“Yes,” he said.
Talquist’s eyes sparkled black in the thin light.
“Excellent,” he said. “But on a serious note, Fhremus, it’s imperative that your men, and the families they left behind, understand the threat we all face. What is that saying you military men have about the initiative for going to war?”
“The defender fights with the strength of ten conquerors.”
“Yes,” Talquist said smoothly. “That’s it.”
“They will understand, m’lord,” Fhremus said. “And they will fight to their last breath to ensure your dominion.” Talquist smiled broadly. “Another form of music to my ears. You may go, Fhremus, but return on the morrow; we have plans to make.”
The soldier bowed unsteadily. “Yes, m’lord.” He bent over the regent emperor’s hand in salute, then left the room, his boot steps echoing down the corner stairway. When the sound died away, Talquist turned to the stone titan that had emerged from within his deeper chambers. “I believe he will do well, at least in the first wave, Faron,” he said idly. “Past that, we may have to make some changes. Do you agree?”
The stone titan watched the Emperor Presumptive for a moment, then returned to the inner chamber and came back a moment later with an object in his giant hand. It was an oval scale, tattered finely at the edges and irregularly oblong, scored with many fine lines. In his hand it appeared gray with a slightly blue tinge, but when the light caught it a prism of color danced across its razor-thin surface. Carved into its convex side was the image of an eye, clear and unobstructed by clouds, as the image on the concave side was. The titan held the scale in his hand, gazing out of the balcony window. A moment later he turned to the Emperor Presumptive and nodded mutely.
Talquist broke into a wide smile. “Good,” he said. “Very good.”
He stood and watched as dusk faded to night, the stars twinkling bright in the vast sky overarching Jierna’sid.
24
Ashe had hoped that in the course of the preparations for war, in all of the noise and hubbub of getting ready for the arrival of the Council of Dukes, and the chaos that was ensuing as the household of Haguefort made ready to move a good piece of itself to the fortification at Highmeadow, he would be able to retain his sanity as long as possible. Distraction was good, he reasoned, and with any luck the aching absence he felt for his wife and child the moment they had left his sphere of influence, had stepped outside the comforting boundaries
of his dragon sense, would be filled up by the clamor and infighting, the thousands of details and decisions to be made, and a host of other diversions that would keep the dragon in his blood busy.
It had only taken a few moments, long enough for the sound of the horses’ hooves to die away into the night. Then within his consciousness he felt rather than heard a deep caterwaul, the keening of a beast that had had something stolen from its hoard. Even deeper within, he could feel the tearing of his soul, in the fairly recently mended place where it had been sewn back together again when he was reunited with Rhapsody.
When the first night without her fell, Ashe took comfort in sitting before the fire that reminded him of his wife and looking back over the haze of time to a different world, a place where he had been happy. It was a time before the War, before the Cataclysm, even before the two Bolg who saw Rhapsody as belonging originally to them, and viewed him as an interloper by virtue of his marriage to her.
When he closed his eyes, he could still see her as she had been then, on the night before her fourteenth birthday, dressed in a simple velvet gown, her breast adorned by a corsage of simple flowers her father had given her. She had been thin then and slight, with long straight hair that hung down her back like a silken wave. Ashe smiled, remembering his first sight of her, crouched behind a row of barrels in the dark outside the fore-harvest dance, an event where the people of her human father’s farming community had held a marriage lottery, the traditional selection of marriage for the young people of their village. How he had come to be in that place he still did not know, even millennia later. He had been but fourteen himself, an awkward adolescent boy walking to town on a fine morning on the other side of Time, almost fifteen hundred years after Rhapsody’s birth. What had transpired was still unclear; the wind had been fresh, the morning birds had been in full song, the day had been beautiful. A day like any other day.
And then, the world had shifted.
Ashe could almost still recall the exact sensation of nausea and weakness that swept over him as he was plucked from the place he had been and deposited in the afternoon sun in a farmer’s pasture in the village of Merryfield, a simple farming town in the center of the Wide Meadows, in the eastern lands of the Island of Serendair. Raised in the presence of magic and beings with ancient powers, he had recovered his composure fairly quickly, and managed to discover approximately where he was in time, if not how he had come to be there. All of this had led him to the foreharvest dance, and to the side of the girl hiding in an alleyway, wistfully listening to the music as it played within the lighted grange hall, resisting every attempt to marry her off in the traditional ceremonies. He had fallen in love with her from the moment he’d seen her, not just because she was fair and because all the chemicals of his young body had begun to hum with life upon beholding her, but because there was something so ethical, so independent and intelligent in her resistance to being used as chattel that he could not help but respect her, even without having been introduced. Eventually he’d worked up his courage enough to tap her on the shoulder, to ask her to dance in the light reflecting from the hall, to walk with her to her family’s fields where the willow tree she had loved stood guard over a valley stream. Ashe closed his eyes more tightly, listening to the music of the water in his head. The extravagant capability of detail bequeathed to him by his dragon nature allowed him a heightened sense of memory; in many ways it was like reliving that night again, feeling the coolness of the breeze, sensing the brightness of the stars, physically recalling the way her hair smelled like morning, the glow in her eyes that sparkled brighter as she talked about things that excited her, unrealistic dreams of escaping the marriage lottery and traveling the world, seeing the ocean that her grandfather had plied as a sailor, something that she longed for but never had done. And above all, he remembered the way she talked about her dreams, of stars falling from the sky into her hands, holding them fast until one day she could hold no longer, and instead they dropped through her open palms into the meadow stream, glimmering up at her, beyond her reach in the depths.
He had resolved in that moment to fulfill those dreams for her, to marry her, with her excited consent, and to take her from the farmlands off to see the world. His reason for that was twofold. Whether or not he could ever get back his own time was of little interest to him; rather, he had determined that whatever force had brought him over the waves of time to be by her side had placed him in the time before the Cataclysm, just as the war that would tear the Island of Serendair asunder was beginning to erupt. If for no other reason, they had to go away in haste, lest his newly-found soulmate become nothing more than one more victim in two of history’s greatest tragedies. She had called him Sam, the common appellation by which unknown young men were addressed in her town. He had never been given the chance to tell her his real one; it was an endearment she still used. Her voice resounded clear in his memory. Sam?
Yes?
Do you think we might see the ocean? Someday, I mean.