Thorn's Chronicle continues...
Silva looked almost as shocked as the rest of my companions. Even still, we found ourselves going to one knee. All of us, that is, except Elder Ivonov.
“Impossible!” Ivonov snapped. “Rowena and Leansethar is a fairy story. They never really existed. Why… if they did, they would be…. thousands of years old by now. There are barely any
dragons that old.”
“There are four,” Aurora said. “Three of which we know personally. Shall we summon them, that they may corroborate my claims?” She made to raise her arm, but Silva — it would be difficult to think of her by any other name — gripped her twin’s arm, holding it firmly by her side.
“Nieah,” she said, with a hard look.
“Idanim na’asti, Anuja.”
“There is only ‘now,’” Aurora whispered. “Yours grows shorter with every breath. We cannot waste it in coddling these ignorant barbarians.”
Silva slapped Aurora, hard enough across the cheek to cause the shrike to turn her head with the blow.
“Vadati na, ce zathayati,” Silva hissed, repeating the lesson her sister had reminded her of back at Krakatos. My knowledge of Ancient Thonian was sketchy at best, but I was pretty sure it amounted to my mother’s advice: “It you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”
She turned towards the Elders. “
Anjua — my smaller sister has…” Silva glanced over to me.
“Samaam? You… make it speak how?”
“Sorry,” I coached. I would definitely need to spend quite some time working on the girl’s grasp of Thyatian sentence structure.
Silva nodded. “Yes. That is its sound.” She turned back to the druids, and bowed, yanking on Aurora’s hand to make her do the same.
“We… are..” She began, and paused, searching for the words.
“Humble before you,” Aurora finished.
“Yes,” Silva said, nodding as she straightened. “That is its sound.”
She glanced my way and winked.
Igorov crossed his arms. “So she knows a smattering of Ancient Thonian. She could very well be from one of the sidhe tribes still on the Isle of Dawn, could have picked it up from there. We waste time with these pretenders. We should be discussing the importance of the missing star.”
“That ‘missing star’ is one of the twelve Thrones,” Aurora said. “The third to have fallen since the Remaking.”
“Legends. Again? You have it backwards, dear child. The
adults tell their
children the tales when it is time for them to
sleep. There is no place for fairy stories in this conference.”
The shrike’s fist clenched, the two red stones adorning her wrists kindling to light. Silva hummed a note, and the dragonstones went dark.
“It was the First Throne,” Aurora pressed. “Nothing else explains my sister’s presence here.”
“So the Sleeper wakes,” the Eldress murmured.
“Not you as well, Solorena,” Igorov groaned. “That old song—“
“That ‘old song’ comes to life before our very eyes.” The other Elder, Connor of Riverfork, finally spoke. “Among so many others. Tell me, Igorov, did you not sing
Leansethar’s Lullaby to your children?”
The Elder of Achelos sputtered, hunkering down a bit in his robes. “What has that old rhyme got to do with any of this? The stars--”
“Please, sing it for us,” Elder Connor prodded, the ghost of a smile quirking a corner of his mouth. “Unless you have forgotten it.”
Igorov sat up straight, his eyes flashing. “My beard was going gray before you even began growing yours,” he said. “If you think that I’ve forgotten a song in my old age—“
Connor folded his arms. “You stall, Elder.” He looked up at the Eldress, Solorena. “I know you know the song. Perhaps you could refresh our fellows’ ailing memory?”
Igorov flushed red beneath his beard, all the way up past his bushy eyebrows. He practically leapt to his feet. Rather than shout though, he lifted his voice in song, a rich, alto that seemed too large to come from so frail an old man:
“Take me away from time and season
Far and away we sing with reason
Prepare a throne of stars above me
As the world once known will leave me
Take me away upon the plateau
Far far away from fears and shadow
Strengthen my heart in times of sorrow
Light the way to bright tomorrows”
Aurora rocked back on her heels, her face gone pale, her golden eyes distant.
“What is it? What has happened to her?” Ana asked, pushing past me to kneel at the shrike’s side.
Silva lifted her sister’s hand, which was slack in her own. “She is safe. The sing, it takes her away to the past. Very deep. Very far.
“She sing it for me, at Father’s house upon the black stone. When I am… not right. Hurting with the fevers. Our mother sing it for us when we were made here.” She rubbed at her stomach. She sighed, squeezing her sister’s hand, and she looked up at me.
“Your words. They are difficult in making. They are not made for that to sing.”
---------------------
It is nearly as difficult rendering Silva's speech in "common" as it is piecing it together from Sanskrit, Old English, and Latin...
