A thing lay at the bottom of the hoard.
It smelled of power. It smelled of human, which little in her father's hoard did anymore; it had all been his too long for any mortal scent to remain. But the thing still smelled of human, and of power, and Kate had been swimming toward it for nearly a year now.
Not constantly, no, of course not: even Janx's hoard wasn't that large. But she had bathed in molten gold until it cooled and bedazzled her claws with jewels until they glittered, and when she was bored with that, she had nosed her way through texts and scrolls so old she couldn't begin to imagine the languages they were written in, much less read them. They smelled, of old dust and ancient paper and bitter inks, smelled so strongly she could catch the scent easily, even in her human form. That was the only shape she was allowed to come near them in: Janx had not saved them from Alexandria, Kate was informed, so that a careless spark could now set them alight. She had stared at him a moment before demanding to know if there were any notorious historical fires for which he was not responsible. He had declined to answer and sauntered off with a sniff, leaving Kate with the taste of dust and curiosity in her mouth.
It was with that flavor lingering that she first caught a hint of the human magic. She had followed it, lips peeled back, mouth open, inhaling like a cat and holding the scent in her throat. It faded: it always did, only to come again from a different angle, carried on some faint breeze made by changing temperatures in the caverns beneath a sleeping volcano. She circled and edged and dug and explored, often distracted by other treasures within the hoard and yet always returning to the hunt.
She found it in a space too small to be considered a cave. A fissure: hardly more than a crack in the wall, and far too small for a dragon to fit through. The scent was strong there: Kate thrust her face forward, nostrils flaring as she dragged in deep breaths of the stuff. Human magic smelled human, not the dry crispness of dragons or the old blood of the vampires, not the arid wind of the djinn or the fresh-broken stone scent of the gargoyles. It came closest, perhaps, to the salt-water odor of the selkies, but then, the selkies had been inter-breeding with humans for generations. And even so, it had a little of all of those things, and more besides. There was a breath of ice and snow, of wet humid greenery, of fresh-tilled soil and sour milk. She could stand there and breathe its scent for days, weeks, months, and find new things with each breath; that was humanity, ever-changing, ever-adapting. That was half of her blood: perhaps that was why the scent nagged at and called to her. She shifted to human—the fissure would never allow her dragon shape to pass through—and pushed a shoulder into the breach before inhaling and squeezing forward.
Crushing a dragon, even one in human form, was nearly impossible: their mass remained, shifted a step out of alignment with the visible world but always there. The narrow passage still pressed in, until the only thought that kept her moving forward was that her father had fit through here at least once, and he was bigger than she.
She popped through the other side in a scrape of blood and skin, whistling with pain and resisting the urge to snap into dragon form and heal the injuries. The slickness would only help her get out again, prize in hand. In the darkness—because to human eyes, even half-human eyes, the dark was nearly complete—she knelt in the tiny room, hands extended, mouth open again to catch scents. Her sister clicked like a bat in the darkness to find her way; Kate had never had the knack of it, always trusting Ursula's guidance when they explored dark places together. Still, there wasn't enough space to become lost; the tantalizing thing sat in the center of the small cave and she could reach it from where she sat beside the fissure.
Her fingertips touched wire strings, first. Notes rippled, unexpectedly pure in the darkness. That, Kate thought, was absurd: this thing had been in the heart of Janx's lair for centuries, at the least. No instrument could hold its tune that long.
No instrument could keep its strings that long, for that matter. Her fingers danced gently upward and outward, finding the shape of the thing. A harp; not a harp. A lyre. They had still been popular when she was a child, four centuries earlier, though they had since fallen out of favor. Almost no one would know how to play one.
Bemused, in darkness, Kate drew the instrument into her lap and pulled a few more notes from it, relying on ancient memory to guide her fingers where they needed to be. Eight strings: an octave, no more. The body of the instrument was wood or stone; she thought stone, because wood should have warped or disintegrated in the years it had spent here. But then, the strings should have rusted away too, even in the dry constant temperatures of the hoard caves, and the thing did smell of magic.
She was better with it than she expected, after not playing for centuries. Old songs came back to her fingertips, finding depth and resonance in the notes. They reverberated off narrow walls, filling the chamber with music even after she stopped. When the sound finally faded, she turned to the fissure, preparing to leave.
An enormous green eye stared at her from the fissure's other side. Kate shrieked in surprise, then fell into laughter as Janx slammed from dragon to human. He carried no torch, but a glow of fire radiated on his side of the crack regardless, as if his very being brought forth the light. Which it did; Kate had not, and might not ever, master that trick. Still laughing, she slipped the lyre along the bottom of the crack and followed after, nudging it with her foot until Janx, exasperated, reached in and took it so she could scrape her way out again. Rubbing her chest, she muttered, "I don't know how you fit through that," before changing swiftly to dragon form and back again to ease the sting of the wounds.
