Blood of Dragons - Страница 68

‘Ramose had his studio there. The sculptor. Remember?’ His voice had gone colder.

She glanced at the empty sockets of windows in the wall. ‘I remember,’ she admitted grudgingly. Something else popped into her mind. ‘You were jealous of him.’

Rapskal nodded. ‘He had been your lover before I was. We had a fight once. Foolish of me, not to know that a man who wields a hammer and chisel all day builds up an arm.’

She shied away from those memories. Too close, she thought, too close to something. And then they turned a corner and she was in a familiar place. There was the well plaza, just as they had left it, beams stacked to one side, broken mechanisms to another, tools in a third. The ship’s crew had put some hours in on the chain. There was a mended length of it by the well’s lip, the end fastened to the stub of one ancient post that had once supported the well’s cover. Heeby was there, too, standing quietly in the darkness. A sense of dread rose in Thymara.

‘Why did we come here?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘So you could get the Silver. So Tintaglia can live. So all the dragons can become all they were meant to be, and their Elderlings as well.’ The light from the locket she wore did not reach his eyes here in the open. They were the lambent blue they had always been but the silvery sheen the jewellery gave turned his face to a ghost mask. She did not know him.

He spoke softly but firmly. ‘Amarinda, you have to go down the well. You are the only one who knows how to bring back the Silver.’

‘My love?’

Reyn spoke the words softly as if he thought she could be asleep. She wasn’t. Couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, and might never sleep again. She huddled by her dragon’s face, her baby on her lap. Her hand rested by Tintaglia’s nostril where she could feel the slow sigh as the dragon continued to breathe. ‘I’m here,’ she told Reyn.

He hitched closer to her. ‘I’m trying to make sense of what I’m feeling. When I was a boy and Tintaglia was a shadowy presence underground, trapped in her wizardwood case, I was fascinated with her. Then she all but enslaved me, and I hated her. I loved her when she helped me recover you. And then, off she went, and for years we heard nothing, felt nothing from her.’

‘I was as angry with her as you were. To leave us the care of the young dragons, to go off without a word. To send Selden off to Sa knows where, never to return to us.’ She caressed the dragon’s snout. She sighed. ‘Do you think he’s dead, Reyn? My little brother?’

Reyn shook his head wordlessly.

The night had turned clear, the clouds blown aside, yet it was not as cold as it had been. Spring was in the air. Above them, the moon sailed on and the stars shone, heedless of mortals below. Their Elderling cloaks kept them warm. The stones were hard beneath her. She had her husband and their first-born son at her side and the dragon who had shaped all their lives. Life and death merged at this spot, an untidy tangle of endings. The dragon’s breath flowed over their son. The smell of her infected wounds hung in the damp air.

‘She is still so incredibly beautiful,’ Malta said. She willed her voice not to choke in her tight throat. ‘Look at these scales, every one a tiny work of art. It’s even more a wonder when you realize she determined their decoration, every one of them. Look at these, around her eyes.’ Her fingers walked to them, traced the intricate pattern of white, silver and black that framed the dragon’s closed eyes. ‘No dragon will ever be as glorious as she was. The young queen Sintara flaunts herself, but she will never be as blue as our Tintaglia. Fente and Veras are plain as tree snakes compared to her. My conceited beauty, you had every right to be vain.’

‘She did,’ Reyn conceded. ‘I hate that she dies like this, broken and flawed. Such a waste to lose her. I could feel the hope in the other dragons surge when she appeared in the skies. They need her, they need what she remembers.’

‘We all do,’ Malta said quietly. ‘Especially Phron.’

The baby stirred in her lap, perhaps at the mention of his name. Malta lifted the corner of her cloak that covered him. He still slept. She bent close to study his face in the moonlight. ‘Look,’ she said to her husband. ‘I never realized it before. The tiny scales on his brows? They are the same pattern as hers. Even without her presence, he carries her marks on him. Her artistry would have lived on in him. If he were to live.’ The baby stirred at her touch as she traced his face and whimpered more strongly. ‘Hush, my little one.’ She lifted him from her lap. His thin arm and scrawny hand sprawled from his wrappings. She put the little hand on the dragon’s brows, held it there between Tintaglia’s scales and her still-soft, still-human palm. ‘She would have been your dragon, too, my darling. Touch her once, before you both go. Imagine how beautiful you would have been if she could have guided you.’ She moved the baby’s hand down the dragon’s scaling in a caress. ‘Tintaglia, if you must go, give him something of yourself first. Give him a memory of flight, give him a thought of your beauty to carry into the dark.’

