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He tongued down two more anyway, and let out a soft burp. His blood flowed with new life.
He watched the water flow into the pool from a crack at a slightly higher level, less of a waterfall than a water step, and a little flowed out into “his” pool on the other side of the crack. The volume coming in and the volume going out seemed out of balance; a torrent came in but a trickle flowed out.>The Copper smelled more gold down the hole. He hurried toward it, following the smell, which seemed to have seized hold of his brain.
The boulder came down, and he ran nose-first into it.
“A dragon must win his own hoard, outcast,” Father said, moving off toward the egg shelf.
Chapter 3
The Gray Rat and he made a sort of peace. The Gray kept to his hunting perches, keeping an eye out for slugs, and as long as the Copper avoided the usual spots they’d go long stretches without seeing each other. Wistala, the chatterer, seemed always to be talking to her mother or brother or sister, and was the most successful hunter.
Of course, they were usually hunting the best spots, so the Copper had to make do with trying to catch the white, long-whiskered cave rats in the offal pile while the others slept. They were smart, quick, and vicious, and to get on he had to be smarter, quicker, and even more vicious. He tried piling bones and loose rocks in such a way that they loomed over a juicy bit of dragon-waste, then toppling them when he heard noises in the pile, but he found that the rats would worm through the bones and hooves easier than if he tried to catch them on the hop.
He found that if he smeared himself first with slime from the receding pools and then with dragon-waste, they couldn’t smell him, thanks to the wet, and would often get within a jump’s distance. But he learned an enervating lesson when he overhunted the garbage pile, for the rats quit coming. He took to visiting it only after the other hatchlings ate something Father brought back, for sometimes they missed a tail or an ear or a bit of marrow. Then he hunted the pile with an appetite that would have taken many, many rats to fill, but took away only one or two for all the filth and bother.
Of course, this necessitated a good deal of washing afterward.
While scrubbing off after one meal he heard a high, pleasant trilling coming from the egg shelf above. The words and tune warmed him like the sunlight he dreamed of. The running, splashing water devoured the words, so he climbed up the egg shelf and peeked over.
Farther down the egg shelf, almost out of the mosslight, his mother slumbered, and he saw the tail of the Gray Rat wrapped around her tail-tip. Wistala’s nose peeped from under Mother’s tail.
The longer and thinner of his two sisters lay across the trickle, arching her back in the water cascading down the side of the cave, warbling to herself:
Paint my wings, as a stranger in paradise,
Take me not from the city’s light,
through white towers I long to soar…
“Oh,” she squeaked, seeing him. She shrank against the cave wall.
“Why did you stop?” he asked.
“Do you want to use the trickle?”
“Use it?”
“The cascade. It’s marvelous for cleaning under the scales, especially that bit that falls all the way from the ceiling.”
“Your name is Jizara,” he said, marveling at how easily the word formed in his mouth.
“That’s just for songs and such. Zara rolls off the tongue so much easier. You don’t speak very well. I suppose you don’t get much chance for talking.”
“Will you sing more?” He felt the clumsiness of his words.
She uncoiled a little. “You like my singing?”
“It’s beautiful.” He edged up on the other side of the trickle.
She turned a little deeper green as her scales rose and fell. “You won’t…you won’t jump on me?”
“Why should I?”
“Auron does it all the time.”
It felt so good to talk, he was wondering if he wanted a song to interrupt. “I’ll stay on this side of the trickle.”
“What do you want to hear?” she finally asked.
