Chapter 23
Wistala flew north in easy stages, more from physical limitations than intent.
Even with her wounds healed over and her blood restored, she still tired easily and needed frequent rests, made all the more difficult by a thirst that seemed to start at her tail-tip and grow from there and a hunger that must have been worse than her hatchling pangs. (It wasn’t, but lost memories are sometimes a kindness.)
She followed the road until it broke off into a series of trails or twin ruts, irregularly filled with increasingly crude bridgework. Even the distance posts of Ancient Hypat’s short-lived Tribal Confederation, still in use to mark intervals of vesk even in lands where the word Hypat was a curse and Hypatian a synonym for “devil.”
Flying mostly at night, but doing what she could to observe the villages and isolated hutments she passed in what felt like a hopeless search for Rayg, she avoided lights below.
Hearth lights and campfires grew less and less frequent as she ranged north, until she began to travel at dawn and dusk so that she had a better chance of dropping on a hoofed-and-horned meal. The snowcaps on the mountains, rich with all the dragon colors when the sun was level with them, marched lower and lower and glaciers hanging between became commonplace.
Then, over the course of a single night, she reached new air currents. The wind ceased blowing pleasantly warm from the southwest, and instead spun down the coast from the northeast, a cold, wet breeze that helped her to glide but she had to fight like an enemy for each hop north. She found that she traveled faster with less fatigue if her track crisscrossed the wind in the manner of a serpent.
Food was plentiful. Out on the coast there were shallows thick with crabs the size of a battle shield and great waddling tubes of flesh and fat that sunned themselves on sandbars and coastal rocks, the fattest often at the top where they could bark at the lesser, but the commanding height just meant they were easily plucked up by a hungry dragonelle.
The exhaustion of flying became too great.
She found a reef-sheltered isle, in seas she guessed were too rough for the boats of men, and spent a dozen or more days happily in the hardy bush and wind-racked pines atop sheer cliffs, taking various multilegged, pincer-armed crawlers from the sea during the day and plucking the occasional barker at night from the sleeping beaches.
While resting there, she saw not one, but three dragons. The sight shocked her, after spending much of her lifetime without so much as a glimpse of her kind. To see not just one, but three, all at once and together, froze her for a moment. They flew almost wing-tip to wing-tip, a slightly smaller silver leading two big reds.
Wistala threw herself into the air, fringe high and stiff with excitement, flapping madly to gain altitude.
Wing-tips rose in unison as they glided. They must have marked her. All turned gently for a better look.
That was when she noticed the riders.
It was so like horses, she glided for a moment, losing altitude, stunned. The dragons had reins, reins! running forward from the riders to the head and out to the leading wing bones.
Dragons fixed and ridden like horses had no appeal, and she didn’t like the way they were coming around, spreading out a little.
She rolled on her back, dived, headed for the shoreline, where she wove around her plateau island and changed course a little southward so if they were moving to intercept, they might overshoot. She chanced a glance back and saw one of the riders was in difficulty; his dragon was circling oddly. The silver and its rider dived toward her, then came around in a great swoop, leading the other red, which could not match its turns. The pair headed to the aid of the other.
The last Wistala saw of them, as she plunged into the coastal forest, was the silver and undercommand red flanking the other as they turned back out to sea.
 
Summer days at the top of the world lasted forever.
Wistala saw patches of ground ice that must linger throughout the year, and inlets where glaciers flowed into the Inland Ocean. Heated by sun and perhaps current, the glaciers would groan and crack and send ice plunging into the water with a rumbling sound like a thousand thunderstorms.
Perhaps it was the rich sea diet, or all the exercise, but she found herself in the midst of another growth spurt and losing scales, despite her careful rationing of coin. But for all her loss of shining scale, her wings grew prodigiously, and she suspected that had she left them alone they would have uncased by themselves at this point.
She came to a marsh country, where the land looked like ocean, patterned into regular waves of higher ground mixed with wet patches below. Rabbits with oversize feet, herds of moss-antlered herbivores, packs of wolves, and little brush-tailed foxes thrived here, along with a few hardy humans who kept to the waterways in flat-bottomed boats.
The wind blew hard here, and Wistala used it. Every day she matched herself against the wind, once after the morning’s hunt and again in the evening, every day fighting a little harder for speed, or height, or the length of time she could hang over one spot, gaining strength with each battle against the wind.
And met her second dragon here.
She spotted him while eating on one of the ridges—the wetter hollows were thick with mosquitoes, but the bugs couldn’t cope with the wind on the hill humps—splashing through the wet, approaching her from land.
