“Thank you, my love.”

“Since you are wingbent on a-dragoning, may I make one request of you?”

“Of course.”

“Some gold. Our hatchlings need it for their scales to grow properly. These ores we’re clawing up out of the mountain seams, all they do is stave off desire for metals without supplying much scale-weight. Aumoahk’s are coming in crooked about the nose—that’s a bad sign. I could break one of Varatheela’s scales with my claw. There must be places where you could find coin.”

“I would hate to fight or rob for it. Perhaps I can earn some as I did with the dwarves.”

“I hope you will consider your hatchlings as you consult your conscience.”

“Let us not argue on our parting. I promise, I’ll return with gold whether or not I find Wistala.”

“Some of the dragonelles will be glad to hear you have gone. More sheep for them.”

Chapter 2

Cold trail, Wistala thought. Pogt.

Auron—or rather AuRon, for he was a fledged dragon now—kept vanishing like a desert mirage just when she approached.

Despite the blighter guide’s assurance, it didn’t look like the sort of chamber a living legend would inhabit. Her tread’s echoes chased each other in and out of corners—nothing but empty dark.

At first check, she thought the cavern had a rather cramped ceiling for a dragon, especially one as old and great as NooMoahk. AuRon had always been a bit on the smallish side, so maybe he found it comfortable.

The empty, old air made her hearts hurt. For so many weary journeys to end in the same way . . .

Was this the end of the long hunt?

Her pursuit had wasted years—well, not wasted, the exploration of other civilizations and cultures having rewards that rivaled a mouthful of gold in flavor and benefited one far longer—chasing down tales of AuRon across the kingdoms of the east.

It seemed every waterfall and cavern had rumors of a color-changing dragon living as a guardian spirit or soul herder or guide into the afterlife.

She disliked the East. For all the prosaic beliefs about a dragon’s role in the order, there was an ugliness to the relationship between the hominid rulers and the ruled that was appalling to one used to the courts of Hypatia. The continual decapitations ordered by the powerful there appalled her—she once saw a man killed in a matter of seconds for accidentally tripping a warrior’s horse. Cross-legged priests, speaking in metaphor while surrounded by burning incense that smelled like roasting rat turds, described life as an illusion and death as a blessed gateway to a higher reality, or a new life as a dragon, even.

Easy for the priests to say. No one dared execute one of them.

Though the peoples of the vast East threw her coins and said prayers in strange tongues to her—she had to retreat to the most challenging of mountainsides to sleep in peace—she learned why so few dragons could be found there. The lesson came in the form of ropes and chains when hunters snared her at a warm spring where she paused for a few days of bathing and fire-nit removal.

Luckily for her the hunters had never met a dragon who knew the trick of hooking a chain around a rock so that no matter how many men they put on the dragline, all they’d do would be to part the chain.

She allowed one of the hunters to live, though she bit off his two bowstring fingers to encourage a change of profession. In exchange for mercy he told her rich lords believed that ground dragon-bone turned into a soup of dragonblood stock gave them renewed youth and vigor. Every old warlord with a garden full of concubines sought it.

She still had three arrowheads buried deep in her shoulder as memorials of the trap and a divot in the scale at her collarbone where they’d plunged the iron hook in. The divot she didn’t mind—she’d never be counted a beautiful dragonelle, as her neck and tail were both too thick—but when she reached above the shoulder joint with her right sii the arrowheads pained her.

While searching the desert wastes to the south she met a trading caravan of white-turbaned merchants traveling under the protective banner of the Ghioz, a mask of gold with snakes for hair. In exchange for a few loose scales, she heard a tale of a dragon warrior-king, leathery-skinned and silent, invisible as a mist, terror of the southern jungles—and leader of fierce blighter hordes.

Wistala lied and said she sought vengeance against the leather-skin, switching AuRon’s place with her copper brother so that she wouldn’t be trapped by making up details as she told her tale.

They offered help in finding him.

Consulting their maps and following their directions, she found the mountains at the northern borders of the jungle easily enough.

