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“Then he doesn’t know as much as he claims about dragons. Rumor is he has an idea to breed them. A gray can have any color offspring.”
The captain shook his head. “I think not.”
“Captain, these cages aren’t doing them any good. Can your armorer fix it so they’re chained to the wall?”
“If you’re willing to pay for the damages to my ship.”
Auron saw the elf clamp her jaw shut as tightly as his. “Yes,” she finally said. Funny that hominids could show emotion now and again. It made them almost dragonlike.
“Then I’ll arrange it, kind heart. I might have a goosedown pillow in one of my sea chests, if you’d like that for their precious heads, as well.” He walked back up the entry hatchway, chuckling. The elf said something to herself in her own tongue to the gaily colored back.
She walked over to Auron’s netting. “Were you listening? Were you?” she asked, absently patting him as she looked up the hatchway the other had used. Auron didn’t understand her language, but at her touch, he knew her feelings. They were warm and caring, similar to Mother’s, and lifted some of his misery. She paused in her stroking, drawing her hand away as if he were burning. Her eyebrows came together like head-butting hatchlings. “You were listening,” she said, switching to the Parl she employed with the captain. “I saw your eye. You looked at me; you looked at the captain. Are you one of the dragons who know our tongues? Nod if you understand.”
Auron wondered if he could turn her sympathy to his advantage. He had watched hominids enough to know that for some reason they shook their heads side-to-side to indicate negation, up-and-down for agreement. Dragons sensibly closed or opened their nostrils. He shook his head up-and-down.
Her eye widened, and then she laughed. It was a pleasant sound; he liked it despite himself. “I wonder if you’d speak,” she mused. “I don’t think I’d better give you the chance. I’m childish-foolish, but I’m no fool.
“I know something of dragons, little one. I used to be as fresh and little as you, when I had flowers in my spring hair. Our . . . what would the word be in Parl . . . elders, our frost-haired elders thought me bright, so I was apprenticed to a great . . . student-nature, no, student of nature. Her name was Ilsebreadth. She knew everything there was to know about wild creatures. She could tell what kind of winter we’d have by where the squirrels would hide their acorns, or tell if a pine tree was healthy by smelling the sap. She spoke to bears and owls about their hunts.”
At the mention of hunting, Auron perked up a little. Then he remembered his hunts with Wistala, and his hearts ached at the loss.
“The frost filled her hair as I grew up, but there was still one great mystery: dragons. She became obsessed with finding an ancient dragon before she had to put down roots for the last age. She sought one of the first sons lingering from the days of your kind’s dominance. Yes, I know, dragons were here before the paran, the blighters, or their descendants, the naran—the speaking-people.”
Auron wished he’d been born into a time before the naran. Why did the Great Sprits have to curse the earth with them? Squabbling fools.
“Dragons make art, dragons tell stories, all without the written word. Your kind’s history goes far before and beyond that, into the mists of time. What secrets you must know!”
Auron followed her story with no small amount of difficulty; she had to pause to form words, as if she was used to thinking of her tale but not speaking it. Especially not in Parl. There were no mind-pictures, either, but that could not be expected from an elf. Even—and Auron admitted this only with his hatchling teeth rubbing against each other in displeasure—a kindly elf.
The elf tucked her long lower limbs under herself to sit beside him. Again Auron found the gesture almost dragonlike.
“She decided to hunt NooMoahk, the black. Not hunt to kill, but hunt to meet. It was a long hunt, and we picked up enough dragon lore for a shelf of books. After much travel, we came upon a caravan trader who had sold a warrior black dragon scales for a shield and armor. After a good deal of bargaining, he agreed to take us to the dragon’s hold. We had to cross a desert, the hardest journey of my life. Ilsebreadth sickened and died on the trip, but I pressed on after; I didn’t want her dream to die with her.
“I found him, but was betrayed by the trader. He wanted to use me, then hand me over to the dragon—for more scales, I suppose. I got away only after an ugly fight with his men, which left me with this memento,” she said, turning the corner of her mouth up on the scarred side of her face and revealing hair the fiery colors of a fall forest. The leaves growing in her locks had a dry smell, like bark peeling from a birch.
“I found NooMoahk, easy as berry picking. Would you believe I came face-to-face with the greatest of all blacks? A slender twig of a youth before a dark hurricane? He would have eaten me, I’m sure, but I’d picked up a strange tidbit while writing Ilsebreadth’s words for her records. I knew you dragons love music. I had a poor voice for an elf, but I sang him a sea song:
Agone, away, abreast the endless sea
To circle in my journeys,
And then come home to thee.
“That was one of the verses. A silly song that rose and fell like the waves. But he liked it. He cocked his head, like a dog hearing a whistle—”
How Father would snort if he heard that, Auron thought.
“—and said a word to me. In my own tongue, the sea tongue, even: more. And I gave him more. He was old, isolated, lonely. I think he liked having someone to talk to, even if it wasn’t another dragon. In his turn, he told me some fine stories. Kings forgotten even by their worn-down coin, empires turned to dust, terrible battles that would live forever, if only someone could remember who fought or why.”
Auron flexed his claws inside the leather mittens. Did elves always talk this much? Hazeleye was worse than his sisters.
“Perhaps he was too old, for I read to him some of our inscriptions of dragon lore. He corrected the work of Ilsebreadth, filled in gaps. He had a dream of understanding between dragons and people. He said it had been so, once. But he let slip the great weakness of dragons without even knowing it.”
Hmmpfh, Auron thought. Dragons have many weaknesses, but no great one. Wouldn’t Mother have mentioned it so he could be on his guard?
Wait, another part of him said. The patient part, that had been memorizing her story, in case he could glean some advantage from the rows of words. Father had said that the dragons were dwindling in number. Had some flaw been discovered in the masterwork of the Great Spirits? A fatal flaw?
She leaned closer. “Would you like to know the great weakness, little one? The chink in the armor? I put it in the book, but it was burned by those barbarian fools years ago.”
