She went to the stables with him where he gathered the tools they’d need.
“I could fly us there quicker than we could ride. Would that suit you?”
“That’d be good.”
He led the way around to the courtyard garden she recognized from her window. “The bag’s heavy. Hang it round my neck once I’ve changed.”
He passed it to her; became the dragon.
He dipped his head so that she could work the strap over it. Then she looked into his eyes, stroked his jeweled cheek. “You sure are pretty,” she murmured.
He lowered so she could mount his back.
They were rising up, above the towers, the turrets, over the waving white flags.
The morning was like a gem of blue and green and umber, spreading around her. She tipped her head back, let the wind rush over her, let it blow away the fatigue of the long night.
She saw horses below on the road now, and carriages, wagons, people walking. The little village she’d yet to explore was a spread of pretty buildings, bright colors, busy stalls. The people who looked up raised caps or hands as they flew over, then went back about the business of the day.
Life, Blair thought, didn’t just go on, it insisted on thriving.
She turned her face toward the mountains, with their mists and their secrets. And their valley called silence where in a matter of weeks there would be blood and death.
They would fight, she thought, and some would fall. But they would fight so life could thrive.
They reached the woods and circled before Larkin wove delicately through the trees to the ground.
She slid off him, took the bag.
When he was a man again, he took her hand.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Before we do this, I want to tell you Geall is beautiful.”
Together they walked through the trees, then stopped to dig three graves in the soft, mossy ground. The work was physical, and mechanical, and they did it without conversation. Going back into the wagon, removing the bodies was a horror. Neither spoke, but simply did what needed to be done.
She felt the weariness dragging back into her bones, and the sickness that sat deep in the belly as they closed the ground over the bodies.
Larkin carried stones for each of the graves, then a fourth for the young girl he couldn’t bury.
When it was done, Blair leaned on the shovel. “Do you want to, I don’t know, say some words?”
He spoke in Gaelic, taking her hand as he said the words, then saying them
again in English so she could understand.
“They were strangers to us, but to each other they were family. They died a hard death, and now we give them back to the earth and the gods where they will have peace. They will not be forgotten.”
He stepped back, drawing her with him. “I’ll pull the wagon into the field, away from the trees. We’ll burn it.”
Everything they’d owned, she thought as they set the wagon to light. Everything they’d had, these people who had no name for her. The idea of it was so sad, as the wagon burned and the smoke rose, that when she climbed onto the dragon’s back again, she laid her head on his neck, closed her eyes and dozed as they flew over the ashes.
Chapter 16
She heard thunder, and thought groggily that they’d have to outrace a storm. Straightening, more than a little amazed she’d dozed off on the back of a dragon, she opened her eyes. Shook her head to clear it.
Not thunder, she realized and gaped at the towering fall of water that gushed over twin spires of rock into a wide blue pool.
There were trees here, still leafy and green, and the surprising tropical touch of palms. Lilies floated on the pool, pink and white, as if they’d been painted there. Beneath the surface of blue, she could see the dart of fish, bright and elegant as jewels.