"I didn't," Janx said beneath the explosions of air. Kate paused in rubbing her chest and his eyebrows darted upward. "I pushed it in with a stick, Katherine. I had no intention of taking it out again, and even if I had, I would have slid a wing-tip in to draw it out. Why abrade my tender flesh when it wasn't necessary? I admire your dedication, though," he said with solemn mockery. "Perhaps you should have considered not playing it, though, if you were planning on stealing it from me." The mockery left his voice, leaving a growl in its place. Not a wholly convincing one; children were rare and precious to the Old Races, and Janx would probably not destroy his own daughter over an artifact.
Probably, Kate thought, and gazed at the lyre now in his hands. "I didn't mean to steal it."
"No? You've spent half a year and more working your way here out of happenstance? You just went to a great deal of trouble to squeeze yourself into a crack because you had no interest at all in the thing hidden inside? You took it out because you only wanted to see it in the light?" Thunder grew in Janx's voice, until dust began to shift and fall from the cavern roof.
"I took it out because it called to me. It's been bothering me almost since I arrived. And if I was going to steal something I certainly wouldn't do it while you were here."
As quickly as it had come, Janx's fiery offense faded. "That, I trust, is true. Interesting, that it called to you. I can't play it."
Kate's eyebrows rose dubiously. "I think I would have guessed you could play any instrument in the world."
"I can play a lyre. I can't play this lyre." He ran his fingers over the wires in demonstration. No sound emerged, and a trick of the light made Kate think the strings themselves tried to squirm away from his touch. "It's a human instrument."
"But I'm—"
"Half human. Enough to draw its song out, it seems. Do you know whose this was?"
"No, I—" And then she did, and her breath caught.
"Long ago," Janx said, softly now, "was born a bard. His voice was the sweetest ever known, his songs the most poignant. He never struck a false note, and the gods themselves sought him out to hear him play."
"The gods…?"
"Gods of fire and of speed, gods of stone and of wind. Gods of war and beauty and song, and of all of these, he was naturally most drawn to the song. But you know this story, Kate; tell me how it goes."
"He wooed Eurydice," Kate whispered. Her hands ached to hold the lyre now, knowing whose it was. Whose it had been. "And then sang her back from the Underworld when she was unfairly taken from him, but he lost her again forever when he looked back to make sure she followed. And he never stopped lamenting her loss."
"That," Janx said, and his smile was bitter, "is the human way of telling the tale. Who were the gods, Kate? Who do you suppose were the creatures of magic and might to whom the humans looked?"
"They were imaginary," Kate said, then, as quickly as before, caught his meaning. "Oh no. Oh, don't tell me…"
Janx shrugged a lazy shoulder. "Did you suppose it was only coincidence that they have gone more and more toward believing in only one god, or none at all? Why should they continue to believe, when those they worshiped withdrew? We had to." He cast away regret with a fluid gesture. "We had to, because they were beginning to develop the weaponry to kill us, and gods cannot allow themselves to die so ignominiously, but there was a time, Kate, when we walked among them and were their highest powers. And of all of us, who had the gift of song?"
"The siryns? If the legends are true."
"They are, in that regard. Come." Janx turned swiftly, stalking away. "This is not a story to be told standing still. Bring the lyre, since it wanted you so badly, and listen as we walk. They didn't—then—lure sailors to their deaths. They sang for them, and I'm sure a careless ship or two foundered on the rocks as a result, but they were hardly ruthless killers. And Orpheus didn't happen on them by chance. They were known to have a fondness for Lanzarote—"
Kate breathed, "Who doesn't?" and laughed at the reproving glance Janx bestowed on her. "I'm sorry," she said with no more genuine contriteness than she would expect of him. "Do go on."
"So he went there looking for them," Janx said sourly. "And he found them. Kate, if you're going to be difficult I won't tell you this story at all."
"Perhaps the lyre will."
Janx gave her a second look, this one sharper. "I wouldn't believe whatever tales it tells. It's meant to make you weep, not reflect history."
"History often makes me weep," said Kate, who had lived enough of it to know. Not so much as her father, perhaps, but enough, and she had been, in her way, closer to humanity for all of her life than he could ever be.
"There is that." Janx fell silent for a little while as they walked to the lyre's accompaniment: notes trembled when they crossed uneven ground, though Kate's footstep was as light as any could be. "He came to listen. That's what he told her, when the ships landed. That he'd only come to listen. To hear the music of the gods, and learn from it if he could. And she let him stay, to the doom of them all."
"She?" Kate barely asked the question, half afraid Janx was no longer talking to her at all, half afraid that if he remembered her, he would choose not to share the story after all.
"Eurydice." Janx's nose wrinkled as he spoke the name. "Who was first known to mortals as Inanna, and then Persephone, and a dozen names more around the world. But to the Old Races she was Ninanak, the siryn queen, whose voice was the purest thing ever born of this earth. She sang for him, and he for her, until she loved him for the sweetness of her voice. She learned all of his mortal songs and he captured an echo of her own, which was all the more that he could manage. She felt sorry for him, and so sat with him to craft an instrument. As he shaped it, she sang, so that it would know nothing but purity of music in its making. It would be the greatest instrument ever made, unable to strike a sour note, able to convey depth and power far beyond its humble shape. And when it was done, Ninanak sang for Orpheus and he matched her song note for note. Then he played it back for her, and when he was done she opened her mouth to sing again and only silence came forth. She had given him everything. Everything.
