AuRon was a tough companion to fly alongside.

She remembered, rather grimly, that Natasatch once told her that she’d long since given up trying to keep up with her mate in the air and so she landed to rest and let AuRon’s anxiety to reach his destination go off with the winds. Wistala took pride in her strength and reserves of energy. She limited her pleas to asking AuRon to slow down, lest she burst a heart struggling to keep up.

AuRon had apologized repeatedly, and he remembered for a day or so to set his speed on hers, but he liked being lead dragon—it let the follower relax a little, riding in the air that his wings broke. But his natural pace always crept back in mid-flight and she had to once again gasp for him to slow down.

The process had been repeated over the week it took them to travel north from the Sunstruck Sea back to the Sadda-Vale. They alighted in a gray dawn, with AuRon’s scales almost colorless from fatigue. DharSii set the blighters to work bringing them fresh-plucked chickens with the blood still warm within.

“We came here to warn you,” Wistala said, tearing into shredded chicken flesh. The blighters had left the digestive track in the birds, but she was too hungry to complain about the taint. “We’ve shown ourselves as enemies of the Empire.”

“They moved before you,” DharSii said. “Or perhaps faster than you. No way to know which.”

They gratefully accepted food and wine hurriedly set out in Vesshall. Scabia greeted them and promised they’d talk in the morning, once they were rested. Then she slept like the dead.

Scabia ordered another overlarge breakfast. Wistala sensed that something had changed at Vesshall. Scabia was subdued—what in another dragon would be called deferential, but it was hard to apply that word to the white matriarch she’d known for so long.

Things seemed different between Aethleethia and NaStirath as well. She was less captivated by her hatchlings and more eager to settle down so that her tail rested against his.

But the greatest change was in NaStirath. He still joked, but his jokes revolved around trivial matters such as the weather or the state of the drains in the Vesshall. He talked sensibly about ways to increase the food supply should more dragons arrive, and wondered what the chances were of getting some dwarfish artisans in to set some matters straight in the kitchen and food storage. She kept expecting him to fall into his old role of Vesshall fool again and demand to know who fell for the new, masterful NaStirath and who knew it was an act.

A little blood spilled in the Sadda-Vale seemed to have created a world of change.

“We won’t stay long,” Wistala said, finishing her breakfast. “I go in search of my brother.”

“I go along,” AuRon said. “More for Wistala’s sake than my brother’s. I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

“He might say the same of you,” DharSii said. “An open attack on the Empire by two dragons?”

“Sometimes all it takes is one blow to give others courage,” Wistala said.

“You’ve been reading Ankelene sagas again,” DharSii said, referring to the intellectual strain of dragons who kept records, knew strange tongues, and served as a learned caste in the Lavadome.

“We talked it over,” AuRon said. “They’ll be more careful in their raids on the princedoms now, worried about dragons fighting for the Sunstruck Sea. There’s great discontent in the Lavadome. Some may decide to ally with us.”

DharSii cleared his throat. “If no one objects, I’ll come along. I know you two have never gotten along with your brother, AuRon, but I respect him. In his time as Tyr, he made enemies, not all of them fairly, but he did well in a nearly impossible job and left dragons in a better position than he found them. Skotl, Wyrr, and Ankelene found they could get along better than anyone might have believed once they no longer had to worry about which clan was carrying the title ‘Tyr.’ I’ve no idea what his vision for the Empire was, or if he even had one, but what’s happened since he was overthrown has been dreadful. Shameful to hold one of a mated pair as hostage to the behavior of another. I’ll oppose it with him, or I’ll avenge his death and bring comfort to his mate.”

“Nobly spoken, DharSii,” AuRon said. “Do the same for mine, won’t you?”

“Certainly.”

“Can we be in less of a hurry to die and more of a hurry to fly?” Wistala asked, removing her dragonhelm. “I’m not getting anything through this.”

“Let me try,” Scabia said. “I used these a great deal in my youth with my mate. Hmmm. You know, Wistala, we may share but little distant blood, but I think our years together here have made us as close as though we were hatched here.”

She settled it on her head and closed her eyes. After a long moment, her pinkish gaze returned to the assembly.

“Nothing. He may be dead, he may have lost it, or had it taken. He may have some injury or defect that prevents its working—how is his mindspeech?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Wistala said. “We never used it much.”

AuRon said he’d never tried.

“Do we know he made it to the old tower of the Circle of Man?” Scabia asked.

“I believe he did,” Wistala said. “I saw a tower set against the sea and clouds. Dragons, some kind of a sea-cave, or maybe it was just the ocean striking rocks at night.”

“Then go to him. I have an—intuition—that the fate of our world will be decided to the east, in Hypat.”

Wistala could tell AuRon was out of sorts. She flew close to him and let DharSii take the lead of the trio.

“You look unhappy, brother.”

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.