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“Strange fate,” the Copper said. “That I would end up avenging my father in turn. I killed the Dragonblade, though it very nearly came to him killing me.”
Wistala looked around, but no one argued with that seemingly impossible statement. The Dragonblade came to the Lavadome? What madness!
“You still had a tooth in the murder of our mother,” AuRon said.
“You accuse me of murdering my family,” the Copper said. He raised his voice so all could hear. “I reply they were no family to me.
“Our parents believed, I think, a strict code of isolation and barbaric survival by wit and wing and claw rather than through civilization. We know of a few dragons here who argue for the belief, even if they lack the courage to leave the Lavadome, with its thralls and its herds and its aid, to go off and fight for a cave of their own.
“Understand, I was not born into the Lavadome, where a hatchling who happened to survive the hatching duel could end up adopted into another cave. For me, the only dragons I knew cast me out. Why, they did not even offer me the dignity of a name.”
“You deserved a name,” Wistala said. “I had nothing to do with that. I know our parents told you to leave the cave.”
“Did they shelter me, as Tyr FeHazathant did?” the Copper asked.
He looked at them, but spoke to the assembly. “Did they reward duty with honor? Did they lay down rules and traditions? Offer advice as to how to survive in the world? Give me even a mouthful of silver so that my scales might come in thick enough to turn a dagger? No, I starved in silence, never hearing the voices of my kind.”
Nilrasha rushed to her mate’s side and buried her snout in his flank under the wing.
“My love, my love, you should have shared this with me!”
“No,” the Copper said, though whether he was answering his own questions or his mate Wistala couldn’t say. “Our parents abandoned these things, or never learned them. Perhaps they or their grandsires abandoned other ideals when they left the Lavadome.
“Tyr FeHazathant and the Imperial Line gave me a name and a station and taught me what it means to be a dragon. Have the two of you forgotten? Wistala, what bargains did you strike in the Upper World to allow your survival? Were you fed like some overgrown guard dog perhaps, or fitted for a saddle?”
Wistala felt the blaze in his eyes. She knew she had little cause for guilt, yet guilt she felt nonetheless. Perhaps for not making more of an effort on her brother’s behalf. Jizara had once spoken to her about their Copper brother, that perhaps they should make an effort to meet with him and feed him, in secret as they hunted for slugs on the cave floor, but she’d seen him then as another mouth and there was already little enough food to go around.
“AuRon, you come here like a messenger-thrall, and you don’t even do that task properly,” the Copper said. “You’ve given us no words from Ghioz. Or was the Queen’s message that the dragons of the Lavadome should doubt and despise their Tyr? I wonder why she might wish for that?”
Wistala could no longer read her brother. The stripes on his gray skin darkened—in layout they were not that different from DharSii’s, perhaps a little thicker. He shifted his weight from one side to the other.
The Copper raised his head high and asked the assembly: “Does any dragon here have a complaint about how I carried out my duties in the Drakwatch?”
“No,” a few dragons murmured.
“I’ve never had luck in duels. I did not fight for this throne, but for all the dragons of the Lavadome. They trusted me with this title, and if they want it back, knowing all this, I will quit it.”
At this Queen Nilrasha raised her snout, glancing around alarmed as though afraid of a fight or a challenge.
No dragon stirred. “I am not a hatchling,” the Copper continued, “maimed by my hatching, starved in sight of my own egg shelf, taken and broken by iron rods in the hard hands of dwarves. I am fortunate, today, in having the luxury of choices.”
“Father’s gold drove you to your choice more than the rods of the dwarves,” AuRon said.
Ayafeeia spoke up. “It does not matter. In the Lavadome, whatever you were as a hatchling, or as a drake, is never mentioned again if you enter the Drakwatch or Firemaidens and grow into an honorable set of wings. The outcast is equal to the scion of the Imperial Line. My mate-brother RuGaard went into the Drakwatch and served, shed blood in battle, and rose to the position of Upholder. With that record I couldn’t care less for the details of what came before. Wistala, settle down. You’ve no need to bristle so. There’ll be no fighting. Or if there is”—she glanced up at the alert griffaran, leaning down and ready to drop—“it won’t last long.”
Wistala hardly heard her. She couldn’t take her eyes off the jewel AuRon wore about his neck. It emitted a soft glow of a peculiar white shade, something between the pale luminescence of reflected moon off the snows of the north and the glitter of starlight.
“So did you come all this way just to accuse me of murder, AuRon?” the Copper asked. “Or is there a message from the Red Queen?”
AuRon felt his hearts hammering. His mind clouded.
“Yes, there is a message from the Red Queen,” a voice that was only partially his answered.
Like speech in a dream.
He froze, seized by the same irresistible instinct that made him spin legs downward as he fell or that made him squat when he voided his bowels.
He found himself speaking in a voice not his own, high-pitched, with the words coming out at all the wrong intervals: “This pathetic, scaleless . . . excuse for dragonkind doesn’t have . . . the backbone of a river fluke. We speak to you dragons . . . now as the Queen of Ghioz.”
