The opening of the library door startled Deirdre awake, and she sat up quickly, rigid, prepared to rebuke whoever dared enter without knocking. She paused when she saw who was there.
'Hello, Mother,' Deirdre said quietly.
Robyn Kendrick, High Queen of the Isles, nodded wearily at her younger daughter. It seemed, Deirdre thought, that her mother did everything wearily these days.
'Are you reading, Daughter?' she asked. Robyn's black hair, unlike her husband's of brown, showed no trace of gray. It fell straight and full over her shoulders and back, past her waist, to the level of her knees. Her eyes, of deep green, were bright and alert, though lines of care now spiderwebbed outward from the corners. She walked with all the grace of her station, but Deirdre suspected that her mother sometimes wanted to cast that mantle aside and return to her life of simple tenderness and care, the life of a druid.
Twenty years before, Robyn had been the most accomplished member of that order, studying under the Great Druid, Genna Moonsinger herself. With the passing of the land from the hands of the Earthmother into the watchful protection of Chauntea, goddess of agriculture, Robyn-unlike most of the other druids of the Moonshaes- had changed her faith to the worship of Chauntea.
Deirdre thought that perhaps, unlike the bulk of her compeers, Robyn had sensed the truth of the Earthmother's passing and had turned to a living deity to pursue the pathway into the future. More likely, thought Deirdre, she had understood that her role as queen would take her from the lands and wilds she had grown to love. Her daughters sensed that this choice of their mother's-to take the hand of the man she had loved, at the expense of the places she had sworn to tend-was a burden that she carried with her to this day.
'Did you meet with your father and the lords?' inquired Robyn, sitting in one of the chairs before the cold fireplace. Though the hearth was bare, she leaned forward, as if seeking some sort of residual warmth.
'Yes. Earl Blackstone, as always, was quite persuasive.'
Robyn sighed. 'We need him, now-you know that. Without the gold he mines and pays in tribute to the king, we wouldn't be able to trade for even minimal goods. His efforts keep thousands of Ffolk from starving each winter.'
'I know. You don't have to convince me of that.' Deirdre didn't particularly care about the lord and his mines, or the trading needed to sustain her people. She did, however, know that Lord Blackstone was the most powerful lord on the island-after her father, of course-and thus, on his visits to Callidyrr, she made every effort to impress him with her acuity and intelligence. She remembered that he still had two sons and had determined that one day she would meet them.
'And you know that your father sails for Waterdeep in a week?'
'Yes. You were to remain here in his place.'
'But now I am needed in Blackstone to inspect the new mines our esteemed lord wishes to open-to sanction the violation of a Moonwell.' Robyn's voice remained quiet, her manner somber. Nothing in her tone betrayed other than the logical necessity of the mine, yet her daughter saw a deep bitterness in her mother's eyes.
Robyn looked out the open windows, her expression wistful. The rain did not enter the room but lashed against the courtyard beyond the window. They could feel the moisture on the freshening wind. The queen wished to close the windows, Deirdre knew, but the princess stubbornly remained seated. Something about this storm appealed to her, and if it caused her mother to leave her alone, so be it.
Surprisingly, Robyn rose and crossed to the windows herself, pulling each shutter closed and latching it in turn. When the last shutter was closed, a cloak of semidarkness pervaded the library.
'Mother,' Deirdre said, suddenly bold, 'what does Chauntea tell you of these storms? Does she offer us no succor? Should we not pray to a different god for deliverance?'
She expected her mother's response to be anger at her sacrilege. Indeed, that was part of the reason she had asked the question. Instead, Robyn surprised her again.
'We can pray to whatever gods we like,' she said, her voice level. 'But I am beginning to think that they have all forsaken us.'
Deirdre looked at her mother in surprise. The princess was startled to find the queen's eyes boring into her own, flashing with an emerald intensity that the young woman found unsettling. Immediately Deirdre cast her eyes down to the floor, her face flushing. She felt guilty, as though she had been caught doing something wrong.
As softly as she had entered, Robyn left the room. Deirdre, standing in the center of the dim library, looked after her mother and wondered.
The expanse of ice stretched to the encircling horizon, and for uncountable leagues beyond. Windswept, so bleak it was almost featureless, the glaciers and snowpack would have glared beneath rays of bright sunlight. But so far north did they lie that even now, in late spring, the sun was a pale sphere climbing through a shallow arc, never moving far from the southern limits of view.
Winds moaned, breathing frost across snowdrifts and jagged shards of ice. No other sound disturbed this region; no wolves howled, no birds cried, nor seals barked, for the glacial waste was utterly devoid of life.
Then one day, after eternal seasons of lifeless chill, something moved. It began as a patch of ice buckled, sending shivers across the face of whiteness. Cracks appeared, and light snow puffed away, flying from niches and crannies where it had escaped from the wind.
Then a great sheet of the surface pitched into the air, toppling to the side, crashing into a million pieces. Below, a vast chasm lay revealed, and in the depths of that chasm, a presence stirred.
Gotha moved for the first time in more than two centuries. Talos the Destroyer had summoned him to his task and imbued the dracolich with the strength to free himself from the crushing tons of ice.
The creature that emerged from the depths of the glacier resembled only superficially the powerful wyrm that had come here more than two hundred years before. The scales, blood-red chips of plate as hard as bone, still coated the serpentine crimson body. Yet now, as the monster moved, many of those scales cracked and fell away, revealing flesh that had long since frozen and organs that had ceased to serve any purpose, for the dragon was now a being of the undead.
The huge wings unfurled, and they, too, cracked and splintered, grown brittle from the long generations of frozen inactivity. When they finally reached their full span, they looked more like spiderwebs than wings, for most of their leathery surface had broken away.
Yet, when Gotha pressed them downward, he flew, borne aloft by a dark power that transcended the mere pressure of wing surface against air. He sprang into the air and gained altitude slowly, driving the great limbs against the wind and feeling the air pass through the shattered membranes. And then he knew: It was the power of his undeath that supported him, the might of Talos coursing through the corrupt body.
At the thought of that capriciously malevolent deity, Gotha raised his head and uttered a bellow of rage. His hatred, having festered for centuries, now spewed forth, and all of it exploded toward that hated presence, the whispering voice in his brain that he had known as Talos the Destroyer.
Yet now, as he flew, Gotha sensed the god's will, a compulsion that came into his mind. He struggled to resist, but he could not. The vow he had made so long ago still bound him. He would do the task toward which Talos compelled him.
Deep in the dragon's mind, however, hatred and resentment seethed, building into a volatile compulsion for vengeance. Someday, somehow, the dracolich would strike out at the god who had betrayed him, but having passed so many centuries already, he would remain patient.
After hours of flight, the ice fell behind, breaking into a fringe of alabaster chips bobbing in the storm-tossed waters of the northernmost oceans. The vista below evolved from the unending, still, and lifeless white of the icecap to the constantly pitching and heaving surface of gray water, flecked with foaming whitecaps. For long hours, the monster passed no island, no settlement, human or otherwise, in its great southward flight.
The seascape below held no fear for the dracolich. Indeed, Gotha felt as though he could fly forever. But he also knew that he would not have to.
The first spots of rock showed as little more than bald crowns thrusting up between the waves like desperate swimmers struggling for air. When the gray water rose, it often buried these tiny bits of land, too small, really, to be called islands. Nevertheless, these rocks were important, for they confirmed to Gotha that he followed the right course.
Indeed, shortly afterward, the dracolich saw larger rocks, some with patches of green showing on narrow shelves perched high on steep shoulders, out of reach of the grasping brine.
