The Weaver's Lament by Elizabeth Haydon Page B

painful to have to wait so long.”
    He put his load of plates into the water, wiped his hands, then took her into his arms and kissed her.
    â€œIf you would acquiesce, we could stop talking about it.”
    Rhapsody smiled, but Ashe could almost see the lump that had formed in her throat.
    â€œIf I acquiesce, we will stop talking altogether.”
    â€œI don’t believe that’s so,” he said lightly. “When my father undertook this transition, he was often in the ether nearby, and able to speak to me. He came to the Cymrian Council, witnessed our investiture and wedding—”
    He stopped as her eyes filled with tears.
    â€œI’m sorry, Aria,” he said as he drew her closer, a gesture meant to both comfort her and spare himself the sight of her crying. “I know it pains you to hear this.”
    â€œIt does,” she said to his shoulder, “but it also pains me to hear the suffering in your voice and to know that you are unhappy.”
    He pulled back and took her face in his hands.
    â€œI have never said that I am unhappy,” he said, looking deep into her eyes to assure her of the veracity of his words. “How can anyone as blessed as I have been be unhappy—be anything but grateful?”
    She said nothing, but her eyes reflected an even deeper sorrow. Ashe sighed dispiritedly and pulled her close again, resting her head on his shoulder and caressing her recently healed back.
    For the past twenty or so years this had been a hallmark of most of their secret-wedding anniversary celebrations in the tiny turf hut, an agonizing discussion that they had agreed to limit to once a year.
    It had begun with a request he had made two decades before out of nowhere in the aftermath of an especially tender evening celebrating just such an anniversary. Faced with his own painful aging and approaching mortality, the persistent rise and increasing unpredictability of the dragon within him, and his unspoken fear that the beast in his blood would inadvertently harm her, their children, or the continent, he had casually suggested that he consider undertaking the same transition from wyrmkin to wyrm that Llauron, his father, had undergone.
    Llauron had made the decision, just prior to meeting Rhapsody, to forswear his humanity in favor of entering an elemental state and become a pure dragon. He had manipulated Rhapsody, by means of a false death, into using Daystar Clarion, the elemental sword of starfire that she carried as the Iliachenva’ar, to light his funeral pyre with the sword, the action that made his transition to an elemental state possible. Llauron, forever after in elemental wyrm form, later had warned her at the Cymrian Council where she and Ashe announced the date of their public wedding of what would happen in the future.
    Rhapsody, I must ask you to remember something.
    Yes?
    Whether you realize it now or not, for all that you hated our last interaction, you will be faced one day with the same situation again.
    What does that mean?
    It means that when you marry a man who is also a dragon, one day you will find that he is in need of becoming one or the other. If he chooses to let his human side win, you will eventually understand the pain of being widowed, as I have. And if he takes the path I chose, well, you have had a window into what both of you must do. I don’t mean to impinge on your happiness in any way, my dear, but these are the realities of the family you are about to marry into. I just don’t want you to wake up one day and feel you were misled.
    Rhapsody, who had been tremendously traumatized to discover she had essentially burned Llauron alive, had greatly resented being so misled. She had struggled to keep her voice calm and as anger-free as possible.
    Goodbye, Llauron, she had said. I’ll see you at the wedding, I expect, or at least feel your presence.
    Now her father-in-law’s prediction was coming to pass.
    That first night twenty