CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
On the final day of mourning, all of Talamh stood in the fields, on the hills, on the mountaintops and villages. They gathered as families, as neighbors, as tribes united with one purpose.
To give tribute to the lost.
Dragons of every size, of every color and age, streamed across a sky that held its spring blue. A tribute of its own. They flew, those who had flown for centuries and hatchlings barely fledged, from north to south, south to north, west to east, east to west, their shadows touching every part of Talamh.
And they flew in silence.
And in silence, like all riders, Breen rode, circling the land below. In a gesture she hoped showed respect, she wore the pendant, the diadem given her by the Trolls, and the mermaid’s bracelet.
She saw Keegan on Cróga, the dragon’s heart on his staff gleaming. And Brian, mounted on Hero’s mate for this last solemn journey.
Nothing spoke but the wind, and she knew the land and seas below held equally hushed.
This was reverence.
The young dragon she’d healed and would one day be Finian’s flew beside his mother in formation with his nest mates who’d survived. Mothers and sires carried the bodies of their children, and others formed lines to bear the great bodies of their dead for this final flight.
Over the green, the sky filled with the golds, scarlets, sapphires, emeralds, ambers, and silvers. Marg rode, and beside her flew the dragon that had been her son’s.
Breen felt Lonrach’s heartbeat as her own, as he felt hers. And this, she knew, was comfort.
As the sun lowered in the west, they flew toward it, and finally out to sea.
They would fly, Marg had told her, farther than any boat traveled, to Eile Dragain, an island of stone. To this sacred place where no one walked, the dragons took their dead to put their remains to the fire. To let the wind carry their ashes across the sea and to their rest.
The sea rolled below, empty, it seemed, toward the far-distant horizon. Above that horizon, the sky went as brilliant as the dragons themselves, as the falling sun painted the blue in vivid reds, shimmering purples, striking golds.
Eile Dragain rose up from that rolling sea. What she’d first taken as a kind of mist became solid, gray and wide, with sharp juts of mountains like towers.
In the sea around it, beyond the thrash of waves against rock, Mers waited.
Lonrach circled with others as the bearers placed the dead on the island.
So many, she thought, and some so small. She saw the one she’d held in her arms, unable to save. And grieved again as she and other riders dropped a tribute of flowers onto the bodies and the stone.
When the last body was placed and the bearers rose up to join the circling dragons, the Mers sang.
It sounded like heartbreak and carried into the air, over the sea, across the island of stone where no one walked.
Voices soared, and on the sea, Mers spread more flowers that floated on the deepening blue water.
As those voices slowly faded, as the last arc of the sun slipped away, the dragons, as one, released a single, deafening roar. And the world quaked with it.
Fire followed.
Great billowing bellows of flame speared down so it seemed the whole of the island turned to fire, burning the stone red. The heat of it coated her, and the rise of smoke came pure white, another tower rising, like the flames that licked the air.
Ash spun up, embraced by the wind that carried it away.
When it cleared, the flame and smoke and ash, there was nothing below but the stone and its towering mountains.
The dragons circled once, twice, a third time, then flew toward Talamh as the first stars woke in the night sky.
The land held quiet, more reverence, when Lonrach came down on the road by the farm. For a moment, Breen lay on his back, stroking his scales. When she dismounted, she walked around to his great head, looked into his eyes.
“Call me when you’re ready. We’ll fly when and where you need.”