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His wing held as he leveled off, making for the staircase cut into the side of the mountain, topped by the familiar outlines of the dragon palace.
The other dragon—for some reason the term hag-ridden popped into his head, but he couldn’t remember the origins; perhaps it was some story mother dragons told their hatchlings to compel them to behave—followed his course, though it made no attempt to catch up.
He came in for a landing at the wide lower entrance hall, and Fourfang trotted up.
“Get my mate and Nilrasha. Danger!”
Fourfang glanced up and turned around, doing a fair attempt at running on all fours to get back inside the palace.
The Copper backed into the entrance to get solid Anaean stone between himself and the stranger—there was that term again, hag-ridden.
The man shouted words down at him, but he couldn’t comprehend their meaning.
“May I land?” the dragon roared.
“What is it, my lord?” Halaflora said from the entrance.
“Stay back. If a fight begins, use your flame to help me and then run for the Lower World.” He stuck his head out. Oh, this was cowardly! He stepped out.
“Cry parley and land away. Beneath me, now.”
The dragon turned one more circle and landed well, though it rocked the man in his leather seat a little. The hag-rider wrapped the reins around a curved tooth at the front of his seat and hopped off, though he kept hold of a rope linking him to his leather seat.
The Copper tried not to stare at the elaborate reins linking dragon, head and wing, to the rider. There were copper rings punched through the skin of the dragon to better fix the lines. He wondered if that hurt.
The man glubbed out a few words.
“That’s Parl,” Halaflora said. “It’s a trade tongue here on the surface.”
“Can you speak it?”
“Only a few words. I know a greeting.”
“Then say it.”
She coughed something out that sounded like the mindless yapping of a dog.
The man took off his helmet and said something in return.
“He’s being polite,” she said.
And there the conversation sputtered and died out. The man spoke to his mount, and the dragon said, in a rather thick accent: “We have come to bring peace.”
“That’s good. I hope you may also go in peace.”
The dragon translated for the hag-rider. The man responded, through his dragon: “We seek allies in a great war. A war that unites dragon and man against their common enemy.”
Hawks and mice uniting against the dogs and cats! The Copper didn’t know what to make of it, but he was in the Imperial line and needed to answer well.
“If you are so united,” the Copper said, “why do you need to speak the man’s words? Why do you fly tied head and wing tip to the man? Answer me that, and don’t bother saying anything to him.”
The bronze looked nonplussed.
“I tell the man that, and he will be angry,” the bronze said.
“All the more reason not to translate it.”
The hag-rider yapped something.
