The Book of Earth (35 page)

Erde hadn’t thought about that pillow for a very long time, but now its image flashed into her mind, as clear as a painted miniature, minute silken stitches all green and gold and brown against soft beige linen. She recalled her grandmother’s delight when the gift was revealed within its brocaded birthday wrappings, how her long forefinger, heavy with the baronial ring, had lovingly traced the dragon’s tiny shape.

“A fat little dragon,” she’d exclaimed with satisfaction. Then she’d caught Erde’s eye. “But he looks a bit shy. Why is that?”

Erde couldn’t remember her reply, only that she hadn’t intended the dragon to look shy. The stitches had just come out that way. She knew she hadn’t told her grandmother that. It might sound like she hadn’t worked on it hard enough.

And then the baroness had said, “And he has no wings. How interesting.”

Erde reeled in a moment of vertigo.

Beside her, Linden gasped softly and caught her elbow. “Are you all right?”

“Why, that’s lovely,” murmured Rose. “Is that what he looks like?”

Erde stared across the circle, but she was hardly seeing Rose at all. Instead she saw Earth’s thick arching neck, his short muscular lizard-body, his stubby pointed tail and curving ivory horns. And especially his humble demeanor. It was all there. She had embroidered him exactly, seven or was it eight years ago?

“What is it?” Hal whispered urgently, glancing from Rose to Erde and back again.

“A carnelian jewel . . .”

“Yes! Meriah’s brooch!”

Rose’s gaze on Erde was distant. “Does it warm to your touch?”

Erde nodded. No one but Hal knew that, not even the dragon.

“What about it, Rose? What do you See?”

Raven nudged Hal reprovingly but Rose nodded, as if his impatience was only to be expected. “Destiny,” she replied.

“Whose? Hers? The Dragon’s?”

“They are intertwined. I see lines of force, not where they will lead. I can confirm, Heinrich. I cannot predict.”

I should not be surprised
, thought Erde. But she was. And frightened. No one had ever read her mind before. Oh, there’d been those winter parlor games with walnut shells and playing cards, where coincidence and body language occasionally conspired to produce a delicious whiff of the uncanny. But this was so direct and unambiguous. It was like the Mage-Queen would have done, in her fantasies. But the Mage-Queen was haughty and magical, and always wore white. Rose was so . . . normal.

“Perhaps his Purpose can be Read from his dreams,” murmured Rose. “Tell us a little of them.”

But the little embroidered Earth would not leave Erde’s mind. The image and its implications crowded her consciousness. She recalled what Hal had said about the carnelian brooch and its “ageless history,” and was suddenly overcome by the responsibility. All those ages of history devolving down to her, and she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was supposed to do about it.

Rose’s deep voice vibrated through her paralysis. “Think of taking hold of something and setting it carefully aside.”

This offered a distraction, and with some effort, Erde complied. The little dragon image faded and, dutifully, she turned her mind to Earth’s most recent dream. At first it was easy to conjure up, like looking at a mural on a wall, the hard gleaming surfaces and sharp planes of the nightmare landscape, with its constant overlay of cacophony and stench. She pictured the knight fading away in the corridor and heard again the ringing call of the Summoner. But she couldn’t hold onto the image. The details quickly went soft, as if the artist’s elbow had smeared the still-wet paint. Some other din distracted her. Erde concentrated harder, but the clash of steel was drowning out all thought.

“Ah, yes. Now I see them,” said Rose. “The two swordsmen.”

The blurred painting fell away like an evaporating fog and Erde saw the source of the noise: her father, in pitched battle with a much younger man. The young man was tall and slim, more agile than the baron. His face, handsome even while distorted by fear and rage, was familiar to her, but she could not recall his name or who he was to her. For some reason, this filled her with despair. She remembered a sword, but not a name, could not conjure it to fit his image, no matter how desperately she tried. She would have wept but for the comfort of Rose’s steady voice filling her ears.

“There, there, child, not all can be Known at once . . .”

But I
did
know it once
, Erde told herself.
I know I did
. Perhaps she really was damaged after all.

“What? What is it?” Hal begged. “Rosie, please.”

“I see Josef von Alte,” Rose reported. “Overmatched, fighting his final battle.” Then, to Erde, she said, “As for this other, his truth is still hidden from you. When you can name him, you will be free of him.”

