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FATE FIGHTS ON THE SIDE OF THE PREPARED.
—Irelia Antialovna
Chapter 11
Wistala, with food in her stomach giving her energy and a mind wishing diversion from the aches of healing, learned much about these “Firemaids” and the dragons they protected as they traveled from post to post.
It seemed there were three strains of dragonkind, according to her rescuers. The Skotl were reckoned the best fighters, as they tended to be the biggest and thickest of scale. They were also the most numerous, by a thin margin, though they were flexible enough to count any largish dragon as an honorary Skotl regardless of bloodline, so their counts couldn’t be trusted. The Anklenes were the cleverest, as they’d once been close servants of the ancient Anklamere, who’d once kept and bred dragons much as dragons now kept other races as thralls. The Anklenes were the fewest and the most clannish. The Wyrr considered themselves the mortar that held the others together, noted for their cool heads and sound judgment and skill at song, story, and sooth.
All the Firemaids apparently thought well of their Tyr, and while there was some doubt as to his parentage, as he’d been orphaned young, each line seemed assured that he was, deep down, of theirs. The Anklenes argued his distinctive eye-ridge and classical crest as proof of their line’s intelligence, the Skotl bragged that such hardihood in the face of battle injuries could only result from Skotl parentage, and the Wyrr praised the friendship he seemed to inspire in not only dragons but bats and thralls and such as well.
“It’s more that what went before him was so bad, he seems thrice as great as he really is,” Ayafeeia said when they chanced to be alone after one dinner when the Tyr’s latest order that Paskinix should be told that a substantial chunk of his army was waiting for him to come and claim it in the Lavadome came down via a Drakwatch messenger. “He gets what he wants. He’s just cleverer about it than most.”
The irony of her situation appealed to her. She wished nothing more than that Rainfall was still alive so she could get back to his estate and tell him. She’d exhausted herself flying from the frozen north down the spine of the world to the south, searched the borders of Hypatia, across the endless plains, and even into the East seeking first other dragons, then AuRon.
All those horizons under her wings, exhausting days and sore nights. Wasted. Well, not wasted. A broader knowledge of the world could hardly be called a wasteful activity. But what she really needed was one slippery step and a fall into the Lower World to bring her into more contact with her own kind than she’d ever imagined.
The one filcher in her hoard was that drakka Takea.
“The Tyr must know about you helping Paskinix escape,” she said. At every opportunity.
“And he shall,” Ayafeeia said. “But from me, not you. All I know for certain is that an exhausted, starved, injured dragon fell during a difficult climb.”
Wistala’s exhaustion was cured by rest, her starvation was remedied by two-a-day meals—one could tell day from night in the Star Tunnel by taking a trip to one of the openings—and her injuries were set by blighter-thralls, who put a brace on the break and used a charcoal forge to seal it closed.
“It feels awful at first, like something’s clutching at your wing. Quite unnerving,” Ayafeeia said. “The itch feels like it will drive you mad if you don’t keep yourself occupied.”
Wistala took her up on it and tried to keep her mind occupied. “Who built the Star Tunnel?” she asked during one of the restorative meals. “Dwarves?”
“It doesn’t look like dwarf-work,” one of the Anklenes in the Firemaids said. “It’s too dry for demen and as for blighters—why? They’re comfortable underground, but they prefer the surface. The triangular shape, while structurally sound, wastes a good deal of space for anything but dragon-sized creatures.”
“But we’ve no legends of dragons making it,” Ayafeeia put in.
“The proportions are right for trolls. They’re rather triangular. And they’re so odd, it’s easy to believe they’re out of the Lower World.”
“Trolls!” Ayafeeia said. “Where are there trolls? I thought they’d vanished.”
“There are still some in the north, regrettably.”
“Trolls! They are supposed to be strong,” a Firemaid said.
“Fast, which is worse. And they can climb like giant monkeys.”
“Best just to fly away and burn them.”
“Well, they squeeze into cracks like spiders. They don’t know fear. But if you burn them good at the tailvent—their lungs are to the rear—you’ll drop them.”
“How do you know all that?” Takea asked.
“I helped kill one, and just survived another. He jumped on me while I was flying through some mountains.”
Takea shut her nostrils, and a few others whispered among themselves. The Anklene stared at her closely.
“You have a great deal of experience in the Upper World,” Ayafeeia said.
“I’ve traveled it my whole life. I know Hypatia better than most areas, but I’ve been up to the icy wastes, I’ve seen the Sadda-Vale, the eastern kingdoms, and some of the Inland Ocean.”
“No one could survive so many journeys,” the Anklene said. “How were you not hunted?”
