Chapter Nine:
The Trance
Chapter Nine:
The Trance
Saeunn stood by the window of her bedchamber staring up into the sky. It was still dark, but there was the faintest trace of dawn on the eastern horizon. The window was open and a chilly wind was blowing. Her white cotton curtains billowed around her. Her blonde hair was loosened from her braids. It whipped about. Saeunn didn’t pay it any mind.
Ulla had been right. She had only meant to glance out and say good night to the moon. Instead, she’d gotten awestruck by the moonlight, and by the stars twinkling.
Saeunn shivered. She’d stood in the same spot for hours feeling the delicate weight of moonbeams on her skin. She had been listening to the stars sing the Dragon Song.
Tonight there was unrest. The dragons were having troubled dreams, and the song was not calming them very well. The stars did not seem to know why this was happening. Or if they did, it was something they could not say to her because she was so young. But she did catch one part of the song. It was the part that had frightened her since she was a very young elfling.
Hidden in the dragon clutch an ancient evil spirit lurks.
Made of emptiness, it stays wherever dragon life is slain.
It would steal the dragon thunder,
it would kill them as they slumber.
Frustrating not to understand why they sang this.
But then there was the calm moon, splashing her light to the Earth.
Planets, comets, Sun and Moon,
keep the dragons’ world in tune.
Standing in the shower of moonlight, Saeunn thought about her future.
There was the Plan. The hundred-year plan that every elf child of Amberstone was supposed to follow. Visit the other elf-kin in the Old Countries. Learn their skills. Healing. Mind-speaking. Spend days, even years, talking with your star. Listen to the Dragon Song and try and try to understand how it holds the world together. Then, when you are ready, truly ready, return home and stare into the giant eye of your dragon, the Drake of Amberstone.
You were supposed to find your purpose in life there.
So far, she had followed the Plan exactly. She’d spent years learning healing in the Old Countries. She’d lived with the Smoke Elves and studied their mind-speak and tree-talk. Now she was in the Mark of Shenandoah on a diplomatic mission. Her family had trusted her to carry it out.
She wanted to. She liked doing things well. She wasn’t particularly proud of that fact, because most things came naturally to her and you couldn’t really be proud of just having a talent. She did feel like she was doing a good thing when she was using the talents that the stars gave her in the best way she could.
And so far she had done what she was supposed to here in Raukenrose. She’d been a true elfling when she’d first come. She’d had the appearance of a human child of perhaps six. The following years had been time for inner growth as well as outer—the elven version of puberty. Using the healing skills and bodily understanding she’d picked up from the Old Country elves, over the past ten years she had let herself mature into a teenager in appearance to match her changing personality.
She’d also studied the ways of men. She’d learned how human children behaved, and what humans thought of elves. She’d gotten to know the country and the people very well.
Why was she feeling uneasy tonight?
Her window faced southwest, and this morning the moon was setting to the south, so that Saeunn had a full view of it. Saeunn closed her eyes and felt the last moonbeams reach her before it sank under the horizon. As soon as the half moon disappeared, its spell on her was broken.
Saeunn sighed. She would sleep now. She didn’t absolutely have to, because being in a moon trance was almost as good as sleep. But she had a full day ahead of her.
Soon it would be time for her to leave Raukenrose. She did want to get back to Amberstone Valley, her birthplace. It was a place where parts of the living, dreaming dragon stuck out through the surface of the Earth. In Amberstone Valley, the ground itself churned with dragon heat. Muddy fountains there seethed with sulfurous dragon breath. Boiling water touched by dragon fire erupted in geysers into the sky. Even the river that formed the valley steamed.
In Amberstone Valley, you could gaze into the half-open eye of a dreaming dragon.
Dragons sang the Earth alive,
and all that breathes beneath the skies.
Every soul born slave or queen
comes from the stuff of dragon dreams.
At the same time, she didn’t want to leave Shenandoah.
She had friends here—good friends, for the first time in her life. She cared deeply about her Raukenrose family. She had brothers and sisters of her own, but they were much older. Her nearest sister, Bealle, was one hundred fifty years Saeunn’s senior. She loved Bealle, but the two of them didn’t really have very much in common other than being related.
But the von Dunstigs were human, and they would all be dead in a hundred years. She would live on. Her parents had warned her to stay away from emotional ties with humans.
Some elves were really good at that kind of detachment. She wasn’t.
The more she came to understand humans and…well, whatever Ravenelle was, with her body given over to the Roman mold…the more she liked how hot these mortals’ feelings could be. Each of them was like a raging fire inside.
Elves might have starlight for souls, but the souls of men were bits of the soul of a dragon.
She was as drawn to that inner fire as much as she was to the moonlight.
Especially Wulf.
The future was always leaking into the present for elves. When she got back to Amberstone she could ask the elders why her feelings had developed so strongly for humans. That was what the elder elves were for. Advice. Understanding. Peace.
When she got back to Amberstone, she would have a lot to ask the elders.
If I get back to Amberstone, she thought.
She shivered.
Why is it so cold in here?
As if in answer, a line from an ancient elven verse Saeunn knew suddenly flowed into her mind.
Karltundelkan nalith Ebereth Serian.
It was a piece of the old tale of the elf maiden who had given away her star to raise her lover from the dead. There was an Old High Kaltish translation of the phrase that Saeunn knew.
Then darkly fell Amberly Reizend.
She shivered again.
My star? Were you singing to me?
Yes, my child, my own.
Amberly Reizend was an elf woman who had done what many considered to be impossible. She had transferred her star—which was an elf’s soul—to her lover, who had succumbed to one of the few diseases that could kill an elf. Then she died.
The swan at the dawn
With its heartbroken call
Is the echo of Amberly Reizend
The dim moonlight seemed to pool in swirls of light and darkness before her eyes. Saeunn could see it now: turmoil gathering in her future. But she couldn’t see past it.
My star, my own, why do you sing this song?
Her star didn’t reply for a very long time. Finally she spoke. Her only words were the same lines from the verse, in Saelith, the language of the elves.
Karltundelkan nalith Ebereth Serian.
As suddenly as it had begun, Saeunn’s shivering stopped. The Sun, still below the eastern horizon, brightened the sky.
But the words from the poem echoed in Saeunn’s mind. Was it a warning, a prophesy? Or just a pretty song?
Then darkly fell Amberly Reizend.