Taudde was not on his feet, so unlike the rest, he didn’t fall. He rolled to put himself between the girls and the jagged fragments of rock that crashed down all around. Except he had lost the bone flute and truly could not protect anyone. A piece of stone larger than his head hit the floor not an arm’s length away, sending sharp missiles in every direction. Beside him, one of the girls, he thought Nemienne, cried out and he knew she’d been cut.
Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes flung out his left hand, the rubies of his black iron ring blazing up like sparks of fire. He might have meant—Taudde thought he meant—to draw on the dark power of the mountain. Even so, he was smashed back against the wall of the cavern and pinned there. And Prince Tepres, also flung back and down, slammed into stone with such force that Taudde could hear the impact of body and bone against unyielding rock even through the other clamor of destruction.
Ankennes alone had gained his feet amid the devastation he had wrought. He reclaimed his staff, which somehow was once more whole and undamaged in his hand, and spun around to fling that staff straight as a spear at the stone dragon.
Beside Taudde, Nemienne snatched at the beads wound through her sister’s hair, leaped to her feet, and threw three beads one after another in a high arc toward the dragon. Somehow there seemed plenty of time to watch them fly and fall. They caught the pale light and fell like sparks of darkness through the air: a glass bead, and one of hematite, and a black pearl. They fell into the pool, one after another, but not with the sound of beads falling into water. Each one struck with a clean, clear, chiming sound, three notes that spanned a chord, as though three harp strings had been plucked. The notes were amazingly pure and sustained, audible through everything.
At almost that same instant, the mage’s staff struck the dragon. Its blow gave rise to a low, powerful note that answered the chiming of the fallen drops of darkness-infused beads. The carved stone shattered beneath that blow, but the three notes of the beads rose up under the sound of breaking stone, and Taudde saw that beneath the stone lay something else, something that was not stone and had not broken.
In the cavern at the heart of darkness, a dark eye slitted open.
Everywhere through the caverns, stone flowed and smoothed out damaged areas. Water that was not water—none of it was precisely water, Taudde thought now—trickled and dripped and gathered into streams that were made of shadows. Or of a strange kind of light. Amid that light and those shadows, the Dragon of Lonne lifted its head.
Ankennes stood mute and amazed.
Geriodde Seriantes got slowly to his feet… slowly, like a man of waning strength trying to make the failure of his body seem merely like considered dignity. He wore a stern, ungiving expression as he turned with slow reluctance toward his son, dreading, Taudde understood, to see too clearly the ruin Ankennes had made of blood and bone. But pale light and strange shadows flowed like water across the prince as well, and around him, and under that influence the prince’s body was visibly repairing itself, just as the caverns were. The king’s attention was fixed on this. He began to step toward his son, then caught at a stone pillar to support himself and stayed where he was.
But Prince Tepres rose to his feet, levering himself away from stone stained with his own blood, and came over to his father on his own accord. This time, it was the prince who reached out first, his gesture constrained and almost shy, to touch his father’s hand.
The king’s expressionless mask cracked like stone, and his hands closed around his son’s arms with the force of mountains shifting. It was a profoundly intimate moment. Taudde looked away, ashamed to have witnessed it. Deeply ashamed, now, that he had tried to strike against the king in the person of his son. He looked at the dragon instead, and then found himself unable to look anywhere else.
The stone opened to free the dragon and closed behind it once it was loosed. Subtle colors washed across it as it emerged from the wall of the cavern. Pale green and silvery blue and delicate lavender ran down its neck, the colors deepening to brilliant jewel tones as moments passed. Its elegant head was lapis and amethyst, with shadings of garnet around its nostrils and at the corners of its long mouth. Its antennae, flexing and extending above and around its head, were a deep sapphire that shaded to aquamarine and then to emerald. The emerald ran down its long sinuous neck in a wash of color that shifted as the dragon moved, to sapphire and then amethyst and then back to emerald. Its nearest wing, sapphire traced with gold, opened a little and then relaxed. Its eyes were black, containing all the darkness that lived beneath the mountain.