Chronicles of the Last Days Chapter 5

Chapter 4

S

unna paced back and forth across the small room all afternoon while Darna lay on the dark bed with her arms around her belly and her face to the wall. The walk back to Anamat had tired her more than she’d thought it would, and she found herself taking deep breaths and falling in and out of a fitful sleep. She woke fully when Myril returned from the temple and the sun was sinking low in the sky.

“How was she?” Sunna asked as she paused in her pacing.

“The Aralel? Preoccupied. Tiagasa was there, demanding bribes and making threats. She seems to be doing the bidding of their Cerean advisor, or trade partner, or whatever he is.” Myril turned to Darna. “She said that his name was Girizit, the king’s emissary. Is he the one you saw on your way back here, the one you were worried about?”

Darna uncurled herself and sat up. She looked pale, even in the dim light. “It must be. I still don’t know how he knew that I was called Darnasa. What does he want?”

“Tiagasa asked for chests of treasure on his behalf, to keep the temple safe, in return for which she would send guards to the temple, to keep the other Cereans away.”

“Not much of a bargain,” Sunna said. She sat like a man, legs splayed open, and rested her elbows on her knees. “Not one the Aralel could refuse, though.”

“She promised to send chests only for the days leading up to Midsummer. After she’d had to go through all of that, I couldn’t make much fuss about getting her to agree to keep you there too, but she will, of course,” she told Darna. “She’s expecting you at dawn. She says that there are too many people on the streets now, and that she needs to make arrangements.”

Darna yawned. Whatever her ailment was, it seemed to be making her unnaturally tired.

“Quite right,” Sunna agreed, strapping on her sword. “I’ll go have a look around for myself and be back in time to see you to the temple, if it’s safe enough.”

“The Aralel thought she could find a place,” Myril said.

“I’d rather know what you think, too,” Darna told Sunna.

“Yes, Your Highness.” Sunna smirked.

Darna threw a pillow at her, which she avoided by darting out of the door. The pillow fell flat at the threshold.

“I wish she hadn’t called me that,” Darna said as Sunna clattered away down the stair. “I just don’t want to be one of them… I’m not a princess; I barely even wanted to be a keep mistress.” Darna sighed. “I don’t know why Giri knew who I was, how he figured it out, or how he even recognized me after all these years.”

“You recognized him, too, and at least he didn’t try to assassinate you outright,” Myril pointed out. “He must have heard about you from his countrymen in Tiadun.”

“I suppose,” Darna mused. “There weren’t any other scrapplings that year who would have matched the description they gave of me, little enough as it was.”

“Maybe he was just testing the idea, to see how you would react.”

“Possible,” Darna said. “I may have given myself away. Most likely, he wouldn’t want to be associated with that theft all those years ago, either.”

Myril shook her head and went to fix herself a cup of tea. “It may not matter so much now. He seems to have Tiagasa in his sway, and as long as she favors him, no one else in the palace is likely to cross him either.”

Darna snorted. “I’d like to see her – I don’t know; maybe I wouldn’t like to see her duped. Either way, I’ll have to go to the palace for the tribunal, maybe even before. I wish I hadn’t seen him.”

They left the subject of Giri aside and had a light supper before resting again. Sunna returned near midnight.

“Unless Tiagasa’s appeasers are against you – and I don’t think they are yet – the temple itself seems safe enough for now,” Sunna reported. “Gallia hasn’t been bothered, anyway. She’s in one of the old towers near the novices’ quarters. I couldn’t get much from her except she did say that Calar had always been vile.”

“I didn’t need her to tell me that,” Darna said. “Anything else?”

“She says that they’re not allowing Cerean armsmen into the palace at all, so for the tribunal itself, we only have Calar and his men to worry about, and they’re no better than other common guardsmen, maybe worse.” Sunna yawned. “I should go back to the training hall.”

“Please, sleep here,” Myril said. “I have another pallet, and I can wake you in the morning.”

