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He stared grimly ahead, straight down his nose, where the point of his egg-tooth could still be marked between his nostrils. He’d kept it, believing it brought him luck, but the cartilage of his aging snout had thickened and swallowed much of it. “I’ve an odd feeling. Intuition, perhaps. Foreboding. I’ve a strange feeling that I’m on my last journey—my last corporeal journey, that is. I’m not sure what mystical paths I might tread.”
“You?” She was surprised to hear this kind of statement from him; AuRon hid his emotions as his skin hid him against a cavern wall. He’d always been such a prosaic dragon. Even DharSii was more poetic.
“I’m a very frightened dragon deep down, Tala. Hiding it is survival instinct. It doesn’t serve to tell others what you are thinking under the best of circumstances. Before, every flight I’ve taken has had purpose. On this one, I do not see how it gets me to where I wish to be.”
“Where is that?” Wistala asked.
“With Natasatch by my side, in some quiet, roadless land with decent hunting.”
“Our parents fulfilled that dream. It did not do them any good.”
He changed course slightly to catch a shift in wind direction. “That’s no reason not to try for ourselves. An ideal is no less estimable just because some fail in practice. Honesty is an ideal worth pursuing, but no one is completely honest. You, Wistala, you’re one of the most honest dragons I know and I admire you for it, but you can’t say you’ve been honest at all times with everyone.”
She thought it in bad taste for AuRon to bring up her hatchlings like this, but she had to agree.
The weather warmed and dampened as they crossed the Red Mountains. Thicker forests grew on the western slopes of the Red Mountains, even the snowline held clusters of pines, clinging to each other like roped-together explorers.
Forests within forests could be found on foot. A second layer of thick, thorny shrubs with broad leaves captured what light filtered through the treetops. A third forest of lichens and fungi lived below that, more brilliantly green than either tree leaves and needles or thorny midgrowth. Fungi had turned much of the tree bark and inevitable deadfalls into a green carpet.
AuRon knew this ground—he’d hunted across it with some wolves in his youth. He found a quiet glade where they could rest and take water. Unfortunately it was poor hunting ground, unless you liked stripping bark for insects and digging up mice and shaking polecats out of fallen logs, but they could rest without fear of being disturbed by anything but jays complaining about dragon-scent from the branches.
They reached Juutfod in one long flight from the mountains. Three dragons arriving together as darkness fell struck up an alarm.
AuRon seemed to be on some sort of guardedly hostile terms with the dragons of the tower. On the one sii, he’d brought down the Wizard of the Isle of Ice, who’d bred and trained some of these dragons together and raised them to glory, but over on the stronger saa side even the most nostalgic old dragon, remembering when they’d been feared across the Inland Ocean, had to admit that every flight the wizard’s dragons took was at the orders of their men, and the dragonelles had been most abominably treated, like laying hens in coops.
There were a few oaths tossed back and forth as the dragons of the tower came out on the craggy green peninsula to see what the newcomers wanted as the gannets and puffins watched and chattered.
“If it isn’t NooShoahk the assassin,” one of the tower dragons called, using one of the worst epithets in the dragon tongue.
“What’s the matter, Blazewing, miss your nose-rings?” AuRon called back.
“Steady there, AuRon,” NiVom said.
A big green dragon-dame shouldered through the males. “AuRon! Good to see you again, you old chameleon. How is Natasatch?” AuRon recognized her as one of the dragonelles who’d been chained in the dark next to his mate.
“Well enough, Hermethea. So you found a berth at the dragon tower, too?”
“I tried inland, but I missed the taste of cod and lobster. I like the air here when I wish to fly and the smell of other dragons when I sleep. I’m surprised to find you off your isle. We all thought you meant to leave your bones there.”
AuRon introduced her to Wistala and DharSii. Wistala thought her nice enough, though a bit bug-eyed.
At last their brother joined the throng on the broken ground leading up to the tower. Wistala decided that the tower would be almost impossible to attack from either land or sea if it were defended by soldiers. It would take dragons in the air to destroy it.
“So here you are,” the Copper said. An old woman who had been leaning on both him and a cane for support listened in. “Just in time for war.”
“We came to give you news, and assistance if you need it,” Wistala said. She and DharSii took turns explaining the attack on Vesshall and the ship-burning raid on the Aerial Host camp.
Wistala asked, “What happened to the dragonhelm?”
“Some locals we’d hired as guides filched it. Odd bunch—dressed poor but rich as Hypatian merchant fleeters. They hired the dragon tower to go after some dwarfs. Fortunately for me, we came to another arrangement. They’ve joined the tower, but we lost a few things when the humans decamped. Turned out they were professional thieves.”
“They could not have traveled fast with bags of gold,” DharSii said. “Did you hunt them?”
“They just took jewelry. Killed poor young Longfang, who was on watch at the gate, as they escaped. Some gems the dwarfs had, and a belt with a great crystal, and my dragonhelm, which is nothing but silver, and the Wyrmaster’s old circlet of dragon-wings, which is nothing but copper wire and would hardly buy a new rowboat. I suppose they thought they might sell it south, in the Empire. We sent a couple dragons down the old north road, but no sign of them. One of the Empire dragons rose up from that town Quarryness to challenge them, and couldn’t give a broken piece of scale about helping us track murdering thieves. Said it was none of our business, as if a blood debt and recovery of our own could be anyone else’s. Our dragons turned around rather than start a fight.”
“We’d feared you were dead,” Wistala said.
The Copper snorted. “I feared it myself for a moment, down in the tunnels with the dwarfs. But it worked out in the end. They joined the tower on a temporary basis, until they build up enough wealth to reestablish themselves, perhaps on the wild coast across the Inland Ocean.”
