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“Sister?”
Auron?
She looked off the shelf, heart leaping and body ready to join it—
And saw the copper. Thinner and more haggard than ever. The copper stood, leaning a little as he balanced on his crippled limb’s joint.
“They killed her, Jiz—” His voice was only superficially like Auron’s after all; he still had some hatchling inflections.
“I’m Wistala. You’re no brother to me. You had a tooth in this.” She felt her fanlike griff expand. Though she had no crest to rattle them against, they could still flutter angrily, she found.
“They lied,” the copper said, but she launched herself off the ledge, jaws agape and sii reaching for him. “A bloody cave, no hoard—”
He dodged as she landed, took advantage of her being off balance to throw himself across her neck. “We need to overcome this, put it behind. Unite. The past can’t be changed!” he said.
Wistala squirmed, couldn’t break free. She gathered her limbs under her body. “No. But it can be avenged.” She lifted herself with all four limbs and her tail, pushing forward.>Auron touched her nose, managed a choking prrum as he pushed her into a crevice.
He listened to the hoofbeats of the approaching elves. “Go to Father. Follow the Bowing Dragon. Follow Susiron. Father is there!”
“Auron, I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. Don’t waste time.”
Auron hurried into the meadow, in the open for everyone to see. High above, wheeling hawks altered course and moved to fly over him. They cried out, and were answered by horns from the valley.
He can’t be leaving! He can’t he can’t he can’t . . .
She called to him with her mind, called him brave and good and sent all the love she couldn’t find words for, reaching to touch his mind if not his soft gray skin.
“Good-bye, sister.”
He’d never called her sister before.
He never would again.
Wistala cried, alone, and not one living thing in the Upper World cared.
Chapter 6
Darkness settled on the mountainside before Wistala moved again. All the time she waited, she had to choke back little peeping hatchling cries. A day ago, she would have put her neck on an oath that she couldn’t keen like a still-wet hatchling anymore, but the sight of her brother leading the elves away from her and to his doom brought the sound—whether she liked it or not.
She waited until long after dark, hoping that Auron would return, galumphing out of the mountainside mists with eyes ablaze and a tail-thumping story of outwitting the elves.
She looked into the valley in the direction Auron had disappeared. Campfires dotted the area around the meadow where they’d come across the unsaddled horses. She heard no baying of hounds, saw no torches in the trees indicating a hunt still on. But Auron was quick, perhaps—
No. You’re alone now. They’re all assassinated.
Except Father. Gone north, to some dwarven fortress by a lake. The clouds thickened; another storm might be working up.
She couldn’t just leave. She and Auron deserved some mark to show they’d lived and breathed and seen. She went to the ledge where they’d watched Father fight the elves and dwarves. She extended a thick saa-claw and scored a pair of marks into the lee side of the stone.
Though she took her time, the result certainly didn’t match the fabled artistry of Silverhigh—it looked like something a bored blighter might carve into his cave wall: two dragons, mirror images, circling each other as though guarding the other’s back.
“We’ll always be together here, Auron. This stone won’t forget.”
She crept up the hill, moving away from the rocky prominence.
Going up a mountain can sometimes save you travel around its base, but that wasn’t the case for Wistala. Without a second pair of eyes to keep watch as she moved, she had to pause every hundred lengths or so, to watch and listen and pick a route for her next creep.
