The Return of the Arinn Read online

  About the Author

  Frank P. Ryan is a multiple-bestselling author, in the UK and US. The first three books in The Three Powers series, The Snowmelt River, The Tower of Bones and The Sword of Feimhin are also published by Jo Fletcher Books. In addition to fantasy, he has written science fiction, contemporary fiction and a contemporary novel. His books have been translated into ten different languages.

  Also By

  Also by Frank P. Ryan

  The Snowmelt River

  The Tower of Bones

  The Sword of Feimhin

  Title

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Jo Fletcher Books

  an imprint of

  Quercus Publishing Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2015 Frank P. Ryan

  The moral right of Frank P. Ryan to be

  identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication

  may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any

  information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  PB ISBN 978 1 78087 742 6

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78429 137 2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

  businesses, organizations, places and events are

  either the product of the author’s imagination

  or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events or

  locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  For my late mother, who inspired me with her song of Ree Nashee in the shadow of the magic mountain.

  Epigraph

  What none would appear to presume, other than my ageing self, is that all might be part of a cycle. A very great cycle, to be sure, in which a world or even a universe might be renewed. Once one becomes aware of cycles, one sees them everywhere: in flower and seed, in animal display and courtship, in the summer of desire, and the autumn of the fruit of that desire, in the death of winter and the rebirth of spring. The cyclical nature of being, of what we fondly describe as reality, is fundamental to all. But even in the glory of that universal realisation, I see now how other eyes might weigh the same possibilities with avarice. What then would such a rebirth make of that order and justice – the implicit rightfulness of all we hold dear? This provokes a terrifying possibility – a despair that gnaws relentlessly within my spirit.

  Could it be that what we assumed as natural and inevitable might be confounded? Could our most fervent hopes be corrupted to the ends of darkness?

  Ussha De Danaan, the last High Architect of Ossierel

  Contents

  A Dragon’s Regret

  A Threat in the Dark

  Fate

  The Unbroken Circle

  Binoculars . . . and a Bike

  A Respite of Sorts

  A Sense of Purpose

  The Beginnings of a Plan

  Breaching the M1

  Escape

  Penny’s Dilemma

  Fear of Duty

  Resistance Headquarters

  A Hidey Hole

  Treacherous Ground

  A Foundling

  An Emissary from Kentucky

  The Meaning of the Rose

  An Unlikely Captor

  The Septemvile

  To Be Reborn

  In Plain Sight

  The Daemon Furnace

  Ghork Mega

  Goya’s Nightmares

  Owly Gizmo

  Eternity

  The Nature of Mo

  The Rose

  Attack on the South Gate

  A Strategy

  Attack on the Rose

  A Bargain with Death

  Mo’s Fate

  Looming Questions

  Man Down

  The Communion

  The Lip of Darkness

  Holding Hands

  Rage

  The Creative Weave

  The Black Citadel

  A Tactical Inbound

  For Kehloke

  The Spindle

  The Arinn Reborn

  Earth Song

  The Fate of the Rose

  Acknowledgements

  A Dragon’s Regret

  Spiralling as he rose on the battering winds, the Dragon King – Omdorrréilliuc to the worshipful Eyrie People and, more familiarly, Driftwood to Kate Shaunessy – found the thermals that were capable of bearing his titanic mass aloft. On the beach below, every face gazed up in rapture. Kate realised she must look minuscule, waving goodbye from on high to the fast-disappearing Cill children. They included her friend Shaami, and the special one who was already taller and more knowing than the others, the new Momu, who was gazing heavenwards with those big golden eyes. The pain of leaving them, knowing she might never see them again, felt like a cold splinter of iron impaled in Kate’s heart. But all too soon they were gone, the beach reduced to a snowflake of brilliant white before it too was lost behind the clouds that were materialising against the up-thrust mountains.

  The dragon’s voice remained a rumble as deep as thunder even when it addressed Kate mind-to-mind:

  ‘I’ll still miss them terribly.’

 

  ‘Ah, sure, and where would we be without it?’

