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“Oh, to the north, while crossing the Inland Ocean. They’d been blown off course by a storm and they saw a dragon aloft. They thought for certain they were doomed and made their last offerings, but the dragon only swooped low over them. They said a man in heavy fur rode its back, but sailors are always telling tales.”
“Are they sure it was a dragon? Not feathered?”
“Yes, a dragon, and blue as the sky. Speaking of blue, I must admire that belt around your throat. Wait—if it goes around your throat is it a belt or no?”
“Harness, I call it, but I pity the man who holds on to it to ride my neck. He’ll need something thicker than fur to save his skin.”
Wistala pulled her griff up and back so the corners of her mouth could rise. Lada laughed.
“I used to hate you,” Lada said.
“You were young,” Wistala said.
“Fair can be foul, and foul fair,” Lada quoted. “Proverbs of Experience sixty-one. That means something to me. Now.”
“I’ll make no promises about Rayg, fair or foul,” Wistala said. “But I will keep my eyes open. I intend to travel at night, though. Your best chance is through Hammar, distasteful as he is.”
“He can be charming, as long as he’s getting his way and his appetite is sated,” she said. “I will dance to his tune, but as a viper does before it strikes the bird. A fair journey, Wistala, and peril only to your enemies.”
“If I come south again, I will leave word at Jessup’s Inn and the circus winter camp. I fly north tomorrow, but one of my hearts stays at Mossbell.”
Chapter 23
Wistala flew north in easy stages, more from physical limitations than intent.
Even with her wounds healed over and her blood restored, she still tired easily and needed frequent rests, made all the more difficult by a thirst that seemed to start at her tail-tip and grow from there and a hunger that must have been worse than her hatchling pangs. (It wasn’t, but lost memories are sometimes a kindness.)
She followed the road until it broke off into a series of trails or twin ruts, irregularly filled with increasingly crude bridgework. Even the distance posts of Ancient Hypat’s short-lived Tribal Confederation, still in use to mark intervals of vesk even in lands where the word Hypat was a curse and Hypatian a synonym for “devil.”
Flying mostly at night, but doing what she could to observe the villages and isolated hutments she passed in what felt like a hopeless search for Rayg, she avoided lights below.
Hearth lights and campfires grew less and less frequent as she ranged north, until she began to travel at dawn and dusk so that she had a better chance of dropping on a hoofed-and-horned meal. The snowcaps on the mountains, rich with all the dragon colors when the sun was level with them, marched lower and lower and glaciers hanging between became commonplace.
Then, over the course of a single night, she reached new air currents. The wind ceased blowing pleasantly warm from the southwest, and instead spun down the coast from the northeast, a cold, wet breeze that helped her to glide but she had to fight like an enemy for each hop north. She found that she traveled faster with less fatigue if her track crisscrossed the wind in the manner of a serpent.
Food was plentiful. Out on the coast there were shallows thick with crabs the size of a battle shield and great waddling tubes of flesh and fat that sunned themselves on sandbars and coastal rocks, the fattest often at the top where they could bark at the lesser, but the commanding height just meant they were easily plucked up by a hungry dragonelle.
The exhaustion of flying became too great.
She found a reef-sheltered isle, in seas she guessed were too rough for the boats of men, and spent a dozen or more days happily in the hardy bush and wind-racked pines atop sheer cliffs, taking various multilegged, pincer-armed crawlers from the sea during the day and plucking the occasional barker at night from the sleeping beaches.
While resting there, she saw not one, but three dragons. The sight shocked her, after spending much of her lifetime without so much as a glimpse of her kind. To see not just one, but three, all at once and together, froze her for a moment. They flew almost wing-tip to wing-tip, a slightly smaller silver leading two big reds.
Wistala threw herself into the air, fringe high and stiff with excitement, flapping madly to gain altitude.
Wing-tips rose in unison as they glided. They must have marked her. All turned gently for a better look.
That was when she noticed the riders.
It was so like horses, she glided for a moment, losing altitude, stunned. The dragons had reins, reins! running forward from the riders to the head and out to the leading wing bones.
Dragons fixed and ridden like horses had no appeal, and she didn’t like the way they were coming around, spreading out a little.
She rolled on her back, dived, headed for the shoreline, where she wove around her plateau island and changed course a little southward so if they were moving to intercept, they might overshoot. She chanced a glance back and saw one of the riders was in difficulty; his dragon was circling oddly. The silver and its rider dived toward her, then came around in a great swoop, leading the other red, which could not match its turns. The pair headed to the aid of the other.
The last Wistala saw of them, as she plunged into the coastal forest, was the silver and undercommand red flanking the other as they turned back out to sea.
Summer days at the top of the world lasted forever.
