Gleamdren opened her mouth to speak but found she had no words. That thrill of fear she’d known for the first time only moments ago returned suddenly, paralyzing her. She went limp in the dragon’s grasp, made no struggle as she was caught up in two powerful arms and borne to the window. It may have been some spell. It may have been the overwhelming poison of the dragon’s breath no longer disguised by an attractive enchantment. Either way, Gleamdren found herself unable to move, unable to speak, unable to so much as cry out for help.
The dragon flung wide the casement, and the fire of her hair and her eyes lit up that dark street within the mountain, angry red light bursting through every window and startling all sleepers into instant, panicked wakefulness. Then she roared in a powerful voice that carried not only throughout all Rudiobus Mountain, but also across the lake, into the Wood and the worlds beyond. The language was one never before spoken in the land of the Merry People, and it would never be heard in those halls again.
“Yaotl! Eztli!”
War and blood. Fire and terror. The words cracked rocks and broke hearts even as they sped through the passages and pierced the boundaries of worlds to fall upon the ears of those to whom they called.
Then the baying began.
The voices of the Black Dogs filled the ears of every man and woman living in the mountain. Called at last from within, those awful hunters burst through boundaries heretofore unbreakable, sped across the water, and hurled themselves like a hurricane wind through the gates of Fionnghuala Lynn. No one dared stand in their path as they hurtled forward, dragging a vicious dark Midnight in their wake.
Gleamdren saw them within a moment of the dragon’s call. She glimpsed huge bodies; she glimpsed flaming eyes all tangled in a snarl of sounds and shadows and raging winds. Her hair whirled about; even the fires of the dragon’s hair were threatened with extinction. But the dragon’s claws clutched Gleamdren by the shoulder, and she was dragged through her window and mounted on the back of a black body she could not see with all that assailed her senses.
Then they were gone: Dogs, dragon, maiden. Vanished from Rudiobus so quickly that no one saw their passing, not even Iubdan’s mare standing dumbstruck at the gate. But the baying of the Black Dogs echoed through the byways of Rudiobus for hours afterward. And when the echoes at last died away, the heavy darkness of Midnight lingered for hours more.
All this while, the girl in the Wood slept on the River’s edge, and it pulled at her hair with its wet and wanton fingers. Her sleep was deep indeed and troubled as only enchanted sleeps may be. In her dreams she lived again and again that dark moment when the moon vanished behind a cloud. When a looming shadow appeared between two jutting stones.
She heard the wolf howling in a voice so like those of the Black Dogs that it may almost have been the same.
4
EANRIN SCOWLED at the blister on his finger. There it was, right in front of him. Swollen and ugly, painful even to look at.
Yet he had carried a dragon into Rudiobus.
“Dragon’s teeth,” he hissed, quietly so as not to be heard. He stood hidden in a gallery above Iubdan and Bebo’s council chamber and did not want his voice to echo.
They rarely used this chamber for anything resembling a real council; their council members were unused to being summoned at all, especially at this hour. Everyone sat ill at ease, some in their nightshirts, some in uncomfortable robes of office that looked as though they had not been worn for centuries (most of them hadn’t). Iubdan sat with his face very red behind his ebony beard.
“How can this have happened?” he demanded.
Eanrin strained his ears, waiting for someone to remind someone else that it had been the poet’s fault. As much as he hated to admit it, it probably was. He should have seen through the disguise! Even the caorann tree had been deceived, but that should have made him still more cautious. Only dragons, it was said, could fool the caorann. And only a dragon—he knew this now with rueful certainty—could burn a man at the slightest touch.
What a fool he’d been. The longer he dithered over her, the longer her glamour had worked itself into his brain. Had he acted upon his first instincts and left her there, none of this would have happened. She could have scraped and scrabbled on the edge of Rudiobus for a hundred years and never found an opening.
“But it wasn’t my fault,” he muttered, unwilling even now to admit a mistake. “I might have put her down, if it wasn’t for that . . . that . . .”
He could not bring himself to speak the word. A dragon in Rudiobus was bad enough. Only one monster at a time, he told himself. You needn’t worry about that other. Not yet.
With a shudder, he returned his attention to the scene in the chamber below.