 

  ‘No. They have a new young Momu to guide them.’

 

  ‘I know I’ve been unreasonable, but I’m back now. I do so hope that we remain friends. Please tell me where we are headed?’

 

  ‘Yes, please take me back to Alan. I’m desperate to see him again. But I had hoped . . . if it will not put us too far out of our way . . .’

 

  Kate bit her lip. Even within the shelter of Driftwood’s dense ruff of bright green and yellow feathers she was shivering. The rushing gale of wind was growing rapidly fiercer as their flight gained pace, the cold numbing her cheeks and ears.

 

  ‘Thank you.’

 

  ‘I promise.’

  Kate allowed her eyes to close upon sleep. A single night’s rest on the beach had hardly cured her exhaustion. And the dreams she wandered into were hardly refreshing: if there was a landscape she never wished to see again, in dreams or reality, it was th
e Land of the Dead.

  She woke up with a cry to discover Driftwood was gliding in slow wide circles over rocky buttresses that rose upwards for hundreds of feet out of the forested slopes. The air was warmer. Kate whooped – softly – with delight to witness the welcoming flocks of young dragons that rose out of the needle-like pillars of rocky landscape, which proved big enough to accommodate wooded plains on their pinnacles. On her last visit, the young dragons had been no more than babies, and she had delighted in watching them. But on this visit, Driftwood made no attempt to alight and spend time with his brood. For no more than a few minutes they wheeled and soared in the company of the excited young dragons before Driftwood bid them farewell in that deep incomprehensible tongue that Kate recognised, without need of translation, to be the language of beginnings.

  ‘Permission to speak?’

 

  ‘I’d have loved to have got to know them – your family.’

 

  ‘Not your brood – you’re a sea-dragon. You eat fish – sea creatures.’

 

  Kate laughed. She just wanted to treasure the experience forever: the great wings beating, or gliding through the icy-cool air, the soaring pinnacles of pinkish rock capped with dense, semi-tropical greenery that were the perfect brood-chambers for the baby dragons, the excited antics of the youngsters, who left smoky trails perfumed with the fiery, incense-like musk of dragon’s breath.

  ‘Do you tell them fairy stories, like we tell our human children?’

 

  ‘What’s so special about each individual story?’

 

  ‘How can there be so many different truths?’

 

  ‘Then explain – enlighten me, please?’

 

  ‘How can I understand if you will not explain?’

 

  ‘Then treat me as a dragon-baby. Tell me my very own story.’

 

  ‘Try me.’

 

  Kate chuckled. ‘After what I’ve been through, I don’t think I am capable of being shocked any further.’

 

  ‘I come from an island people famous for their recklessness. Oh, please, Driftwood – I thought we were friends?’

 

  ‘What are we, then?’

 

  ‘Why a conundrum?’

 

  ‘It wasn’t from slumber and you know it. I resurrected you from a self-inflicted death: a death that happened in ages past, when you dragons bit off your own wings and sacrificed yourselves to the depths of the oceans. Moreover, I didn’t resurrect you deliberately. The oraculum in my brow did it all by itself while I slept.’

 

  ‘Does it offend your godly – your kingly – pride that a minuscule girl-thing not only resurrected your poor wingless body but also gave you back your beautiful gold-veined wings?’

 

  ‘Oh, Driftwood, tell me a story anyway.’

 

  ‘All the more so.’

 

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that I want to become one with this Nimue the Naïve. Can’t I just listen to her story?’

 

  *

  Something . . . everything . . . had changed. Within Kate’s being, a veil of time had been traversed and she had somehow lost track of her passage. There was an alien awareness of her surroundings, a heightening, as if her senses had multiplied. Something was whispering to her, bathing her in warmth that invaded her nostrils, filled her vision and then coated her entire skin. Kate only gradually became aware that the warmth was the breath from the mouth and nostrils of a face that filled her entire field of vision, and the tickling sticky sensation that enveloped her was a gigantic tongue. She felt suffused with emotions, such as fear and joy, and overwhelmed with the alien wonder of it.

