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“You don’t have to call me your honor, Rasha. Not when we’re alone.”
“I like formalities. It’s so easy to hide behind them. If you offered to take me up, I’d say yes. You know that.”
“Take you up?”
“You know. Mate.”
“Nilrasha, my mate is above in the palace.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t have to fly out together, silly. Go out separately, and meet where she couldn’t see.”
The Copper felt bar-struck. “I meant a dragon should just have his mate.”
“So we are never to…I thought you just mated with Halafora to make the line happy.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t make the mating anything less for that. She’s been kind to me.”
“And you to her. Too kind. Do you ever—”
“I don’t want to talk about that. You’ve got the wrong idea about me if you think I could—”
“Could? Do you have another injury I’m unaware of?”
He rattled his griff. “Would, then. No. Not while Halafora lives. I’ve pledged myself to her, and that’s an end to it.”
“But do you still love me, RuGaard?”
He couldn’t answer that. If he did, he’d never be able to look at Halafora across a feast again. He turned tail and left the Firemaid’s cold, chaste quarters.
Chapter 24
He told FeLissarath and his mate that as soon as the bridge was completed and he could turn his attentions to Anaea, they would be free to leave.
“The odd thing is, I don’t think we want to go,” FeLissarath said. “The hunting is good, and we have friends here among the humans and condors. Perhaps we’ll leave the palace to you and set up somewhere in the mountains. A little cave. Really rough it, like young, wild dragons of the north first mated.”
His mate looked at him and she loosed a prrum.
Talk turned to politics, as it often did. Rumor had come up through the Drakwatch that SiBayereth, SiDrakkon’s first clutchwinner, had been killed, not in a duel, but in his bath. Some were saying he was assassinated in retribution for some of the killings and forced duels that had been taking place with greater frequency since SiDrakkon turned Tyr.
Others said that he’d bodily insulted some maiden dragonelle and she’d taken the traditional revenge of a female wronged and discarded.
The Copper returned to his cushions and his mate, exceptionally happy to be in Anaea and out of the Imperial Resort and its feuds. He slept with his neck across hers in silent appreciation.
So eager were the FeLissaraths to be in their new digs that they started hunting for caves almost immediately, and turned over all the day-to-day temple duties to him.
Now that he had his wings he hunted for NiVom, searching the mountains to the south, but there was no sign of him. He spent a rather cold night in the mountains—the Upper World made him feel exposed and watched; he didn’t like it, even when the unpredictable weather was nice—and flew back in the morning.
It was a brilliant, clear day. The sort of day that wouldn’t think about being evil, and instead put off ill tidings until the next overcast.
He saw a distant dot. It was a dragon, male—and therefore not Nilrasha, nor FeLissarath. It was light-colored, reflecting the sun, perhaps white.
He beat his wings hard toward it. He hoped if it was NiVom he’d recognize him rather than think him an assassin, despite the improbability of his being in the air. The dragon turned a little, not running away then, but coming toward him.
They rushed toward each other with frightening speed. The Copper saw that it was a light shade of bronze, though a good deal smaller than Father, at least Father as he remembered him. The dragon gained altitude at the last moment, as though seeking an advantage, and the Copper veered away, fearing a tailstrike on his weak wing and upset by something odd about its lines.
The dragon had a rider!
The implications so upset the Copper that he dropped toward the palace as fast as he dared—Rayg said that he couldn’t be certain that the joint wouldn’t give way under what he called “extraordinary stress” but refused to further define it.