He looked wider than he was long, reminding her of a toad, and had rust-colored scales edged with white cracks and chips that struck her as unhealthy. He approached, nostrils sniffing her as if she were a dinner of venison, perhaps attracted by her smell or the blood.
“You are stranger, welcome,” he said. It had been so long since she’d heard Drakine, it seemed more foreign a tongue than Elvish.
“UthBeeyan am I, dragon of the coldwinds. Which wind brought you?” He bobbed his head but kept his sii still. She guessed he meant no harm, but she left off eating so as not to be taken with a mouthful of bone.
His mind held nothing but hunger and an eager lust for her green flanks.
“Wistala am I, dragonelle of whatever winds may bear me. Are there many dragons in the coldwinds?”
“I drive away!” UthBeeyan said, which Wistala found easy to believe, as she was downwind of him. He let out sort of a croaking roar. “You hear my song, we mate now.”
“We shall do no such thing,” Wistala said.
He jumped at her and she backed up, putting her tail point in between his nose and her, ready to crack him across the soft spot between his eyes, but he settled onto her kill and took a mouthful. “You huntress worthy of spring wind. I take dragonshare. Find another.”
Gladly, Wistala thought.
 
The weather turned cold, bitterly so, almost overnight, freezing the swampy areas and turning the soil on the hill hummocks hard. Snow blew some nights, but could only cling where the wind couldn’t reach it, and Wistala returned to the rocky coastline. During the day everything turned a hard, uniform gray: water, shoreline, clouds, the sun at best a whitish circle behind mists.
She happened across a big boat, of all things, hugging the coast as it crept along south, a dwarf at the tiller and four men pulling the oars. All wore hides so thick, they looked like bears, save for the dwarf, who might be mistaken for one of the sausagelike barkers on the rocks, for his booted feet barely protruded from beneath his coat, looking like flippers.
More hides, entire bundles of them, were lined up in the center and bottom of the boat, along with strings of fox tails and what looked like wolf skins.
Swooping low, she saw the dwarf turn the boat for shore and lift a device that looked like an immense crossbow, wider of bow than she was high. She dropped into the water some distance away, upwind so her words might carry and any bolts fired would have to fight a stiff breeze. The cold, after its first shock, wasn’t so bad.
“May I ask you a question?” she called across the water in Parl.
The dwarf startled, and the rowers bent over their oars and bowed and chanted and rattled strings of shells.
The dwarf lifted a speaking trumpet. “Question away, though I warn you, I’ve no coin.”
“Do you know these lands, good dwarf?” she called.
“Know them? I love them, and will tell you why: Fools don’t survive up here.”
“I seek my kind. Are there dragons to be found?”
“None you wish to find,” the dwarf said. “Wait! There are some decent dragons, though it is a long journey.”
“Where?”
“East, over the Icespine and then across the plains a full two hundred vesk of journey. The Sadda-Vale. I’ve not been there in years, but once a goodly white dragon named Scabia ruled there with her kin and accepted some trade.”
“What is the Icespine?”
“You may know them in the south as the Red Mountains. Cross them and from your heights you may just see the peaks beyond. The Sadda-Vale is pleasant, though rainy, but beware the trolls roaming outside it. They were thick there when last I visited.”
“Thank you, good dwarf.”
“Any news from the south?”
“Wars with barbarians, in Hypat’s northern thanedoms,” Wistala said.
“Ah. One’s been building for a while. Luckily the Ya-yuit don’t go in for such nonsense. Good day, dragon!” The dwarf thickened, and Wistala realized he had bowed. She dipped her head and swam for shore.
 
She went east with a serious storm, which forced her down to seek shelter in trees. It raged for two days, leaving her hungry and the land thick with snow. She followed a game trail down into a valley and found nothing to eat, save a dead bear frozen solid under a tree, which even her foua could achieve little against without burning the meat to uselessness. She picked at the bits of icy flesh, but it left her with sore teeth.
She flew east in the clear icy day, and came to a river. The local men—was there anywhere men did not go?—had chipped a hole in the ice and were smoking fish in a shack built next to the hole. They ran for a little cluster of huts standing in the shelter of a hill at the bank as she passed over, and so great was her hunger that she raided the smokehouse and gorged—even eating the poor iron fishhooks stored there. She broke the film of ice on the fishing hole and drank, then slept right on the ice, wrapped around the small fire keeping the smoke going, feeling as stuffed and pampered as though she were back in Rainfall’s steam-filled health room.
She awoke to chanting and the smell of burning fat.
Downwind on the iced-over river the locals were burning a small fire, with a pot hung over it, and a tent pole stood next to it. When she raised her head, three contraptions went whizzing across the ice, pulled by dogs.
