ARMIES

THAT HARRIED HIM BACK TO THE KEEP OF THE CASTLE

WHERE PYRRHUS THE FIREBRINGER CANCELED THE WORLD

BENEATH THE DENIAL OF BATTLEMENTS,

WHERE HE DIED AMID STONE WITH HIS COVERING ARMIES.

FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS THE COUNTRY OF CAERGOTH

HAS BURNED AND BURNED WITH HIS EFFACING HAND,

A BARREN OF SHIRES AND HAMLETS,

AND Firebringer HISTORY HANGS ON THE PATH OF HIS

NAME.

I sat on the cold stone floor and laughed and cried quietly, exultantly. I waited there an hour, perhaps two, as the “Song of the Rending” ended and began again. I wondered briefly if this were the echo of Arion himself, if I was hearing not only the words but the voice of the bard my father had killed a generation back.

I decided it did not matter. All that mattered was the truth of the words and the truth of the telling. Arion’s song had marked my grandfather as a traitor, but it had preserved the land, for what bandit or goblin would care to invade a fire-blasted country? Orestes’s song had rescued Alecto’s name, at the price of flame and ruin and his own life. So when Arion’s song returned again, I was ready to hear it, to commit it to memory, to wander these caves until I recovered the light, the fresh air, the vellum or hide on which to write the lines that would save my father’s line, my line.

It did return, and I remembered each word, with a memory half trained in the listening, half inherited from a father with bardic gifts. For the first time in a long while, perhaps the first time ever, I was thankful for who he was, and I praised the gifts Orestes had passed on to me.

And then, with a whisper that drowned out all other voices, at once the beast spoke. It was a dragon!

So HE HAS SENT ANOTHER FROM UP IN THE LIGHT… O MOST WELCOME … THE STRUGGLE IS OVER IS OVER … REST THERE REST… NO CONTINUING … NO … NO …

Oh. And it seemed not at all strange now to fall to the monster without struggle or issue, to rid myself of the shifting past and the curse of these scars and their burning, and to rid all above me of the land’s torture …

So I stood there, ridiculously clutching pen and ink, and though it was already darker than I could imagine darkness to be, I closed my eyes, and the alien heat engulfed me, and with it the evil smell of rust and offal and old blood. The jaws closed quickly around me as I heard a man’s voice, saying, I HAVE KILLED ARION, AND THE BURNING WILL NEVER STOP. THE LAND IS CURSED. I AM CURSED. MY LINE IS CURSED. I DIE.

And then, like a last sudden gift, a woman’s whisper:

THERE IS POWER IN ALL WORDS, AND IN YOURS ESPECIALLY.

*****

It was the hot fetor that awakened me. I gasped and coughed and closed my eyes immediately to the fierce and caustic fumes.

I was sitting upright in very confined quarters.

Slowly I tested my surroundings, my eyes clasped tightly against the foul biting mist. I stretched my arms, and to each side I felt slippery leather walls.

It came to me slowly what had happened.

I sat in the dragon’s stomach, like a hapless sailor at the end of an ancient tale.

I cried out in panic and kicked against the pulsing walls, flailing frantically, but it seemed that the great beast had settled and fallen asleep, assured by long experience that the dark corrosives of his stomach would do the rest.

I felt my scars hiss and bubble. The tissue was old and thick as hide, and it would take hours for the acid to eat through. There was a fair amount of air, though it was foul and painful to breathe. What was left to me was the waiting.

For a while, for the space, perhaps, of a dozen heartbeats, the absurdity of my quest rushed over me like a harsh, seething wave. Four years of wandering across two continents, hiding away in castles and marshes, under the abutments of bridges and in filthy, narrowing alleys, enduring searing pain in silence …

Only to come ignobly to the filthiest, narrowest end of all, and with me the line of Pyrrhus Alecto, dissolved and digested miles beneath our beloved peninsula. I had gone down to the depths of the mountains, and the earth with her bars was about me forever.

I cried out again, certain no one would hear me.

Then it seemed almost foolishly simple. For after the weeping, the vain recollection of my hundred adventures, I recalled the last thing I had heard:

“There is power in all words, and in yours especially.”

My first purpose, many seasons past and a hundred miles away, when I left my mother and home, had been to discover and make known the truth about Orestes and Grandfather.

I had discovered. Now I must make it known. I would salvage the truth in the last dissolving hour. And though I assumed the words would never see light or catch a willing eye, I brought forth quill and inkhorn, and said aloud, canceling my father’s words as he had canceled Arion’s, “The fires are extinguished. The land is free. I am alive.”

Dipping the quill, I began to write blindly on the quivering stomach walls of the dragon.

DOWN IN THE ARM OF CAERGOTH HE RODE …

*****

Some men are saved by water, some by fire. I have heard stories of happy rock slides releasing trapped miners, of a ship and its crew passing safely through hurricanes because the helmsman nestled the boat in the eye of the storm, in sheer good fortune.

I am the rare one to be saved by nausea.

Credit it to the ink, perhaps, or the incessant, swift scratching on the walls of the dragon’s stomach. Whatever it was, the fishermen skirting the coast of Endaf, the good folk of Ergoth who drew me sputtering from the water, said that they had never seen the likes of it on sea or land.

They said that the caverns of Finn of the Dark Hand had exploded, the rubble toppling down the cliff face and pouring into the circling waters of the cape, that they thought for certain it was an earthquake or some dwarven enchanter gone mad in the depths of the rock until they saw the black wings surge from the central cavern, bunched and muscled and webbed like the wings of a bat. And they told me how a huge creature pivoted gracefully, high above the coastal waters, plunged for the sea, and inelegantly disgorged above the Cape of Caergoth.

It seemed a clear, sweet grace to me, lying on the deck of their boat as they poured hot mulled wine down me and wrapped me in blankets, their little boat turning west toward the Ergoth shore and the safety of Eastport, a haven in that ravaged and forbidding land.

The fishermen’s attentions seemed strange, though - as if, in some odd, indescribable way, I was one of their fellows. It was not until we reached the port itself and I looked into a barrel of still water that I noticed my scars had vanished.

But the memory of the burning returns, dull and heavy in my hands, especially at night, here in this lighthouse room overlooking the bay of Eastport. Across the water I can see the coast of my homeland, the ruins of the bandit stronghold at Endaf. Finn, they tell me, dissolved with two dozen of his retainers when the dragon thundered through their chambers, shrieking and flailing and dripping the fatal acid that is the principal weapon of his kind.

And the creature may as well have dissolved himself. He has not been seen since that day on the Caergoth coast. But the same fishermen who rescued me claim that, only the other night, a dark shadow passed across the face of the red moon. Looking up, they saw nothing but Lunitari and a cloudless sky.

They saw an omen in this, and now carry talismans on board, but sailors always were a superstitious lot, fashioning monsters out of clouds and the wind on the waters.

At night I sit by the window, by lamplight, and watch the constellations switch and wink and vanish in this uncertain time, and I set before me a fresh page of vellum, the lines of each day stored in my memory. For a moment I dwell on the edges of remembrance, recalling my mother, L’Indasha Yman, the reluctant knights, and the fortunate fishermen. But, foremost, I recall my father, come down to me in an inheritance of verse and conflicting stories. It is for him, and for Grandfather before him, and for all those who have vanished and been wronged by the lies of the past, that I dip the quill into the inkwell, and the pain in my hand subsides as I begin to write …

On SOLAMNIA’S CASTLES

RAVENS ALIGHT.