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  She walked down the long expanse of hewn rock lit by torches, across to the tower, turned in a dark corner where flames did not reach, retraced her steps—as single-mindedly as the guard who trod the walls and watched the Desert.

  By her fourth circuit one moon had fallen below the horizon, her sisters not far behind. Chayla glared at them. All that light begging to be used, and she knew nothing of how it was done. She was helpless to know what might be happening at New Raetia, or where her family rode through the night—

  All at once Chayla swung around, scowling. Someone was singing to the music of a lute, a sprightly tune that offended her. The strings were plucked with effortless skill and a pure strong voice rose in a language she did not understand.

  She followed the music to where a man sat in the darkness between torches, long legs crossed at the knees, a beribboned lute cradled in his lap.

  “You’re singing,” she accused.

  His fingers continued their supple dance across the strings, but he broke off the song. “Better than weeping,” Kazander said matter-of-factly.

  “How can you do such a thing—”

  “—at such a time?” he finished for her, and in the dim light she saw the white flash of his teeth below his mustache. “Sweet lady, I am forbidden by my prince to go to his aid. I am forbidden to leave these walls to escort him and his to safety. I am forbidden to slice these enemies of my prince into dragon fodder. I am forbidden all that could be of any use. But I am not forbidden to sing.” He shrugged. “So, I sing. It makes sense, if you consider it.”

  “It makes no sense at all!”

  The lute fell silent. “And what would you have me do, my lady? Remagev is ready for war. My men are abed, cherishing the sleep they need and deserve. Those still awake listen for my lute and my voice. If you have no objections, I will continue.”

  “Continue what? Singing them to sleep? Do the Isulk’im need cradle songs?”

  “You scorn what you don’t understand.” He strummed a light melody.

  “Explain it to me,” Chayla demanded.

  “If there is time for music, then all is well,” he said simply, and began to sing.

  It did make a crazy kind of sense—the kind she was growing to expect from this odd man. She flushed, glad of the darkness that would conceal her reddened cheeks, and started to walk away from him. But he was a talented and sensitive musician, worth hearing; she gave a little shrug and sat down near him with her back against the wall. From this angle torchlight afforded her a clear view of his profile: proud, hawk-nosed, eyebrow and mustache black slashes against sun-darkened skin. The song went on for a long time, and she began humming a harmony to the chorus, wishing she understood the words.

  “I liked that,” she said by way of apology when he had finished. “What are the words?”

  He cast her a sidelong glance as he retuned the strings. “If I said they were a poem inspired by the impossible beauty of your eyes, your formidable father and awesome grandsire might let me live just long enough to say my last devotions to the Goddess.”

  Chayla grinned. “Oh, no, my lord, you’re wrong. They’d keep you alive for a long time. But I don’t think you’d enjoy it.”

  Kazander laughed. “You’ve forgiven me!”

  “What for? Oh—” She recalled being snatched up and carried half a measure across the Desert on his knee. “I suppose I have. Now, tell me what your song was really about.”

  He did not answer, instead starting another song. This one was quieter, and in her own language. The lyric was about the search for a white crown. It guaranteed its wearer everything from victory in war to gaining the love of a reluctant maiden. A lot for one crown to do, even an enchanted one—which was the argument of the skeptical prince who had been told to seek it out.

  “Did he ever find it?” Chayla asked when the song was over.

  “Not in this version. In another he takes a different view, and succeeds. I like this one better.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because its lesson is that we cannot hope to gain that in which we do not believe.”

  “That’s not very optimistic.”

  Kazander chuckled. “Reverse it, then.”

  She thought for a moment. “If we believe in something, we can gain it?”

  “We may seek it, which is not the same thing at all. But with courage, strength, and cleverness, we may yet succeed.”

  “But you like the version where the prince doesn’t believe in the white crown.”

  He nodded. “The one in which he doesn’t even try.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I prefer it because by being a fool, he loses all. A more useful warning than when someone believes, tries, and succeeds. There are a hundred songs of similar theme. This one is unique.”