‘I don’t know anything about Silver or about this well. I’m not Amarinda and I don’t know. And I’m not going down that well. Not now, not ever. I hate places like that, dark and small. Go down there in the night, alone? That’s crazy.’ Her heart was pounding at the mere thought of it. She crossed her arms, hugging herself. Tats. Why hadn’t she wakened Tats and made him come, too? No one knew they’d gone out walking.

He insisted relentlessly, in such a gentle voice. ‘Tintaglia is dying. Now is all we have. Thymara or Amarinda, it doesn’t matter. You have to go down the well. I’ll go with you. You won’t be alone.’

She tried to fight her way back to her own reality. He was just Rapskal, just strange Rapskal, and she didn’t have to let him bully her. ‘I won’t! I’m tired of this, Rapskal. And I’m tired of trying to help you. I’m going back to the hall to get some sleep. You are being too strange, even for me.’

She turned to go but he seized her arm in a grip of iron. ‘You have to go down the well. Tonight.’

She slapped at his hands and tried to twist free of his grip. Could not. When had he become so strong? He did not even appear to be making an effort to hold her as she fought his grip on her. She could not bear the gaze of the stranger looking out of his eyes at her. ‘Let me go!’

Wings flapped and a gust of air washed over her. The paving stones of the square shook as the dragon’s claws met them and skidded to a halt. Sintara! Thymara knew her scent as well as she knew her mind’s touch on hers. Be calm, Thymara. I am here. All will be fine.

Relief washed through her, bringing icy anger with it. She met Tellator’s stare coldly and stopped struggling. ‘Let go of me now.’ She suggested it calmly. ‘Or my dragon may do you harm.’

Heeby had advanced on them as she spoke, the spikes on her neck rising at the perceived threat to Rapskal. Thymara caught her breath. This could be bad. She had no desire to see the two dragons fight one another, especially not with her in the middle of it.

Neither did he. His hand dropped away from her arm. ‘You’re right. It’s better this way.’ He turned away from both of them.

Hurt choked her voice as she rubbed her bruised arm. ‘Rapskal. I loved you. Now I don’t think I ever want to see you again. You’re not my friend any more. I don’t know who or what you are now, but I don’t like it.’

She turned to go.

‘Thymara,’ Sintara said gently. ‘It will be all right. We have not always trusted one another. But now you must.’

Thymara walked slowly to the well’s mouth and looked down. An unnameable dread rose in her, a horror of confined dark places. She shuddered. Rapskal had followed her. He did not try to touch her but knelt on the other side of the well. He seized the fastened chain, pulled a length free, and dropped it in the hole. It clanked against the side. He pushed another loop after it, and then another, and suddenly the links were rattling over the stone lip as the chain paid out and down into the darkness. It stopped, taut against the pole, and Rapskal said to himself, ‘Not long enough.’ He stood up and walked off into the darkness.

Thymara remained by the well, staring down into it. An eternity of blackness. And she would go down into it.

She lifted her eyes to her dragon. ‘Don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t.’

Sintara only looked at her. Thymara felt the compulsion building in her. But this was not the dragon pushing her to go hunting when she wanted to sleep, or encouraging her to groom every single scale on her face. This was different.

‘If you force me, it will never be the same between us,’ she warned the dragon.

‘No,’ Sintara agreed. ‘It won’t. Just as I haven’t been the same since you left me hungry, with no choice but to face my fear and try to fly.’

‘That was different!’ Thymara protested.

‘Only from your point of view,’ the dragon replied. ‘Thymara. Go down the well.’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’ But she walked stiffly around to the other side of the well and knelt by the chain. She put a hand on it. It was cold. The links of it were big, big enough to slip a hand into. Or the toe of her boot.

‘I’ll go first.’ Did Tellator or Rapskal make that offer? He stood next to her, a coil of line over his shoulder.

‘You can do no good down there,’ Sintara objected and Heeby whiffled nervously.