Erde shook her head. Was Earth dreaming her father’s murderer?

“Try to speak his name,” Rose urged.

Hal made a sound of protest. Rose laid a staying hand on his knee. To Erde, she urged, “Speak it. You can, you know.”

But she couldn’t speak and didn’t know the name, and if that’s what speaking it would mean, she was glad. She didn’t want to be free of this young man, whoever he was.

“Well, perhaps it’s not time to face that truth yet,” said Rose. “But these are not dragon dreams?”

Erde frowned. Indeed. How would the dragon know her father? Her own dreams, then, mixing with Earth’s, getting in the way. For the first time, she considered the source of dreams. Where did a dream come from, and how did you tell one to go away?

“Your dreaming is not like the dragon’s,” said Rose. “He hears the voices of Power. Yours come from within. Human dreams are our inner voices begging to be heard.”

Erde vowed to silence these importunate voices. She must allow the dragon to be heard.

“But you must listen to your own dreams as well,” said Rose. “Self-sacrifice is rarely the answer.”

“Some sacrifice is inevitable,” Hal put in sharply.

“She is a child. A child must have her dreams in order to grow.”

“She is the Dragon Guide.”

Rose glared at him. “And you are the Paladin, who will keep her always to her mark.”

He took a breath, then set his jaw. “If I must. If that is my destiny.”

“Your destiny.
Your
destiny!” Rose stood abruptly and walked away through the long grass to the edge of the lantern light, raking her hands through her cropped graying hair. “Your destiny!”

“Rose . . .”

The other women relaxed. The tightly drawn circle eased into a ragged arc of casual arms and legs, listening.

“Rose, you saw it yourself. She is the Dragon Guide. If I walked away from this today she’d still have no choice.”

“No. You are assuring that she’ll have no choice.”

“The Dragon assures that.”

Rose paced away from Hal’s reasonable tone. Erde did not understand this sudden irritable concern. Surely if Rose could read minds, she knew no other choice was wanted. Erde would always choose for the dragon, and willingly.

“Rose, you said it yourself,” Hal repeated. “You said you saw Destiny.”

From the edge of the shadows, Rose replied, “I saw it, but I don’t have to like it.”

“You shouldn’t judge the . . .”

“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do!”

“Rose!” Hal threw up his hands. “I mean, is this useful? Does this offer us a single bloody clue about what to do next?”

“You take what you get with a Seeing, you know that! You can’t control it like one of your household servants!” Rose stalked off into the darkness.

Hal leaped up to shout after her, “I don’t have any servants! I don’t even have a household!”

Esther leaned over to murmur in Erde’s ear, “He would have, if the two of them could get along for longer than an evening’s meal.”

“They have, they do,” protested Linden softly. “It’s just that he’s always leaving, from the moment he gets here.”

Raven wrapped an arm around Hal’s legs, hushing him. “Sit down. Let her come to it her own way.”

Hal sat. His long back curled over his crossed knees, he massaged his forehead. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

Raven patted his arm.

Erde was disturbed by being a cause for disagreement, but thought that if Rose and Hal really loved each other, they wouldn’t fight so often. She was sure that when she fell in love, she’d never disagree with her beloved. She remembered the handsome young man in her dream and wondered again who he might be.

Hal straightened with a sigh. “Rose, please come back. The child needs your help.”

And Rose returned out of the darkness and sat down beside him as if all was forgiven. The women resettled themselves alertly. Hal sighed again, his face shuttered with relief.

Rose gazed across at Erde without apology. “There is also a white city in your dreams. At the end of a long white road.”

Erde nodded, her heart suddenly in her throat. The white towers swam in brilliant light before her eyes. Was this the moment she found out her true destination?

Carefully, Hal murmured, “Gerrasch did mention a city . . .”

Rose ignored him. The lanterns gathered their deepest shadows beneath her brow but threw off a reflected glimmer within. “That white road is longer than you can presently conceive of.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Hal growled.

Raven elbowed him, sharply this time. “If she knew, she would say so.”

“But what city is it? Can you see where it is?”

“Please!” Rose shaded her eyes with her palm, as if blinded by some bright sun. “I don’t . . . it’s odd. I can’t tell. The image is so very clear, yet I have no sense of where.” She paused for a moment, then added slowly, “Not even of
when
.”