Wistala blinked the crusts of ice and snow out of her eyes and followed the smell, cold muscles only slowly warming to their work. There was no sign of a trap; indeed, if one could imagine a less likely place for a trap than a frozen river one had to put one’s mind to it—but she still felt something was wrong. She probed the ice carefully before taking each step.
Back at the houses, the villagers were lined up along the river’s edge, and she heard faint chanting.
Something moved at the pole, a little obscured by the waves of heat coming off the fire. She circled round, again carefully probing the ice.
A girl stood tied to the top of the pole, shivering in the wind. Pieces of dragonscale were fixed to its peak, in imitation of a flower. The stuff bubbling in the cauldron was hot fat, she could smell it clearly now. At the base of the pole were three dogs, old and scrawny looking, also chained to the pole. They were barking and trying to hide among each other at the same time.
Curious.
The girl was young, perhaps Lada’s age when she was returned to Mossbell, and well coated with fragrant fats to keep the wind off her skin.
Or to make her more appetizing?
Wistala decided she was some sort of offering, perhaps a trade off to keep the newly arrived dragon from raiding any more fish shacks. A dragon could destroy a village in other ways than eating the inhabitants or burning them out of their homes. What the dogs were for she couldn’t imagine, unless they were meat to serve as an appetizer or dessert in the manner of the fancy tables Rainfall set.
The girl had her eyes closed, her face turned away, red hair—the only spot of color in the endless whites and grays in this land—whipping in the wind. Wistala reached up a claw and cut the bonds. She fell to her knees but made no attempt to escape.
“Go back to your people,” Wistala said. The girl didn’t move, probably not understanding Parl.
Wistala pushed her by the shoulder with her sii, and the girl finally came alive, struggling against her claws, pounding against her scales. Wistala knocked down the pole and stood on it with her other leg, as the dogs tried to run, still giving a whimpering bark now and then. Wistala put the girl’s hand on the dog chains and broke them away from their fixture on the pole, and as she was pulled away in a shower of ice particles thrown up by the scrambling dogs, she looked at Wistala in wonder with bright green eyes.
After a quick taste to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, Wistala tried the hot fat. Now this was a meal that readied one to face the winter winds again! She even ate the chains that suspended it over the fire before flying off, but sadly the kettle was too large to swallow.
 
One advantage of a cold wind is that it makes exercise a good deal more agreeable. Wistala managed to cross the line of mountains in a single day, thanks to a strong wind at her back shooting between the mountaintops. Then she was out over dry, treeless plains that she remembered from the day she and AuRon had escaped up the chimney.
Only colder and more barren.
There was nothing to eat on the steppe-lands, as far as she could see. She saw some goats on the mountainside at a distance, but when she flew closer they disappeared, flowing into cracks and behind stones like water. No herds of sheep, no files of elk, just odd two-legged birds that could turn like a zephyr when she swooped in on them, running with bobbing heads and spiny feathers flying. She finally managed to brain one with her tail—by accident—as she pursued another, and got a thin, bony meal that was all skin, tendon, and feathers.
But she could see her objective in the distance, which gave her heart to go on through hunger.
She wondered what the trolls ate until she saw plots of torn up earth around discreet holes in the turf.
The peaks weren’t so high as the Red Mountains, and resembled dry rockpiles, with evenly layered lines stuck up this way and that, as though someone had broken up the upper world’s crust. These mountains were thick with pine and littered with caves. She saw a few sheep with horns like helms and a huge wildcat or two, and smelled troll waste.
But she was now a match for a troll, unless one caught her unawares, and she had no intention of letting that happen. She watched the sides and floors of the canyon as she passed over trees, out of reach of even the longest troll arm from treetop below or concealing rock to the side.
Unfortunately, its attack came from above.
Later she visited the spot, and guessed where the troll had climbed when it saw her course. Perhaps it had been sitting on a high ledge, surveying the western slopes of the rock-strewn mountains, and climbed up a little farther when it saw her coming.
It was a good thing the sun was high when it jumped, for some piece of her noticed the shadow of its fall on the mountainside below, and she turned to avoid it before the rest of her figured out why. The hammer-blow of its arm therefore fell on her side rather than her wing or spine.
The troll grappled her with its awful rubbery fingers and she felt a tearing at her wing edge. She instinctively folded it down and out of the way, and her careen through the mountains turned into a one-wing plunge into the stony slopes. She had just enough sense to roll over so the impact struck the troll—mostly—and her tail rather than more vital limbs.
The impact knocked the wind from her, and for a second she did not know where she was.
