven murmured. His brow was furrowed, and his eyes closed.
“What’s that?”
He held up a finger, and she sat back to wait. He rocked slightly, as if he were lost in the rhythm of some unheard song.
His eyes opened. “The Storm Dragon slumbers for twenty-nine turns of Eternal Day and Endless Night, and then withdraws from the world, to emerge in the Time of the Dragon Above.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Turns of Eternal Day and Endless Night-Irian and Mabar, the planes of light and darkness. Irian draws near every three years, Mabar every five. Every fifteen years they draw near in the same year. Twenty-nine cycles of fifteen years is four hundred and thirty-five years. I think that’s how long I was-”