Skeletons of other boats and even great ships littered the lake beneath her. Rose Red saw them the farther she got from the shore. The hulls, like bleached bones, shimmered with their own cold, hopeless light, very different from that in the Asha Lantern. Rose Red remembered the games she and Leo once played, making and sinking ship after ship on the Lake of Endless Blackness. How many of their own dreams had they built and destroyed with their own hands, leaving them to sink into oblivion? How many of their own and each other’s?
“Leo,” she whispered as she looked over the side of her small craft down at the broken ships below, “I’m so sorry.” A tear slipped down her face behind her veil. “So far I’ve only failed you.”
Stop striving, child, the silver voice said.
“Stop striving,” said the Dragon. “Give in to me.”
Walk before me.
“You were always meant to be mine.”
I chose you before you were born.
“I want you.”
I love you.
She shook her head, closing her eyes. “If you love me, why have you abandoned me? Why do you let me wander down this Path to Death?”
This is not his Path, child, said the silver voice, the voice of her wood thrush’s song. Though darkness surrounds you, and you walk to the very household of Death, you walk my Path, not his. I am with you always.
“Don’t believe a word of it, princess,” said the Dragon. “Look around you! Could this world be anything but mine? I am Death-in-Life, and you have entered my domain. Your only chance is to turn to me. I am master here, and only I may help you.”
“No!” she growled, her grip on the lantern and the rudder tightening. “I don’t need you! None of you! I’ll do this myself. I’ll do this for Leo.”
“That’s right, my princess,” whispered the Dragon. “Come to my arms.”
Remember me, child.
Then, because she could not bear to hear those voices anymore, Rose Red burst out singing. Her voice was not beautiful. It was very ugly, in fact. But she sang loud and long, sending the words rolling across that black water, ringing from shore to shore. She sang the first song that came to her head, the song she had grown up listening to the mountains sing:
“Cold silence covers the distance,
Stretches from shore to shore.
I follow the dark Path you’ve set before my feet.
Let me follow no more!”
And answering her out of the empty vault above came the silver voice, stronger than her own:
Beyond the Final Water falling,
The Songs of Spheres recalling.
When you find you must pursue that lonely way,
Won’t you follow me?
The light of the Asha Lantern flared to new and brighter life, and Rose Red felt her heart lifting.
At the same moment, she saw a red-gold glow flickering hot in the distance. She approached the far shore of the Lake of Endless Blackness.
Beana sat by the gates of the Eldest’s House. She sat in her own form now. What was the use of disguises? Four years at least, perhaps a little more, had passed since last she’d glimpsed her charge. Deep inside, she knew she was despairing; and though she also knew this was wrong, at the moment, she did not care.
Very faintly, wafting through the dragon smoke, across the courtyard and out the gate against which her back was pressed, a voice reached Beana’s ear.
Won’t you follow me?
She was on her feet in a second just as the gates, at long last, swung open to her. “Light of Lumé!” she exclaimed. “It’s about time!”
A shaggy goat pelted across the stone courtyard as fast as her cloven hooves could carry her, vanishing into the curtain of smoke.
7
THE NEAR WORLD
ORIANA PALACE SAT ON TOP OF A HILL overlooking the city of Sondhold by the sea. It was built in the time of King Abundiantus V of Parumvir, just outside the fringe of Goldstone Wood. This had been a daring move on the part of that king of old, for in those days Goldstone Wood was considered nothing short of an enchanted forest, a refuge for all manner of strange beings of the Far World. But the palace had been constructed nonetheless and, over the course of several hundred years, added on to until it was become a beautiful structure indeed, complete with a seven-tiered garden extending down the eastern side of the hill and ending where Goldstone Wood began.
King Fidel ruled the kingdom of Parumvir these days, holding court in Oriana. He was a well-liked king. Every third and fifth day of the week he opened the great Westgate to the common people so that they might bring petitions before him.
Southgate, however, was never opened to the common people. Certainly not on the first day of the week.
“Here! Here, what do you think you’re doing?”
Two guards in heavy armor (which may or may not have added to their sour moods on that hot summer’s day), who looked as though they were unused to actually working at this post, took hold of a brightly clad intruder as he sauntered without ceremony through Southgate into the gardens of Oriana.
“Oi!” cried the intruder, who was mad-looking in hideous, multicolored raiment. “I say, sorry about that.”
“Get out!” One of the guards pulled the idiot from the grip of the other guard and gave him a shove back through the gate.
The Fool shoved back. “Pardon me,” he said. “I’ll not leave just yet, thank you. I have a letter from—”