Fury took over when the troll’s fingers locked around her neck, trying to twist, trying to throttle, and she clawed at it, but it moved with that horrible, rubbery mobility she remembered. She batted it about the body with her wings, and may have struck the sense organ cluster, for it backed off and swung up a rock, leaving smears of blood as it squeezed into a crack. She righted herself and spat her hunger-weak foua after it, but did not know if she hit it or not.
Fearing another sudden jump from above, or thrown boulders, she backed down the hillside, watching the black smoke of her fire disappear into the winter sky.
She flapped her wings experimentally. The right was sore but worked. She launched herself into the air and saw the troll wedging itself through a crack. It retreated beneath an overhang like a wary spider.
“Call it a new throw,” Wistala said, using the slang of the Hypatian dice pits for when a bet is neither paid nor lost. She was breathing and unharmed, and wouldn’t risk her wings going after a troll on a point of honor.
Her injuries allowed only a short flight before she had to stop and rest, but she made it to the other side of the mountains. From a prominence she looked out upon the Sadda-Vale.
The vale reminded her of a half-filled cauldron. Water filled the center of the valley, though unlike the Ba-drink, green flats and low hills surrounded the water. The water was calm and the color of polished steel, the grasses around a deep green that reminded her of seaweed. Forests grew in the spaces between the toes of the mountain.
Capping the cauldron were low-hanging clouds, made of mists rising from the water, or so it seemed from the sheets of moisture rising in slow spirals. The rock face on the inner ring of mountains was black with moisture. Wistala felt the cold wet on her face.
The temperature had risen considerably on this side of the mountain; Wistala no longer felt frozen and windstruck, but simply chilled and damp. She didn’t like this much wet in the air, it fed itchy growths that lived under your scales.
As she rested she counted waterfalls. It seemed every mountainside had a trickle or two running down, more easily spotted at a distance, as they cascaded between the thick fern growth—higher up they looked like faint veins against the rock face.
An orange flash caught her eye, a gout of flame that welled and slowly faded. The odd shape to it was evocative of a dragon’s—no, there was a dragon there, on a ledge where the mountain was broken by a crack, like a smashed plate unevenly repaired.
So excited was she—hope died hard in Wistala—that she immediately launched herself off the prominence, flying for the dragon as fast as sore wings would carry her.
The dragon—she saw it was a male by his distinctive coloring: a dull orange like a fading sunset that alternated with stripes of black. The pattern intrigued her; in her experience scaled dragons were usually uniform in color. Auron sometimes showed stripes like that against his gray, but he’d been born without scales.
She landed a little up the ledge from him—she folded her wings as she came in, absorbed the impact with her tail and settled with only a slight slip. She wanted the advantage of height just in case.
Though she thought it a well-done landing. But the dragon ignored her.
He nosed in a pile of broken rock, grasping pieces with his tongue and swallowing them. He had four horns, and two more buds, rising from his crest. Older than she, younger than Father, and there was a strange gold behind his griff: he had a ring threaded in the skin of his earhole.
He extended his long neck, took a big mouthful of water, then swung his neck to the other side, where the mountain face was broken. Wistala looked closely at the rock—there were threads of metal in the rock, like bits of ragged sewing.
The four-horn spat water into the broken rock. His head bobbed as he read distances, then he spat flame where he’d placed the water. The rock flamed and hissed, cracking, and with a suddenness that surprised her and made her edge back, he whipped up his tail and struck the flames. Pieces of broken rock slid down and hit the ledge, and he commenced nosing again, still ignoring her.
“I take it there’s metal in that stone,” Wistala said.
He swallowed a piece, and rolled an eye toward her as he sniffed over more shattered rock. “What is your name?”
“Wistala,” she said.
“We don’t know each other.”
“No,” she said. “May I have your name?”
“DharSii.” He swallowed another stone.
The name struck her ear funny. If the word were rendered in the simplest form of Parl, a human would have called him “Sureclaw.”
“Do you live here?” she asked.
He made a strange throat-clearing sound: Ha-hem. “As little as possible.” He kept eyeing her leather carry-harness and the blue emblem at the base of her throat.
“How is the metal?”
“Adequate, though you have to eat a good deal for it to do any good. Cleansing, though.”
He took another mouthful of water and spat it into the cracks in the rock face.
“I’ve come to find others of my—our kind.” He said nothing in reply. “The water helps break the stone up, I take it.”
“I doubt you’d understand.”
Wistala felt her fringe rise a little. “I suppose when your foua strikes the water it vaporizes into steam. The sudden expansion in the confined space of the crack, combined with the heat, shatters the rock.”
