stillness even in her movement, a purity of intention. A thread of eternity woven into her mortality.
“I don’t know,” he admitted at last.
Early the next morning, Jordhan called Gaven and Rienne to the poop deck and pointed to the coast ahead of the Sea Tiger. Gaven scanned the coast, but he found that his eyes were still on the Prophecy, and he had a hard time discerning what Jordhan was pointing at.
“The cove?” Rienne asked.
“I think we’ve found our harbor,” Jordhan answered.
Finally Gaven saw the cove cut into the coast ahead of them. The mountains rose up on the near side of the cove, but on the far side, a beach sloped gently up to level ground.
“The gates to Argonnessen stand open,” he said.
The words stirred something in his memory-the gates of Khyber? The Soul Reaver’s gates? That portal had figured prominently in the Prophecy surrounding the battle at Starcrag Plain and his fight against the Soul Reaver. But he felt there was something else…
He smiled at himself. A few months ago, the Prophecy had been so vivid in his mind that it leaped to mind unbidden, overwhelming him with visions and dire warnings. Now he searched his memory and caught only the hem of a fleeting thought-the gates to the land of dragons… or something like that. He didn’t miss the nightmares, the visions that seized him even when he was awake, the constant sense that he remembered events an instant before they occurred. But as he had said to Rienne, he did miss the sense of purpose.
“The gates to Argonnessen,” Rienne echoed.
While Gaven was lost in thought, Jordhan returned to the helm to steer the Sea Tiger into the cove. Rienne leaned over the bulwark, staring at the distant beach.
She glanced over her shoulder at him with a grin. “You have a way of making everything sound so momentous.”
“Don’t you think it is? How many people have even seen this land, let alone walked into its heart?”
“Perhaps I’ve grown jaded. You and I spent years venturing into caverns far below the earth where no one had ventured before. Somehow that never seemed so… weighty.”
“It turned out to be, though, didn’t it? That’s where I found that nightshard, the Heart of Khyber.”
Rienne’s face clouded. That single moment had set world-shaking events in motion-from speeding along the schism of House Thuranni, to Gaven’s sentence in Dreadhold, and ultimately his confrontation with the Soul Reaver. It had caused them both a great deal of pain.
“We were so young,” Gaven added. “Too young to appreciate the significance of what we were doing.”
“Or perhaps now we’re inclined to exaggerate the importance of our tiny quavers in the voice of the Prophecy.”
A surge of anger rose in his chest. “You think I’m being arrogant? Is that what you think this is about?”
Rienne turned and leaned back against the bulwark. Gaven expected her face to mirror his own anger. Instead he saw sadness. “I still don’t know what this is about,” she said.
Her calm demeanor did nothing to soothe his anger. “How many times do I have to explain it to you?”
“Just until you find an explanation that makes sense.”
“Saving the world doesn’t make sense to you?”
“Saving the world, Gaven? Listen to yourself.”
Gaven was completely dumbfounded. “You think that’s pride.”
“I think the world doesn’t need saving. You said it earlier-this place is eternal, and the world with it. Nations and empires will come and go, we mortals will live our lives struggling like mad to leave any kind of lasting mark on it, but the voice of the Prophecy continues. Like the drums and the drone, unchanging beneath the melody.”
“Eternity doesn’t make that struggle less important. Maybe this isn’t about saving the world. But it might very well be about saving everything we know as the world-all of Khorvaire, for example. I think that’s important enough.”
“And you think you can do that.”
“I think I have to.”
Rienne turned back and looked out over the glassy water. “I’m sorry, Gaven. It seems my heart’s just not in this yet. I don’t know what I’m doing here, what my part in all this is.”
He put a hand on her back. “I’m glad you’re with me, anyway.”
She gave a slow nod. Then something caught her eye, and she pointed. “What’s that?”
Gaven’s gaze followed her pointing finger off to port and upward. Two dark shapes wheeled in the air- dragons. There could be no doubt.
“The dragons are back,” Rienne breathed. “Sovereigns help us.”
“We’d better tell Jor-”
The voice of the lookout cut him off. “Dragons!”
“Do you have a plan?” Rienne asked.
In answer, Gaven stretched out his fingers, feeling the wind that drove their ship toward the cove. His dragonmark itched again, and the wind gusted briefly, then grew steadily. He felt the wind move through him, felt the storm gathering in his mind. The brilliant blue drained out of the sky, and a veil of gray draped the sun.
“What are you doing?” Rienne said. “They’ll think we’re attacking!”
Dark clouds gathered above them, responding to the surge of anger he felt. “I’m trying,” he said, “to get the ship into the cove.” Speaking was difficult. Every word sparked a gust of wind.
Rienne looked toward the cove, then back at the panicked crew. “I’ll get the crew below.”
The dragons were coming in fast, adjusting their course to account for the Sea Tiger’s burst of speed. They would be upon her before she reached the cove. Gaven couldn’t read their intent-they might have been coming to parley, or purely out of curiosity. But the sunken ship they’d passed in the channel suggested otherwise. Gaven growled in frustration, and thunder rumbled in the clouds overhead. The winds grew stronger, and the clouds roiled in a great maelstrom.
They were close enough to identify now. One was the same dragon that he’d seen before, at the sentinel pillars. Its wings didn’t so much flap as undulate along the length of its serpentine body, and it managed to ride the wind better than the other. Sunlight shone gold on its scales. The new dragon was a bit smaller, but its white body was thicker. It flapped its wings furiously in the wind.
They weren’t too large, by dragon standards-both were smaller than Vaskar had been, but Gaven would barely reach the shoulder of either one. The gold dragon had two sharp horns sweeping back from its brow, and a number of small tendrils extending like a beard from its cheeks and chin. A thin crest started just behind its horns and ran the length of its neck, matching the twin membranes of its fanlike wings. Where the gold gave an air of wisdom and subtlety, the white dragon was all predatory hunger. A short, thick crest topped its wolflike head, and thick plating started at its neck and its heavy tail.
The gold circled above the ship, and a moment later the white landed heavily on the deck, right in front of Gaven. The deck creaked as the galleon keeled forward, and Gaven stumbled backward to avoid sliding right into the dragon’s claws. The dragon growled deep in its throat, and it took a moment for Gaven to realize that it was forming words in Draconic.
“You should not be here, meat,” the dragon said, prowling a few steps closer to Gaven. It ran a blue-white tongue over the teeth on one side of its mouth.
Meat-dragons sometimes used the same word for humanoids as they did for food. A vivid memory sprang to Gaven’s mind: Vaskar’s bronze-scaled mouth closing around the neck of a wyvern. He shook the memory from his head. He would not be meat, and neither would any other person on the Sea Tiger.
“I’ve come to learn the wisdom of the dragons,” Gaven said in Draconic.
The dragon pulled its head back, evidently surprised to be answered in its own language. Then it snarled and snaked forward again. “Then you’ve made a fatal mistake, meat.” It bared its daggerlike teeth and started padding toward Gaven.
“You’re the one who has erred,” Gaven said.
Thunder rumbled overhead as if to underscore his words, and Gaven thrust his arms forward. A ball of lightning formed around him then hurtled at the dragon as a mighty bolt and a resounding clap of thunder. The force of it knocked the dragon back and over the bulwark. It thrashed about for a moment before catching air under its wings again.