  “Do songs always have to teach lessons?”

  “It helps the peculiarly stubborn.” Shifting to get more comfortable, he said, “You may know this one, my lady. Will you take the woman’s part?”

  As she sang, she smiled to think what Kazander’s listening men must think—let alone Walvis and Feylin and anyone else who heard. But as she concentrated, weaving her voice around and through his in the difficult melody, she forgot all but the song. Even Kazander’s voice and lute were only the loom to the fabric of her own music. Did Pol’s wife Meiglan feel this when she stood before her fenath? Did Sunrunners, when they stitched their colors with threads of sun- or moonlight?

  Suddenly the framework of sound was gone. Chayla choked off the last verse and stared in embarrassed confusion at Kazander. He was on his feet, the lute abandoned on the stones.

  “What is it?” She stood beside him looking out at the Desert.

  “Listen.”

  She heard nothing, and said so.

  “You’ve lived too long near the sea,” he said, more sharply than he had ever addressed her. “Your ancestors were mine, at least in part. Listen to the oldest blood in you.”

  She thought he meant the ability to sense dragons before they appeared in the sky; her great-grandsire Zehava had passed that eccentricity on to his progeny. Chayla could not do it—yet. Pol had come into it late, too. But when she finally heard something at the very edges of her perception, it bore no resemblance to the sound of wings.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was the sea,” she whispered. “Breakers in a storm.”

  “Yes,” he answered grimly. “A storm. But not of the sea.”

  • • •

  Back at least a couple of hundred years, the Long Sand had been a kind of white-gold river slicing the Desert in twain. Water holes along its edge had given rise to a string of temporary settlements, then permanent fortresses, and finally communities clustered around castles. But then the sand began to flow like a slowly swelling river, claiming one keep after another. Remagev was the only one still inhabited. Some of the rest had vanished completely under encroaching sand. The others served as way stations for travelers, empty rooms and crumbling walls offering protection from the searing heat—and shelter during sandstorms.

  Before the survivors of Radzyn reached the abandoned keep that was their first goal, a dozen frantic horses stampeded into the stinging, wind-driven grit. Another ten injured themselves severely in panicky straining to escape the storm. Once within the walls, Sioned, Pol, and Hollis, who knew how to weave sleep, ran frantically from group to group of hobbled animals before sand blocked all light. Their hasty work in some cases was so sloppy that rather than peacefully dozing on their feet, the horses toppled to the ground.

  People huddled beneath tentlike cloaks, backs to the wind. Rohan took Sioned under his own cloak for added protection. Made of thick red wool, borrowed from Chay’s collection, it afforded better insulation than the light silk he had worn on the way to Radzyn. He could even hear himself think above the whining wind. He could also hear Sioned’s painful breathing. He soaked a piece of his shirt with his water-skin and pressed it to her nose and mouth.
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  “Better?”

  She inhaled and nodded. “Some. Our Desert usually speaks in whispers, Rohan. But now it sounds furious.”

  An ancient lyric about sand and the Wind Father beat through his mind in sibilant rhythm with the tempest. He murmured portions of it to himself.

  The sands sing

  a yearning song of beginnings

  when rain sank into embracing land

  when water-rich flesh fashioned proud fortresses

  when water-blood flowed sweet-singing . . . .

  the song changes

  the Desert’s arid soul mourns itself

  its dead dry castles, its thirsting skin . . . .

  Sioned moved closer in the blackness and spoke the poet’s words of storm.

  The sands shriek

  the Desert wars against itself

  raging anguish in the wind

  no one answers for its lost life

  yet there is strange vengeance in self-destruction

  though flesh and blood are dry

  the Desert’s soul lives and grieves

  given voice by the Father of All Winds . . . .

  “The Storm God seems to be on their side, not ours,” she finished.

  “If we’re trapped, so is the enemy.”

  “I hope the wind lashes their bones clean,” she muttered.