“The when must be now, Rose,” Raven reminded her. “You only See the now.”

“Yes, but . . .” Rose frowned at Erde distractedly. “You think that it isn’t, but it is.”

“Is what, isn’t what?” Hal fumed.

But Erde thought she knew what Rose meant. The city was
real
. But how could it be?

Rose met her puzzled gaze. “I don’t understand it either.”

“Is this city our destination?” asked Hal.

“Yes.” Rose bowed her head, as if there were something else she found even harder to believe.

“How can I take them there if we don’t know where it is?”

“I don’t know.” She spoke with sudden gentleness, though still without looking at him. “You will take them to the gates.”

“To the . . .” Hal blinked at her, absorbing her meaning. Erde had never seen a man’s hopes collapse visibly before. She had to restrain herself from scrambling up to comfort him. Finally Hal licked his lips, cleared his throat. “Only to the gates.”

“You will be needed outside.”

“Outside what? I don’t want to be outside! Because I don’t share his dreams, I have to be left outside?”

Erde stared at her knees. Hal’s dragon-envy was a swift and treacherous current flowing within him. Occasionally, it surged free and flooded them both with its tides of guilt and longing.

Rose raised her head as if surfacing from a deep pool. The shadows had faded from her eyes and moved into the hollows of her cheeks. She looked exhausted. “You ask to know Destiny, Heinrich, but what you really want is to be able to choose the one you prefer.”

“Wouldn’t any man?”

“This is not given to mortals, man or woman. Not even to dragons is it given.”

A breeze sprang up, setting the lanterns aflicker. For a moment, their light dimmed and the night flowed into the circle like dark water into a pit. Erde shivered. She had taken it for granted that the knight would be there to protect her for the full length of her journey, wherever it was leading, which appeared to be into some place of her own dreaming. She could not imagine how to get to such a place, but how else might she understand Rose’s Seeing?

At length, Hal answered softly, with bleak humility, “I know. And therefore, so be it.”

And the breeze died, the lamps flared, and the pain and tension was drawn away out of the circle, along with the darkness.

“The Seeing is over,” said Rose.

“Now let us offer our love and silence to the night,” Esther intoned ritualistically.

The women sat quietly, and Erde thought to fill the time appropriately by chanting various little benedictions she’d learned from the nuns. But she was too distracted for prayer. Sometime soon, she had to admit to Earth that the Mage City was only a fantasy she’d let run out of control to soothe him, to offer him—no, both of them—a goal, a hope when there’d been so little. Now that the aura of power was gone from the circle, Erde was sure Rose must have misunderstood her Seeing, to suggest that they could actually go to such a place. She vowed never to lie to the dragon again.

As she sat, restless and uncertain, a certain stillness came to her after a while, alive with the night breeze and the scents it carried of grass and earth and ripening fruit, and the sounds of insects and owls and the noisy brook at the bottom of the hill. She felt so welcome among these women and content, and as it had on the road out, this sense of well-being filled her chest like a great intake of breath. She felt her ribs expand with it, and her back straighten. It grew until it was so big she knew she could not contain it. She felt she might burst, and began to think of letting a little of it go, letting it flow out of her into the night like warm water, like milk, releasing the pressure of joy inside her.

Around her, the women sighed and smiled. Rose smiled also, but glanced at Hal to see if he had sensed this invasion of warmth. She was answered when he leaned over and kissed her quickly, sweetly, then grinned like a boy who’d just gotten away with something.

“When this child finds her voice,” Rose murmured, “she will be dangerously charismatic.”

Poised for another kiss, Hal raised a brow. “When? Then you know she will?”

“Oh, yes. This much is certain.”

“I thought maybe Linden could . . .”

“No healer can cure this. She must find it herself.”

Erde heard, yet didn’t hear. The joy in her was drawing
together into a presence. Finally she understood it was the dragon returning from his hunt. It disturbed her that she hadn’t recognized him immediately. There was something different about him, something . . . bigger. She sensed his same plodding gait as he toiled up the hill, the same distracted curious air, nosing her out yet knowing exactly where to go. But there was an aura of bigness, a new sense of resolve. He had come in search of her and he had something on his mind. Clearly, the dragon had eaten well.