Prophecy, Child of Earth (83 page)

'Tell me, Aria, whatever it is. Tell me."

'Well, first and foremost, I won't know this tomorrow, Ashe. I won't have any idea when the sun comes up that anything is different. I will go on with my life, with the same belief that you deserted me, that I misjudged you utterly, that you died when the Island was destroyed, or before. It is something I think about every day, Ashe, even now,
every day
. It makes me doubt myself, it makes me afraid to trust. Gods, you will leave me tomorrow, and I won't know this. And I will believe that even the love I found with you here belongs to someone else now. Perhaps everything is all right for you, but for me, everything will be just as wrong as it was before, in fact, more so."

She gave in to the tears. Ashe drew her into his arms and held her as she wept.

"You're right," he said, kissing her ear after he spoke. "I'm going to get the pearl."

Rhapsody sat up, pulling out of his embrace again. "What? Why?"

Ashe smiled at her, brushing the tears away with his knuckle. "Nothing, nothing in this world, is worth hurting you for one more second. You have carried too much pain for too long, Emily. I'm going to give this memory back to you. You deserve it more than anyone else deserves the selfish fulfillment of their stupid goals." He started to rise, but she stopped him.

'What will happen to Llauron?"

'I don't know. I don't care. I care what happens to you."

Rhapsody's eyes were now dry, and radiating worry. "Well, I do know, and I think you do, too. If I am useless to Llauron as a herald, because I know the truth, if I refuse to immolate a man I know is still alive, then the plan will fail. And it is already too late to prevent the assassination, isn't it? Lark's plans are laid; Llauron will die for nothing, and there will be no chance for immortality. He will be gone, because I was too self-serving to wait to know something I have lived without the knowledge of for more than a millennium." She sighed heavily.

'I'm sorry, Sam," she said, finally using the name. "You couldn't believe I'm selfish; well, here's the proof. My whining almost caused you to let your own father die."

'That's hardly what happened."

'That's exactly what happened." Rhapsody wiped the remnants of her tears out of her eyes with the hem of her dress. "But at least we caught it in time."

Ashe regarded her with a sharp look. "What are you saying, Emily? You don't want to keep the memory?"

She smiled at him. "You keep it for me, Sam. I can live without it a little longer."

He took her in his arms and held her quietly for a moment. "Do you want to tell me?"

'Tell you what?"

'What happened to you? When I didn't come back?"

'I don't think you really want to know, Sam."

'Your choice, Emily. I want to know everything I missed, everything that isn't too painful for you to tell me."

'So you wish to nullify our agreement? To talk about the Past?"

'Yes," he said forcefully. "Up to now we have been keeping silent not only to spare ourselves the pain, but to protect the interests of our families, our friends.

Blast them. There is nothing in this world, the next, or the last, that ever was or ever will be more important to me than you are.
Nothing
. Please, Emily; I want to know what happened, whatever it won't hurt you to tell me, so that perhaps we can make sense of why it happened, and how."

Rhapsody studied his face, lost in thought. After a few moments, he could see her eyes darken as she came to a decision. "Very well. I need to tell you this, Sam, and you need to hear it. It may make you reconsider things you think you've decided."

He took her face in his hands and stared at her hard, trying to emphasize his words. "Nothing you could possibly say will make me change my mind about you, Rhapsody. Nothing." He tried to use the tone she did when she spoke truly, as a Namer.

She recognized the attempt and smiled. "Why don't you hear me out and then decide, Sam."

"
Nothing
," he repeated, almost testily.

Gently she pushed his hands away and rose, crossing the room to the corner by the fireplace. She picked up the paintings of her grandchildren and studied them, smiling after a moment. "Do you remember my recurring dream? The one I told you about that night?"

'The one where the stars fell from the sky into your hands?"

'Yes. And then later, when I was enrolled in the marriage lottery, the dream changed, and the stars would fall through my hands, and into the water of the stream that ran through the Patchworks.