  “Goddess, but you can be vicious. Some might be appalled, but I’ve always found it rather exciting.”

  “I’m not in the mood for jokes, Rohan.”

  “Well,” he said cheerfully, “we could discuss Denirov’s rules of grammar, or Drukker’s Precepts, or dragon statistics.”

  Sioned glared at him; not that he could see her expression in the reddish darkness of Chay’s cloak. Her voice was enough. “Why not be really creative and decide the meaning of life once and for all?”

  “Heart’s treasure, I thought you already understood that.” He meant to kiss her lips and got a mouthful of dry, dusty hair instead.

  “Nice try,” was her comment on the kiss and the chiding. “But there’s more to it than making love.”

  “An unfortunate truth.” He kissed her anyway, with better aim this time, and caught the side of her mouth. “But I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  “Will you stop!” she shouted, totally out of patience.

  Other low conversations around them ceased; then Maarken, in a deliberately provocative voice, called out, “Our High Prince chooses the damnedest times and the most inconvenient places, doesn’t he?”

  “With a wife that beautiful, who can blame him?”

  “Who said that?” Rohan bellowed.

  Sudden laughter defeated the storm, and Rohan would have been the last person to credit his own very personal magic for the miracle.

  • • •

  Visions came to Andry again in his sleep that night. Radzyn in ruins; dragon ships in the harbor; a boat drifting out to sea in flames, living sacrifices burning along with enemy dead; a hatchling dragon shot from the sky.

  He woke before dawn, shivering and drenched in sweat. Cloud cover and unfriendly patrols had kept him bound all the previous day and evening. But the sky was clear now, and he waited in a fever of impatience for enough light to work with. His escort of Medr’im slept on in enviable peace. He did his pacing a considerate distance from them.

  Ossetia was a sweet land—low forested hills alternating with pastures and farms, wearing autumn colors of leaf and flower that were a feast to Sunrunner senses. Andry saw none of it. He watched the eastern sky, counting his own heartbeats until thin golden rays slid through the trees on the near hills. Only a little while longer; only a few more breaths, readying himself for the first touch of sunlight on his face . . . .

  The landscape spread out below him, shallow valleys, rich meadows, harvested fields between the broad silver-blue ribbons that were the Catha and Pyrme and Faolain—tattered at irregular intervals by blackened farmhouses and enemy camps. He had no time for any of it. He sped along woven sunlight—and nearly unstrung the careful loom in his shock.

  Radzyn was still standing. All eight towers. Every wall. Smoke did not billow from the stones, nor were there fiery fingers tearing at the last of the gutted ruin. Radzyn was whole, and he nearly wept.

  But the burning ships bearing casualties—and captives—floated to sea on the tide. Dead faces shorn of beards, ritual chin-scars revealed, gazed empty-eyed at the lucent dawn sky.

  And the dragon of his vision? Unable to watch the living burn with the dead, he cast about for the hatchling and did not find him.

  Warriors gathered onshore to praise the dead turned as one, faces to the sky. Not hatchling, but dragonsire. Andry drew back; he had heard how Sioned and Maarken had once collided colors with a dragon. This one was blue-gray with silver underwings. The great jaws parted in a roar. He swept down with claws extended, circled the keep, soared out over the breakers to the dragon ships.

  Andry tore his attention from the sire to the warriors. To a man, they were prostrate on their faces on the beach. Again he was so stunned that only instinct and training kept his weaving coherent. He had not seen this in any vision; the implications staggered him.

  With a mighty wrench the dragon tore the carved prow from one of the ships and flew over the beach with his prize. Sunlight gilded the silver and blue-gray of him, sparked off the spines along his neck, turned his eyes to flame.

  Small wonder the enemy groveled.

  Andry followed the dragon back across the Faolain, careful to keep a respectful distance. The sire rode the wind with wings unfurled, twisting his head to rip the wooden dragon head to splinters with his teeth. The bits scattered along the regular route to the Catha Hills, where many dragons wintered. As Andry made his own way back to Ossetia, he remembered where he had seen this particular beast before.

