Then she leapt up, her grey robe rustling around her. Her pale face brightened and the grip of exertion fell away from her features.
‘My lord!’ she cried, her voice ringing with joy.
Imladrik laughed, pushing himself away from the door to meet her. They embraced, clasping one another tight.
As he pressed against her, Imladrik drew in her familiar aromas of homecoming: coarse woollen fabric, inks that stained her fingers, crushed petals of the seaflower he had placed in her hair before he’d left. He guessed that he would smell of sweat, brine and dragon. Yethanial professed never to mind that; he doubted whether he believed her.
‘I was not expecting you,’ she said, nestling her face into his shoulder.
‘I told you I would return before nightfall.’
‘Then I did not listen.’
‘You never do.’
He pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length to get a better look at her.
He thought then, not for the first time, how different they were. Imladrik knew well enough how he looked: tall, broad-shouldered, his body tempered into hardness by the demands of riding the great drakes. He knew how severe his features were, hewn roughly, so he’d been told, like the white cliffs of Tiranoc. He knew his long hair, a dull bronze like his mother’s, hung heavily around his shoulders, pressed flat by the dragon-helms he wore in battle.
Yethanial, by contrast, was like a dusk-shadow: slight, her limbs as lean as mages’ wands, her glance quick and her smile quicker. In every movement she made, the sharpness of her scholar’s mind spilled out. In her eyes it was most unavoidable – those steady grey eyes that seemed to look within him and prise out his innermost thoughts.
It was her eyes that had snared Imladrik long ago. He had gazed into them on the windswept cliffs of Cothique during their long formal courtship and revelled in their elusive, darting intelligence. Now, after so many years together, they still had the power to captivate.
‘The flower I gave you,’ he said.
Yethanial’s hands flew to her head, searching for what remained of it. ‘It was lovely. I cherished it. But, somehow–’
‘Somehow, during the day, you forgot it was there,’ smiled Imladrik, taking her hands back and pressing them gently into his own. ‘Your work consumed you. What are you doing? May I see it?’
Yethanial looked apologetic. ‘Not finished, of course.’
She led him to the desk. A battered leather-bound book rested, clamped open, on the left-hand edge. Next to it was a pinned leaf of heavy vellum, fresh-scraped and as white as bone. She had been working on it, transcribing text from the flaking pages of the book. Only a part of one page had been completed, but Imladrik could see the emerging pattern of it. She had traced out runes carefully, leaving spaces where gold leaf and coloured inks would be applied. The text had been painstakingly drawn in black ink, and several discarded quills littered the floor around the writing desk.
‘These books were not well-made,’ she said, glancing at the open volume. ‘But their contents are precious. When I am done I will take this to Hoeth to be bound. They can create books that will last for as long as the world endures.’
Imladrik looked at the script. It wasn’t in Eltharin, even though the characters were familiar. ‘I cannot read it,’ he said.
‘Few can. It was written before the time of Aenarion – we only have copies of copies. The speech is called Filuan. These are poems. I find them beautiful.’
Imladrik tried to decipher something of them, but made no progress. He was not a gifted loremaster – only the language of swords and of dragons had ever come easily to him. ‘What do they speak of?’ he asked.
‘The same things our poets speak of,’ she said, running a finger lightly down the edge of the vellum. ‘Love, fear, the shape of the world. They must have been very like us. I would hate their words to be lost forever.’
Imladrik considered asking her to translate some for him, but decided against it. He would pretend to appreciate it, she would see through him, and a small cloud of irritation would come between them. He had long ago resigned himself to their fundamental differences.
‘I wish I could understand it as you do,’ he said softly, pulling her close again. ‘I feel like a barbarian out of the colonies.’
‘You are a barbarian out of the colonies.’
‘I miss you, when alone up there.’
‘Then stay,’ said Yethanial. ‘We can dwell wherever you wish – Kor Evril, Tor Caled, an empty barn in the mountains.’
‘Anywhere but Elthin Arvan.’
‘What is there in Elthin Arvan?’
Imladrik almost replied. He could have said: freedom, open lands as wild as at the dawn of creation, dark woods that stretched from horizon to horizon, untouched by the hand of civilisation and rich in both peril and majesty. Then there was Oeragor, the city he had founded but not seen for over twenty years, a half-finished sanctuary he had hoped to turn into a desert jewel for the two of them to grow old in together.
But he said nothing. They had covered this ground before and he knew when to retreat from a hopeless cause.
‘I am back now,’ was all he said. ‘My duties are here.’
Yethanial rested her head in the crook of his shoulder. It was an almost childlike movement; one of trust, of contentment.
‘That gladdens me,’ she said.
Dawn brought rain, hard and slanted from the east. It drummed against Tor Vael’s lead roofs and gurgled down its granite walls.
Imladrik awoke before Yethanial. He slipped soundlessly from the sheets and opened the shutters of her bedchamber. The view from the window was dove-grey and rain-blurred. In the east he could make out the smudge of the ocean. Nowhere in Cothique was far from the sea.
He breathed deeply, inhaling the salt-tang. He felt rested. He stretched, feeling long-clenched sinews in his back and shoulders unfurl.
‘My lord,’ said Yethanial, sleepily.
Imladrik smiled, turning. ‘My lady.’
She sat