Sunna hesitated before accepting, but she did accept – after all, it was easier than walking up the hill to the Defenders’ hidden hall. Soon, both she and Darna were snoring while Myril sat vigil through the night. She roused them at cockcrow, sending them off into the still-dark morning.

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The Aralel met Darna at the door of her chambers. “Ah, good,” she said with a weary smile, face crinkled from sleep. “You do look rather old in this dim light, even without your limp.”

“I’d like to see Gallia,” Darna said.

The Aralel cast a wary eye across the elders’ courtyard. “Later, maybe. Come inside. First, you must tell me about Slaradun. You know that my first duty to you is to your priestesshood, and don’t tell me that you’re not a priestess. I’ll send for tea.” As the Aralel shooed Darna in, she struck three quick notes on a bell. Across the elders’ courtyard, someone shuffled off to the kitchens.

“Go in. Please, it would be best if you stayed out of sight,” the Aralel urged her. She barred her outer door as they entered. The room inside was still dark as night; the only light was from a small brazier in the inner chamber, which smoked with a smell that brought elder priestesses to mind. Geta always smelled of one of those dusky herbs, as did most of the scryers, but the Aralel never had before. She shuffled across the carpeted room and sat heavily on her bed. She was getting old, Darna realized.

“You were the prince of Slaradun’s lover, and he had no keep mistress,” she began. “Given the fact that he is gone – or is he?”

“He’s gone,” Darna confirmed. “I saw him die, but his mind was gone before that. Just before that.”

“I will regard you as his widow and the de facto ruler of Slaradun.”

Darna laughed, which made her stomach ball up in agony. It took her some time to recover enough to speak.

“I am in no way – I mean I can’t be. I was there for less than a year. I barely know the land, let alone the people, and besides, they’re nearly all gone.”

“Did the prince have any other heirs?”

“None that I know of, and I don’t think any that he knew of. He would have said something, or Harzet might have.”

“Harzet?”

“His Cerean advisor – more of a friend, really.”

“So, the Cereans had a grip on Slaradun, as they do now on Tiadun? I was unaware of that.”

Darna shook her head. “I don’t think that Harzet has any power in Cerea. He was more like a steward to Ivanat than anything else, and a friend. He certainly didn’t have his own army, not even a single guardsman. All the foreign armsmen I saw there were the ones who came with the Ganateans. In any case, Harzet’s probably dead, too.”

There was a clatter as someone set a tray down outside the door. The Aralel went to fetch it but handed it to Darna as she returned. Darna set it on a low table and began to pour. There were only a few pieces of bread.

“I don’t eat much these days,” the Aralel said. “You may have it all, increasing as you are.”

Darna clenched her teeth against the cramp. “I don’t know that it is that,” she said. “I’ve never borne a baby before, but it doesn’t feel right, and Myril thought there was something odd about it.”

The Aralel let Darna drink her first cup of tea before she resumed her questions.

“When you came in the spring, you told us that Salara had become male. When the realm dragons begin to change, the land will not stay as it is. Only Na will remain; that’s what the prophecies say.”

“Will Anara change too?”

The Aralel shook her head. “I don’t know. They are only prophecies, some of them secret from anyone except myself and the ambassadresses, but now the rumors on the streets of Anamat – what’s left of them – outpace our prophecies. Rumor is a kind of prophecy in itself. It can shape the future, even the minds of the dragons, sometimes.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of it that way, but I suppose it makes sense,” Darna said.

The Aralel cleared her throat. “In any case, you must tell me everything that happened that morning, when Slaradun fell into the sea.”

Darna took a deep breath. “Nothing about that night and that early morning fit into the way I’ve always understood things to be. Dragons don’t join with humans, not even priestesses. Not even Ara, or Iola.”

The Aralel was still for a moment. “Not usually, but I’m not so sure about Iola, and there were always stories about Ara, how Enat was not her greatest love.”

“Of course he wasn’t; Anara was. Anyone can see that. It’s like Iola with Thorat –” Darna stopped.

“The young man of Enat’s order who was here after the attack on Tiada’s gate?” the Aralel asked. “But then, he must be; it couldn’t be otherwise. Do you know much about the Defenders?”

