A conspiracy to discover and a civil war to prevent. Here she thought being Queen meant licking new hatchlings and presiding over feasts.

Chapter 3

The sun hadn’t visited the Isle of Ice in scores of days, it seemed.

Of course winter always came early this far north. Once it became truly cold, the inhabitants could look forward to long stretches of clear daylight, for the sun only set for a few hours over the winter solstice.

AuRon the Gray had settled on this island to be cut off from the world and its mad hatreds. Man against dragon, dragon against dwarf, elf against man and dragon… it was a long and bloody list of enmities. Just in his brief lifetime of a few decades he’d seen new ones form, hot and fast, and others burn down into charred lumps like dry wood. But even so, as much as he enjoyed the quiet of this remote, hard-to-reach island, come the winter storms the feeling of being cut off intensified, for you could hardly see your own tail when the snow was blowing.

“My love,” Natasatch said to AuRon. She was his mate and mother to his four now-fledged offspring and sometimes she chided and nudged him as though he still had bits of egg clinging to his skin. “You must attend the ceremony.”

AuRon didn’t like the pomp and pageantry of his Copper brother’s cursed Dragon Empire. He’d seen it born in bloodshed, even if he grudgingly granted its success in allowing dragons to live openly above ground in safety. Trumpets and banners and dragon roars, with those blowing and roaring the loudest the ones farthest from the fighting.

“It wouldn’t hurt for you to mix a bit more with the Lavadome dragons. Even your brother sent us a bullock with his compliments. A fine fat beast it was and that messenger had to carry it all the way out of the south. This old enmity deserves to be laid to rest. The Tyr’s put it behind him.”

Had he? AuRon wondered. Or was it some elaborate treachery?

Of course, if his brother really wanted to do away with him, he had the power. He could put forty or more fighting dragons in the air over the Isle of Ice if he wanted. He might escape two, five even, but forty?

No. Still, just because his brother had the power to end their old feud and chose not to use it, it didn’t mean he had to like him, or his empire or Grand Alliance or whatever he was calling it lately.

“It will be a celebration of magnificence. It’s not every day a new Queen is announced. Well, Queen-Consort, they call it. And your sister no less! Plenty of coin to eat. The Hypatians own the seas again, south of the neck. It’s a chance to mix. Besides, the last two winters have been dreadful here. I’m not sure I feel up to facing another, the island could do with a couple less appetites to feed. Your wolves may like the howling wind and blowing snow driving bighorns into the valleys, but I don’t.”

Natasatch had spent too many years chained in a dark cave. She loved going hither and yon on social calls and sometimes was away for weeks when she visited Queen Nilrasha in her refuge to hear the news.

He couldn’t deny his mate the pleasure of company, or seeing their newly fledged son promoted into the Aerial Host. Besides, there’d be little enough to eat besides fish on the Isle of Ice if it was another hard winter, and the blighters complained if he went after their seals and such. Maybe that was the reason for his foul mood lately, not enough variety in the diet. He was still growing, after all.

Youth. He was still a young dragon, even if the knowledge that there was now a generation behind him made him feel old at times. Some dragons went on and on, in and out through whole nations of men.

Perhaps Natasatch was right. This mania of his to be isolated, remote, out of the affairs of the hominids—lurking in a cave listening to groaning glaciers between flights to warn off deep-water fishing boats or treasure hunters chasing legends of an entirely imaginary “wizard’s trove” on the Isle of Ice wasn’t much of a life. Besides, he owed it to his mate that she might see some of the world. He’d traveled all those years she’d been chained in a cave.

Don’t be a blockhead, gray dragon. The outside world isn’t that bad.

“It will be a long flight,” he said, giving her both a warning and a chance to bow out gracefully.

She fluffed her wings with a leathery crackle. “I don’t mind at all.”

“Oh, very well. Let’s enjoy ourselves. But Natasatch, try to keep out of the business of my brother’s alliance. I don’t want us joining any factions.”

