The Song of Andiene - By Elisa Blaisdell Page 0,121

that could not be denied. “The people who befriended me, you were the cause of their destruction?”

“Such weaklings, those ones you call your people. Flimsy tools, but they served their purpose. You are another matter, a sword of true-forged steel. But foolish too. From across the sea I called you to me, and you never asked me why?”

“Why then?” Andiene spoke in anger, but in fear also. “To take your revenge?”

The white flames licked out toward her, but drew back slowly, as though they had a life of their own, and said, “Not yet, not yet.” Yvaressinest spoke proudly. “Do you think I care for revenge? Who takes revenge on the crawling things of the earth? Why would I want revenge for my imprisonment? I let myself be taken captive.”

“Why?” she asked.

At her side, Kallan spoke for the first time. “The enemy within the gates.”

The dragon’s green gaze stayed fixed on Andiene. “I entered your defenses. I learned the ways of your kind, their foolishness. When I departed, of my own free will I left my bones behind, to hold the gateway open, and I waited for one to come who would open it wide.”

“Not I! I am no part of your plans!”

“Yes you are. You, or that fool who stands like a statue by your side. You have power over him. Give him to me. He has laid himself open to that. I will live in him and teach you more. You will walk freely by my side. Did you think you had learned all I had to teach? You have not scratched the surface of your power.”

Andiene stared past him to the blue-gray forest that stood in the mist, in the beating roar of the patient waves. She fought again, and drew the battlefield back to the high-walled courtyard, the land where she was born. The dragon’s stony bulk curved around three sides of the enclosure. He lay as he had been chained, his torn shoulder close beside the fettered bones. The shattered stones lay behind him, speaking mutely of his wrath.

At her side, she heard Kallan’s breathing, loud in the unearthly silence. He had not once turned toward the dragon, his attention all fixed on her. “So you offer me the filthy bargain of the southerners?” she said slowly. “To make treaty with evil, and offer it sacrifice, and live close to it? I would rather see the whole land laid waste from the mountains to the sea!”

The pavement cracked from the white heat of the dragon’s breath. Little chips of rocks split off, and flew hissing through the air. One struck her cheek and slit it open, but she scarcely noticed.

The crackling dryness of the dragon’s voice became louder, but still as inhuman. “You have no choice. You are my creature. Think back to that witless, speechless child. Can you remember that life as your own?”

He knew well that she could not. The chasm had grown wider and deeper with every day.

“I shaped you from nothingness,” Yvaressinest said. “Cast off what I have given you and you will be mute and mindless again. I made you what you are, and I chose to make you flawed. Look at all your endeavors. You raised a storm that wracked the ocean, and your enemy took no hurt from it. You fought the grievers of the forest, and if a weak child had not come to your aid, your comrades would have died. In your pride, you went out into the heat of summer, and nearly destroyed yourself and the ones who trusted you. You could find only one way to enter this city, and to do it, you slaughtered those you call your people.

“Look at the very beginning. You vowed to help the creatures who rescued you, and they died in agony, by the orders of the one who stands beside you. You tried to save your father; he died too at the hands of the man who stands beside you. What could be more fitting than to give him to me and make your revenge complete?”

Andiene shook her head. Around her feet, the gray-green grass sprang in the flowerless meadow. She was in the dragon’s land again, or it had come to her.

The list went on, relentlessly. “What have you ever done that you can call your own, that was unflawed, that did not end in sorrow and death? The other soft fool that you thought you loved; he fled from you as from a viper. Why