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eyes were black and round as beads of jet.
"Excuseme!" she said, and was gone, swooping low over the courtyard. She
seized a loaf of bread from a baker's tray as she passed, and vanished over
the battlements, leaving the baker startled and cursing below.
He slept at last, worn out with futile plans and speculations. He dreamed,
small things at first of an ordinary kind but gradually, the dream altered. He
swam, it seemed, in a sea of gold. He was bare limbed; his arm and hand
dripped and shone when he raised it, each joint gilded in glowing fire. The
current took him, bearing him up, carrying him to the song of stones, along
paths of shining radiance, to a place of love.
She treasured him.
He woke suddenly, to find himself out of his bed. He was on the floor, on his
hands and knees, crawling mindlessly toward the window. Something hard was
under his hand, hurting the palm. He sat, head whirling, the hard thing
clasped in his hand. It was a tiny pebble from the dragon's hill. He swallowed
hard, shook his head to dismiss the dream, and threw the pebble hard against
the wall.
"What are you looking for?" Ivoire stood atop his cabinet. She ducked her
head and turned it, upside down, the better to peer at the things within.
"I have no idea." Actually, he hadn't thought hewas looking for anything. It
was his habit to look at his collections, to handle the objects, only as a way
to soothe his mind and encourage thought. But Ivoire had known better than he,
he realized; hewas looking for something. He didn't know what it was, but
something had taken shape in his dreaming, and he was looking for its mate,
somewhere in the array of things before him.
But what was it? He sighed and began to go through the cabinet again, one
shelf at a time, picking up each object and discarding it in turn, as it
failed to trigger any sense of discovery. Beads on the top shelf wood, bone,
stone, and ivory; broken, whole, single, strung. Nothing there.
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Carvings on the second shelf; some of great antiquity, some so old as to have
been carved on river stones, the lines so blurred that the image was
uncertain. He looked at these with great attention, hoping perhaps for
something else like the elk-bone knife but there were no more dragons. Bears,
wolves, hares, horses, dogs, mice... even one piece of ancient silver carved
with the likeness of a greenman, those fearful creatures half-man, half-tree.
He had met a greenman in the forest once, and he put the piece down,
shuddering at the memory.
"Oh, him." Ivoire shoved at the medallion contemptuously with her beak. She
hadn't liked the greenman, either. She made a chuckling noise deep in her
throat, turned around and cocked her tail over the piece, intending to make
her opinion abundantly clear. Trusellas swatted her away with the back of his
hand and she fell off the table with a shriek of surprise.
"Shoo," said Trusellas, and went back to his work.
The third shelf held natural artifacts the shed skins of snakes, mummified
toads, seedpods and dried roots. His hand hovered over these, but... no.
Whatever he was looking for, it was not here.
He squatted to look again at the bottom shelf, where the heavier things were
kept the ancient tools and things of stone. Axes, scrapers, grinders, blades
... one at a time, he picked them up, holding them, hoping.
A clacking noise behind distracted him.
Ivoire had abandoned the cabinet, and was on the floor near the window,
playing a game that involved batting one round stone against another, so that
the second shot away, rebounding from wall or table leg. She looked up at him,
and he could see the look of calculation in her eye. He lifted a foot, meaning
to set it on one stone, but she was too fast her beak swung back and forward,
and the stone shot up, hit the wall, ricocheted, and struck Trusellas right
between the eyes.
"Gooooooooal!" gurgled the raven, staggering around the floor in a raffle of
feathers, helpless with mirth.
Teeth clenched on an epithet unbecoming to his office, Trusellas bent and
snatched up the stone. It was one of the pebbles he had brought back
inadvertently from the dragon's cave, caught in the folds of his high leather
boot. It was an ordinary enough rock, no gemstone. And yet there were small
veins of greenish stone crisscrossing the pebble serpentine perhaps, or
marble? The veins of green gleamed faintly in the light, and the niggling
thought in the back of his mind dropped softly into place.
It lay at the back of the bottom shelf, out of sight. It was a thing he had
picked up because it was unusual, but an object he didn't know the use of a
sliver of stone, too flimsy to be a tool, but showing the marks of careful
knapping and shaping it had been made for something, but what? Not an
ornament, not a ceremonial object; it was plain stone, not carved but with the
same small veins of green marble running through it.
Long and thin, fragile but very sharp. His hand closed carefully around it,
this gift from some ancient castellan. He saw in memory the swirling seas of
Lunaris's eyes, and his heart went cold within him.
It was nearly dark when he reached the hill. He began to sing at the bottom
of the slope, his voice damped by dripping mist and the scent of ashes from
the half-charred forest. As he came out of the last of the trees, though, his
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voice rang from the stones of the ancient fort. He stopped then, and waited.
"Come," said the dragon's voice in his mind, and his breast filled with
warmth and longing. As he took a step toward the cavern's entrance, he felt a
sudden sting and clapped a hand to his head.
Ivoire fluttered down on an alder branch and sat staring at him, the strand
of hair she had plucked from his head dangling from her strong pink bill.
"What did you do that for?" he demanded.
She laid the strand down and put a pale pink foot on it, then looked up at
him. Her eyes were black as the soot on his shoes.
"A keepsake to remember you by," she said. "I'll take it back to the castle
and weave it into my nest on the tower. You'll be a part of the castle, then."
"I'm coming back," he said, and hoped he sounded much more confident than he
felt.
"Sure you are," she said. Evidently he didn't sound all that confident.
"Come," said Lunaris, and her voice struck his mind like the clapper of a
bell. He turned and walked into the cave.
He wondered, dimly, whether dragons could read thoughts, but he had forgotten
to ask Ivoire if she knew. It didn't matter, though. There was nothing else to
do.
Lunaris awaited him, in her inner chamber. Words froze in his throat, but he
didn't need them. It wasn't song she wanted, this time. She stood beside her
couch and smiled.
"Come," she said, and he came to her.
"Why do you close your eyes?" she asked him, later.
"Your beauty blinds me, Mistress," he said, and kept his eyes tight shut. She
laughed and the soft embrace of great wings enclosed him.
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