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“Here’s Red Lightning, a fast, tough dragon in the sky. He can still do a dragon-dash like a first-fire hatchling. He’s in charge of the groundeds. Over there we have old Thunderwing. He broke the bowline and capsized three ships in the big fight with the elven ocean city, back in the days of the great sacks. Fourfoes—we call him the Blind Ripper these days—lost his eyesight to a dwarf, but there’s no one who knows the smell of them better, and he can hear an arrow coming out of the dark before it hits. Corpsecount, Horseflinger, Wardog . . .”
The list went on, earthy, human-tongue names with deadly deeds. There were sixteen dragons including Shadowcatch.
The Copper wondered at the names. They were all mature dragons; if you added them all up there must have been a thousand or more years of life among them. AuRon had once told a tale of the Wizard of the Isle of Ice and the dragons he’d collected and bred. Most of them had been given such names with meaning in the human tongue.
They looked healthy enough. They must not spend all their days in this chamber, or they’d have thin and chalk-edged scale. “You all look fit enough. What do you do for exercise?”
“Swim. There’s a decent-sized tunnel for sluicing out the waste. Dragons produce a powerful lot of it, sometimes more than the tide can handle. We help push it out into the Inland Ocean and have a swim and some sun on the Outer Rocks. Good crabbing round the sluice, too. The carapaces are good for the digestion.”
If only they could fly! This number was half the size of the old Aerial Host, and Shadowcatch the Black was a proven fighter. If he said they were good, the Copper could trust his old bodyguard’s esteem. They’d have Nilrasha out of her refuge in no time.
“I’m sorry, Shadowcatch. I really should have come looking for you before this.”
“What, and risk death? If you don’t mind me asking, sir, what are you doing out and breaking your exile?”
“I believe NiVom broke it first when he tried to kill me on the Isle of Ice, so I don’t feel bound by it. But to answer your question, I’m trying to puzzle out a way to retrieve my mate. I’m determined to get her back or die trying. Life is too lonely without her.”
“Find another mate,” Horseflinger said. “A piece of green back’s not so hard to come by.”
“We’re not talking to you,” Shadowcatch said. “And when he does, show a little respect, or I’ll tie your ears together to remind you to keep a civil tone. Tyr RuGaard once commanded hundreds of dragons.”
The Copper put himself between the two of them and accidentally knocked over the feeding cart. Smelly fish juice rose from the mess, hopefully dampening the males’ smell to one another and cooling their heads. “Your wing never healed, Shadowcatch? I’m sorry.”
Shadowcatch lifted the crippled member and looked at it curiously as if it were a cat suddenly perched on his shoulder. “Oh, I’m not the first grounded dragon and I won’t be the last.”
“My own mate can no longer fly, as you recall.”
That caused a stir among the flightless dragons. Some pricked up their ears and began to pay attention. The Copper saw a glimmer of hope. This might be the core of the force he needed . . .
“Fine lady and a fine Queen nonetheless,” Shadowcatch said.
“What ever happened on the Isle of Ice?”
“Had a merry game with that beast Ouistrela, my Tyr. She saw the island as hers more than the Empire’s, and when she wasn’t hunting me to pull out my throat, she was shooting fire at our—or rather at the dragons of the Empire. Hypatians thought about establishing a fishing village for cod-drying and whale oil and whatnot, but they lost boats in the fogs—or at least that’s how it seemed to them. What was really happening was Ouistrela was swimming up under them and knocking holes in them or tearing off rudders. Clever old stump.”
“How do you know she’s the one who was sinking them?”
“Bit of a long story, my Tyr.”
“Let’s have it.” The Copper had little else to do and it was so pleasant to see old Shadowcatch, he would be happy to hear fishing stories from the fat old black.
“Well, we came to sort of a stalemate, see. Most of the wolves, they knew I was friends with that brother-gray of yours, so they took my side of things, you might say. They kept me abreast of where she was and what she was doing. She had the blighters on her side and if they spotted me they sent her a report. We usually each knew what part of the island the other was on, and kept away from each other. It’s a big island—wasn’t that hard to do.
“I had information that she was hunting around a glacier-pool way off from the blighters, so I snuck up the glacier and dug into some loose soil the glacier had pushed down the mountainside. When she was snuffling around, following some goat tracks, I jumped out of the loam and had her, or so I thought.
“We took a bit of a tumble down the mountainside and ended up in the glacier pool. Next thing I knew, we were—mated, I guess you call it. I’m not sure when the fighting died down and the mating began, but it seemed well along before I noticed.”
The Copper snorted. He’d heard many bawdy jokes in his days in the Drakwatch, about a young winged member fighting so hard in an exercise against a Firemaid that she ended up fertilized. He always assumed such stories had some basis in truth, but this was the first time he’d heard it proven out.
“You’re not still on the island, I note.”
“Soon as the mating was over, so was the mating, if you understand me, my Tyr. I heard from the wolves she did have a clutch, a small one. One of the blighters sent me a message saying that if I wanted to see my offspring well fed and thriving, I should quit devouring so many sheep and goats and go live on one of the outer islands. Too windy and cold for me, so I swam here. I used to fly mercenary for Red Hair—that’s what I was doing when we met, at that battle.”
“The hardest fight of my life, Shadowcatch.”
“Aye, I’m not often bested. Red Hair’s gray now, but she found me a place with the groundeds. You know, she calls us the ‘tower guard,’ but we don’t earn our keep. I think she just keeps us around because she’s carrying a soft spot in her heart for dragons.”
“Better a soft spot in the heart than in the head, I suppose. I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s my problem.”