“Factions? Us? No, my love, you’re quite right that we should keep out of politics. I just want us to be sociable with our relatives to the south. It never hurts to have friends for when we desire a change of scenery, and I do so want to be able to congratulate AuSurath in person.”

“To tell the truth, I’m curious to see how he looks, now that he has wings. I always thought he rather resembled my father.”

Natasatch looked downcast for a moment. She hadn’t known her parents at all before being snatched away to the Isle of Ice. “Very well. Shall we bring Istach?”

“She has young wings,” AuRon said. “The exercise would do her good.”

“My lord is wise,” Natasatch said. Her tone was light, and the wording was the one she used when she teased him for dispensing what she called “the wisdom of the obvious.”

He snorted. “You’re right, my love. You mated a dragon with delusions of sagacity.”

Istach, their striped daughter, was a bit of an odd-hatchling out. Always had been. Quiet and thoughtful, she stuck close by her home cave, learning the tongues of blighters and wolves and sea mammals. She brought home game almost every day. It was unusual for a dragon her age to dote on her parents so, but again, she was an odd-hatchling.

Her sister Varatheela was a Firemaiden and took after her mother in her desire to enjoy the social struggles with other dragons. He doubted he’d see her; from what he understood, the Firemaids and younger Firemaidens spent most of their time guarding the beating heart of the Dragon Empire, the Lavadome, running or flying messages, or learning about the lands under their Tyr’s subtle control.

At least that’s how Wistala explained it to him when he asked her advice about Varatheela joining. But Varatheela was a full-fledged dragon now, and able to shape her own destiny.

It was a longish flight to Hypatia. AuRon, being scaleless, could make it in three hard days, but Natasatch and Istach were weighed down by scale and inexperience in distance flying.

To give themselves energy for the flight they feasted three days on a dead whale AuRon found beached on one of the tiny islands surrounding theirs. The gulls hadn’t torn it up too badly. There was still plenty of juicy fat and it was too cold for flies. Then they spent a day in short conditioning flights cleared their digestive systems, and accustomed themselves to the air. They flapped off to the south the next day, as the weather promised fair.

Though he’d steeled himself against the departure, AuRon couldn’t help but leave his island with regret, the pain all the sharper for Natasatch’s eagerness to leave.

To think, when his hatchlings were first above ground, his worry was overpopulation on the Isle of Ice and running out of sheep or goats in consequence. Now most of the dragons were gone, eager for the gold and glory of his brother’s glittering new empire. Save old Ouistrela. Too cantankerous for dragon society, always hungry, she rained contempt on the young dragonelles who flew north with messages. The Firemaid who brought the message from the Tyr, letting him know about the victory against the men on the western side of the Inland Ocean and his son’s promotion into the Aerial Host, had had her tail shortened by a mouthful for taking a sheep without permission to refresh herself.

He had paid Ouistrela a visit to bid her goodbye and heard the story about how she’d seen off the “trained dog of a dragonelle” with noise and teeth, the one resource of the Isle of Ice’s old Ouistrela made free with. He’d brought her some of his pitifully small hoard in return for keeping an eye on the cave and not causing his wolves too much grief.

“Some price for my services. If you’re gone longer than a year, I’ll go looking for the rest,” she said.

The trio traveled with the wind; with winter coming it was blowing hard out of the north, their flight alternately serious and playful. Istach had the energy of a newly fledged dragon and enjoyed swooping around her parents and experimenting with surfing the air currents created by their hard-beating wings in their wake. AuRon, unhindered by scale, could outfly any dragon he’d ever met without sucking wind much deeper than he did on the ground, and continually asked his mate and daughter if they wanted to float and rest. Natasatch responded, as a proud dragon-dame should, by flapping harder and forcing him to catch up.

Istach simply took over the lead position, so her parents might suffer a little less drag by riding in her wake.

From the air, AuRon always thought Hypat, capital city of the Hypatian Empire, looked like a white vase dropped on a coral-strewn shore and shattered. From a beautiful core bits of it were scattered in all directions; even the toothlike sails in the great sand-choked estuary of the Falnges River might be mistaken for broken pieces of a greater structure.