“Certainly more than I did a year ago, or even after I met the Enatel that day in the spring, but that’s not my tale to tell.”

“No, I suppose it’s not. I’ll ask Sunna later. Do go on. Dragons don’t join with humans?”

“I didn’t think it was possible, but that has to be what it was. I fainted, I suppose, but when I woke, everything was different, not just in the land but in me. My leg was healed. I could run. These pains didn’t start right away, but there were the scars, the marks of Salara’s scales on me.”

“Let me see.” The Aralel rose and drew back the heavy curtain from one window, letting in a gray light that seemed bright against the darkness of the chamber.

Reluctantly, Darna unbuckled her belt and drew up her tunic. The Aralel gasped and shut the curtain.

“It glows with its own light, like a dragon. Are you, could you be?”

“I am not a dragon; that much I’m sure of.”

“And the thing in your belly?”

“I don’t know; I don’t think anyone can know. It’s painful, though.”

“It gives you power, power of a kind no prince of this land has ever had.” The Aralel shook herself. “I’m no prophet. I hate it when words like that come to me.”

Darna sat back down and took a piece of bread. “I don’t think anyone likes prophecy much.” She thought, though, that the Aralel should be able to handle prophecy better than anyone else. The fact that it discomfited her made Darna feel deeply uneasy.

“I still don’t want Iola to go to the dragons,” the Aralel said. “It’s a senseless sacrifice. You must try to stop her from wanting to go, even though it’s probably futile. Whatever is coming, her death won’t stop it, and Anara will take her life when she goes under the earth, or Na will.”

“I don’t think that she’d want to die any other way.”

The Aralel sighed, nodding. “True, but it serves no one. She must be made to see that. I’ll have you go to her now. You’ll stay in her quarters; it’s the safest place in the temple for you. I’ll see that a healer is sent over later to help you with the pain. Until then, please try to persuade our ambassadress that her reign is ending.”

Darna could think of a dozen arguments for why Iola wouldn’t believe that, but the Aralel already knew that it wouldn’t be easy – otherwise, she would have done it herself.

“Yes, Your Holiness,” Darna agreed.

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She pulled her shabby gray veil over her head and made her way across the peresi’s garden to the ambassadress’s quarters, walking alone because she and the Aralel had agreed that that would be least conspicuous. She looked neither to the left nor to the right, locking her focus on her destination. The young peresi on guard at Iola’s gate – who Darna did not recognize – let her in without question.

Inside the miniature temple that housed her, Iola was fuming. Not at being woken early but at the Aralel’s orders to stay on the surface of the earth, which had been repeated to her again by the elder who brought her morning tea, now cooling on the table by her sleeping nook.

“I must fly!” she said as soon as she saw Darna. She paced around her gilded chamber like a flustered sparrow, robes flapping in her wake. “This decree of the Aralel is –” She stammered. “It’s – I say it’s blasphemous. How can she ignore the dragons? She’s been there; she knows what it’s like.”

“Aren’t you glad that I survived Slaradun?” Darna asked, not really surprised that all Iola could talk about was her own journey to the dragons’ realm.

“Slaradun?” Iola said. “You were there?”

Darna nodded. “What have you heard about the last dawn there?” she asked.

Iola poured herself some tea, not bothering to offer any to Darna, who in any case had drunk her fill at the Aralel’s rooms. She drank thirstily before answering. “You told me that Salara became male, like Na, and I heard a half-moon ago that he shifted his lands into the sea. I felt uneasy the morning that it happened, and I heard the stones shift as the city sank its heels into the sea. Some of the sea dragons drew closer, many of them. I could see them from the tower that morning. I haven’t even told the Aralel, so I don’t know why I’m telling you, after all…”

“I’m not surprised that the sea dragons came. They’re wild too, aren’t they?” Darna said. “Do you know if they’re male or female?”