"And he would not give it back.
"The siryns did drown the sailors, then. All of them save Orpheus, whom Ninanak wouldn't allow them to harm. She took human form and went with him instead, perhaps hoping he would return her voice, perhaps simply wishing to be near the music. She never spoke again, so it's hard to know. In time, though, it became such that she could no longer bear to hear the music she couldn't make, and so she ran to the underworld, just as the stories say. And who do you think was King of the Underworld, Katherine?"
Kate turned to him with a question in her eyes, on her lips, and exasperation flitted across Janx's changeable expression. "No, not me. Don't be silly. I may keep my treasures beneath the earth, but I'm at my most magnificent in the sun. No, it was the other one. Your sister's father."
Daisani. Kate didn't so much as breathe the name, only nodded. It had been over a year since New York and her father had yet to forgive Eliseo Daisani for the discovery that he'd betrayed his own people decades earlier. She knew that in lives as long as theirs—even in a life merely as long as hers—a year was nothing, and yet it surprised her that they hadn't reconciled. Daisani, loathe as Janx might be to admit it, had been right…but if he could betray his own people, it was possible, perhaps, that he might someday betray Janx as well, and that, Kate thought, was the wound that cut. Not that they hadn't spent aeons doing just that, as it was part of their game—but that was what it was, or had been: a game. Daisani's choice to betray his own kind had somehow moved the game into deadlier stakes, and Janx had yet to let that action go. He would: their camaraderie was greater by far than their differences. In the end they would always be there for one another.
Unless, of course, they were not, and that seemed to be a possibility too unpalatable for Janx to face. Kate shook off the worry; they had gotten on forever without her interference and would no doubt carry on that way. "What happened?"
"She went to him," Janx muttered. "She ran from her enslaver and went into the underworld, and she made it clear she would rather die than go back to Orpheus."
"Oh my God," Kate said faintly. "Did Daisani kill her?"
"What? No!" Genuine offense sent Janx's voice unexpectedly high. "That's against our rules!"
Katherine Hopkins, proscribed daughter of a dragon and a human, stood in front of her immortal father, looked down at herself, up at him again, and lifted her eyebrows in incredulous challenge.
"Oh, stop that. I didn't know about you, it doesn't count."
"Really." Kate's own voice went flat. "The year you spent as my mother's, that doesn't count? Because that was against the rules too, Janx."
A little silence, a little stillness, filled the room, until Janx finally said, so softly as to be dangerous, "This is not my story that I am standing here telling you now. This is not your mother's story. Do not test me on the matter of Sarah Hopkins, Kate. Not now. Not ever. If you are wise, you will never test either of us on the matter."
"Did you love her?" It was not the time, it was not the story, but the question spilled out of her, and Janx turned his head to look at her as though he had never seen her before. Or, perhaps, Kate thought, as though he saw someone else entirely within her.
"Better than Orpheus ever loved Ninanak," Janx said, again softly. "Better than you will ever know. And no. Your sister's father did not kill Ninanak. He constrained her in a circle of blood she could not cross, and when Orpheus looked back it was to see her on her knees, screaming silently for the song she could never again sing. He might have gone back for her again, but no living creature crosses twice into Hades' realm and survives. The king of Hell waited, hoping and praying, if we can be said to pray, that Orpheus would turn back a second time. If he could have slain Orpheus, there might have been a way to restore Ninanak's voice."
"But why wouldn't Ninanak let him kill Orpheus in the first place?"
Janx's mouth twisted. "She loved him, or she had once, and he still had the most beautiful voice of any mortal who ever lived, and she was the queen of song. She could not bear for his voice to be lost, even at the cost of her own. There are reasons that we had those strictures in place, Katherine. Good reasons. Not that, in the end, the Negotiator was wrong, but…we Old Races paid heavily, time and again, for dallying with humans. None more heavily than the siryns, because in the end it turned out that they couldn't breed, without Ninanak's song. By the time they realized, Orpheus was long dead and could no longer release Ninanak's voice even if he wanted to. I've had the lyre here ever since. The last person to make music on that was Orpheus, Katherine, and now it answers to your touch. I think you should be honored."
"I'm holding the voice of a ghost." Kate shuddered. "I don't know if that's honorable at all. What happened to Ninanak?"
"She stayed in the underworld until Orpheus died, always hoping he would return her voice. After that…" Janx shrugged. "I suppose she died too. Your sister's father might know otherwise, but I doubt she lived long after that. Even we can die of grief, if we try hard enough. Of all the men who have told her story again through the years, I've often thought that Anderson came closest to its truth."
Kate couldn't help glancing at her feet. "It doesn't feel like knives to walk in human form."
"Find a little poetry in your soul, child. What is the loss of a voice like that, but knives in the soul? Keep the lyre safe, Katherine. It's precious to me."
