“It’s good thinking. And smart to make sure she’s seen after last night. Anyone who wasn’t there would have heard by now. The more visible she is, the better.”
In the coming weeks, Blair thought as she went inside to clean up, the shopping, list-making, supply-gathering were all something women like Deirdre and Sinann could deal with. Keep them busy, she mused. And keep the royal family visible.
She scraped off the mud, changed into a reasonably fresh shirt, then strapped on her standard weapons.
When she met Larkin in the courtyard, she took the sheaths for his sword, his stakes. “Got something for you.” She picked up the harness she’d set on the ground, slid the sheaths into the loops. “Put this together for you so you can carry your weapons when you’re zipping around up there.”
“Well, isn’t this fine!” He grinned like a kid presented with a shiny new red wagon. “This was thoughtful of you, Blair.” He leaned over to give her a kiss.
“Do your thing, and we’ll try it out.”
“I owe you a gift.” He kissed her again.
When he’d become the dragon, Blair looped the harness over his body, gave it a quick cinch. “Not bad, if I do say so myself.” She vaulted onto him. “Let’s fly, cowboy.”
She’d never get used to it. Even in the rain it was a thrill to feel the wonder of what was beneath her, and rise up and up. Into mists now, drenched with wet, that curtained the land below. It was like flying inside a cloud, she thought, where the sound was muffled and there was nothing but the flight.
She decided she’d never be satisfied with anything as ordinary as an airplane again.
The rain thinned, and as the sun struggled to carve beams through the clouds, she saw the rainbow. It arched, a bleeding blur of delicate colors that seemed to drip through the rain. With a lazy sweep of wings, Larkin turned so that the arch glimmered like a doorway ahead. And the colors deepened, seemed to shine like wet silk. As shafts of sunlight cut through the clouds, the rain and those soft, arching colors turned the sky to wonder.
There was a trumpeting call, a kind of joyful blare. Then the sky was filled with dragons.
She lost her breath, literally felt it whiz out of her lungs as beautiful winged beasts soared beside her, in front of her, behind. In more colors than the rainbow, she realized, with their emeralds and rubies and sapphires. She felt Larkin’s body ripple as he answered their call, and grinned like a fool when he turned his head and fixed a laughing gold eye on her.
She was flying with a flock of dragons. Herd? Pack? Pod? What did it matter? The wind from their wings blew over her face and hair, sent her coat billowing as they soared through the rainbow sky. The other dragons circled, looped, somersaulted in playful dances. Anticipating, she gripped the harness, shouted for Larkin to: “Do it! Do it!”
And screamed with excitement as he dived and rolled. Hanging upside down as he soared belly-up, she could see the mists tear and reveal the sparkling green and deep, deep brown of the land of Geall.
He skimmed the treetops, dipped over the rush of a river, then climbed, climbed, climbed into air that gleamed now with the strengthening sun.
They flew on, past rainbows and jeweled wings, until it was only the two of them and the sky. Overcome, she lowered to him, laid her cheek on his neck. He’d said he’d owed her a gift, she remembered. He had given her one beyond price.
They flew through sunlight now, and occasional and surprising showers of rain. Below she could see small villages or settlements, the rough roads that joined them, the tangle of streams or narrow rivers, tough little knuckles of forest.
But ahead lay the mountains, dark and mist-shrouded and somehow foreboding.
She could see the edge of the valley that lay at their feet, broken land scarred with rock. The first shudder rippled down her spine as she looked down on what she’d too often seen in dreams.
The sun didn’t sparkle here. It was as if the light was absorbed, just sucked away into the dark belly of gullies and chasms, rejected by the dull grass that fought with the spears and juts of weather-pocked rock.
The land dipped and rose, tightened in on itself into folds. And the looming mountains cast great shadows across it, shadows that seemed to cause the land itself to move and shift.
It was more than a shudder that ran through her now. It was an unreasonably, atavistic fear. A fear that this hard and forbidding land would be her grave.
As Larkin veered off, she closed her eyes and let the fear have its way for a moment. Because it couldn’t be beaten off, she thought, couldn’t be battered down by fists or weapons. It had to be recognized, and accepted.
Once it had, she could control it. If she were strong enough, she could use that fear to fight, and to survive.
When he touched down, she slid off. Legs a little shaky, she admitted to herself. But they held her up, and that’s what counted. Her fingers might have felt stiff, but they worked, and she used them to uncinch the weapon harness.
Then Larkin stood beside her.
“It’s an evil place.”
It was almost a relief to her to hear him say it. “Yeah, oh yeah, it is.”
“You can almost feel that evil rising up out of the ground. I’ve been there before, and it always seemed to me to be a place out of Geall. Not quite a part of it. But it never felt as it did today, as though the ground itself wanted to open up and swallow you whole.”