Iola tipped her head as she did when she wasn’t sure of herself. As a girl and as a novice in the temple, she’d been perpetually uncertain, but life as a peresi and as the ambassadress had made her deeply self-assured, so long as she didn’t stray from her practiced path. The sea dragons were just outside of her direct experience.

“Neither, I think,” she answered at last. “They’re shifting, like their element, the water.”

“Maybe all of the dragons are,” Darna said.

“I don’t know if Salara lived or died – I don’t mean that. Dragons can’t die.”

Darna’s gut turned. “What about Tiada?”

“She went to join the deepest stream. I told you that. It’s not death as we know it.” She said it as if she were trying to explain something to a child or a particularly obtuse petitioner. “The dragon joins the deepest stream when she has wearied of the human world.”

“So, she only dies to us, not to herself?” Darna asked.

“More or less,” Iola said. She was being hopelessly vague.

“Did you see Tiada in the other realm?” Darna asked.

Iola looked over to the door. It was open but no one seemed to be it the garden outside, let alone on the stoop. She whispered anyway. “I’m not supposed to speak of the other realm, you know that.”

“Did you see her or not?”

Iola glanced around again, this time at the statue of Anara. “A shadow, no more. I’m still human, even when I’m down there. She didn’t show herself to me.”

“What about Salara?”

“Only at a distance. He seemed to be in pain or sleeping. I wasn’t sure, but he did fly up with the others at the crossing time.”

Darna frowned. Iola knew that she’d been in Slaradun through the waning year and at the crossing time, but she didn’t know the end of it, except whatever Myril or the Aralel might have told her, which couldn’t be much.

“I don’t mind the thought of dying, if only I can go to the dragons’ realm again,” Iola said.

“I know you don’t mind, but other people do. The Aralel thinks it would be a senseless death.”

“It wouldn’t be. Maybe they could stop this change, bring Anara’s city back above the waves.”

“It’s not under the waves yet, not even halfway,” Darna said, “but it is sinking. Myril told me that people are leaving Anamat already, sailing to Ganat and Enomae, abandoning their places. They heard what happened in Slaradun, and they saw the waters rise here. You can hardly blame them for not wanting to drown.”

“You were there,” Iola said. “You didn’t drown.”

Darna looked to the door, wishing that she could just leave. “I didn’t, but I was all the way up in the mountains, at Salara’s gate, and he…he wouldn’t have let me drown.”

“No?” Iola sat down and looked up at Darna. “You don’t have your cane,” she observed.

“Salara is like Na,” Darna said. “You’d have to be mad to worship him, or you’d go mad, I think.”

“But you saw him?”

Darna closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “More than that,” she said, looking Iola in the eye. “Much, much more than that.” She wandered over to rest on the offering place, not at all surprised that it had taken Iola so long to notice the changes in her. Iola never paid much attention to the physical world beyond what she could touch with her body. Her jaw dropped as Darna lay back on the silken drapes and looked up at the statue of Anara rearing over her. The dragon’s teeth were bright; her eyes shone. Darna felt the currents of the earth coursing up beneath her back. This offering place was a pillar of the world. Iola felt that power every day. For a moment, Darna was almost jealous of her. It was a holy place, as holy as any except maybe the rough gates joining one realm with the other. In the ambassadress’s quarters, the realms joined in a different way, a more civilized, more human way. By temple law, only the ambassadress herself could lie there, but after Salara, Darna didn’t care. It would hardly anger Anara any more than Salara had been angered by Ivanat, and she’d survived that.

It did, however, anger Iola.

“What are you doing?!”

“Lying on your offering place, or rather, the offering place of the ambassadress. I don’t think I could do it here. I don’t think I could kill a man. You’ve never met Calar, have you? I’d half like to sink a dagger in his back before he gets me.”

She didn’t want to think about Salara anymore. Even Calar was easier to face. She didn’t really want to kill him with her bare hands so much as she wanted not to be killed herself.

“Calar didn’t come last Midsummer, not to the temple. You can’t take my place with him or with any of the others.”