"I will." Kate hesitated, arms curled around the instrument. "Thank you."
"For giving up an item from my hoard? You're welcome." Janx's eyes glinted. "Don't imagine it's likely to happen again."
"I wouldn't have imagined it was likely to happen once. But I meant for the story, too. Will it bother you if I play it?"
"Play the story?" Janx said lightly. "Are you a child now, to act all the parts of the play? No," he said, at her exasperated glance. "It won't bother me. I might like to hear her voice again, in its songs."
"I don't know those songs."
"The lyre does." Janx left her then, in the too-fluid way that the Old Races had. He was much too large to simply disappear, but she, who could do nearly the same thing, was still left smiling in bemusement at the space where her father had been.
She did not, despite the invitation, begin to play again. Not then, anyway: less-than-idle footsteps took her back through Janx's hoard, her prize wrapped in her arms and its song lulling the hoard's glimmering appeal into insignificance. It wanted—she wanted—to go to the sea, through miles of treasure and more miles still of twisting cavernous tunnels. Away from the heart of the hoard, away from the belly of the volcano that warmed it, the air grew more temperate, until for a long time it was neutrally cool: the temperature of the underground world. She went up, blind certainty guiding her feet, until she could smell salt water. The lyre sang then, a tremble that had nothing to do with her touch. Kate was running by the time she burst free of the lair, and the warm lash of sea salt sat heavily in her lungs as she drew ragged breaths.
The wind itself played the lyre, not tunelessly, for the thing could never be out of tune, but aimlessly, as if searching for a song. Kate found stones only just high enough to avoid holding tidal pools and sat on one, her toes stretched toward the water. The sky above was molten grey, thick and heavy with rain, and turned in the distance to a blur of ocean, the line between them indistinguishable. There were other islands out there, thousands of them not so far away, but with the equatorial waters turned dark from the oncoming storm, she might have sat alone in the single inhabited place on the planet.
A lament came to her fingertips, old and mostly forgotten. It had been composed by an Irish bard called Ruaidrhí, when she was young; until then she would have said she'd forgotten it. But laments were for those who might be forgotten, too, and so when that one ended it became another, a piece by a Polish poet who had died before Kate was born. Kochanowski: that had been his name, and his poem had been for a lost daughter. She had been Ursula, like Kate's sister; Kate's Ursula hated that Kate had memorized the lyric, and put it to music. It was made up of nineteen stanzas, and Kate's fingertips ached long before it ended.
She might have edged a little into her dragon form, callousing her hands with tough scales, but she was afraid she would lose the lyre's song if she did. She would heal quickly anyway: the Old Races almost always did. When she might have stopped for her own sake, the lyre whispered music to her instead, and the notes she pulled from its strings were poignantly unfamiliar. A new lament, or more truly, an ancient one: a song given to Orpheus by Ninanak, and captured for eternity in the lyre.
It carried the howling of a storm in it, the relentless wail of wind over water. It held the sun, rising red over the broken bones of a ship on a still sea. It had the hiss of rain approaching from the distance, a sound so vivid Kate could see it with her eyes closed: flat seas and oncoming clouds, the leading edge of rain a wedge of darkness in the sky. No wonder ships had stopped sailing to listen to the siryns' songs; the lament told the story of the sea, and of all the things lost in it. Sailors would find their loved ones in this music, and no few would be drawn to join them. Kate's fingers bled as she made the music, but it had been aeons: surely a lost people deserved to have a little blood shed in their memory.
Other songs lay beneath the lament, but those mournful strains came back to her time and again, binding one melody to another, and making all of Ninanak's stolen voice part of the same sorrowful tune. Kate played for hours, never opening her eyes, not until a shaft of sunlight turned the darkness behind her lids to red. She blinked then, scattering a crimson sunset across the horizon: only there did the clouds break, just enough to set fire to the sea and sky. Grimacing, she took her hands from the strings and flexed her fingers, finally allowing a hint of transformation to ease the burst and bloody blisters. Janx couldn't do that: no full-blooded Old Race could. Shifting for them was all or nothing, but Kate and her sister Ursula could linger in any half-state of transformation that they wished. So they were clawed, those fingers, delicately serpentine and scaled above almost-human palms, when Kate realized that in taking her gaze from the horizon to her hands, she had seen something in between.
They were there in the water: all she had to do was change her point of focus. The low stones she'd settled on were more deeply immersed now, thanks to the changing tides, and the ocean licked her toes. They could touch her if they wanted to, touch her without even breaking the water's surface. They didn't, though: they only hovered in the shifting sea, their hair inking the surface like seaweed and their black eyes unblinking as they looked up at her. Half a dozen of them, no more, and when they knew she'd seen them, they darted into the depths as one, disappearing between one breath and the next.
"Wait!" Kate slid off the stones, plunging hip-deep into shockingly cold water, and gave a cat-like hiss of disgust. Once upon a time the dragons' sea-born cousins, the krakens, had swam the oceans, but dragons themselves did not like to get wet. Still, there were times that it was worth it, and chasing siryns into the sea seemed as worthy a cause as any. She held herself still, though, once she'd dropped in: she wasn't a strong swimmer, and most fish scattered if chased. Siryns might do the same. "Wait," she said, more softly, doubting they could hear her. "Come back."
