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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.”
“What insult is this?” his brother’s mate said, raising her head.
His voice continued: “We propose a division of influence. The Upper World shall be mine, and the Lower World . . . shall belong to the dragons, and we will have . . . peace and such commerce as benefits . . . us both. Accept this and enjoy prosperity, or reject Our terms and starve in the dark. Fight Us, and you’ll . . . find your second offer to be much worse terms, with the alternative the extinction your kind . . . toward earning.”
AuRon wanted to smash his head against the floor—anything that would remove the awful alienation his own body had taken on itself.
As though spellbound, he continued: “We will accept . . . a delegation of no more than two dragons to attend Us and discuss the arrangements further. In return, We propose to send . . . two dragons as Our representatives into your realm.”
Horrified, AuRon wondered what would happen if his body just stood here speaking words not his own forever. Would he stand here, a living, speaking statue, soiling floor and self, until he starved or died of thirst?
The voice that wasn’t quite his continued: “As for this wretch, We suggest you . . . kill it. It has a nasty habit of worming its way into the confidence of its prey and then striking from behind. That is what it did with the Wyrmmaster on the Isle of Ice, and it had some thoughts along the same lines with Our royal person.”
Good-bye, AuRon. You were most useful to us, whatever your intentions. Even now our daggers are poised to strike that traitor Naf. Little Hieba will be heartbroken. Ah, well, there are plenty of balconies for her to hurl herself from.
With that, he jumped at the Tyr, his brother.
Two flashes of green.
One struck him, hard, the other interposed itself between his saa and the recoiling Copper. He felt his claws rake scale.
A tail struck him across the snout.
White and yellow stars obscured his vision. It may have been Wistala’s, it may have been Nilrasha’s. It hit too fast for him to tell. Then on his side, a saa clawing at his throat—
—But instead of opening him up, two claws hooked under his necklace and broke it away. He heard the clatter as it bounced off a wall.
Feathers batted from above to the sound of alarmed cries.
Limp as a water buffalo with a broken back, he realized Wistala was atop his neck. She’d scratched his neck where she’d ripped away the chain, and he bled. Hers was worse. He had cut both Wistala and Nilrasha along their sides and haunches.
“Wait, wait!” Wistala called. “This is not his doing! The Queen of the Ghioz—she spoke and acted through him.”
The Copper pushed away a mass of feathers and claws. “Griffaran guard, back! It’s over.”
AuRon raised a sii, a pathetic gesture. But it was his own. He controlled his body again.
The Copper stared down at AuRon. “By our laws you should die.
“But being Tyr has its privileges. One is the ability to dispense mercy. Should you, AuRon, ever be able to hold death in one sii and life in another you’ll come to know the temptation in both. Once, long ago, you might have killed me, quite easily, but you didn’t,” the Copper said. “All things are now equal, as far as I’m concerned. I will forget the present; I hope you will forget the past.”
“The court has never seen such a tumult since the arrival of the Dragonblade,” Ayafeeia said. “You came very near to dying, visitor, on the very stones where my grandmother’s blood was spilled.”
“The crystal,” Wistala said. “It serves as a link with the Queen. I wonder if this is some doing of the great one that NooMoahk once possessed?”
That blighter fetish? AuRon wondered. How could an oversized hunk of luminous rock control a dragon’s words and movements?
NoSohoth and the Firemaids were calming the crowd. The Tyr climbed back upon his perch.
“Crystal?” AuRon asked, righting himself.