Darna sat up. Her belly didn’t hurt when she lay on the offering place. “Well, that’s just the thing,” she said. “The Aralel almost asked me to when I was here in the spring. I never would have thought that I could, but now, I don’t see why I couldn’t, except that I don’t really want to die. I’d rather you didn’t either, not even in the dragons’ realm.”

“I don’t know why they’re so sure I would die. I didn’t die last year. Tiada’s shadowiness hurt, though. What does any of this have to do with Salara?”

As if in answer, a bolt of pain shot through Darna’s belly, but it was brief and left a lightness in its wake rather than an ache. “Tiada’s absence still hurts, doesn’t it?”

Iola nodded. “Please, move. Get off of there. You don’t belong there.”

Darna wasn’t so sure about that anymore. The offering place did seem to ease her pain. She moved, just not in any hurry. She sat and admired the drapes, looked carefully at the statue of Anara and the curve of the dome above her. Eventually, she got to her feet and went back to her cup of tea.

“I’m going to tell you about Slaradun, then maybe you’ll see.”

“I think the prince of Lemirun is supposed to be coming soon. You’d better go.”

Darna shook her head. “The Aralel said that I would be staying here with you. It has to be the safest place in the temple. Besides, if anyone comes, they’ll warn you; they always do, even for peresi in the outer courtyard.”

Iola shook her head. “It’s not like it used to be. Peresi are two to a chamber now. It’s not the same at all.”

“The ambassadress is a peresi too,” Darna reminded Iola.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Iola sighed and found a stool to sit on. She was thinner than she’d been a year before, but her hair was still darkly luminous and her fine bones had not lost their beauty. “If you must tell me, what happened in Slaradun?”

In answer, Darna began to take off her clothes. “You know that the prince and I were lovers,” she began as she let her tattered gray robe fall onto the floor behind her. “At first, I was mostly not a priestess to him, but I was priestess-trained, and in the end, I couldn’t help myself, even if it was against his wishes. Ivanat wanted to deny the existence of the dragons. He saw them, but foreigners were his only friends. They’d taught him most of what he knew, and he couldn’t face their mockery, so he convinced himself that what he’d seen of the dragons wasn’t real.”

Darna took off her belt and threw it onto the bed, on top of her cloak. “Ivanat needed Theranian allies, too, though, so he called on Calar of Tiadun for help. When one of Calar’s sons came, I fled.”

“You told me all of this before.”

“I did. I think I also told you about the temple in the mountains? It was old, as old as the hills. It was older, I think, than Anamat, but I could be wrong.”

“You must be wrong. Ara and Enat were the first to worship the dragons. They came here.”

“They also went into the hills. Maybe they built that place, or maybe they found it. I was inside it, in the baths, when Slaradun fell. I didn’t even hear the earth move, let alone feel it.”

“But what does that have to do with Salara?”

“I’m sorry; I skipped the most important part.” Darna pulled her tunic off over her head, revealing the scale pattern burned onto her belly. “They are fiery creatures.”

“What’s inside you?” Iola asked, her voice far away. She’d jumped past how closely Salara had touched her, had changed her, as if it were almost a matter of course to lie with a dragon, though as far as Darna knew, Iola’s skin was unmarked, unbroken.

“When Salara was done with me – and he is most definitely male – I was thrown to the earth, but rather than being broken, I was unbroken. I woke up on the rocky ground by the gate. Thorat had come to fight off the Ganateans, and I discovered that I could run. I left my stick there. I haven’t needed it since. So, I can answer that one question.”

Iola looked away.

“Ivanat had been lying with me when Salara came out of the gate. He – Ivanat – wasn’t the same either. He’d been so clear in his mind –”

“– except for denying the dragons.”

“He knew, though. Salara left him dragon-touched, literally. His madness was much worse than anything I saw among the bandits. His best friend killed him.”

“The Cerean? Harzet?”

“You heard about him?” Darna asked, surprised.

Iola shrugged. “Tiagasa visited me. She said that there were other Cereans making arrangements with Slaradun and with Tiadun, as Girizit has been doing here. She was trying to tell me that there was no point in fighting them, that I should join her in adopting their ways.”

