"I don't. He does. This is not my image, Kaylin; it is taken from him; I am merely giving it a shape and form that we can also witness."

Maggaron spoke. Even the acoustics of the room failed to magnify his words enough to make them audible to Kaylin. But Bellusdeo was standing inches from where he knelt; she didn't have that problem. She laughed. The sound was a shock of warmth that traveled up Kaylin's spine to her ears, poking her insides on the way there.

"She's beautiful," Kaylin whispered, seeing it clearly for the first time. She would have said more, but the Bellusdeo of Maggaron's memory threw her arms wide and spun in a circle, as if she were a child. No, Kaylin thought, seeing her expression, not a child. The movement was ebullient, but it was deliberate, as well.

Her eyes were perfect gold.

Bellusdeo stepped away from Maggaron, who continued to kneel; when she stood once again above the pool's center, she bowed. To him. Then she laughed again and said something that Kaylin would have paid a week's salary to understand. Two weeks'.

Maggaron's tears had stopped; his face was wet with their tracks, and his eyes were shadowed by both wonder and apprehension.

Bellusdeo began to transform. Kaylin had seen such a transformation only a few times, because it was, strictly speaking, illegal in the Empire without the Emperor's express permission. If she'd had any questions about the Arkon's visceral reaction, she forgot them: Bellusdeo stretched and elongated, taking at last the shape and form of a Dragon Queen.

CHAPTER 17.

She was golden. Her scales were the color of Dragon happiness or Dragon peace; they shone in the room like contained lights, as if she were translucent and had swallowed the sun in her flight. Her wings were folded across her back, and her tail swept past the pool's edge, brushing through the three witnesses like a visible breeze.

"Tara," Kaylin whispered, unable to take her eyes off the Dragon. "Did she speak before she died?"

"Yes."

"What did she say?"

"I didn't understand it," Tara replied. "Did they?"

"I...I'm not sure. I find Lord Sanabalis and the Arkon very, very difficult to read or understand. The Arkon was upset, if that helps."

"Not really. These days, he's always upset." Kaylin squared her shoulders and left Severn and Tara. She approached Maggaron alone, her hand touching the hilt of the sword she carried. It was cool against her palm; it caused her no pain, no tingling, no itch.

"Maggaron."

He nodded, still staring at the Dragon that Bellusdeo had become. A starving man would have looked at food on a distant table with less longing.

"Is that the Dragon known as Bellusdeo?"

She felt his shock-and his disapproval; he mastered both quickly, remembering that foreigners were allowed to be ignorant. "Yes."

"Is there a reason that she would want to die?"

She expected shock, horror, anger; what she saw instead was sorrow. Sorrow was harder to deal with. She retreated into quiet professionalism instead. "I a.s.sume the answer is yes."

Maggaron said nothing.

Kaylin took a deep breath and made a decision. "Maggaron, I think she's trying to reach our world."

He continued to stare at the Dragon. Thankfully, the Dragon's image was silent. "I think she's tried eight times now."

"Chosen-"

"I know this is hard for you. I don't know how hard, no. I'm not Norannir, I've never been trained to be an Ascendant. I don't really understand what an Ascendant is. But I know it's hard. I don't want to make it harder-but I don't have much of a choice."

He nodded, but this time he looked away; she could almost see him straining to do it. "Chosen, there are matters that Ascendants do not know. Why do you think that Bellusdeo has attempted to reach this world? And why eight times?"

"Because she's been seen. There were witnesses."

"Were they of the People?" he asked a little too quickly.

"No. One of them," she added as he opened his mouth to speak, "was me."

Clearly the Chosen were considered impeccable witnesses, at least in comparison to unknown outsiders. He glanced once at the mirror's image of his beloved Dragon, but he was torn between agitation and a strange excitement. "Where, Chosen? Where did you see her?"

"In the streets of this fief." Technically, this wasn't entirely accurate, but as Kaylin wasn't writing a report or being debriefed by a cranky Leontine, it was good enough.

"Where is she?"

This was the tricky part. "She wasn't well when we found her. Tara brought her directly to the Tower-and the three Dragons who are currently in it-but she didn't survive. I'm sorry." Watching hope die was difficult; being the one who killed it was worse. Kaylin had been trained to deliver bad news to nervous parents and distraught spouses, but it had always, always been gut-wrenching.

"Was she injured?"

"No. I think she was ill."

"Impossible." He turned away. Turned back. "But it's impossible that she be here at all. You said this was her eighth attempt to reach your world?"

"...Yes."

"She told you this?"

"No, not exactly. The Arkon, a visiting Dragon-and the oldest Dragon in the Empire, as far as we know-implied that there would be nine attempts."

"Nine?"

She nodded. "Is that number significant to you?"

"No."

d.a.m.n. "Me, either. Maggaron, we a.s.sume there were eight attempts because she died today."

He looked confused, and Kaylin honestly didn't blame him. "This would be the eighth time she's died in the fief of Tiamaris."

