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AuRon flew north, wondering if he had learned a lesson. He had heard tales of young mateless dragons chasing down hominid females, even pursuing them into castle towers or taking them prisoner to toy with before eating. According to Mother, it meant the end of many a dragon. Hominids avenged the loss of their women, whereas a dragon could sometimes make off with half a herd in the belly and get away with it.
Perhaps he’d become that sort of dragon, pursuing the smell of human females instead of his own kind. He saw himself as a night- stalker, twisting natural desires down a desperate path that would lead to his death. Sickened at the thought, he resolved never to chase down that particular smell again.
But that night, he dreamt of screaming womanflesh.
“A prize, a gift for you we bring, O AuRon-vhe,” Unrush Uth-Rinsrick said some months later. “Today the Feast of the Deathrage among my people is marked. We remember! We give! We revel! Join us, we ask. The fireblades gather.”
The blighters had probably dug up a jade bauble in one of the ruins to the south. AuRon had a collection of statues in his library. The statues were better company than blighters: quieter and certainly more aesthetic.
“In what manner am I to join?”
“Accept our offering. We bring you a prisoner.”
AuRon nodded. So that was it. The blighters occasionally brought him some wretched hunter who had wandered too far in the forest. Rather than just kill him, they presented him to AuRon and watched while he made a meal of the trespasser. The half-starved prey never made much of a dinner; he would have preferred a bullock.
The blighters filed in and formed a circle. AuRon cast a wary eye over them; he had set down a law that said no weapon larger than a dagger was to be brought into his cavern. A blighter witch-doctor had stirred up a few malcontents against him once; while they perished in fiery battle, he never did find the witch-doctor. AuRon didn’t trust any but Unrush. A dragon couldn’t afford to trust if he was to live long.
They dragged the captive in. He was small and dirty, pinioned by a pole thrust across the small of his back and bracketed by his elbows. His hands were bound before him. One of the keepers pulled him along, and another lashed him from behind with a leather switch.
AuRon unwrapped himself from the dais—wanting to put the captive out of his misery and be done with it—and the blighters fell back to form a ring around dragon and prey.
“Day of death! Rage of death!” the blighters chanted.
“Take your sacrifice, sacred spirit of the fireblades,” Unrush howled, rolling his eyes in barbaric ecstasy.
AuRon sniffed the captive, and startled. The woman smell. The hunger that was not all hunger rose in him, wetting his mouth and quickening his heartbeat. AuRon trembled like a hatchling out of the egg.
The sacrifice raised her bruised face. “Bite. May you choke on me, if you’ve forgotten your daughter, Auron,” Hieba said in dragon tongue.
Chapter 19
AuRon’s mind flashed back to his good-bye in the woods outside the lumbermen’s stockade. He saw Hieba again as a scared little girl, running from her guardian through the wildflowers.
When the first shock faded and he saw the ring of confused blighters again, he snorted.
“Berrysweet!” It felt good to say the word again. He stepped around her, putting his body between Hieba and her captors.
“I can’t believe I’m here again,” she said quietly, perhaps more to herself than AuRon. “It feels like this was a dream-life.”
The blighters grumbled to each other. The one who had beaten her shifted to the back of the crowd.
AuRon turned his head toward the blighters. “The Umazheh may go,” he said. “By a trick of fate, I know this human. There’ll be no ceremony with her. Go with my profound thanks—you’ve given me five herds’ worth of satisfaction in bringing this human here.”
Unrush scratched the gray bristles at his temples and talked to his fellow chieftains.
“Bring her to the dragon-throne tomorrow night, my lord. We will have oxen and swine, and wine in the year of our bargain first casked. What is your answer?”
“I will be there. Tomorrow night.”
Hieba touched her dirty, scratched hand to the crystal statue.
“I remember this from when I was little,” Hieba said, speaking the tongue of the sons of Tindairuss. AuRon had to ask her to repeat words at times, but it was a version of a language NooMoahk knew well and had passed on to him. “I believed this was my mother and you were my father, Auron. The stone was light and warm and constant, and you were strong and brave and wise. I wonder what it is? I suspect it’s worth a principality of Hypat.” She sagged against the pillar and sank to her knees.
“You need sleep and food,” AuRon said. “A bath perhaps? There’s still the trickle at the back of the cave. It’s bigger than you remember. I added rocks to give the water more notes to play on its journey.”
But she was asleep.
AuRon sniffed around the cavern. There were a few joints lodged high up in the pillars carved from the rock, but he suspected the meat was past edibility—at least to a human—even in the cool of the cave. He did not want to leave Hieba alone in the room, though it would be a suicidal blighter who would return to do her harm after he had dismissed them. He went into the outer city and burned out a rockchuck nest. The hare-size rodents would at least make a mouthful or two for Hieba when she awakened. He hurried back to the cave with his scorched prizes to find her comfortably asleep in the warm light of the statue.