DharSii left off his mining and turned his head so he could fix her with both eyes. He seemed about to speak, his mouth opened anyway, shut again, and finally he said: “If your design is to meet the others, please follow.” Then he launched himself off the mountainside and flapped away on wings long and thin that reminded Wistala of knife blades.
She couldn’t say whether she’d been insulted or not, but she flew after him. He sailed off north, crossed the hills that Wistala noted held red, wide-horned, high-backed cattle, and was soon skimming the misty water of the vast lake. The lake was so wide, the trees upon the other side were an indistinct green smear; and so long to the south, the waters ate the horizon.
It felt distinctly warmer over the lake, and some of the mountains to the east smoldered from vents in their sides, adding to the overcast trapped between the mountains. The mist layer hanging above was tinged with green, gold, and even blue depending on the thickness of the murk and its nearness to the vents. Wistala saw more of the long-horned cattle with the mountainous humps projected up at the base of their necks. They grazed on the thick grass, stupidly oblivious of the dragons overhead.
Wistala caught up to DharSii, flying a little below—yes, he was scarred around the right pocket of his arm, and the outer toe was missing from his left saa. Not so scarred as Father, but not so old either. And his snout only showed the barest hints of white fangs—Father’s had seemed permanently on display.
He rolled an eye toward her, and she felt embarrassed to be watching him, so she fixed her gaze ahead.
She marked a white construct of some kind on the northern shore, well above and back from the lake. Or was it some trick of geology? A spur of the mountain came down and divided, and from the divide on down the mountain was scored with white, far too regularly for the marks to be snow or ice.
The lake here steamed, tendrils of moisture danced across the smooth, clear water before dissipating into the chill. She saw a head rise from the water, dripping, and a golden dragon made a leisurely climb to a mushroom head of volcanic rock, where he scratched his belly on the stone and stretched out neck and tail with a bit of a yawn as his snout turned to the fliers.
Wistala dropped back a little, not knowing if there would be a battle between the dragons. Her striped companion paid the wet dragon no more attention than he did the fork-tailed birds zipping around the masses of rock. The stones here looked shaped, but to dragon proportions rather than hominid, progressing down into the water like irregular, broken steps.
Her guide continued on his way toward the point between the divided spur.
Closer now, Wistala could see a “garden” of thick thorn trees—she thought of it as a garden because it was, precisely edged both inside and out and regularly shaped, a great crescent with the points running up the outer edges of the divided mountain spur, thinning somewhat as they climbed the thin-soiled heights. The thorn trees were thick and intertwined, so it wouldn’t be a matter of just cutting down trees, for they all supported and wound around each other; sever trunk from root and the rest would hang. She guessed a team of dwarves with axes could hack through it in a day or two—under a tasking leader—and it would be a remarkable thief who could negotiate that wall without becoming hopelessly lost or torn to pieces and waste much time backtracking out of blind alleys.
The thorn wall guarded a vast courtyard, almost as big as all of Mossbell’s cultivated grounds, between the two mountain arms. Instead of wild cabbages and berry bushes, this plaza was paved with broken and irregular bits of masonry. Even the odd statue fragment of a hominid arm or face showed here and there, placed to fit between an old fountain rim or some unknown chunk of temple wall.
Two pairs of blighters walked here and there and swept up some long thin leaves fallen from the thorn trees. Judging from the size of the courtyard, when they finished they’d have to start all over again where they’d began.
She forgot the blighters as soon as she saw the arch.
The stone of the mountain had been formed and carved into a great gallery leading into the darkness between the spurs of the mountain, going up an interlacing like a woven basket of round reeds, meeting like snakes hooking at the neck. The stone had been carved so it evoked bones, or tree roots, or dragon tails, anything but dull and lifeless rock. It was supported both from the courtyard and the mountain ridge by pillars, all shaped to match the whole and etched with scale patterns. At the outer rim of the stony lattice there were holes big enough for a dragon to climb through, but the spacing grew tighter and tighter as it approached what looked to be a cave mouth, though the most regular and finished Wistala had ever seen.
It was wide enough for a dragon to fly into it and pick a comfortable, well-lit landing spot before the cave. DharSii glided in, widening and then slowly folding his wings as he alighted. Wistala tried to imitate him and made a clumsier landing, not expecting the smoothness of the courtyard paving. It wasn’t a sprawl, but it could have been one if her tail didn’t catch on a fortunately placed crack.
“Welcome to Vesshall,” DharSii said, letting his griff give an elegant little flutter. “I will take you to the dragons within, but I shan’t stay.”
“Do you have enemies here?” she asked.
“You ask a lot of questions. Scabia will be delighted with you. Make your queries sound like praise, and you’ll share endless hours of chatter.”
