Free Ivory Lyre by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Page A

need bits in their
mouths and would not tolerate spurs.
    He thought how Garit would have ridden them,
gentle-handed and wise, understanding at once their perceptiveness.
Garit had stayed on as horsemaster after Teb’s father was murdered,
serving the dark leader, Sivich, and certainly hating him. He had
stayed to help Teb and Camery when the chance finally came. When
Sivich’s men discovered there was still a singing dragon on Tirror,
Sivich decided to capture it, using Teb as bait. It was the small
birthmark on Teb’s arm that told Sivich he was a dragonbard.
    Sivich had been an ignorant fool to think
that a singing dragon would let itself be captured. Teb supposed
that in his embarrassment at failure Sivich had kept the fact that
there was a dragon again on Tirror a secret. Maybe he still dreamed
of trapping her. He was a fool as well as an incredibly evil man.
He followed the dark leaders eagerly. It was Sivich’s kind, more
than any other, that helped the dark grow strong. Teb intended that
Sivich would die painfully and slowly for the murder of his
father.
    Garit had outsmarted Sivich handily when he
freed Teb from Sivich’s army before they reached the site of the
dragon trap. Garit fled on horseback to lead Sivich’s soldiers away
from Teb, where he hid in the sanctuary of Nison-Serth. Garit
didn’t know Teb had been captured a second time and chained in the
dragon snare. Surely it was Garit who had returned to Auric much
later, to the tower, to free Camery. The great owl, Red Unat,
winging across the channel to Nightpool, had brought Teb news that
she was gone.
    Teb began to pace again, impatient to join
the dragons. He wondered—if he could bring folk awake, he and
Seastrider, make folk cast off the mind-numbing dark, maybe he
could make them sleep, too.
    Half amused, he tried a song of peace,
singing softly, his voice moving out onto the night breeze too
quietly to be consciously heard through open windows. The song came
to him easily, and he felt more power than he should; then he
realized Seastrider was singing with him, a whisper of dragon song.
They wove a subtle ballad filled with stars and soft winds, and
pretty soon the palace lights began to be snuffed, one here, two
there. The reflections of light from the rooms below him began to
die.
    At last the night was black, with only the
stars for light. Teb slipped out his chamber door, to the shadows
of hall and stair.
     
     
     

Chapter 8
     
    The white mares were silhouetted against the
night, the two black stallions visible only because they hid the
stars. Teb swung onto Seastrider’s back. They headed at a fast trot
for the hills. “We made good magic,” he said. “The palace sleeps
soundly.”
    “It was not our magic alone, Tebriel. There
is power around us tonight. There is something in the palace of
bright power. Can’t you feel it?”
    “What kind of something? I can sense only
the dark.”
    “I don’t know what it is.” Seastrider tossed
her head. “I expect you will be aware of it, given time
. . . and a little freedom to breathe, among all the
social complications of these humans.”
    So she had sensed his frustration at the
supper table. “Are you laughing at me?”
    She didn’t answer but broke into a gallop,
the other three beside her, and they headed for the far hills.
    Once out of sight of the palace, they let
their horse shapes slide away, and the four dragons burst skyward
on the cold west wind. They swept out over the black sea, banking
and gliding, spending their pent-up, restless passion in a storm of
spinning flight.
    When they settled at last, they dove for
shark, Teb half-drowned as usual, his ears full of water and his
boots full as well. On an outcropping rock the dragons made their
meal. When they took to the sky once more, still possessed by
wildness, Teb clung, dizzy and laughing. The lands below them were
all dark, not a light anywhere. The sea heaved with patches of
phosphorescence so it was brighter than the