Both Karah and the prince were always partially hidden by the shifting shadows and rippling light that trailed them, but they were there, in the king’s wake. Safe, Nemienne thought. She could see that they were struggling, that they clung to one another, that each of them sometimes hesitated as though to turn back into the shadows. She could see that it was the king’s will that overrode theirs and not only gave them a way forward, but compelled them along it.
“Can he make it through?” asked the senior of the black-clad men. But he didn’t speak as though he addressed anyone in particular, nor as though he expected an answer. He was simply driven to speak by his own desperate uncertainty.
Nemienne understood that very well. She whispered, “I think he will. I think he has the strength to walk it all the way. Surely he will! He’s his father.”
The man glanced down at her. He asked her quietly, as though she were someone who might know, “Is there nothing we can do to help him?”
“No—” Nemienne said uncertainly, and glanced over at Leilis’s sorcerer. The Kalchesene was now sitting on the stone floor of the cavern, leaning back against Leilis. His eyes were still closed, his face tight and strained. He let notes fall one at a time into the air, left each lingering as long as possible before playing the next. Nemienne looked up at Leilis and asked, “There isn’t, is there?”
“Should I know?” said the woman, but then she leaned down and said softly in the sorcerer’s ear, “They have almost won back. You have held the way almost long enough.”
There was no sign on the young man’s face that he’d heard her. But he drew a shuddering breath and began a series of long, sweeping phrases: one note after another that blurred into another, higher pitched, that gave way in turn to another that rose higher still. Like waves running against a gentle shore, Nemienne thought. No. Like the tide coming in, where it rose higher and higher and drowned the sand… in the bone flute, she thought she could hear the sea.
And, following the strong pull of the flute’s melody, the king heaved himself through the clustering shadows and strode at last out of the paths of shadow and light and back into the dragon’s chamber.
CHAPTER 15
Rightly was Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes called the Dragon of Lirionne, Taudde thought. The king’s brief, profound journey had pared him down beyond mortal flesh to essential will, and indeed, though white and profoundly exhausted, he now seemed very dragonlike.
Once he had broken through the paths of the dead and back into the world of the living, the king turned and stared back through the dark moving shadows among which Taudde had laid his path. Taudde was no longer playing, but there was no longer any need. The king merely put out a hand and, with the force of his own stark resolve, pulled his son and the young keiso out after him.
Prince Tepres, though not as worn as his father, also had a strange look about him. He had gone farther along the path of death than the others, and this showed in a lingering remoteness, a darkness that still inhabited his eyes. The prince glanced around the cavern. His gaze paused on Taudde’s face, unreadable, and at last met his father’s. The prince’s expression, from vague, became guarded.
The little keiso’s response was different. She came out into the cold moist air of the caverns, gasped, laughed, burst into violent tears, and fled across the cavern to her sister, who embraced her. The two girls clung together in mutual comfort and anxious inquiry: Are you all right? Yes, but are you all right? They looked very young.
Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes, in those first moments, had attention only for his son. His face, pale and set, showed very little: long experience of court diplomacy had no doubt taught the Dragon of Lirionne parsimony of expression. But he reached out, oddly tentative, and took his son by the shoulders. Prince Tepres stood passively at first, merely allowing this near embrace without returning it. But at last he lifted his eyes to his father’s face and slowly brought his own hands up to grip his father’s arms. The two of them stood that way for a long moment, neither of them speaking. They looked very like, the Dragon and his heir, both worn with fright and exhaustion and the dawning awareness of reprieve.
While they were caught up in the moment, Ankennes acted. The mage, balked at every turn at the very cusp of success and blazingly furious, disregarded the blade at his throat and smashed one hand down on the stone where he knelt.
Thirty feet away, by the edge of the black pool, his staff exploded.
The force of that explosion slammed through the caverns, cracking stone and smashing delicate formations. A thousand bells, of iron and brass and crystal, shattering all at once, might have sounded like that.