A cave entrance, wide enough for two dragons to pass abreast, stood just above a ledge about the height of one human seated on another’s shoulders. A ring of stones, chiseled and filled in with a black material like glass forming unfamiliar glyphs like thorns crossed and arranged, decorated the entrance.
“I don’t know that script,” Wistala said.
“It’s the old iconography,” DharSii said, rearing up to climb into the tunnel mouth. His tail gave a little twitch; perhaps he was pleased at her ignorance. “It reads ‘Welcome is the dragon who alights in peace.’ ” They passed down a short passage, arched above to match the stone lattice outside, filled in with six-sided colored chips in all the colors of dragonhood, making patterns interlaced and winding above and beneath in such intricacy that Wistala wished she had an afternoon just to let her eyes travel the path.
But DharSii did not stop, but moved on into another cavern.
This one was vast and round, by far the biggest interior Wistala had ever been in. The far walls were so distant their old footfalls bounced back at them from the walls to join the fresh noises they made, waiting to take their turn to visit the other side of the cavern and return.
The convex ceiling curved high enough for Wistala to flap her wings and fly if she wished, and went up like an inverted bowl to a circular gap that admitted the outdoor light and aired the room. It wasn’t big enough to fly out, she’d have to fold her wings to pass through it. A shallow pool of water stood under the skylight, and the floor under the light was much edged with bands of green copper, one of which the edge of splash of dim sunlight rode even now.
Around the walls of the cavern—or chamber, rather, for while there was mountain muscle to be seen there was no rock that was not shaped by artistry—long blocks of basalt stuck out of the wall, narrowing and rising to a softened point like an inverted dragon claw. At the far end, two scaly forms reclined.
Wistala saw more blighters at work beneath the smaller, scrubbing the tiled floor.
DharSii struck off straight across the floor toward the pair and Wistala followed, hearts hammering. The place smelled of dragons, rainwater, and fresh air; she relished every breath, took it in through her nostrils and clamped them so the homey smell might never escape.
There were still dragons in the world, not skulking and hiding but living in grandeur and peace!
At their approach the blighters carried off their implements, flattened and squeezed themselves through a thin gap at the base of the wall like escaping mice before a prowling tom.
They caught her eye only because of the motion. The two dragons on the jutting lofts of rock had her attention.
Both were dragonelles, one rather undersize, her green scales pale and almost translucent, well formed of limb though in a delicate way that suggested little in the way of gorge or exertion.
The other was a white dragonelle, formidably huge and perhaps a bit more massive than DharSii. Wistala had the odd sensation of knowing her without having ever been introduced, probably some vague echo of a mind-picture from Mother. But there was, yes, a half-familiar shape to her short, proudly curved snout, the challenging arc of her eye ridge . . . Her scales had thinned a bit around her jawline and above her eyes, the flesh sagged in a little where her saa met her spine; she was a dragonelle of long years but still formidable.
“I bring a visitor, Damesister.” It took Wistala a moment to work out the relationship; she’d only heard the word once before from her Father in one of his battle-stories . . . a man or a dwarf would have said aunt. “I humbly present Wistala, a dragonelle out of the south, who seeks ha-hem succor and solace.”
I never said that, Wistala thought.
The striped dragon turned to her. “Wistala, this is Scabia, Archelle of the Sadda-Vale, and her daughter Aethleethia, my ha-hem beautiful uzhin.
Both dragonelles fluttered their griffs at Wistala with that same bird-wing delicacy. Wistala thought she should fit in and tried to imitate it, but her griff rattled off her scale, and the dragonelles glanced at each other.
The white dragon extended her nose just a little and sniffed the air in Wistala’s direction, her pink eyes as cold as the glaciers Wistala had passed over.
“Will you not make her welcome?” DharSii said, and Wistala liked him a little better.
“Who were your sire and dame?” Scabia asked.
“AuRel of the line of AuNor and his mate Irelia.” Wistala decided to make her introduction formal, and spoke as Mother taught: “I was first daughter and fourth out of the five eggs.”
“Ah,” Scabia said. “I thought I recognized your wing-points. I knew your mother somewhat. You are how long out of the egg?”
“These thirteen winters.”
“And already wide-winged! I’m amazed.”
Aethleethia extended her long neck and scratched herself under the chin with the claw tip on her loft, and DharSii turned away to inspect a piece of iconography etched on the floor in a manner similar to that ringing the entrance. He brushed away some dust with his tail so that the black glass might shine.
A shadow darkened the splash of outside light and the golden dragon dropped through with wings folded. He opened them again with dramatic suddenness and alighted. “Ah-ha! A visitor!” he trumpeted, folding his wings.
