with the dragon herself, and they would figure out with the spirit how to steal Rothbert’s potions and rob him of his powers later.
To steal the flasks with his lizards and ingredients for magic solutions, she will send a spirit to his principality. The dragon will have to fly over the sea again and wait until she summons him. This will be soon, the war has almost begun. The messengers with her announcement have already been sent, and the place of the first battle has been set. The dragon will have to fly to her on that day and no later, and only if she needs his help. That is her only wish. When they met on the cleared ground in the thicket, he bowed his head again in reverence, as if he hadn’t noticed the glint of a comb in her hair that had been stolen from his treasure.
«You will go to his castle,» Rhianon insisted. It was difficult to get anything out of the spirit, but she demanded, pleaded, threatened with clenched fists until he began moaning.
«I don’t want to go there,» he squeaked.
«And what you want is of no concern to anyone.»
«Maybe I’d better follow Vivian.»
«He’ll be out in the woods all night. We’ll have to keep an eye on him later, not now.»
«I would rather follow other dragon. He lives in the caves near the Duchy of Rothbert. He is the one who keeps the prince in fear. He is a wise man. He has a tower of books carved there in the mountain. He keeps the scrolls of an angel who called himself Mastema. You are not interested in that.»
She almost dropped the brush she was running through her hair. Mastema! Madael! He was the same under every name. Only his character was different for everyone.
«With his runes, his coils, his annals, and so much more, I learned in his own tower,» she cut out. «There is not much the dragon can teach me. He is only a follower, not an innovator. Madael was the first to rise, and the others only followed.»
«And now they’re all biting their claws in frustration. Take me, for example…»
«I don’t care about your complaints. If you wish to be with me, serve me, but if you will not do as I command, I swear I will find a spell that will banish you once and for all.»
For a moment the room was silent. She could even hear the fire crackling on the logs. Any sound would have seemed loud now.
«Well, all right,» the spirit agreed reluctantly and in such a mournful tone as if she were sending him to his own execution.
Rhianon wasn’t going to feel sorry for him.
«While you look around the castle and steal anything of value, I’ll have a word with the dragon you told me about.»
«You’ll have an easier time with him,» the spirit cheered up. «He could be called a scholar. At least he has more of his memory than most. Or rather, he’s forgotten almost nothing. You know what I mean?»
She nodded. The sight of the angels, who retained memories of their former glory only in their dreams, depressed her. To her mind they were magnificent even now, looking like the living contents of a jewel box in their dragon armor. But they had been different before, truly beautiful, wise and seductive. Now, when they looked at their own reflection, they could feel only pain. So they preferred to gaze at the jewels and gold as a reminder of their former brilliance.
Some dragons still retained their former minds, they also collected books. Madael said that the greatest punishment for most of them was the loss of their sanity. It is hardest for those who have lost all or part of their memory, because the mind tries to return to something former, but runs into a wall of timelessness. It’s painful to know that you have to remember something that’s slipping away. But from here on earth, the creators of poetry, music, and verse emerged. Their partial memory pours out only as fantasy, and their path lies toward the Cathedral of Thunder and the ritual knife. At the thought of the blood sacrifice, Rhianon shuddered. Those renegades of Madael’s army, condemned as punishment to feel like mere humans, sacrifice their mortal bodies to gain their lost wings. But at least they can do so by becoming their former selves, albeit extremely angry, while magical beings have no such option. It is only for those who have suffered most. Rhianon imagined how crushed an angel felt, retaining scrappy memories of brilliance but forced to consider himself a mere mortal. People do not accept him, heaven rejects him. Hell puts a choice before him. And then there is the Cathedral of Thunder and the bloody path to it. Sometimes she dreamed that she was walking down this path lined with roses. Her feet are already wounded and bloody from their thorns, and there is still no end to the path. Madael said that this path appears only during an eclipse of the sun, when one of the chosen ones is ready to take it. No man would ever walk this path, only those who belonged to his army. Rhianon was not one of them. By tearing her own guts out during the ritual, she could only die. Or did the fact that she had slept with a fallen angel make her equal to his host?
She had many difficult questions. Perhaps the wise dragon could answer them all. Of course, only if he retained all of his former mind, not just the remnants of it.
Though if he collected the scrolls that held the symbols and secrets of the angels, then Rhianon could read them herself. She understood their language, so the mysterious writings would be comprehensible to her as well. She knew that the important thing was not to trouble oneself with trying to read or decipher something, if she was strong enough to do so, and if she got close enough to the forbidden, the mysteries would reveal themselves to her. That was how she first understood the magical symbols, just by looking at them. That was how she began to understand the language of beasts and birds. That’s how she learned to read minds.
And that wasn’t all she could do. She could see more clearly than dragons. She could sense the presence of supernatural beings from afar. And she could hear everything for miles around. She could hear everything, down to the smallest of sounds. Sometimes it seemed to her that not a cacophony of voices, but a whole cobweb wove the world, and in this cobweb she could distinguish any sound.
Thus she knew that the dragon was awake even before she approached his cave. It was hard to call it a cave, to be exact. From a distance the magnificent tower, with its many staircases and branching passages, might have looked like a real building, but only up close did she realize that it was carved entirely out of the mountain. It had once been a mountain range, but now it took the shape of a bastion. It would have passed for a fairy joke if the light in the distant windows had not been burning.
As they approached, another oddity became apparent. The tower had no gates or doors, only arched windows, disproportionately huge and devoid of glass or any visible barrier. They seemed to beckon birds to fly in.
Rianon could not fly. It was the one ability that Madael had never given her. But she had her pegasus. He could easily carry her to one of the huge windows. This time, though, he hesitated for a long time. She reassured him in a quiet whisper, explaining that she would be fine. Just in case, he would have to stay close to one of the windows to help her out. They had been traveling together a lot lately and had become very close. Rhianon could easily read his mind because he let her do it herself. So she learned that before, that is, when he was still an elf, his name was Noreus, and there was a time when he sought advice from this very wise dragon, under whose tower they were now. All members of the magical race who could not remember something themselves turned to him for advice or help. The fairy slipped out of one window in tears seemed to be no exception, and apparently the dragon had refused to help her or told her something that upset her greatly. Rhianon glanced at a figure in greenish
