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They proceeded into the circus arena. Piles of sawdust and matting showed that several dragons were staying for the duration of the celebration.
“Sister,” AuRon said. “I am told you are taking an important new role soon.”
“Formally, yes. Informally, I’m already helping the Tyr.”
“Rounding up slaves for the Lavadome?”
“Nothing so distressing, AuRon. My duties are mostly to represent the Tyr at minor functions when he’s busy elsewhere. But sometimes problems are brought to me when it is thought that NoSohoth or our brother will refuse aid. I wish I had a mouthful of gold to offer, but it flows out as quickly as it flows in. I have some copper scraps, however.”
His mate and Istach gratefully swallowed a few battered remains of cooking pots. With so many dragons about AuRon wondered what even these odds and ends had cost his sister.
Natasatch asked Wistala about arrangements for the celebration, who would be there with whom, whether there were any important humans she should greet or defer to, what kinds of dishes might be served—“all the flying put me in good appetite, and I’ve long been hungry for society.”
Her life wasn’t yours. Try to understand.
Did he expect his mate to always trail along in his wake, dutifully waiting for the next clutch of eggs? No, if she was as hungry for company as she was for precious metals, he could put up with a few cheers for his brother. He might even have done something to deserve them.
Wistala assigned them a thrall to help them with her traveling household, and made her excuses. Already she reminded AuRon of one of these smooth-talking dragons of her brother’s court. What had his sister grown up to be? Not another preening decoration, he hoped.
At least Natasatch wasn’t vain. The dragons of his brother’s empire accumulated small armies of human retainers and servants. Every scale polished, filed, and aligned, claws smoothed and sharpened, teeth picked as clean as a corpse in the desert he’d crossed in his unfledged youth with the girl Hieba.
He consented to a bristle-brush scrubbing of his skin, more to keep his mate company while they worked to clean beneath her scale. She chattered happily to him the whole while, and he suddenly felt better about the trip south. Maybe he’d encourage her to visit Hypat more often. Wistala seemed to like her and might appreciate a companion on her rounds, doing whatever a Queen of Two Worlds did.
She’d refused several friendly loans of “body thralls”—slaves, really, to help her prepare for the victory banquet by filing and shaping her scale. “A healthy dragonelle is perfectly capable of attending to her own scale, and I wouldn’t care to go into a fight with those oversharp talons you underground dragons seem to favor.”
Fashionable dragons are such a bore, she thought to him. He’d never been more proud of her.
They had good weather for the feast, with just enough wind to disperse the dragon smell so that the humans could enjoy themselves. The only part of the banquet AuRon enjoyed was the fact that Natasatch gloried in the polite exchanges and friendly conversations. It did his hearts good to see his mate so happy.
It was held before the Directory, a vast building where the Hypatians met and schemed and governed, a place of alliances and betrayals, of promises public and secret agendas, or so Wistala’s quick history of it explained when AuRon and Natasach were shown inside. There were circular ranks of benches fitted for humans running around the walls looking down on enormous statues of the beasts of the world: Oxen and dolphins and lions and such, along with a dragon who had the wrong number of toes and his crest-horns growing in the wrong direction.
Wistala had a high opinion of the traditions of the place, something to do with some old elf friend of hers who’d been a “Knight of the Directory.” To AuRon the place only echoed with noisy vanity.
AuRon noted an empty place next to his brother—where his Queen Nilrasha would be had she not been restricted from travel by injuries. Perhaps for the first time since their hatching he felt a pang of sympathy for the Copper. Tyr RuGaard was grave and ate little, though he offered elaborate praise and politenesses to his guests. On his other side Wistala reclined, supplying him with names when he forgot the identity of this, that, or the other so-and-so.
“My tongue does you an injustice,” his brother said, after mispronouncing the name of a human thane from the north.
The human, awestruck and uncomfortable in the presence of a throng of dragons, assured “my Tyr” that he was utterly unable to pronounce half the dragon names in attendance.
When it came time for the banquet, the dragons ate on the great pillar-bordered street leading up to the immense Hypatian Directory. Even that vast building couldn’t fit this many dragons, at least in such a way that they might be fed. Using a road allowed oxcarts to carry food to the dragons, stretched out on their bellies in a vast rectangle—the oxen were blindfolded and had Ghiozian camphor rubbed in their noses to cover up the dragon smell to forestall panic.
Dragons, humans, and a smattering of elves and dwarfs and even a blighter or two with hair neatly bound and ribboned dined in two long lines flanking the road. The dragons lay on their bellies to eat and many of the humans and elves did likewise, reaching for tidbits from bearers carrying plates in endless procession.
AuRon and Natasatch, with Istach trailing behind, were both last and first. They were the last dragons to be introduced—as “distinguished visitors from the north and relatives of our great Tyr,” ahead of various humans and elves and dwarfs representing their kind.
In the interval between the feast and the ceremonies Wistala talked with a dozen rather wizened, bent-over humans, whom she introduced as “librarians”—keepers of knowledge and secrets.
“Oh, would you look at that little bit of tail?” Natasatch said, spying the mate of one of Hypat’s ‘Protectors.’ “Dyed all in red. She looks like she’s trying to pass as male.”
AuRon glanced over at the dragon who’d chosen a bright shade of red favored by the Red Queen, who’d ruled Ghioz until she settled on war against the Dragons of the Lavadome. He’d had more than a claw in the killing of the strange creature who claimed to be too busy to ever die. He half-hoped one of her supply of bodies still lurked at the edges of his brother’s realm, ready to wake him out of his dangerous dreams of an ever-expanding rule.
“Oh, and look at that painted advertiser,” Natasatch said, referring to a graceful young dragonelle, some sprig of dragon nobility with fledging scars still dripping and wing skin hardly dry, who’d painted the fanlike griff that protect a dragon’s neck-hearts with gold and added jeweled designs to her claws. “Practically simpering in hopes of a mating flight,” she thought to him. “Some young dragon will get a mate and a hoard in one quick flight. Weighed down like that, she could get caught and breeched by an eager eagle.”
His mate displayed a rather perverse sense of humor at times. She explained it as the product of long years sequestered on an dismal egg shelf with nothing to do but dream erotic dreams.
“Mother!” Istach said, scandalized.
“Isn’t that Varatheela with her?” AuRon asked aloud.
