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“I’d give you some chicken if I dared take your bands off,” she said, pouring a little blood-mixture into the nasal tube. He still hated the tube. He felt as though he were starving anyway, so he might as well starve without having a piece of leather threaded through his snout twice daily. No matter how much he struggled and glared, she persisted in her feedings.
Two other hatchlings arrived, caged as he was. One was hardly out of the shell, a young silver dragon with a barely healed wound where its egg tooth had been. It was wan and looked at him miserably. The other was green, a dragonelle.
Auron made mind contact with the young male, and got such a wave of confused anguish that he had to break off the conversation before it even started. He read all its history in a flash. The dragon had been hatched in captivity, had never known the smell of its mother or the proud eye of its father. Just some brute of a blighter who had cared for it, and poorly at that. It was harder to know the mind of the female; she must have been a more distant relation. If they could only speak!
He tried again, simplifying his thoughts to her, trying to remove emotions, mind-pictures, ideas, anything but bare words.
“You . . . name?”
“Not . . . as . . . such.”
Not as such? What did that mean?
“I Auron. I gray. Father AuRel. Father bronze. Your name?”
“Not . . . as . . . such.”
Auron thumped his tail against the deck. Wasn’t she paying attention? “What?”
“Not as such.”
Auron broke it off and rotated his neck so his eyes faced the wall. But for some reason, he felt better. Just the smell of other dragons, the feel of their minds, comforted him. In some ways, wretched as he was, he had it better than they. The dragonelle didn’t have the knack of mind-speech, and as for the poor young male, fresh from the egg, he was utterly lost. At least Auron had known his mother and father, his sisters. He had seen dragons and knew what he was.
Hazeleye and another elf came into the hold, two ship men trailing behind. The male bore a box. He set it carefully on deck and opened it. Sawdust spilled out onto the floor, Auron sniffed the distinctive dry odor. The ivory tip of a dragon egg could be seen within.
The elves spoke for a moment; Hazeleye squatted and put her ear to the egg, before shutting and locking it again. They talked as the sailors secured the chest among sacks half-filled with more sawdust. The male spoke sharply to one of the men in Parl.
“Watch it there, that’s not a cask of pork. Humans! You never take the time to do aught properly, do you?”
The sea-men ignored the comment. Perhaps they were inured to that kind of speech from elves. Another sailor descended with a pair of lanterns, and put them next to the chest. Auron smelled the almost dragonlike scent of burning oil. The elves spoke some more, and Hazeleye pointed to netting in the corner of the hold.
Later that day, the ship’s motion altered. Auron felt it change directions, and rock harder side to side. Was it beginning its flight above the water?
Auron submitted to a feeding from Hazeleye and watched her do the same to the female and the hatchling. It was almost as bad to watch it as it was to go through it. He tried to keep out the other dragons’ pain as best he could.
With the ordeal over, the elf filled the oil in the always-burning lanterns and climbed into some smaller netting strung between two square-carved tree trunks holding up the ceiling above like stalagmites in a cave. Auron watched her rock and think with the eye facing her, and she looked back at him. With one eye.
A man in clothing so bright, it reminded Auron of a dragon’s hide stepped down into the hold the next morning. “So, how is our floating garbleup?” the man said, using an unknown word.
“Well enough, Captain. It’s not my first passage.”
“To the Isle of Ice? Truly?”
“A long voyage, I know.”
“Then you should also know better than to claim you could hire another ship.”
“It got your mate to do what I wanted.”
“This is my third trip in three years. Each time with dragons.” He looked at the cages. “This one won’t live much longer,” he said, eyeing the little one. “The female seems a fine strong one—you’ll get your price for her. But what is this?” he said, coming to Auron’s enclosure.
“A male.”
“Of no color? His Sagacity’ll no more take him than he’d buy a basilisk. He’ll be cut up for fish bait by sunset the day we land.”
“We’ll see.”
“I know the pointy-head will laugh in your face if you try to sell him a birth defect.”