'The night you didn't come—well, let's just say it was a sad night, and when I went to sleep I had the dream again, but it was very different. I dreamt I looked into the water, and the stars had fallen in a circle around a long dark crevice, and were shining up at me. It wasn't until recently, when we fell in love again, that I understood what it was."

'That being—?"

'It was your eye, Sam; your serpentine-pupiled eye, so very different from what I remember and yet very much the same. That must have been what my mother meant in the vision when she said if I could find my guiding star I would never be lost. She meant it was in
you
—that you had a piece of my soul inside you, and to find it I needed to find you. That I would be complete with you. You aren't the only one who had lost a piece of his soul; now each of us has carried that piece for the other.

'Now I finally understand why I'm prescient; why I have dreams of the Future.

It's because I gave you part of my soul that night in the Patchworks, and it came back here with you. That piece has been living, in the Future, all along. It has seen things that for me constituted the Future, since I was living fourteen hundred years in the Past. It has been calling to me, trying to reunite us."

He smiled, looking down at the floor. "Thank God for those dreams. And if I ever meet the Lady Rowan again, I'll have to remember to thank her."

Rhapsody replaced the paintings and sighed. "Unfortunately, I didn't understand any of this at the time. A deep despair descended on me, and I went through my days as if in a fog. My parents were very worried about me, just as your father was about you. I had told them you were Lirin, and my father was convinced you had cast a spell on me.

'He decided I needed something to salve my heart, and that marriage was the answer, so he moved up the suit interviews. That only made me more desperate and frightened, but I had to trust his judgment, because now I doubted my own. I remembered the gold coins you offered me as a gift, and decided what I had actually done was sold you my virginity." Ashe's face constricted in pain, but she didn't seem to notice. "It made things that happened later inevitable, I guess."

'Then one day, about a week after you left, several soldiers rode into our village.

They didn't know anything about you specifically; they were looking for anyone who had seemed unusual, who might have shown up at the same time you did. The Partches, the people whose barn you slept in, showed them the items you had left behind, and then they departed.

'I was terrified they would find you, and harm you. I knew I had to try to warn you, so I packed whatever I could carry, took one of my father's horses, and ran away, following them to Easton. I lost them after a few days once we were there.

'I had never been in a city before, and it seemed very large and very dangerous to me; my horse was stolen almost immediately. I asked everyone I met if they had seen you, but no one ever had. I even made a foray into the Wide Meadows to see the leader of the Lirin who lived there, but she didn't know any of the names you had given me, except for MacQuieth, who was a warrior of great renown that lived in the western lands past the great river. I realize now it was because, except for him, none of those other people had been born yet.

'Years later I did meet MacQuieth; it was quite by accident, really. And since he is a legendary hero in your lineage, I will spare you the details of how that occurred. I don't want to dispel any of his mythos. I guess some things run in the family."

Ashe laughed. "Could it be that your meeting had something in common with the way I, er, met Jo?"

She smiled sadly. "Well, in a way, yes," she admitted, "but you were far nicer to Jo than he was to me. I asked him about you, and he said he had never seen you.

And it was at that moment that I gave up; I knew that either you were dead, or a liar, but either way you weren't coming back for me; and I would never see you again.

'But, as I said, that was years later. After a few days, when I could find no one who had even seen you, I decided to go home. Then I realized I didn't even know where home was. The trip to Easton had taken several weeks, and I had no real knowledge of navigation then, and no horse. I always thought I would make it home someday, anyway.

'I needed money, so I sold the buttons; the silver buttons that matched the one I gave you." He winced, remembering the excitement in her eyes, the pride on her face as she displayed them for him that night. "They brought a decent price, and that allowed me to live, at least for a little while; the money bought me shelter and food. But then the money ran out, and I had to find another way to support myself.

'At first I found work cleaning houses. I was a farm girl, and I knew at least how to do that well. But always something would happen. Sooner or later the master of the house and his wife would begin to argue about me, and sometimes he would even—" She turned away from him, crossing her arms and staring at the wall. The firelight reflected off the shimmering dress, casting shadows that undulated through the creases in the fabric, as though it sought to comfort her.

