The courtyard was in ruins. The walls of the guest house extending from the keep looked as though some monstrous insects had been eating away at the stone. Even the mausoleum was broken, its fine marble scored with deep gouges, the door to the crypt hanging on its hinges.
But one structure, Leta noticed with mild curiosity, had not yet been touched by the goblins and their mortal slaves.
One lone, humble building.
Leta gasped.
She stumbled back from the window, dropping Lady Pero’s scroll, and stood in near darkness. Suddenly she whirled about, hurling herself at the pile of books on the long table, books she had scoured again and again, and dug through them until she came to a volume near the bottom. A familiar volume. The first she had seen when she stepped into the library all those months ago.
It fell open to the familiar page: the nursery song of the Smallman, with its bold illumination of the House of Lights. The vellum was torn by Corgar’s claws, but in the glow of her candle, the colored ink on that page still shimmered like liquid gold pouring from those carefully sketched windows.
Leta stared, hardly believing what she was seeing.
“I’ve found the House of Lights,” she said.
The grating squeal of door hinges startled Leta into dropping the book. She whirled about as Corgar entered the library.
12
BUT EVENTUALLY MY MIND RETURNED. Amarok could not deceive me forever. I began to recall myself, my flame, my voice. I began to recall the power I’d been reborn to, the power of dragons. Though I could not again take my dragon form, I found my fire and blazed brightly. I could not kill Amarok in his self-made demesne, but I escaped him with our children.
And later, when opportunity arose, I saw to it that he was slain.
Two guards stood at the outer gate of the Citadel of the Living Fire. The younger kept glancing up at the sky. The elder fixed his eyes upon some distant point on the horizon that never came any closer, unwilling to see what the younger saw: the churning smoke, dark even against the night sky, blotting out stars. And the occasional flash of red flame.
The goddess was angry. Or glad. It scarcely mattered which.
Something was brewing, the young guard thought. True, the Flame was temperamental, and he’d seen firestorms before, some worse than this. But this evening the air held a tension he could not begin to describe—tension flowing from the top of the Spire down into the temple grounds and on even here, to the edge of the holy ground. He wondered if his comrade felt it and might have liked to ask. But he had long since forgotten how to speak. Perhaps he had been cursed or poisoned. Perhaps he had merely been forbidden to let a word cross his lips. Either way, he was as mute as if they’d cut out his tongue.
Men of the Citadel were less than animals. They were also loyal unto death.
Still, he could not help wondering what life might have been had he not been taken for his village’s temple tax all those years ago, dragged from his mother’s arms, presented before cold-faced priestesses, shamed and degraded. . . .
“What-ho, young fellow, got any Time?”
The guard turned to see his comrade drop like a stone under some unseen blow. His mouth fell open, and he raised his spear, but someone tapped his shoulder from behind. He whirled about to face a pair of bright eyes gleaming in the gloom.
Then he too fell senseless as Eanrin’s blow struck his forehead.
Eanrin stood over the two fallen guards, his eyes narrowed. “Come out and help me, girl,” he said. “We can’t leave them lying here.”
Mouse emerged from the shadows along the wall, hastened to Eanrin’s side, and helped him drag the guards away from the gate into a hollow where they would be less visible from the inside. “They’ll change watch eventually, but no need to draw attention before then,” Eanrin said.
Mouse, shaking too hard to answer, eyed the same churning smoke and fire that had bothered the guard, and felt her stomach heave. Walking the Faerie Path in Eanrin’s wake had so completely thrown off her sense of time and space that she thought her head might explode. Mortals weren’t intended to walk such Paths, of this she was certain. Was it only a few hours since she had stood on the slopes of the mountain beside Granna? Since Alistair had vanished into the darkness?
Or had weeks gone by and the Dragonwitch already achieved her goal?
“What are you staring at, girl?” Eanrin growled. “Nightfall won’t await our convenience, and we need to be well inside before we lose the last of this twilight. With any luck, they won’t have noticed you’re gone yet.”