The sun fell past the horizon before they did, and with clouds blocking starlight, it was only her Old blood that let her see them return at all. One surfaced and sank again with a chitter of undersea noise that reminded Kate of Ursula's blind-sight clicking. Another rose and dove, speaking again: their conversation bounced off Kate's skin, tickling her. Then at once all of them rose: five women whose slick hair lay against almost-earless heads. Their eyes were large and black above high cheekbones and small chins, making them more elfin than human, save for the ears.
One shimmied closer, her approach reminding Kate of dolphins tail-walking. Up close she was bigger than Kate had expected: half again Kate's height, with broad shoulders that put a large body into proportion. She stayed far enough away to remain in deeper water, surging up and down with idle flicks of her tail; when she rose, Kate saw the sleek but not slender lines of her torso, and strong arms whose power was in no way compromised by the layer of insulating fat that packed them. She looked as though she could effortlessly tear a human into pieces, and Kate knew a moment's gratitude that she wasn't human.
The siryn spoke suddenly, a cadence of words so unfamiliar and well known all at once that Kate laughed in surprise. "What?"
Offense flew across the siryn's face. She breached, diving backward into the water and soaking Kate with a flick of her massive tail. The others all dived as well, slapping the water with their tails in rejection. Kate, alarmed, called, "Wait!" and then, shaping her tongue to an older way of speaking, repeated the word one more time.
The siryn surfaced again, hesitantly. Kate had gotten a glimpse of her whole body with that breach, and had been wrong: she was twice Kate's own size, with flukes like a dolphin's. If she and her pod wanted to be away from Kate, Kate would never catch them in the water, or risk flying low enough to track them in dragon form. Kate spoke hastily, tripping over her words. "My accent is bad. I'm sorry. I haven't spoken this language since I was a child."
Four hundred years: it had been four centuries since the siryns were seen regularly, and two hundred years since the last ones had been seen at all. Their knowledge of human language was archaic, and Kate hadn't begun to learn other tongues than English until she was nearly a hundred years old herself. They were lucky they could communicate at all: she certainly couldn't emulate the clicks and whistles she'd just heard echoing under the water, and much to her father's disgust, she had only the barest grasp of the dragon tongue. "My name is Katherine, and my father is Janx."
One by one the other siryns came to the surface again, whistling at each other. One swam closer to Kate, then rolled, a shiver rippling down her body as she did.
Bioluminescence bloomed from her temples to her tail in orange and blue spirals that lit the water around her. Kate gasped and clapped one hand to her mouth, gazing at her in astonishment. "Thou'rt lovely, lady."
The siryn who had first spoken gave the glowing one a look of exasperation that transcended species, but the single phrase of admiration Kate had uttered encouraged the others to spin and bring their own light to the darkness as well. The leader was the last to concede, and her colors glowed more deeply than the others', as if she could express disapproval through light as well as sound. Kate, still speaking through her fingers, whispered, "They ne'er told tales of this, my ladies. What a crime, that thy secrets should go untold."
"Nought else keeps us alive, save that they go untold. I am Mymyrat, and your sire is known to us. How came you by that lyre?"
"It was in his hoard. I—"
"How canst thou play it?"
Kate glanced at the instrument, tucked safe against her chest. In the siryns' luminescence it had depth of color unlike anything she'd imagined: it was a thing of magic, awakening to not just her half blood, but the very presence of the people it had come from. "My mother is human."
"So was mine," Mymyrat spat. "It does not lend me the power to call songs from those wires."
"Really?" Kate looked up, eyebrows drawn down in surprise. "Your mother? I thought siryns were like the harpies, mostly women…."
Exasperation slid across Mymyrat's face again as one of the others laughed. "Mine father, then, if you must have the truth, but—" She stopped herself, and Kate fought down a laugh.
"But that lacked dramatic impact? Sorry." Laughter won after all, or at least, a smile did: she smiled at the siryn with sudden deep affection. "Accept my apologies, I prithee. I would have spoken as you did, for the impact, mine own self." More quietly, she said, "Can none of you play it, then?"
"We tried. All of us who were left, tried, in hopes that we might crown a new queen and survive another long night beneath the ocean's waves, but the lyre is as silent for us as it left Ninanak. Why you, a child of flame and sky and man, should be able to bring forth its voice—"
"Mayhap that's why. All the things you are, I am the opposite, save for the blood of man."
"And that is wild," said the siryn who had laughed. Her voice was light and sweet, a soprano's in comparison to Mymyrat's deep alto. She spoke again when Kate looked her way. "The blood of man is wild. It frees us, but only for a price. Mayhap thou canst as well."