  Opening his eyes to the Ossetian dawn, he began to laugh. So Azhdeen didn’t approve of dragon-headed ships, did he? And those stupid, superstitious barbarians cringing in the sand—perfection. And quite possibly very useful. Pol would enjoy hearing about his dragon’s exploit.

  Pol, who knew how to construct the ros’salath from the Star Scroll copy in his possession, but was too inept to defend Radzyn with it.

  Anger stilled his laughter. He turned on his heel and went back to the small camp, determined to say nothing about what he had seen.

  Chapter Twelve

  The day of the Battle of Radzyn, Tilal of Ossetia, Laric of Firon, and Edrel of River Ussh met in Pol’s library at Dragon’s Rest to make some hard decisions. But it was nearly impossible to believe in battle plans when a glance out the window yielded only peaceful orchards and quiet gardens.

  Tilal rolled up a map of the southern princedoms and slid it back into place on the shelf. The long room was lined with Rohan’s gifts to the palace: copies of all the volumes in his own extensive collection. Bound books and scrolls offered every conceivable subject—from medicine to metallurgy, history to animal husbandry, poetry to politics. For Tilal, who had been his squire for ten years, it was rather like walking into Rohan’s mind.

  But not Pol’s, now that he thought of it. Rohan’s heir had dutifully read what his teachers thought was important, but he was no scholar. Tilal smiled in rueful sympathy, remembering how he’d hated days spent in the library at Stronghold. But on taking possession of River Run, he’d missed the physical presence of books—their scent, the feel of parchment pages and leather bindings, the stark black elegance of script, the delicately inked drawings. He’d found himself ordering more books from Volog’s scriptorium each year—and reading them. It would take him many years of collecting to bring Athmyr’s library up to the standards he envisioned. But he was keenly aware that war threatened not just crops and castles. The books were in danger, too.

  Edrel finished making copies of strategy notes and put down his pen. “I think we’ve covered everything, my lords. But I have a confession to make. My instincts are screaming at me to gather what troops I can an
d start fighting. Trouble is, I don’t know which way to march.”

  “West to your brother at River Ussh, or east to the Desert,” Laric supplied, nodding. “I’m torn in two directions also—protect the princedom I was given, or fight alongside my brother to win Graypearl back.”

  Tilal fixed his gaze on the map of Ossetia still spread on the table. “I know. Gemma says she can feel enemy footsteps on our lands. My brother’s princedom lies between two rivers held by the enemy.” He glanced around at the library shelves again. “My mind tells me to take care of my own. But my guts demand that I defend my prince.”

  “Personal loyalty is one thing,” Laric commented. “Duty is another. Perhaps it comes down to a choice of which course is most easily lived with. None of us can go in two directions at once. But who is more important—our own people, or the High Prince?”

  “You know what Rohan would say to that, of course,” Tilal smiled.

  The other prince shrugged. “And he might be wrong. For there’s a third presence, and a powerful one. Especially in the minds of the people. What do you think would happen if Goddess Keep fell?” A knock on the door turned their heads before any reply could be formed. Laric said, “Come,” and Pol’s court faradhi, Hildreth, entered hesitantly.

  “Forgive me for interrupting, my lords,” she said. “I thought you might need me.”

  Hildreth had left Goddess Keep ten years earlier with her husband and two sons, unable to countenance any more of Andry’s changes in tradition. He had made no protest; neither Ullan nor the boys were gifted, and thus no loss to him. After three years as an itinerant faradhi in the south, Hildreth had severely injured her leg in an accident. Sioned, hearing of it, had asked Pol to invite the family to Dragon’s Rest. Hildreth was an old friend, one of the group that escorted Sioned to the Desert in 698 to become Rohan’s wife; Pol was glad to welcome her, the more so because she had been trained by Lady Andrade and was no champion of Andry’s growing power.