Nightpool (24 page)

He pulled the door open.

Two gowns hung there. One was red, flame
red, with braid around the throat in three rows, and buttons in the
shape of scallop shells. He could see his mother in it quite
clearly. It had been his favorite dress.

She had been in this room. She had lived in
this room.

But when?

She had never been away from them until she
left them that last time. She had worn the dress just before she
went away.

Was it here she came, then? But why?

And returned to the Bay of Dubla only to
drown there? His mind seemed frozen, unable to think clearly.

If she came here in the boat, how did she go
away without it?

He stood looking at the dress and at the
little room with its blanketed bed and two chairs and the cupboard.
In a shelf below the mantel was a blue crock, a small paring knife,
and a green plate, all of them familiar, all of them from the
palace. The knife handle made of wrapped cord soaked with resin, as
old Pakkna always fashioned his knives.

Dawncloud was watching him now, and he knew
that she, too, saw his thoughts. All five dragons were watching
him, the four young draped along the tops of the walls. He looked
at his mother’s dress and could see her wearing it before the red
flowers of the flame tree.

“Where did she go?” he whispered. “What
happened to my mother? She didn’t drown in the Bay of Dubla. Where
is she?”

Then he sensed Dawncloud’s own eagerness and
confusion. He sensed her desire, and then visions began to touch
him, and he knew, all in a moment, how Dawncloud had lost her bard
to murder, how she had slept away her misery in Tendreth Slew, then
awakened to seek out a mate.

“But now another bard speaks to me, Tebriel.
Somewhere she lives, she who lost her dragon even before my own
agony. Somewhere Meriden lives.”

“She . . . is a bard?” Teb said
hoarsely, hardly believing it. But knowing it was so, and wondering
he hadn’t guessed before. Her songs, her strength, the way she
seemed drawn away sometimes, searching. “She is alive,” he cried,
caught in wonder. “But where? Where?”

“She is alive, she who turned from the skies
in her own misery, and then was drawn back again.” Dawncloud reared
tall above the broken walls and stared up at the sky and out to
sea. Then she writhed her great body down again, into the
chamber.

“There is a door in this city, Tebriel. I
don’t know where, but I will find it. A door that enters, by
spells, into the far Castle of Doors. And from that castle, one can
enter anywhere, into any world. She is someplace there. Meriden has
gone through one of those doors. And I will follow her.”

“My mother is alive,” he said. “Why did she
go? Why would she leave us?”

“She went,” Dawncloud said, her voice
ringing, “to a mission for all of Tirror. She went hoping to
return. Do you not see her boat is still here? She would have sunk
it otherwise. She went to give of herself in the saving of Tirror.
She went to seek the dragon she thought did not exist anymore on
Tirror. And to seek the source of the dark, too, and to learn, if
she could learn, how to defeat the dark.”

“But how can you know that? You didn’t know
before, or you would have gone before, to find her.”

“Somewhere in this room is a paper with
words written on it. The paper tells this message.” Dawncloud
sighed. “If I were not destined to join with Meriden, if I were not
destined to know and love her, I could not know these words.” She
fixed him with a long green look. ‘The paper is here, Tebriel.
Search for it. And I,” she said, stretching up, then winging
suddenly to the top of the wall, so the room was filled with the
cyclone of her wings, “I must search now, for the door through
which she vanished.”

She rose up towering, then was over the wall
and gone; he heard the tremendous splash of her dive. Then three
dragonlings leaped from the wall to follow. Seastrider remained,
looking down at him. He stood a moment, his heart pounding; then he
stormed up the wall and leaped into the sea and was beating the
water, swimming after Dawncloud, choked in the waves she made. He
felt Seastrider beside him. “No, Tebriel. No.”

“I must,” he said, choking, “My mother is
there somewhere. . . .”

Dawncloud was so far ahead of him she was
almost lost from his sight; the rocking of her passage sent water
slapping into his face and up the stone walls. He felt Seastrider’s
annoyance at him, and her love.

“Come onto my back, then, or we will lose
her.”

He slipped onto Seastrider’s back and she
leaped ahead with a twisting speed, her wings beating like great
sails. He could not see Dawncloud. And then:

“
I’m diving, Tebriel; hold on.”
Seastrider dropped beneath the sea as he clung, and the water
closed over him. Down, down . . . then up again, through
a tall arch.

They were in a courtyard. Dawncloud filled
the salty pool, rearing up before a dark stone gate all carved with
symbols and held with a metal lock. He heard the words she
whispered in her silent dragon’s voice, then she sang out loudly,
so bright and wild he trembled. The dragonlings were singing with
her, a strange song, not a ballad; this was a dragon’s command, and
magical. The stone doors opened, and he could see nothing beyond
but white mist, moving mist. Then Dawncloud was through. He leaped
from Seastrider’s back to follow, but Dawncloud turned in the
doorway, the huge silvery bulk of her filling it, and faced down at
him, her great mouth open in a dragon’s terrible scream, so close
to him he saw flame starting way back in her throat. “Stay back,
Tebriel. Do not come here.”

“I must come. She is my mother.”

“All of Tirror is your mother. All of Tirror
needs you and Seastrider. You would only hinder me here. How can I
travel as I must, search as I must, with a small human companion?
She is my bard, Tebriel. If she can be found, I will find her. A
million worlds lie beyond this mist. I would lose you.

“Stay with Seastrider here. See to the tasks
you were born to. . . .” And then with one thrashing
motion she was gone into the mist, and the great doors swung closed
again.

He paddled close to Seastrider, heartbroken.
Then he slid onto her back, sadly, silently, and they returned to
the small room where his mother had slept, the four dragonlings
close together now, steeped in the sadness of losing their own
mother.

“We sang the ancient song for opening,”
Nightraider said, filled with wonder.

