Read Song of the Beast for Free Online Page B

that he sang in answer to my music or that he had disciplined me to find beauty even in the harsh bellowing of dragons. It seemed pretentious to say I knew how my god did what he did. It was mystery and took no honor from him to remain so. They did not need to know.
    And so it was that my wrist was marked with silver on that day, and I was proclaimed a guild singer dedicated to Roelan.
    For seven years I traveled the length and breadth of all known lands, my life an unending celebration of beauty and mystery and joy. I refused no invitation, shunned no venue as too remote or too dangerous or unworthy, and I took no payment save food and shelter, for there was nothing that could match the gift of my life. I was the voice of a god, and I carried his joy into noble houses and into lepers’ dens, into palaces and the poorest quarters of great cities. I sang before the king, and I sang for his soldiers in the field of battle, and I sang for the stunned and starving victims of war in their squalid tenements. When King Ruarc died, I sang his funeral dirge, and when my mother lay consumed by her last illness, I sang her through the crossing with words of those people and things she had cherished. And when my eighteen-year-old cousin, Devlin, was crowned king of Elyria, I made my obeisance with my harp in my hand. But always I returned to the dragons, watching from afar as their Riders screamed the commands that would force them to obey, listening to their pain and wild fury and grief, and making it my own.
    Â 
    I had always gotten along with my cousin Devlin. Until the days of my rebirth at eleven, we met on every family and state occasion, always shuffled off to eat and drink together and amuse ourselves while our elders carried on adult business. The rivalries that one might have expected for two highborn youths so close in age and family—I was six months his junior—were made moot by the difference in our passions. He claimed to have no ear for music, and I made no secret of my disdain for the arts of warfare and statecraft, which were all that interested him. I complained bitterly to my mother that I had to waste time with fencing and riding, while Devlin did not have to spend equal time with my strict flute master. But we found things to do and had some good times, and we did not dread our rare meetings.
    I saw my cousin very little in my three years of madness or my years in the guild. If he felt any jealousy that I was already at the pinnacle of my profession while he was still “the boy” riding in his father’s massive shadow, it was surely blunted by the certainty of his ascension to the most powerful throne in the world. Devlin was his father’s only son, his four sisters long married off to distant nobles who were strong allies but no threat to his inheritance, and in five hundred years no king of Elyria had lived beyond the age of fifty. The high price of using dragons to wage war was that there was no end to it. The devastation they wrought on land and cities and people was so terrible that there was no shifting of loyalties or blending of peoples or softening of borders, no forgiveness and no respite from vengeance.
    A year after his coronation, when I was eighteen, I sang at Devlin’s wedding to a beautiful girl of impeccable Senai breeding, and a year after that I sang at his infant son’s anointing as Prince of Thessin, heir to the throne of Elyria. I did not speak to my cousin on either occasion, but I did spend an hour with his son as we waited in the gardens for the anointing ceremonies to begin. The child, draped in heavy finery and held at arm’s length by an exasperated waiting woman, was wailing endlessly, threatening to sour the harmony I’d brought to honor him.
    I had no experience with infants, but when the waiting woman began to curse at the child, I offered to make an attempt to quiet him. I picked for a moment at the sound of his lament, and then began to