She didn’t see fierce hordes of torch-bearing blighters. Instead there were woven huts giving way to more-substantial wood-and-brick constructs with green gardens and planters, and lodgepoles decorated and dyed into fascinating shapes. Tempting herds of shaggy-backed cattle and sheep thick-wooled after a mountain winter stood about pens and improvised shelters of trees bent together with branches tied, piles of hay and fodder high and dry on wooden platforms. She saw stacks of wool.

She’d arrived during shearing season, it seemed.

It was hard to find a spot outside the principal blighter settlement’s gates where she could land that wouldn’t result in melons being crushed. She settled for the edge of an orchard, scattering the water bearers down the slope toward their town.

The blighters assisted her, eventually. Their headmen argued and fought through two risings of the moon that night, screaming, baring fangs, one slamming down his staff in disgust, but there were no knifings or head-bashings that tales of blighters’ savagery would lead one to expect.

Best of all, no decapitations.

She resolved to put a paragraph about this land in her journal, if she ever returned to Thallia and told her story to a quick-writing scribe.

From what she could tell of their shouting they didn’t want to be ruled by a dragon again—though all acknowledged the advantages of one being present in the area. The last one had turned back an invasion from the south and scared the waste-elves out of the dry foothills in the north, fearing some horrid beast called a “revengerog.” She spoke to several who’d served their “dragon-lord”—gray, scaleless skin with faint black stripes, when he wasn’t the color of whatever vegetation he rested against. He’d given up his throne and gone off with some pretty little bronze—odd how hominids called such variations of dun colors of dragonscale—human wench, though reports on her homeland conflicted. Some said east, others west, others north. He’d come back once six seasons ago, scarred and bearing an undersized, pinkish tail, to pick up some personal treasures he’d left behind. His stay had been brief: only one night’s feasting, one day’s admiration of a military display. He’d promised to return, so if she wished to enjoy their hospitality until that happy day . . .

Finally they led her up an old pylon-strewn road to a massive scar in the mountainside, a great cave like some yawning mouth filled with snaggletoothed ruins. Runnels of mountain rock stretched from cavern floor to ceiling, all thickly bricked with old dwellings, holed and tumbledown as broken crockery. There were no bears but many bats. The guide told her stories of Old Uldam in its glory, when the blighter charioteers used the crowns of human kings to decorate their wheel hubs.

The blighters had kept one wide lane clear running back to where the cave narrowed, and then down, somewhat in the manner of a dragon throat. It was easy to imagine the dwellings as teeth.

“The greatest of cities—once,” said her guide, who proudly named himself the sixteenth son of Unrush Uthvhe-Rinsrick. He spoke Parl tolerably well. “When commerce was to be had between the worlds of sun and dark. Before the demen. Before the promises of Anklamere that turned to death.”

Wistala, who sought secrets and histories the way some dragons chased the purest refined gold or hominid females or rare wines, listened to the mishmash of legend and folklore as they passed through the tumbledown piles of mud-brick. Anklamere was a sort of devil to several cultures; once he’d ruled the world from the kingdoms of the east to the city of Hypat at the mouth of the Falnges River on the Inland Ocean. They said his rule had once stretched just as far in the Lower World, too. She’d much rather hear of NooMoahk, but the blighter said that he’d died when he was still upon mother’s teat, and the name had an evil reputation, for he’d often forgotten old promises and stolen cattle or taken lives in his dotage.

Scores of warrior blighters now guarded the tunnel entrances, the mouth of the cavern, and a great yawning sink they had to traverse under hanging pots of bubbling, torch-heated fat. They greeted the sight of a dragon with a mix of babbling consternation and kneeling reverence.

The guide told her these were the sacred Fireblades. They’d won victories under AuRon and replenished their aged and injured from the tallest and strongest of the clans. Now they dwelled near the holy dragon cave.

The warriors slaughtered bullocks right and left, and their leaders told stories of the splendid hunting in the jungles to the south. Their enemies to the south and west, the Ghioz, feared dragons—all she would have to do would be to appear in the sky and they’d turn back. In return the blighters would hammer heavy cups and urns and fill them with the blood and sweetbreads of game—or their enemies.