“She should know you better than that.”

“I said that I didn’t need to welcome them, but she wants me to see Girizit, to give him audience.”

Darna’s laugh barked off the walls. “She’s the one who’s mad, even if it isn’t from the dragons. She must be, or else Giri’s changed more than anyone. Don’t you remember how much he fears and hates the dragons? He’d never come to you.”

“Don’t I remember?” Iola asked, baffled.

“Girizit is Giri,” Darna said. “He was that foreign boy who was pretending to be a scrappling, who tricked me into stealing that stone from the palace, who – I can’t believe I believed him, but he had such scars on his back from being whipped. He was terrified of the dragons, always hiding his food from the birds in case they turned out to be dragonlets and clutching his little Cerean cap to his head. Surely, you remember him?”

Iola shook her head. “I was always looking for Anara, and I saw her, too, more than I do now.” Her voice was so sad, it was almost heartbreaking, but at least she had seen the dragons and flown with them. So many had not.

Darna draped one of Iola’s blankets around her shoulders and felt a strange heat stirring inside of her, a new sensation. Iola reached for Darna’s belly, but she hesitated before touching it.

“Go ahead,” Darna said.

Iola knelt on the bare marble floor and reached out her thin fingers to trace the lines Salara had left. As her fingers touched the scale-print, it glowed like a dragonlet. She leaned in closer and kissed Darna’s belly, the heat of it rising to her lips.

“It belongs to the dragons. The Aralel’s right; you should stay here to guard it. It’s not safe outside, not even in the rest of the temple.”

Darna slid away from Iola’s covetous reach. “Do you think that I’m safe here, really?”

“You’re not important. What’s inside you is,” Iola said. “I mean, it’s not that you’re not important at all; it’s just that this is new, this is the seed of what’s to come.”

“It’s probably just a baby,” Darna said. “Villagers say that about babies all the time.”

“You can stay here when I’m under the earth,” Iola said.

“You’re not going under the earth. Everyone agrees on that.”

“I don’t, and neither do the dragons. I don’t think the elders have done a real divination. They can hardly tell me that the dragons don’t want my sacrifice.”

“With all of this, with the foreigners running across the land to steal everything they can, your death won’t be enough,” Darna said. “Surely, you must see that.”

Iola shook her head. “My going down to the dragons might give them the strength they need to shake off the foreigners, to keep a little of their land without being overrun. Anara…” She looked up at the statue and shook her head. “I like to think that she would carry me down again.”

“There’s no purpose in it,” Darna said.

“There is,” Iola insisted.

In the silence after she spoke, they heard the clang of the gate opening outside.

“There’s one more thing I should tell you: Thorat should be back in Anamat soon.”

Iola brightened at that. “Oh!” Her cheer evaporated as quickly as it had come. “But it’s no good. His usual way in is flooded.”

“I’m sure he’ll manage somehow.” Darna wondered if maybe she could crouch behind the dais with a kitchen knife and dispatch Calar when he came to spill his power into Iola, if he came at all.

One of the treasurer priestesses hurried in, and Darna ducked out of sight of the doorway.

“The prince of Onarun is here. You will receive him now,” the treasurer said.

Iola glanced in Darna’s direction. “Tell him to come back tomorrow.”

“The Aralel wishes us to keep the peace.”

“All right, let him in, then,” she said, resigned to this part of her fate, “but tell the Aralel I don’t want to see any more today.”

“As you wish, Most Blessed One.” The treasurer priestess spat out the honorific, then left in a flurry of gold and green.

Iola sighed. “I’d better prepare myself. There’s shelter in the garden; you can stay out there. I’ll get rid of him as soon as I can.”

“Be careful,” Darna said.

“I will, I promise.” Iola smiled. “And I’ll see if I can’t put that dragon-killer Calar off when he comes.”

“If he comes,” Darna said.

Iola followed her out into the garden and pointed the way to the hiding place, then ran back inside to prepare for her powerful but unwelcome petitioner. No, Darna did not envy her, not one bit.

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