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The elf’s behavior surprised her as much as her survival. According to Mother and Father, elves were soft-stepping hunters of spear and bow who blew horns and sang swanlike warbles over the corpses of dead dragons as they danced, holding hands sticky with dragon blood.
The only part of that legend that rang true was the elf’s quiet nature. Whether passing over brick, wood planking, or soft grass, he hardly made a sound, save for the whispers of the wind moving around him. The rest of his manner was as gentle and tender as a mother dragon’s over still-wet hatchlings.
Thoughts of Mother and Jizara left her cold and sleepy and miserable. Why didn’t memories heal and fade like wounds?
That evening he cooked her a platter full of organs and entrails in a sharp-smelling herb she’d learned to call gar-loque, or dragon-buds, as the smell of the white clusters when crushed was faintly dragonish.
The meal filled her gorge but did little for her anguished mind.
To divert her thoughts, the next day Wistala ventured out of the stable and viewed Rainfall’s home.
It was a vast home and garden for a single hominid and a few animals. Treble vast when she learned that the wild orchards, melons, and wheat- and tuber-fields around were also his. He made no effort to farm as she understood the word, though he threw the horse’s manure on two beds of flowers surrounding the trees on his threshold.
They were the oddest trees Wistala had ever seen. They became positively animated when Rainfall worked in their vicinity. Their leaves rattled, and their branches scraped against each other, and now and then he looked up and spoke to the limbs, or plucked a bloom and left it to rest in one of the trees.
Then there were the goats.
They came in a variety of colors, sizes, and temperaments; the only attribute they shared was a fear of dragon smell. The goats wandered away whenever they saw or smelled her, horned billies keeping a watchful eye as their charges paced away with tails flicking. They climbed to the highest peak of the house—
And such a house!
Wistala had never seen anything like it.
The house stood on, or rather comprised, a hill and the trees that grew on it. The main door stood between those two vast and arching oaks Rainfall attended, beneath a sort of webbing that had any number of brambles and berries stretching from the oaks to the hillside entrance. Several of the tree limbs supported a sort of stone-and-wood balcony that offered shelter to anyone at the door below.
There were smaller balconies of stone, not shaped but cleverly laid together, windows you couldn’t see unless the sun hit them just right, and chimneys rising up through old stumps.
The inside had narrow passageways and stairs that opened up on wood-paneled rooms with skylights carrying down birdsong from the outside. It was like a cave with surprises at every turn, including a lower room that held a small waterfall that ran warm after its passage around the chimneys, or so Rainfall explained.
Some of the rooms echoed every claw-click of her saa on the wooden floors, others—the sleeping rooms—absorbed sound with moss-covered walls and ceilings thick with roots. At the uttermost top there stood a room filled with paper bound up in leather wrappers or enclosed in tubes, lit by a cupola of crystal that, when slightly opened to air the room, carried in the bleatings of the nimble-footed goats.
Wistala passed a chamber that made her wonder if it was an armory, with many big-doored cases in between, perhaps for armor and shields.
But the weapons seemed frail and lacking in edges.
Rainfall took down one of the devices, vaguely like a small bow, and ran his long fingers along it. A sharp, clear sound unlike anything Wistala had ever heard came from a series of strings that hummed until they quit vibrating. Wistala’s nostrils opened in surprise—was the odd bow alive?
“Senisote,” Rainfall said.
Apparently one could create senisote by blowing into tubes and tapping on clay cylinders topped with leather, as Rainfall demonstrated. She enjoyed it all.
He pulled out a wooden construct so he could squat without folding his legs and played on the instrument she liked best of all, a long wooden tube with a hollow chamber on the end like a hulled melon. It created a sound as pure as birdsong, sweet as a sigh a mother dragon might make over her hatchlings, and as varied as a waterfall.
Wistala gave her first prrum in what seemed like an age. Her neck stiffened, and she began to bob her head. Strange magic. Her head rose and fell with the tune.
Rainfall stood and stepped crabwise, his eyes so merry that Wistala couldn’t help but move opposite him so she could keep him in view. He turned a circle, and so did she, and the next thing she knew, they were moving this way and that across the floor. He capered as he played, and she imitated; the slight pain in her joints couldn’t keep up with the pleasure the music brought.
The tune ended, and her host attempted to strike a pose that involved entwining his legs and spreading his arms, but he must have misstepped, for he collapsed to the floor with a bit of a bump.
And then he began to laugh.
She’d never heard the like. The sound was as pleasing as his music, and infectious besides, for she found her griff fluttering and scraping against her scales.
The elf sat back and wiped his eyes, face split by his mouth that now seemed to stretch from cheekbone to cheekbone. He reached out with his foot and tickled her under the chin, and she couldn’t object.
“A rare delight,” he said, and she took perfect understanding, for his words came out with such a wave of happiness, it was almost mind-speech.
“Very good,” she said back. He used the expression whenever she pronounced an Elvish word particularly well. It must have suited him, for he gave a little bow.