"Free you? For a price? I wouldn't. Not for a price," Kate amended as Mymyrat's face darkened. "If I could, I would. Of course I would. There aren't that ma—" A memory of her sister came to her, all at once: Ursula's anger at learning about Daisani's betrayal of the vampires. Ursula's determination to right that wrong had been clear. She hadn't said so, but Kate had known where she was going, when she left the wreckage in New York. There were so few of the Old Races left: to condemn any of them, even wisely, to eternity, went against Ursula's soul. Kate—whose own people had not been betrayed—had not been certain her sister was in the right. And yet to see herself now, standing before a handful of siryns and about to make promises to them, it seemed that in her core, she agreed with Ursula after all.
Their world had been simpler before The Negotiator had entered it, Kate thought ruefully, and finished the promise she had begun: "If I can help somehow, I will. There aren't that many of the Old Races left to begin with. I wouldn't stand by and let you come to harm—or even simply waste away—if I can stop that from happening." She had fallen entirely out of the Elizabethan cadences and word choices by the end of her speech, but the phrasing of that era was, in the end, close enough to modern: after casting glances between themselves, the siryns nodded their understanding. More, their luminescence brightened, unquestionably reacting to their emotions. Mymyrat's remained the darkest, the most tamped-down, as if she was the least willing to commit to hope. She was old, Kate thought: old enough to remember Ninanak as a living queen, and bound by the caution of experience.
"Come with us. We will bring you where you must go, to be of use to us."
"Come with you? Are you nuts?" Kate trusted her sentiment, if not her words, were clear enough, but reached for how she might have said them as a child. "Art thou mad? I am, as you said, a creature of air and fire. I will not go into the sea. I cannot!"
Mymyrat squealed with enough force that Kate flinched back, struggling to cover her ears without dropping the lyre. The sound lodged itself in her bones, rattling her, and the series of furious clicks that followed left Kate's chest feeling bruised and airless. She had thought the siryn could tear a human apart, but they wouldn't have to resort to physical attacks. Their voices could kill men.
Which was just as the legends had always said. Kate gave a shuddering laugh and crawled painfully from the hip-deep water that she'd stood in. "Were I human, thou wouldst have rendered me senseless and of no use to thee at all. Mind thy voice, Mymyrat, and tell me whence I am required, and why."
Anger creased the siryn's alien features, and it was the soprano who finally responded. "The island men call Crete, there to return our voices, lady dragon. Play the lyre on the southern shore, and those who can will come to thee."
Those who could were waiting for her. Dozens of them, diving and surfacing again, watching a dimple in the southern shore in anticipation. Kate saw them as shadows in the water from the cliffs above. Sailors had been told for centuries now that they were seeing dolphins or manatees in the water, not women who were also half fish, but seeing them now, there could be no mistaking their forms for other than what they were. Even from dozens of feet above them, they were clearly female, and clearly—well, not fish; they were mammalian, but they were no more manatees than Janx was.
Kate, imagining her father's expression at being likened to one of the mellow warm-water beasties, grinned, then leapt lightly from the cliff to the rocks below. She landed easily and spat as salt water, kicking against rough rock, sprayed her. It was no cove there, no quiet safe harbor; if it had been, neither she nor the siryns would have dared to meet there. Humans could scale the cliff, or dive from it, if they were enthusiast enough, but there were innumerable easier and more pleasant places to explore. Bits of sand and smooth stone were occasionally revealed by the shifting waves. Kate took the highest of them and sat down cross-legged, holding the lyre in her lap. It, she suspected, would be less offended at getting wet than she was.
The first notes sang true and called the siryns to the surface. Kate glanced skyward at the afternoon sun, and for the first time thought she should have waited until nightfall: human surveillance was ubiquitous now, with their satellites and drones. Too late now, but the Old Races would need a magic to hide them from that kind of observation, if they were to survive long enough to merge with the modern world. "Mymyrat asked me to come," she said, then wondered if she ought to speak Greek, and a Greek of four hundred years ago besides. But she no more had the skill for that than she did for swimming, so she shrugged and hoped the music might say it for her.
Besides, they'd known she was coming: perhaps Mymyrat had somehow sent word ahead. Whales could send songs all over the world. Siryns no doubt could as well, if there were enough of them. So she looked for a song of greeting in the lyre, and found one. A rush of sorrow-filled joy rippled through the gathered mermaids, and for the length of the piece none of them moved. Then two came forward and left the water, shedding their Old forms for human ones.
They were still tall, as humans, and retained the powerful builds of born swimmers: broad shoulders, tapered hips, strong thighs. One worked her mouth as if becoming accustomed to it, which she probably was: humans had simple flat teeth, compared to the more dolphin-like sharp teeth the siryns had. "I am Kekeal. I haven't worn this form in some eighty thousand tides," she said carefully. "Forgive me if I am…awkward with it."
Eighty thousand tides. Kate glanced skyward again, this time at a moon she couldn't see. Eighty thousand tides, at two a day, was close to sixty years. The human world had changed considerably since Kekeal had gone into it, but not so much as it had since Mymyrat had been part of it. She looked back at Kekeal, who waited for her response with untested patience. "You'll be fine. My name is Kate, and Myrmyrat sent me. I have Ninanak's lyre from the dragon Janx's hoard, and…I'm meant to play it for you."
