After a time, I shook Merulo gently. “Hey, are you awake?”
There was no response.
“HEY?” I tried, just a little bit louder.
“WHAT?” Merulo answered in a snarl, proving that he’d been very much awake and simply ignoring me.
I hugged his thin body tight in a placatory gesture. “It’s something Glenda said. It’s stuck in my mind.”
“The elf? I’d like to have her stuck in my teeth.”
“Gross. Anyway, so she made a fair point, that if I’d been polite enough to die when they wanted, a good number of knights would still be alive today.”
“And?”
“I mean, they’re dead because you killed them. Or your constructs did. Or, wait, you did too, as a dragon.”
“And?”
“Well, it’s just that I don’t feel bad about it.”
“So then,” Merulo’s voice rose to a shout, “why are you bothering me about this? Sleep!”
“I’m just wondering if I’m a bad person, is all.”
Under my arm, I felt his body stiffen in anger. “And who would they be to decide that? Who are any of them to pass judgement? They live like animals, ignorant of how the world could be, how I will MAKE the world. They needn’t even die, if they would stop throwing themselves at me to be slaughtered. No, there’s no merit in docility, in obedience, in—in scientific stupidity. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ only the truth of my work and the lies of the Church. You are with me. You’ve spat up all the filth they fed you, and now you will help me tear the restraints free from this world.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Truth and lies. Hadn’t thought ofit like that. Good talk, Merulo, I’ll just . . . huh.” I nestled closer, unsure if I should reveal that I was now more confused than ever.
Still, it was better than thinking about that other thing. I wondered if, before he drifted off to sleep for a second time, Merulo felt my trembling.
Returning to a void of nothingness, even of the temporary sort, held little appeal to me. I’d wake, I knew I’d wake, this time and the next, but someday I wouldn’t.
Someday, I would die again.
Drawing what comfort I could from the presence of another warm body, I ordered my eyes to shut, waiting for brain-exhaustion to take me where I wouldn’t go willingly.
CHAPTER 31
In Which Glenda Admits that Perhaps It Was a Tad Ambitious to Think that Her Presence Would Be Enough to Offset the Human Incompetence of the Order. In Which, if It Had Been a Purely Elven Operation, then Of Course They Would Have Known He Was a Dragon, and Of Course They Would Have Known He Had Time Magic. In Which She Needs the Support of Her Own Kind, and In Particular, In Which She Needs Access to a Special Resource.
All elf children knew the story of the mongrel witch.
A passing she-dragon, seeking to ruin a noble elf man for her own cruel amusement, seduced Chadwick Sproutjoy. Only after the birth, when he saw the warped child that resulted from their pairing, did shock restore the man to his good senses. He slew the beast and earned an admirable fortune all in one stroke. The man remained a great leader, if now whispered of with gentle pity for his past. And, in a gracious display of tolerance, the daughter was surgically corrected and raised as an elf.
The mongrel witch paid back their generosity, as sheproved to be an unending well of natural magic. In adulthood, however, her dragon nature dominated; she became volatile, self-isolating, choosing to live as independently as the Church would allow, in a hut that wandered on goat legs, deep in the Swallowing Swamps.
This was who Glenda now sought.
After the slaughter and chaos of the field, she had returned—on foot, all their steeds having been monstrously transformed—to the assembled force waiting to storm the sorcerer’s castle. Just as before, they’d traveled through the fog, up the rising slope of the land, but no constructs met them with flaming eye or bared splinter-fang. Instead, they found wooden husks, strewn like toys after a child’s play session. Even the fog lost its power as they walked, dissipating so the sky shone a clear blue at the summit. The tapestry of forest that spread out beneath them, unchoked by fog for the first time in decades, spoke to a victory already won.
Reaching the castle, the forces of Order had no need to bash through the doors. They found them broken explosively from the inside, as if a massive force had exited the castle at great velocity.Perhaps a black dragon in a terrible hurry, Glenda thought, her mouth crumpling.
Inside, she’d separated from her elven kin and retraced her steps. This time when she passed through the library door, nobody waited within a convoluted pentagram. There was no cadaverous man to laugh at her and spatter his own foul blood. What’s more, the room had been emptied. Wide and high-ceilinged, it had formerly contained shelf upon shelf bristling with the sorcerer’s dark tomes. But not a scrap of wood or page remained.
The hideous sorcerer and his traitor paramour had escaped.
The other elves found her kicking the walls of the emptied library, senseless with fury.