Ha-hem,” DharSii said, his eyes and nostrils half-closed. “Wistala, you meet the dragonlord of Vesshall, NaStirath.” A certain airiness highlighted the words, but what he meant to imply, if anything, Wistala couldn’t guess, not knowing him well.
“My daughter’s mate,” Scabia added.
NaStirath loosed a short but loud prrum in the general direction of Aethleethia’s place. The lord of Vesshall was a finely formed fellow, long and well fed, not a scar on him or a scale out of place, and he smelled of steam and hot scale, being fresh out of the lake.
He spoke: “Just like you, DharSii, to guide a female over me without an introduction. Don’t tell me you’re finally courting a mate.”
“I hope not!” DharSii said. “Too wide of wing, and her tail is so much longer than her neck.”
The arrogant, two-colored
“My dear uzhin always gives an honest opinion,” Aethleethia put in. “It startles those who are not much used to him.”
Ha-hem. I’ll be about my business,” DharSii said. He fluttered his griff, but when Wistala met his eyes, fire bladder pulsing, he looked away. He turned and made for the entrance.
The tap of his claws played off the walls as he crossed the chamber.
“Two visits to the Vesshall from DharSii in one winter,” NaStirath said. “I feel so honored, I’m having a hard time not yawning.”
“Tell us your troubles, dragonelle of AuNor, so that we may comfort you,” Scabia suggested.
“I’m the last of my family,” Wistala said. Was that quite true? The copper still lives, for all you know. “Dwarves of the Wheel of Fire slaughtered them and took from their bodies as trophies. Elves and men were also involved, but I cannot say which for certain. One called the Dragonblade was almost certainly aiding them in the assassination.”
“We’ve heard this before,” NaStirath said, in a bored tone as if to indicate he was not much troubled at the news.
“We are sorry for your loss,” Scabia said, though she was the only dragon in the room that much looked it, for nothing remained of DharSii unless he lurked still in the shadows of the entrance passage. “You may claim a loft here for as long as you like; there are ample to spare.”
“I heard they got CuSanat and his mate, Virtuthia, in their cave as well,” NaStirath said, stretching. “Such a shame we won’t be seeing them again, even if they weren’t exactly uzhin. The Red Mountains are being quite cleared of dragons. Is it bullock again for dinner, or fish?”
Wistala wasn’t sure she was hearing right. Did these fools not realize—?
“We must take vengeance on these assassins!” Wistala blurted.
“I’ve no dead to avenge,” NaStirath said. He climbed into a loft on the other side of Scabia. Odd that he didn’t sit to the side of his mate—
“Be quiet, NaStirath,” Scabia said, pronouncing his name in a way that labeled him still a wingless juvenile. “And have some feeling for our guest’s sorrow.”
“I shall achieve both through a nap, where I will dream awful, sorrowful dreams,” NaStirath said, closing his eyes. “I rejoice in your survival and arrival, Wistala of the line of AuNor.” He twitched his griff as he turned on his side.
Wistala remembered how Father had once caught Auron sleeping on his side, and though her brother was scaleless, punished him with a series of roars that left the hatchling quivering.
“Rest your wings,” Scabia said. “Pick any loft, and wait for your nostrils to waken you.”
Wistala crossed the room to be away from the others and climbed into one of the giant projections. One could arrange one’s body so the head and tail were at almost any height for comfort. She hated Vesshall a little less, and slept.
 
Her nostrils did wake her, as the blighters brought out huge platters of pan-fried fish and dumped them before the three dragons, with much falling to the knees and arm-waving with palms held toward the dragons. Only the faintest light came down from the circle in the center of the ceiling.
Wistala felt horribly stiff from the troll fight even as she wondered why DharSii didn’t join his relatives for dinner. Not that she cared to see him, of course, only that his absence struck her as odd.
She crossed over to the others.
More platters of fish arrived and Scabia pointed with her tail toward Wistala, shook it three times, and they made a mountain of cooked, blackened fish before her.
“It’s quite safe,” Scabia said. “The blighters look to us for protection from the trolls, and of course the other races of the world who have superceded them.”
Wistala ate, but the charm of prepared food was nothing like that of Mossbell, with lively conversation and the friendly banter with Widow Lessup about the cooking. She felt like a pig at a trough.
“How many trolls have you killed, lord?” Wistala asked NaStirath.
“Hmmmmm. Killed? I set one aflame once and he made quite a spectacle rolling back to the mountains, but I don’t care to close and kill. Awful, the stench of trolls. I’m not sure that burning improves the odor.”
“I know DharSii has killed several,” Aethleethia said. “Every time he does it, the blighters talk of nothing else for moons.”