  ‘I never realised . . . I can’t believe I’m experiencing it.’

 

  ‘No – no. It’s . . . wonderful, Driftwood. But . . . I’m changing. I didn’t anticipate the profundity, the immediacy of it.’

 

  That deep sigh immersed her as if she had entered a waterfall, a thundering, skin-tingling cataract. Another veil . . . she was passing through veil after veil of experience and strangeness.

  ‘I’m not a child; I’m fully grown. I don’t understand . . . I know what I feel. I know what I am thinking. I feel so proud of my marriage to the king, but it’s not as I might have anticipated. This is so very different.’

 

  ‘Oh, dear! Am I really that vain? And yet within myself I feel merely curious and kind. At least I would appear to be kind.’

 

  A dragon tale! It certainly felt different from the fairy tales of Kate’s childhood – she really was within it; she was feeling it happen.

  ‘Oh, Driftwood – I am riding through an enchanted forest. It’s so real I can feel my nostrils tingle with each breath of air.’

 

  ‘But I love them all. I love to greet them.’

 

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

 

  How she loved the fact it was ever high summer here, with the cotton-wool clouds turning lazily in their blue heaven. But even here, a twist of magic could alter the mood of time and place in the blink of an eye . . . and fate. But surely her fate was to wake in the regal bedroom within the enchanted castle? So she reflected with pleasure on a night when there was a full moon shining in through the mullioned windows, the garden outside bathed with luminescence. There was music too, a lilting delight of harp notes, rising and falling, lulling her back to sleep.
<
br />   Why was it wrong to delight in such bliss?

  Queen Nimue glanced around the moonlit bedroom. She was clearly sleeping alone. Presumably Ree Nashee slept alone too? But surely there would be servants, some watchful figures nearby, who would respond to her needs?

  She tried calling out: ‘Hello? I would so love a nightcap . . .’

  But no servant answered her summons. She was close to panicking now, wishing she wasn’t here.

  ‘What is it, Driftwood? What is happening?’

 

  ‘My ring?’

  Her bridal ring! She raised her left hand and stared at it, but there was no ring on her finger. ‘What’s happened to it?’

 

  Panic overwhelmed her, making her feel close to fainting in her downy bed. What would the king say when he discovered she had lost her ring?

  ‘I must have dropped it when I was riding through the Wildwoods.’

 

  ‘Darkness . . . Darkness will rise – as it rose when he was cast into the spell of sleep by Balor.’

 

  ‘But how do I recover the ring? How do I make the Wildwoods hale again?’

  But even she spoke, she realised the lesson of her personal dragon tale. In her obsession to save the Cill, she had neglected Alan, who loved her and who was facing terrible dangers. Kate, who was also Nimue, felt her vision clouding as if real tears were filling up her eyes.

  ‘Stop it, Driftwood. Stop this right now.’

  But she could not so easily escape from the tale. She was still gliding through those eerie veils, but she was no longer in that sumptuous bedroom, now she was lost in the Wildwoods. She found herself standing by a low wall, below which a mound of pine bark marked the place where elfin foresters might have pulled consignments of logs over coping stones. She sat on the wall, brooding, feeling wan and sad in the pallid moonlight. Her tearful eyes darted between the grey shadows that surrounded her, her fearful fingers toying with the hoary beards of rosebay willow herb clinging to the crevices amongst the sloping stones. And then it dawned on her, with all the impossible logic of a dream, that she had arrived here a million times. She had followed the same ghostly trail, even on her final ride as queen. And now, dressed only in her white cotton nightdress, she haunted the woodland paths. And on this cold, moonlit night, a terrible winter beckoned. Her movements felt leaden with dread as she left the wall and emerged into the lonely glade. In the distance was a lake of utter darkness. She sensed the stillness of the air over the dark water that reflected the tall forest of pine trees on the far bank. Within the blue-black crepuscular mass, their twigs and needles like roinish hair, she saw tiny flickering lights, like will-o-the-wisps, that called her. All she had to do was float through the veils to join the other ghosts passing soundlessly across the confluences of stone, air and water.