“We sang it all together in our minds,” said
Windcaller.

“It opened for her,” said Nightraider. “And
she went through.”

“She will be through the Castle of Doors by
now,” said Seastrider. “She will be out into another world by now,”
she said sadly. “Searching for Meriden.”

In the little room, as the dragonlings lay
along the top of the wall, Teb began to search for the small bit of
paper or parchment that would hold his mother’s handwriting.

He found it at last, tucked down between an
empty wooden cask and an iron pot, beneath the oak bed. He knew it
at once, and wondered why he hadn’t guessed before. It was not a
slip of parchment but his mother’s brass-bound journal that she had
kept just as Camery kept a diary. His mother’s journal, locked, and
the key missing.

He supposed he could break the lock, but he
was loath to. Dawncloud had told him the message, surely all of it.
He put the little book in the pocket of his breechcloth, then
climbed the wall and down again, to examine the boat, as Seastrider
watched from above.

The boat’s name could still be seen,
Merlther’s Bird
, then the name of her port, Bleven. Merlther
Blish’s boat, reported lost months before his mother went away.

“She deceived us,” he said, fingering the
cracked letters. “She meant to go away all the time. She lied to
us.”

Seastrider sailed down to land beside him,
dwarfing the boat and weighting it to its gunwales. She rubbed her
cheek against his. “She did what she must. For Tirror. You do not
listen well to my mother.” She was annoyed with him. He regarded
her evenly.

“My mother said she went to battle the dark.
Do you not listen? She deceived you only because it was required of
her, because it would be wisest. Not because she didn’t love you.
There was no deceit in her heart, Tebriel.”

He stood quietly, looking at the little boat
that had been pulled in so carefully between the stone walls in
this shadowed watery world. And he knew Seastrider was right. She
nuzzled his hand until he put his arm around her. At last he let
wonder touch him and the true joy that his mother was alive.

It was later, when he had returned to the
little room that had been her last chamber in this world, that he
began to wonder if his father had known all along. That she was not
dead. That she had meant to go away in this fashion.

He must have hated the dark all the more,
because it made it necessary for Meriden to go away. He must have
felt terrible anger that he could not help her. That he must stay
and guard Auric, while she did battle in a world so far away he
might never see her again. Had he known, guessed, that they would
never be together again?

Seastrider soared off the top of the wall
and dropped down into the room beside him.

“How can Dawncloud ever find her?” he said
sadly.

“It will not be an easy search. Perhaps
there are vibrations out among those worlds, just as there are in
the sea.” She curled down around Teb and lowered her head on her
back, making a cocoon for him. “Rest, Tebriel. When night grows
darkest, we will go home. To the Lair. Tonight, Tebriel, you will
sleep among dragons, at the top of the highest peaks.”

“And tomorrow?” he said, his excitement
rising.

“Tomorrow . . . and tomorrow
. . . we will begin to assess the dark, Tebriel. We will
begin to discover how best we can battle it, to bring Tirror back
to truth. We will begin to strengthen our powers—of creating image
and memory and hope through song. We will begin to discover other
powers.”

“What other powers? The opening of doors
. . . ?”

“Perhaps. And perhaps we can master the
magic of shape shifting, and perhaps other ways to confuse the
dark.”

He leaned back against her warm, jeweled
side and felt the strength of bard and dragon, teamed, and thought
that, with training together, they might know more power than he
had imagined. Together they would make song, would shape Tirror’s
true past for those who lived today, and he knew that this was
their one great weapon. For to know what has been is to know what
can be. This was what the dark must destroy if it would win the
minds of its slaves. If it would create a willing acceptance of
slavery. As the night drew down, and the thin moon rose, Seastrider
said, “We will go now,” and they swept out across the sea toward
Windthorst and Fendreth-Teching, four bright dragons, one carrying
her bard, he caught in the wonder of this first flight, caught in
the wonder of beginning.

They passed over Nightpool in darkness, high
against the stars where no earthbound creature could see them. Yet
in the empty meeting cave, before the sacred clam shell, Thakkur
saw. This vision was clear and strong. The white otter smiled, and
put from him his loneliness for Tebriel, in the knowledge that Teb
was now, in this time in the world, exactly where he belonged.

Above, so close to stars, Teb grinned too as
he stared up at the heavens, then down toward the dark earth below
him, and he thought,
Tonight I will sleep among dragons.
The
night wind washed around him, stirred by Seastrider’s powerful
wings, and he felt her laughing pleasure, like his own.

We are together now, Tebriel, and soon my
brothers and sister may find their bards, and my mother return with
Meriden, and we will be an army, then, to challenge the lords of
the dark.

#

Shirley Rousseau Murphy grew up in southern
California, riding and showing the horses her father trained. She
attended the San Francisco Art institute and later worked as
an interior designer while her husband attended USC. “When Pat
finished school, I promptly quit my job and began to exhibit
paintings and welded metal sculpture in the West Coast juried
shows.” Her work could also be seen in many traveling shows in the
western States and Mexico. “When we moved to Panama for a
four-year tour in Pat’s position with the U.S. Courts, I put away
the paints and welding torches, and began to write.” After leaving
Panama they lived in Oregon, Atlanta, and northern Georgia before
returning to California, where they now live by the sea.

Besides the Dragonbards Trilogy, Murphy
wrote sixteen children's books and a young adult fantasy quintet
before turning to adult fantasy with
The Catswold Portal
and
the Joe Grey cat mystery series, which so far includes sixteen
novels and for which she is now best known. She is the winner of
five Dixie Council of Authors and Journalists Author of the Year
awards—two of them for
Nightpool
and
The Ivory
Lyre
—plus eight Muse Medallion awards from the national Cat
Writers Association.