At the queen's name, Kekeal glanced at the other siryn who had emerged with her. She was smaller than Kekeal by the length of a hand or more, though she still stood inches taller than Kate, and her hair, drying swiftly in the sunlight, turned the color of amber. Kekeal's was darker, though still in the same hue; together with Kate's own red hair, they ranged from embers to flame. "You are Janx's daughter?" Kekeal asked. "The half-blood? This is how you can play the lyre?"
"It is not enough," the other siryn said before Kate could do more than nod. "Blood tells all. She must be of his blood, or the lyre would not speak to her."
"His—Orpheus's?" Kate grimaced at the second siryn's nod. "If he had children, I suppose I could be. It's too far back to track, but something like every other human male is descended from Genghis Khan, and that's only a thousand years ago. Granted, Khan did put an unusual amount of effort into trying to impregna—" She broke off at the siryns' uncomprehending and uncaring expressions, and returned to what matterd to them: "You're certain Orpheus had children?"
"We are."
"Then he could be one of my forefathers. But if it takes his bloodline and an Old bloodline to play the lyre, why didn't you—"
"It was not enough. They had children, Ninanak and the betrayer, but not one of those children could play the lyre either. So it went into Janx's hands, for safe-keeping. And now all these centuries later, it is his child who can play it?" Suppressed rage glittered in the other siryn's eyes, and Kate again thought that if she was human, she would be wise to fear these creatures.
But she was not human, and she had come halfway around the world on a moment's notice to offer her help. No more than any other being did she care to be met with fury for such a gesture. She lacked Janx's age and size: she could not bring the strength of her presence into the mortal world with such authority as he had. But she was still dragon, and four centuries in age: she surrounded herself with that, and felt its weight suddenly change the air around them. Half a breath more and she would change, but she didn't need to change. She only needed to remind this raging sea-creature that she, too, was to be reckoned with, and if there was a taste of flame in her next words, so be it. "Aye, it is the dragon's child who can play it, and if the blood says it must be so, then it is the bard's grandchild, too, and if I have the strength to play it, sea-dweller, then perhaps I have the strength to destroy it, too."
Her hands were not—not quite—clawed as she clenched them around the lyre, but her dragon strength was in them, and the enchanted wood creaked within them. It had survived centuries; the whim of a dragon should not take it from the world, but neither should the help of a dragon be lightly cast aside.
"No!" Kekeal thrust a hand out, not quite catching Kate's arm, though the wish to do so was clear. "No, please, do not. Forgive Inhihine; she feels the inability to play that lyre more deeply than any of us, and it hurts her to see that someone else can fulfill the destiny she could not."
"That she couldn't?" Kate's hands slowly relaxed around the lyre, releasing the strain in its ancient fibers as she gazed at Inhihine. "You're their daughter. Orpheus and Ninanak. You're the child who couldn't play the instrument that stole her voice."
Inhihine turned her face away, answer enough. Kate put the lyre down, not entirely trusting herself with it at the moment, and spoke again when she had gathered herself. "Then you are their hope, aren't you. If I can release the songs back to you, the siryns can breed again. Without you—without me—there is no hope for your people." She breathed a laugh. "Cousin."
"I am the last of their children," Inhihine whispered. "Two sisters and a brother, all long dead of despair. I cannot allow myself to die and take the last hope from my people, but neither is this living, dragon's daughter. Cousin," she echoed, but the word had poison in it. "Will you play for me? For all of us?"
Kate sank back to the stones, drawing the lyre into her lap once more, and when she answered, it was a whisper, too: "Of course I will."
A song waited in the lyre: a song of comfort and gentleness. A lullaby, the sort a mother might once have sung for her daughter. Inhihine wept; Kate knew that without looking, and still played without surcease. From lullaby to lament, the music grew, and from time to time Kate opened her eyes to look at the strings in surprise: still only an octave, but they carried richness and depth beyond their ken. Different voices were plucked from the wires, until the siryns in the sea answered with their own music, sometimes broken and uncertain, other times strong and proud.
They were none of them human, and a spell had been cast long ago: the need for sleep fell away in the face of those truths, and Kate played on through sunset and moonrise, through the dark of night and the rising dawn. No mortal came to disturb them, and the music went on, every song the lyre had ever known, the voice of Ninanak, the siryn queen, released into ever-changing days. Clouds gathered and rain fell, then cleared away again; it had taken untold hours to create the lyre and pour Ninanak's music into it; to unwind that magic took at least as long again.
She didn't know it was the last song the lyre held, not until the thing turned to dust under her fingertips. Her hands fell together in a useless clutch, trying to catch the fragments whisking away on the wind before she lifted her gaze in weary, sharp hope to meet Inhihine's eyes. Ninanak's heir met her gaze for a moment, then turned swiftly to her people and opened her mouth to sing.
The sound that emerged was pure: sweet and true and without flaw, and—Kate knew it from the first note—not the stuff of the lyre.
