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“Don’t throw your life away trying to get her back. I may not be wearing the work of ancient Silverhigh, but I know what is on your mind. You are lonely, but she is hostage to your exile. Were you, by some miracle, to retrieve her, it would bring war to the Sadda-Vale.”
So that was it. The gift wasn’t so he could communicate with Wistala; it was so she could spy on him in his activities. He wondered how many of his thoughts Wistala could read.
“Why this hostility, RuGaard?” Wistala communicated. “Are you worried I’ll give away your plans?”
Fine. She couldn’t perceive his thoughts, precisely, but she could sense his mind. He sensed some conflict in her as well. Wistala was building toward a decision of some kind.
“As I said, I need change and exercise,” the Copper said. “I will get both without starting a war.”
He exchanged bows with each of the dragons of the Sadda-Vale. With Scabia he was careful to bow lower than her, with his sister they touched noses at the bottom of the bow, with DharSii the pair kept their snouts carefully in alignment, each conceding nothing to the other. NaStirath did an elaborate sweep with his neck and bade the winds and weather to be his servants, and Aethleethia wished him a fair journey and a quick return and didn’t mean a word of it as she nudged her hatchlings forward. They were shaping up as likely young drakes, but apart from endless lessons on how to interact with the blighter servants, they were spoiled rotten. Each could use a few years in the Drakwatch or the Firemaids under stern guidance, the Copper thought.
The blighters swept him with fresh-cut birch branches and leaves as he exited the palatial expanse of Vesshall. With skin tingling and scales clean, he left the Sadda-Vale with no intention of returning.
Chapter 3
AuRon the Gray clung to the shadowed side of Eagle
Nest Mountain, hanging over the dragon-city like a watchful spider.
His skin matched the granite, cold against his belly, to perfection, right down to the white veins crisscrossing through the stone. It wasn’t a trick he willed; his skin just shifted and rearranged its tiny faceted leaves and the play of light did the rest.
AuRon sometimes wished he’d been born a scaled dragon rather than an oddity. His father once told him that fewer than one in a hundred dragons were born this way. Certainly, his color-shifting skin came in handy when he didn’t wish to be noticed; from a distance or in any kind of cover he was the next thing to invisible. It was also quieter, since there was no sound of metallic scales clinking against each other or whatever surfaces he passed around. In the air he wasn’t weighed down with half again his bodyweight of armor, making him faster in the air than the fleetest scaled dragon—though still hardly a match for the great birds, the Rocs and griffaran, he’d at times been forced to fight.
And that was the sore spot. In a fight, without the tough covering, he’d suffered from arrows and blades and lost his tail to enemies. Twice. It had regrown, of course, but you could still see the slight indent where he’d lost it a second time. When breathing heavily, he still felt a twinge where an arrow had pierced his lung when he was a hatchling.
So he’d learned to avoid fighting if at all possible. He waited and listened his way out of trouble. He’d trailed his mate, Natasatch, here without so much as a snap of his jaws.
Once, this had been the capital of the Red Queen’s Empire of the Ghioz, the stonemasons who’d learned their craft—and their proud obstinacy—by copying dwarfs. Before her, he’d been told, it had belonged, alternately and in what order he couldn’t remember, to elves, dwarfs, and blighters. One might say the city was like a fought-over throne, occupied by whichever great power now ruled the lands beyond the mountains east of the Inland Ocean.
In this epoch, the Imperial City was that of the dragons. More specific, the dragons whom his outcast brother once ruled, with some help from Wistala now and then. A score of years ago he’d wandered into their giant, crystalline cavern, the Lavadome, and been reunited with his siblings. Since then, the affairs of his brother’s Dragon Empire with its wars and political plots had stalked him like a hunter.
As for the name of the mountain above the city, he had no idea what the dwarfs or humans or dragons called it. To an accommodatingly garrulous raven, it was the Eagle Nest, thanks to a vast snow-filled hanging valley that reminded condors and other high-flying avians of an eagle’s creche full of fluff. He’d suspected the raven of being a spy, but as it refrained from asking him a single question and instead prattled on about the lateness of the spring—“surely a sign of a hot summer”—and the doings of insects—“the dragon reek has banished the whole sunrise side of the mountain of bluebottles”—AuRon decided he was just an odd bird who enjoyed the glamour of talking to dragons. That or he hoped for exclusive rights to the head of his next bighorn kill.
