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“Have you never met him? That’s Rayg, my engineering adviser.”
Wistala hadn’t thought of the name in so long it took her brain a moment to make the connection.
“Rayg… Raygnar?”
“I believe so. He was raised and taught by dwarfs, I believe.”
“Rayg. Trained by dwarfs?” Wistala asked, shocked. This was Lada’s child! What was he doing in the Lavadome? For him to have come so far, she had no idea the Wheel of Fire dwarfs traveled so far in the Lower World. The last she’d ever learned of him was that he’d disappeared into the Lower World after King Fangbreaker’s death in the barbarian victory over the Wheel of Fire dwarfs—an assault and a regicide in which she’d played no small part.
“How did he ever come here?”
“I hardly remember,” the Copper said. “Some traveling dwarfs we captured, I believe. He’s smarter than any of our Ankelenes. He designed and built my wing joint. Dwarf-training, I suppose, but he’s built things not even a dwarf could create. I keep meaning to free him, but there always seems to be one more task for him to do.”
One more trip to make. She’d have to find time somehow to go north and tell Rayg’s mother that he still lived. Not only lived, but had grown into brilliant manhood.
But nevertheless, he was little more than a slave.
So when her brother asked her for a private chat in his baths after the feast, she happily accepted.
“It’s much reduced from SiDrakkon’s day. At one time his bath took up most of the upper level of this end of the Imperial Rock.”
“I’ve heard stories from the Firemaids about all the human women he kept.”
“Not my weakness,” the Copper said.
Thralls brought in stones heated in the cooking fires until they created an optical illusion of waves above them. The thralls dropped the stones into shallow pools of water, which instantly boiled and filled the bath with steam.
The heat raised her scale and the water beaded up on skin and scale, washing her delightfully clean from nose to tailtip. She felt as though a dwarf’s weight in dirt ran off her and into the sluices.
“You’ve never been in the Tyr’s bath before, have you?”
“It’s pleasant,” Wistala said. “Why doesn’t the Queen have her own?”
“The Queen, or Queen-Consort, can use this one whenever she likes,” the Copper said.
“I shall. Nilrasha never said how much flying would be involved in being Queen-Consort.”>Chapter 8
Fount Brass was much as Wistala remembered it. Tucked between two converging mountains like the last pea in a pod, the tin roofs gleamed from far off. Its famous wind chimes and musical water cascades—the water flowed through tubes that created notes through the flow—that gave the city its name could be heard from a hundred of dragonlengths away if the wind was favorable.
Inhabited by men, many of whom were wider than they were tall and bowed in leg and arm, who cultivated and knotted their beards with the same care dwarfs took in dusting and watering the lichen within, it was a city of ringing smithies and white-hot foundries venting sulfurous fumes.
They were notoriously independent. They were a province of Hypatia, but didn’t accept Hypatian law or temples, and had fought wars to keep their freedoms in Rainfall’s day.
She’d last passed through as a reluctant fortune-teller with a traveling circus. She’d have an easy time telling the fortunes of the men now: If they didn’t accept a dragon into Fount Brass, her brother had every intention of cutting off all trade with the obstinate men.
“The slow pillage of a dragon-lord. No thank you,” their king, a hulk of a man named Arbus Glorycry said, bouncing his daughter on his knee. The curly-furred little girl was fascinated by Wistala and watched her every move, wide-eyed.
Wistala wondered if he’d brought his spawn forward as a shield against dragon-wrath or to show courageous nonchalance against yet another of the Tyr’s emissaries.
Perhaps a little of both.
“Every other Hypatian province of the old order has accepted the help of a dragon. Why not yours?”
“Where were you when the Ghioz were battering down our towers? Where were the dragons when my daughter’s room was burned?”
“Myself, I was fighting in the snow of the Ba-Drink Pass,” Wistala said. “Others fought and died in the streets of Hypat, or over Ghioz. Have you not been at peace for ten years? Are there still bandits riding your mountains? Do Ghioz soldiers still walk your streets?”
“They never conquered us,” King Arbus said. “As to the old Hypatian order, it fell apart in my grandfather’s time, when he knew only the title of Lord Protector. My father took the title of King and passed it to me. Am I to relinquish it to a dragon?”
