Etanun crossed the flat rooftop. She snarled at his approach but did not otherwise move. Her fists clenched so hard that her talon nails drove into the flesh of her palms.
“You have not brought me your sword,” she said, spitting sparks between her teeth.
“No,” said he. “Did you really think I would?”
She hadn’t. But it did not matter.
“I will kill you,” she said.
“I know,” he replied.
He put his hands on the altar and pulled himself up to sit with his legs dangling over the edge. She joined him. Side by side they sat, like two old friends who had not spoken in years. Neither was willing to break the silence of time, time which they, though immortal, felt stretching between them. But the moment of slaying must come.
At last Etanun said, “Tell me, dear queen, why do you burn?”
She turned to him, and for a breath, the smoldering coals of her eyes dissolved, and the real eyes that had once been, dark and liquid and beautiful, were visible. For a breath, she could see him through a film of tears.
But with the second breath she spoke in a smoldering voice:
“Have you ever watched an immortal die?”
16
YOU ASKED ME WHY I BURN. Do you recall it now? Do you recall the story of a queen who loved but was not loved in return? Do you recall how you hunted her down, she who had been your friend?
Do you remember the answer to your question?
“Do you?”
The Dragonwitch sat beside the Murderer on the altar, and her body quivered with every stray wind, threatening to break into ashes. Etanun listened silently. Even after she finished her tale, he kept his peace, hearing the rasp of uneasy breath in her lungs, watching her eyes smolder blindly, unable to see even the dark truths she had brought into this mortal realm. The stink of her death was upon her. Yet her body lived on in a death of a life that had driven her to the brink of madness and beyond.
“I am strong,” she said, her voice quavering with vulnerability. “I am neither wholly woman nor wholly dragon, but stronger than either. My fire is hotter even than when I destroyed that mortal woman you chose, hotter than when I burned the Houses of Lights and sent the smoke spiraling to the heavens.”
Etanun looked upon her and saw everything again as though it were all new. The beautiful, frightened creature who came to him and his brother at the Haven. The pain of rejected love in her eyes that he had ignored, even scorned.
He saw the dead body of Klara, the girl he had loved. The dead body of Akilun.
“I am a goddess,” the Dragonwitch said, and her voice was hoarse and shattered. “I am so strong!”
“I am a murderer,” Etanun replied. “I am so weak.”
“See then how the Spheres have sung the cadence of our lives,” said she, and there was cruel laughter in her voice: laughter . . . or tears. “You have paid for your deeds, and I have been rewarded.”
“Is this your reward?” asked Etanun. He indicated the desolation surrounding the temple and slowly spreading across the mountain-encircled land. Not even the rivers, powerful guards on the Near World against the forces of Faerie, could hold it back.
“No,” the Dragonwitch said. “My reward is you. Your life at last in my hands. For you are weak and I am strong, and I shall kill you now as you have killed me thrice already: first, when you broke my heart; twice more when you plunged that cursed sword through my armor and into the furnace of my breast.”
Etanun nodded. “Well,” he said, “I expected as much. Being killed by you at the last, that is. It’s poetic. The stuff of ballads to come.”
“Ballads you will never hear,” the Dragonwitch said.
“Thank the Lights Above,” he replied. “I’ve ever been a man of action, not so much for the finer arts. But one thing, Hri Sora, before you kill me. One thing I want you to know.”
Her lips twisted back from her teeth. Ash poured like saliva over her chin, ash that glimmered with building heat. “What is it, Etanun?” she asked. “What excuses do you make for yourself?”
“No excuses,” he said.
She could not see him. But her ears, sharply attuned to his voice, heard the change in it. The loss of age, the melting away of disguises so long assumed as to have nearly become reality. She heard the voice of the Etanun she had once known. The Etanun she had loved. The Etanun who had killed her.
She trembled at the flood of memories that rose inside, choking her, drowning her. He sat there, a being of immortal power and beauty, his skin bronzed, his eyes like star sapphires, every bone, every muscle exquisitely crafted as by the hand of a master sculptor. She recalled it all, and she felt it now, the overwhelming pain of loving this creature, this hero, this slayer.
“I have no excuses anymore, dear queen,” he said. The liquid gold of his voice washed over her, and she shuddered at the dangerous sweetness of it, at the longing it stirred even now in the trembling core of her ashen frame. “Only this.” Etanun took her ravaged face between his hands.
“I love you.”
A perfect silence hung upon the air.
Then the Dragonwitch exploded in a roar of flame.