Inhihine knew it too. Within a few measures she faltered, and fell to her knees with a cry of despair. Kate grasped again at the particles of dust, already long-since torn away by the wind, then let her hands drop as she looked helplessly from Inhihine to Kekeal, and finally to the gathering of siryns who had waited so long and so patiently. One by one they sank beneath the water, but not to disappear: strains of music, like whale song given half-human voice, began to shift through the changing waves. Harmonies grew, expanded and fell into discord before finding their way again, and the song they sang was the first that had come to Kate's fingertips when she'd played the lyre on Janx's lonely island. It had been nameless then, that piece, but now she knew it for what it was: an elegy for a lost queen and the end of hope. Tears did not come easily to dragons: they were water, and anathema to the fire, but Kate wept into her hands as she listened to the last song of a people. She wept that a man had betrayed them so many centuries ago, and for the twisting of stories that had made Ninanak's truth into a myth, and most of all, that she herself had failed them, here at the end of the tale. There was a humming at the base of her skull, a buzz of building regret, and she spoke to shake it off, even though they had not yet finished singing. "What will you do?"
"Dive too deep to breathe, perhaps." Inhihine broke off to respond listlessly, all the strength of her song washing away in the spoken word. "All of us together, at once, and in the toothed whales' hunting grounds, so our bodies might offer sustenance back to the sea. Better that than to rise bloated and be found by men. You play well. Will you take our story to the gargoyles, and sing it for them so our memories are not lost even to the Old Races?"
"I don't play that well. Not without the lyre." Kate clenched her teeth, swallowing against the ringing in her ears. Even other immortals weren't meant to stand at the heart of a siryn lament. It shook the stones under her feet, too, endless vibrations sung by inhuman voices. "But yes. Of course I will. I'll give them everything I can remember of your songs, and I'll make sure Ninanak's story is remembered. Inhihine, cousin, I'm sorry, but I don't think I can stay any longer. I'd like to hear the end of your song, but…" She touched her nose, which tickled, and came away with a streak of blood.
Inhihine lost her listless tone. "Your ears—and that is not—"
Kate swiped, then scrubbed, at her ear, caught between alarm and astonishment as her fingers turned red as Janx's scales. "It's not what?"
"It's not our song!"
The cliff wall behind them dissolved into fragmented stone. Sound burst forth, such sound as to knock Kate from her feet. She knew an instant's disbelief: nothing could unfoot a dragon; even a gargoyle at full strength could no more move a mountain. Beneath disbelief, instinct warred with caution: they had gone undisturbed for days, but surveillance still rode the skies, and a dragon's transformation was vastly larger than a gathering of siryns. The sea reached up to claim her before she had decided, and a thrill of genuine fear turned her guts to ice.
She landed, astonishingly, in the unfaltering hands of siryns. Dozens of them, all breaking off their song to leap upward and catch her above the waves, and to catch a dragon's mass, even in mortal form, was no small thing. Kate gasped, almost laughing, then did laugh as she was cast forward again, returned to the rocks she'd been thrown from.
A woman stood there now. Another woman, slighter than Inhihine or Kekeal, both of whom were also dragging themselves from the sea. She was still more than Kate's height, and her hair, cropped short around large dark eyes, gave her a sense of fragility that was undone by the echoing strains of power she had unleashed. Her lips were still parted, though she no longer sang: the ache in Kate's ears faded, though blood still itched them. She examined Kate briefly and as quickly dismissed her, seeking out the siryns instead.
They were coming from the water now, not just Inhihine and Kekeal, but all of them. Kate stepped back, and back again, edging between siryns until she'd half-climbed what remained of the cliff wall, far out of the way as a new song began. They crooned this time, soft incredulous joy that lifted the hairs on Kate's arms without driving pain into her marrow. Dragons might not cry: siryns did, with tears so salty Kate could taste them on the air. It was theirs, and not her own: that would be the story she told, when she bore witness.
Crete, entrance to the Underworld. Where else would the King of Hell reside but in the sacred caverns there; where else would he draw his circle of blood and imprison the siryn queen; where else would she wait, but near to where her people had once thrived in the plentiful seas, in hopes of her voice someday returning to her. She sang now, murmurs of healing music that washed over the women crowding her, and Kate could hear the lyre in her voice.
She would ask, soon. She would wonder what a dragon's child was doing at the heart of her restoration. The question would take her from her people, even if only for a little while, and that—that was a thing that did not need to be done. Not now; not when they had always in front of them, awaiting discovery.
Quickly, quietly, while the joy of reunion captured them all, Kate climbed the ruined cliff wall and swung over its lip, then took a moment to glance back down at the gathering below. Colorful heads, all bowed together, bodies pressed close in a multi-hued bloom against the rocks. A song that sobbed with joy, in time to the surf rushing over the stones, and the sunset casting gold across it all.
This. This was such a jewel in a dragon's hoard as could not be equaled. Kate tucked that gem into her heart, cast a glance toward the setting sun, and smiled. There was new hope in the world, new magic waiting to be born. Humans were going to have to get used to it.
A moment later, a dragon winged its way west, into the sunset, into the world.