AuRon didn’t care for the raven’s world and its troubles. He’d learned over the years that there were very few friends one could trust, and those who he could trust either died or drew him into their affairs thanks to bonds of friendship and honor. Every dragon had a weak spot, his father used to say, and AuRon admitted he had several, starting with his skin, but it was this accursed habit of sticking his nose into the affairs of hominids in support of old friends that had brought him within a tail-flick of death more than once.
This time, however, he was snout-deep for purely selfish reasons. He wanted to feel his mate next to him, listen to her breathing, smell her old familiar, welcoming—to a male dragon—scent. While the Sadda-Vale had its points, the conversation had grown stale, and even his sister’s intelligent companionship was no replacement for the dragon who’d curled around their eggs for long winter months.
The shadows rolled across the city of Ghioz as the sun turned the mountains bloodred. AuRon didn’t believe in omens, but he still had to suppress atavistic, fearful thoughts brought up by the dusk-washed granite.
May as well chance it.
He glided down the mountainside. Most probably he wouldn’t be noticed. The whole city was thick with dragons, and masses of slaves—“thralls,” to use the euphemism of the Lavadome—there to do the work of feeding and washing them.
Tracking her was not as difficult as one might have thought. Natasatch still occupied the modest cave they’d shared as Protector of the poor province of Dairuss. He’d found an old servant who remembered them—one of King Naf’s veterans, a peg-legged man who thought the smell of dragons tolerable, and certainly better than the carrion-strewn battlefields of the Ghioz wars, and he was discreet about the occasional visit of the great king’s old friend. He’d told AuRon about the enormous feast planned in Ghioz to commemorate the victory over the Ghioz that had established dragons in the Upper World. AuRon, who’d played a role in that victory, settling his own score with the Red Queen, suspected they’d chosen the date on the basis of likely pleasant weather for gathering rather than on that of history.
AuRon wondered how the Ghioz felt about a mass of dragons descending on them, to eat their cattle, pigs, and sheep and leave nothing but hooves and other offal to be cleaned up.
In any case, he learned where Natasatch had temporarily established herself—the old hippodrome, now called the Drag-onhalls. She’d gone early to aid her friend Queen Imfamnia—remarkably now on her second turn as mate to the ruler of the Dragon Empire after serving her own exile—in preparing for the party.
The hippodrome/Dragonhalls were easy to find from the air. Two small horse tracks flanked the building, which was then enclosed by a much larger horse track for long races. The outer track had multiple fences, and dogs between the fences, and guards posted behind the dogs, to keep out beggars and scale-filchers.
There was an interior ring as well, covered against weather save for a small hole in the peak. Remarkable construction, yet typical of the Ghioz. The seats had been converted to dragon-sized benches; evidently meetings of some sort were held here, though the place smelled a little of blood, which set his griff to twitching. There was a wide corridor behind the seating for bringing horses to and from their stables. The stables had been enlarged to make sort of small apartments, though the ones near the roof looked more spacious and had a view out of the city, judging from the light bleeding in.
He heard snoring dragons, saw piles of wine casks, still wet at the bungs. From one apartment above he heard the tussling, flapping sound of mating.
AuRon shook his head. Dragons mating indoors, in secret. He followed his nose until he found Natasatch’s scent. It was in one of the bigger spaces at the top, what used to be an old promenade where viewers could look down on the horses or into one of the rings. There was a nice sort of arching gallery giving her a view of the city. He found an empty apartment, passed through to the balconies, and slipped into Natasatch’s temporary residence from behind thick draperies.
He heard voices, human and dragon. Natasatch was saying something about scale-polish to a human with a head shaved and tattooed with a design that reminded him of interlaced dragon-scale. When she finished, he used DharSii’s quiet throat-clearing sound to draw her attention.
