“What did you do?” Brack said. Not feeling like his voice was his own.
“We ran,” Juoth said. A snort of laughter. “If it were a real tale we would have fought the guards and overcome them and thrown the cages open and freed the slaves and they'd sing of us now as we sat on thrones. But it's never like that. No, he just ran toward me and past me and I let him go and turned and followed. They tried to get the gate down but they couldn't do it fast enough and we ran out into the streets. I dropped the spear at some point and they chased us but we ran until we found some trash to hide in and we hid and that night we snuck out with a group of lepers and we left the islands forever.”
Brack shook his head and could see Tarek doing it, doing all of it, and then he said: “Why are you telling me this?”
“So you'll know,” Juoth said. “So you'll know why I'm here.”
They rode the river down to a plateau and stood at the edge of the trees. There was no snow but just thin grass lightly frosted. Gray stones standing up out of the soil at places, low and flat. A type of tall weed moving in the wind like wheat but the color all wrong. The river swelling out and slowing. Five hundred yards away the descent continuing into that mist-covered valley, the water resuming its speed and the river there heavy and loud and powerful.
They let the horse free to roam that grass and built in the center of the field a small fire. Lay out their bedrolls one on each side. Scavenging the wood they needed and keeping it small so the rising sparks would not be seen. The frost making the grass brittle and everything on the edge of frozen, but both of them sweating in their furs and leather and armor. The sun had fallen and a heavy gray dusk lay on the place and after they had eaten they both stretched out and looked up at that starstrewn sky for the black shape of the dragon moving in the night, but it did not come.
After a time of silence, Juoth turned and looked at him in the glimmering light and his brow was creased and his eyes distant as if again turning about all the words spoken and looking in them for new meanings or perhaps old ones there confined. “Tell me something,” he said. “You told me of your great grandfather's kill. The one you tried to emulate. But what did that story have to do with this dragon?”
“He killed it,” Brack said.
Juoth just looked at him for a long moment. The way he had, with his eyes dark and full of thought. Again turning over everything that was said. Then: “He killed that other dragon?”
Brack was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said at last. “He killed this one.”
Chapter Nine
She went in and stood while the guard chained her to the wall and went out and already she knew something was wrong and stood longer waiting to see just how bad it was. The door closing heavily behind her and the thick smell of this place. Bones and mildew and age. And then she saw him sitting in the halfdark against the far wall and he was grinning and holding his arms back against the wall behind him, over his head.
“Worlds turn and mountains fall,” he said. Eyes wide and staring and bloodshot. Hands not moving as if themselves made of stone. “But still he comes.”
She did not answer and just looked back at him. This old man with his rotten teeth and long hair. His skin nearly gray from this place. And she thought then that maybe they knew he'd cut his chains but they did not care and perhaps this the reason. A dead and lost man still chained in other ways, if not with iron.
For an invalid was not one to attempt a bid for his own freedom.
“Still he comes,” he said. Then licked his lips. His tongue darting out quickly, almost as if it were afraid of this dank air. Wetting those already glistening lips and then disappearing between the crooked rows of teeth. “Still.”
“Are you all right?” she said.
“Mountains fall and worlds turn. Which way is the wind coming from, and which way is it going?”
“Listen to me.”
“And still he comes. Mountains turn and worlds fall.”
She opened her mouth and went to speak again, but did not. For it was something deeper, something engrained. He was looking at her almost eagerly, as if waiting there for some response. For him, this was a conversation with two participants, not the incoherent rambling of one and the confusion of the other. Both on equal footing.
Once she had known a woman who was perhaps her aunt. Some relative distant and yet usually at court. She could not remember now. Long ago, this had been, long before everything had come apart at the seams and the world had fallen into its current form. Her world, at least, trapped here in this dungeon and only shuffled out to pretend to rule a people she had once dreamed of ruling.
The woman had suffered an affliction. They knew not what at the time and still did not. She had been standing in court and watching on a long afternoon while others talked and then suddenly she had been stepping and turning and falling. Not making a sound, her wrinkled mouth clenched tight and her gray hair descending ever so rapidly. The man next to her turning as well and catching her as she fell and calling out even as he did so for others. But the woman never making a sound.
She never spoke again. Arisine had seen her at times. The skin on one side of her mouth turned down, her legs not broken but stricken with near paralysis. Unable to walk on her own or even to stand without help. The left side of the body much worse than the right.
They'd brought her many potions. Chanted the dread spells as slaves gave their minds and filled the rooms with smoke or steam or sunlight or night air. Given her herbs and flowers to eat, or taken away others. None of it made a difference and she sat in her chambers with her blankets about her and did not speak. This silence like one who had taken a vow.
But once, sent there for some reason she could no longer remember, the girl Arisine had been climbed the stairs in the flickering light of lanterns and pushed open the tall oak door with its metalwork and window, stepping through and into the woman's rooms. Two rooms, with a wide doorway and a stone wall between. A bed on one side and a sitting area with arched windows on the other. Those windows looking out over the long fields and the orchards and the world.
It was before those windows that the old woman sat. The blanket upon her lap and one hand raised to her chin, supporting it. Gazing out at nothing and everything at once. She turned as Arisine came in and half-smiled and the girl walked across to her and sat on the sill. The drop below soaring and causing her stomach to jump, but she liked the feeling and leaned over just a bit more to look down the sheer stonework.
And it was then that the woman talked to her. But she also did not. For every time that she spoke, the sound she made was not words, but fragments. Perhaps pieces of the same few words cut up and moved and put back together into a string of nothing with no meaning or sense to it. A babbling of confusion.
But it was not as if talking to someone who did not know what she was saying. The same eager look had been in that woman's eyes. The same patterns of speech. Arisine would tell her something, of the day's chores or the war to the south. And the woman would speak, as if answering, and say nothing at all.
Between her mind and her tongue, those words lost. But Arisine could see they were there, at least to start. Forming in her mind as true words and sentences and working their way down and in the process coming apart and then being spoken as nothing. They were whole when this broken woman thought them, but gone by the time they passed her lips.
“The world turns and mountains fall, and still he comes,” the man said again.
“Who comes?” she said