Not surprisingly, this didn't decrease the Ascendant's confusion at all. "What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said. The reason we know about her at all is because we discovered her body. And then we discovered her body again. And again. There are seven identical corpses in a magical preservation room in this Tower. I'm not sure where the eighth body is, yet-but it's somewhere in the Tower, as well."

"Chosen, my apologies, but are you certain?" he asked in the tone of voice generally reserved for accusations of insanity.

"Yes. If you want to look at them, we can take you there now." Turning to Tara, she added, "We can take him there now, can't we?"

"To the morgue, yes." She lifted her hands; Maggaron shouted. It was wordless, but the meaning was clear. "Ascendant," Tara said quietly, "I will need to use this mirror at some point. But I will leave the image as it stands until that time comes. Will that suffice?"

He lowered both his head and the line of his shoulders. "Yes, Lady. Thank you, Lady."

"Do you fully understand that these images are taken from your memories?"

"Yes, Lady. But it has been so long. So long since I have seen her. I cannot now recall her so clearly and so perfectly as your mirror has done; she is buried beneath the weight of other memories." He bowed deeply. When he rose, he smiled at Kaylin; it was a shadowed, fragile smile. "Please, take me to your morgue."

It wasn't her morgue, and she wanted to point this out, but couldn't think of a way of doing so that didn't sound childish or argumentative. She was certain Tiamaris could have done it, and was mostly certain that Maggaron would escape unscathed. It was never a good idea to misattribute ownership of something that belonged to a Dragon.

But the point was moot. Maggaron was led to the morgue and when he entered it, he froze in the door. When he started to move again, he moved slowly and deliberately toward the seven corpses. As Tara had guessed, the eighth hadn't made its way here, yet. He walked from corpse to corpse, uncovering each in turn, but touching nothing except their eyelids.

At last he said, "My apologies for doubting you, Chosen." He was quiet, and he was visibly jarred, but he wasn't upset. "Seven. And you've said there was an eighth?"

She nodded. "When we found the eighth she was alive, but not by much."

"You said your Elder thought there should be nine?"

Kaylin nodded again. "He's not my Elder, by the way; he's a Dragon."

"What do you call him, then? What is his t.i.tle?"

"We call him any d.a.m.n thing he wants to be called. At the moment, that's Arkon. The Arkon."

Maggaron nodded gravely. "My apologies. The Arkon, then. He said there should be nine bodies?"

"He was slightly upset at the time, and he didn't really offer much in the way of explanation. You have to understand something: she doesn't look like a Dragon to us in this form; even her eyes-"

"Her eyes are wrong, yes. And no."

"I want to hear more about the no; I've heard enough about the yes."

"The last time I saw her, her eyes were this color."

"I don't understand. It's magical-when we examined the corpses magically, the eyes were gold. But only then. We can't dispel the magic." She shook her head and continued. "We thought she was human. We thought there was a good chance that these bodies were originally seven very different corpses, and that they'd been transformed before death somehow."

He shook his head.

"But the Arkon now believes that she is, in fact, the mortal form of a Dragon in some respects."

"What are his concerns?"

"She has no subcutaneous evidence of scales. Her skin is much thicker than normal human skin, but that's not the defining feature of a Dragon."

"Chosen, you said she was alive when you found her this time."

"Yes."

"Did she speak to you?"

"Yes."

"What did she say?"

Kaylin hesitated, but it was brief. "She asked me to kill her."

This, at least, Maggaron hadn't been expecting.

"I didn't," she added quickly.

"You are Chosen."

He might as well have said "You have blue spots" for all the sense it made. "I don't think she asked me to kill her because I'm Chosen," she told him with a bit more heat than she'd intended. "I think she asked me to kill her because she recognized the sword I'm carrying. She wanted me to kill her with this sword."

"And you refused her?"

"Yes, I refused her. Killing helpless strangers isn't in my job description. Would you have done what she asked?"

He looked at the scabbard that held what had once been a giant's two-handed greatsword. "Did the sword not speak to you?" he finally asked. It wasn't an answer.

Kaylin could guess what his answer would have been, and she didn't like it much. "No. I've never heard the sword speak."

"You aren't trained to listen."

"No."

"Unsheathe the sword, Chosen."

Kaylin looked dubiously at the sheath, remembering just how much of a ha.s.sle it had been to get the sword into it the first time. "She's not here now," she replied, evading the request.

"She is not, no. But you will understand more if you hold the sword." He looked at the sheath again, his eyes narrowing. "The sheath stills her voice. Where did you acquire it?"

"It was a gift."

"It would have been considered a curse-and a great evil-among my kin."

"I got that. Tell me why."

"I...cannot." He turned away.

"You can't? Or you won't?"

"I was trained as an Ascendant candidate. I was chosen to become one of the Ascendants. I was the last. Bellusdeo found me, and Bellusdeo chose me. I've never understood why. I was not the strongest, not the wisest, not the quickest. But she chose."