“Keen on sports, my good uzhin is,” NaStirath said with a belch. “Shall we have molasses elixir tonight, to celebrate our happy arrival?”
“No,” said Scabia firmly.
“Why do you care so little for the fates of other dragons?” Wistala asked.
The other three stared at her.
“Now see and hear, thirteen winters,” Scabia said. “You’re a guest, and welcome as long as you will be accommodating, but I don’t want challenges or lectures and twaddle about what we must and must not do, or you’ll find me a terrible enemy who’ll drive you from this home cave with fire and tooth and claw. This vale is safe and distant, and those wise enough to stay here do well. As to other dragons’ affairs, we keep out. It was a lesson dearly learned. My father? Dead. My brother? Dead. My mate? Dead. My sons? All dead. DharSii only just survived out there, was even a captive once, and it seems every time he crosses the mountain ring or goes down the river, he comes back with a new scar.
“We give no cause to the Ironriders or the wildhairs or the blighter bands on the steppe to feel aggrieved, and the trolls on the outer slopes of these mountains keep other hominids from the so-called civilized lands at bay. I don’t look for trouble in the wider world, and the wider world comes for no trouble here. Am I making myself understood?”
“Perfectly,” Wistala said. In different circumstances, would she have become Scabia?
“Oh, I don’t care for this sort of talk,” Aethleethia said. “Now let us have a pleasant game to aid the digestion. Wistala, how are you at add-a-couplet? We have a poem about dancing gems that is quite without a decent end.”
 
Wistala woke to the sound of dragon claws on the floor below her loft. She came instantly awake, but it was only Scabia, with NaStirath fidgeting behind.
There was a little light, but just a little, coming in from the ceiling hole.
“Good morning, Wistala,” Scabia said. “I came to say that I regret some of my words from last night—no, don’t apologize.”
Wistala wasn’t about to. “You’re most kind,” she said, which was true, to a point. She’d been foolish to seek an alliance with other dragons.
“I’m really here to ask you if you wish to stay, to live with us,” Scabia said.
“It is quite the most marvelous home cave,” Wistala said, watching blighters clean up dragon waste about the pool.
“We would like you to be uzhin,” NaStirath said.
“Wistala, I am like my uzhin DharSii in that I’ve no patience for disguise. My beloved daughter is the best of dragons but barren, and I would have hatchlings in this cave again.”
Wistala stiffened.
“Don’t look alarmed, I’m not asking for you to take wing on a mating flight now,” Scabia said. “Nor even call any male here your lord. NaStirath is a fine dragon and would sire strong hatchlings. You would have a home and honor and, yes, even precious metals here for the rest of your moons if you would leave a few clutches for Aethleethia to sing over and raise as her own. Don’t look so shocked—it was not an uncommon practice in ancient Silverhigh. You’re obviously healthy; I’ve never seen such thick scale on a maiden before, more like that of your grandsire AuRye, who was always stuffing himself with well-armored dwarves and golden hilts from broken battle-axes. I will condescend to say that such a famous line will improve the blood around here.”
Scabia cast a pointed glance back at NaStirath.
She’d always meant to keep her promise to Father; in fact, she’d dreamed of a clutch of restless eggs last night for some reason, but this, this—“Unnatural,” she said. “It would be unnatural.”
“No more unnatural than a dragon wearing hominid jewelry and a carrying harness,” Scabia said. “Were you born with that icon on your fringe, perhaps? Or growing up among hominids, as I suspect you did. Tell me I guess wrongly.”
“I . . . ,” Wistala said, groping for words. “I didn’t come here to find a mate.”
“Is it a song you want?” NaStirath put in. “I know one or two:
 
“There once flew a maiden of AnFant
Whose mind was as pure as her vent
But when—”
 
“You’re not helping your cause, NaStirath,” Scabia said, again employing the juvenile—deservedly so, Wistala thought.
Scabia turned those faintly pink eyes back on her. “Now, dear, we shall have breakfast soon. Let’s have you join us for a few more meals and we’ll speak no more of this while you recover from your fatigues and hurts. Get to know my darling Aethleethia, and I’m sure you’ll come to feel, as I do—”
“I must go,” Wistala said, hopping from her loft and running for the exit. Grand, Vesshall was, but it was also hollow. Hollow of honor, hollow of feeling, hollow of—
She almost bowled DharSii over as she sprang out the tunnel mouth, leaped from the ledge, and spread her wings beneath the stone canopy that suddenly seemed as dreadful as the thorn garden below. He began to say something, but Wistala didn’t hear the words in her eagerness to get away, flying south as fast as she could.