'Anyway, I would be out on the street again. And, unfortunately, there is a whole class of people who prey on young girls who are on the street. Then again, there are occasionally some who, while profiting from girls like me, also seek to protect them, and I was lucky enough to meet one of them, just before some of the more unsavory types moved in on me. Everyone called her Nana. She took me in, and wrapped her network of protection around me. All I had to do was—was—"

His voice was choked with pain. "Emily—"

'I guess I don't need to spell it out for you, Sam. She sold me, often, I'm sorry to say. I wasn't exactly the easiest commodity to sell; my body wasn't womanly, my breasts small for the profession, and I didn't help things by refusing to service married men. That severely limited my clientele. Yet despite all the obstacles, she still managed to find work for me."

Tears touched the corners of Ashe's eyes.
Easily, no doubt
, he thought bitterly.

'I thought I wouldn't care; nothing really mattered anymore, I was just marking my days. But I remember the first time," she said, each word becoming softer "I was just fifteen. It had been a long time since you, and, well, Nana was able to sell me as untouched. She expected I would bleed again, and she was right. I guess she got a much better price because of it. She would always give me a treat or small gift when that would happen later on, but then it was due to violence, not inexperience. The first time there was both. I tried to be brave, but in truth I cried all the way through it. I probably would have anyway, but the kind of man who is willing to pay extra for that particular privilege-She stopped when she heard a deep sob from behind her. A look of alarm shot across her face; she gathered her skirts and hurried to him, throwing her arms around his neck.

'Sam, I'm sorry; gods, I shouldn't have told you. It's all right, Sam, I'm all right.

Oh, Sam, please don't cry. I'm so sorry."

He pulled her into his lap, burying his face in her shoulder as he wept. She held him to her heart until he calmed. At that moment she decided she would never again tell him anything about that time, locking the door in her memory.
That was
nothing
, she thought ruefully.
He would never survive hearing about the bad stuff
.

'What is really ludicrous here," he said when he could speak again, "is that
you
are comforting
me
. You're the one who lived it, I'm the one who caused it."

'That's nonsense," she said, dabbing his eyes gently with her skirt. "You had nothing to do with it. I'm the one who chose to run away. And it's a good thing, too—the truth is if you had not come into my world, for however short a time, I never would have followed you. I would have spent my life, married to a farmer I didn't love, never seeing the world you told me I would see, and have. I would have perished long before the Island sank; probably I would have died inside even before my body did. If you hadn't come along, I wouldn't be here now. You saved my life, Sam; think of it like that.
Kyle hira
. Life is what it is. Whatever we have suffered, at least we are together now."

He pulled back and looked at her, sitting on his lap, holding his hands. The perfection of the image she had made earlier was gone; the dress was rumpled, her hair beginning to come down, but in the firelight she looked as close to angelic as anything he had ever seen.

'I was wrong," he said, his voice quiet. "What you've told me does change the way I feel about you." Rhapsody went pale. "If it is possible, it makes me love you even more."

Relief flooded her face. "Gods, don't scare me like that," she scolded, slapping his arm lightly. Her face grew solemn. "But there is one more reason you might want to reconsider marrying me." "Impossible." "Sam—" "No, Rhapsody."

'I don't know if I can give you children," she blurted, her face growing pale again. "I think I'm barren."

Ashe stroked her cheek gently. "Why do you think that?"

Rhapsody stared into the fire. "Nana used to give us an herb called Whore's Friend, a leaf extract that prevented pregnancy and disease. I don't know what, if anything, that has done to me inside. I have had none of that preventative in this land, but you and I have certainly made love often enough to have—"

He pulled her rapidly into this arms. "No, Aria; I'm sorry. I thought you knew.

I'm a dragon, one of the Firstborn races. In order to sire a child, it would have had to be a conscious decision on my part, and, since you didn't tell me you wanted me to—a wise choice, in my opinion, by the way—I haven't done so." Painful memory lingered in his eyes. "In fact, one of the greatest reasons for my despair about leaving you behind in the old world was that I never knew for certain whether you had become pregnant after our first night together.