“Wistala, you live!” a voice shouted from a dark alcove.

A dragon, smallish only by comparison to the great Skotl hulks flanking him, moved forward. Gray-skinned, he had a distinctive nub on his snout, his egg-tooth.

AuRon! Had she gone mad? AuRon? Here! She extended sii and saa, dug them as hard as she could into the stony floor.

This must be a dream. Surely she would wake, and vomit up some piece of wormy pork.

But would she dream an AuRon with an oddly foreshortened tail, or a glowing jewel on a chain about his neck?

“Our emissary from Ghioz has arrived at last, I see,” NoSohoth said. “Wise of you to bring him through the griffaran gate. My Tyr, may I present—”

“AuRon, son of AuRel,” the Tyr finished, stepping forward. “Griffaran! Be ready to kill. Who knows what sort of viper the Red Queen has found to thrust into our bosom.”

Chapter 16

AuRon felt . . . disinterested was the only word for it. There should be anger, hatred, but he felt none of that, nothing to make his griff rattle or make him imagine plunging his sii into the Copper’s throat or eyes.

Perhaps it was the fatigue of the long underground trek. The mass of rock and earth above him—could the pressure of it be bothering him? The wonder of the Lavadome with its lava-streaked “sky” and unnatural outside-inside air, the smell of unknown dragons, these “griffaran” and tremendous bats and dragonelles who acted like a pack of wolves he’d once run with, only as disciplined as any of the Wyrmmaster’s riders. Quick meals of dry, tasteless meat, water with strange metallic or chemical tastes, in the endless mosslit tunnels, when there was any moss to be found with dragonelles feeling their way along by markers in the stonework.

Exhaustion and lack of sunlight had numbed him.

He wondered how much the Red Queen had known about him, and his brother, when she selected him for this assignment. What would be the effect of an emissary from Ghioz making an assassination attempt on the ruler of the Lavadome—this mass of restive dragons, hidden beneath a volcano, forgotten or half legend to the world above? How would they react to such an attack? Would they unite and fly as one to Ghioz?

What would meet them there?

Wistala. Had the Red Queen arranged this too? What trick of fate had brought her to this place, at this time, mixing anger with joy, regret with regard? Where and what had she been all these years? Had she somehow found the Copper and come with him deep into the earth? If Wistala hadn’t been there, would he have leaped, sii and saa ready to rend and tear?

The moment overwhelmed him.

Perhaps that’s how it was for the other two. Each waiting for a third to make a move.

Say something.

His thoughts felt strange to him, as though from a voice in his head not his own. Mind-speech from Wistala? But it wasn’t her voice either.

“I hope your subjects know what kind of king they’ve put upon their throne,” he finally said. “A patricide.”

“AuRon, don’t,” Wistala said. She stepped up, putting herself between AuRon and the shelf where the Copper rested. The Copper’s mate took a protective step forward as well.

“Give us this message from Ghioz,” the Copper said, glancing about.

Was the Copper gauging the reaction of the other dragons in the room or looking for somewhere to run?

“Fine one to speak of vipers,” AuRon said. “Do they know your history?”

“If you’ve come here to plant some lie about my mate—” Nilrasha said.

“He can’t hurt us, my love,” the Copper said. He set himself as straight as a dragon with only three sound legs could. AuRon pitied him for a moment. The overdevelopment of muscles on the good side had left him almost twisted. “Say your piece. Then I will say mine.”

AuRon hardly heard even breathing from the assembled dragons. Perhaps they were hoping for a fight.

Well, say it. Challenge him!

“Your Tyr bargained with dwarves for the murder of his parents and family,” AuRon began. “He saw the murder of his parents, hatchlings sold into slavery or death. One treachery resulting in three deaths.

“For the truth of this, ask Wistala. She’s of your own band, it seems.”

“Ah, truth,” the Copper said. “Truth is a messy business, shaded and colored by experience. Now, sister, let’s have your truth.”

Wistala’s tongue went dry. It clung to the roof of her mouth like a dead bat, too frozen to drop.

She felt the attention of the dragons on her scale. “I can only speak to a mouthful of knowledge. The dragon who stands before you is my brother, of that I’m sure. I’m not so sure I was ever sister to him. I know I didn’t try. In fact I begrudged every mouthful of food or bone he stole. Ours was a bare cave during a harsh winter.

“He did conspire with dwarves. It resulted in the death of his mother and sister. I don’t know that he expected them to kill Jizara—his sister—and myself, however. I believe the dwarves came to capture hatchlings and take an older vengeance on our parents.

“My father died in honorable battle against a man who aided the dwarves, called the Dragonblade. Later I destroyed the dwarves and forgave the Dragonblade.”

She heard a stir and gasps at that.

Wistala raised her voice. “I have no business holding a grudge against a crippled, hungry hatchling. As Tyr, you know the whole of him better than I.”

“Strange fate,” the Copper said. “That I would end up avenging my father in turn. I killed the Dragonblade, though it very nearly came to him killing me.”

Wistala looked around, but no one argued with that seemingly impossible statement. The Dragonblade came to the Lavadome? What madness!

“You still had a tooth in the murder of our mother,” AuRon said.

“You accuse me of murdering my family,” the Copper said. He raised his voice so all could hear. “I reply they were no family to me.

“Our parents believed, I think, a strict code of isolation and barbaric survival by wit and wing and claw rather than through civilization. We know of a few dragons here who argue for the belief, even if they lack the courage to leave the Lavadome, with its thralls and its herds and its aid, to go off and fight for a cave of their own.

“Understand, I was not born into the Lavadome, where a hatchling who happened to survive the hatching duel could end up adopted into another cave. For me, the only dragons I knew cast me out. Why, they did not even offer me the dignity of a name.”

“You deserved a name,” Wistala said. “I had nothing to do with that. I know our parents told you to leave the cave.”

“Did they shelter me, as Tyr FeHazathant did?” the Copper asked.

He looked at them, but spoke to the assembly. “Did they reward duty with honor? Did they lay down rules and traditions? Offer advice as to how to survive in the world? Give me even a mouthful of silver so that my scales might come in thick enough to turn a dagger? No, I starved in silence, never hearing the voices of my kind.”

Nilrasha rushed to her mate’s side and buried her snout in his flank under the wing.

“My love, my love, you should have shared this with me!”

“No,” the Copper said, though whether he was answering his own questions or his mate Wistala couldn’t say. “Our parents abandoned these things, or never learned them. Perhaps they or their grandsires abandoned other ideals when they left the Lavadome.

“Tyr FeHazathant and the Imperial Line gave me a name and a station and taught me what it means to be a dragon. Have the two of you forgotten? Wistala, what bargains did you strike in the Upper World to allow your survival? Were you fed like some overgrown guard dog perhaps, or fitted for a saddle?”

Wistala felt the blaze in his eyes. She knew she had little cause for guilt, yet guilt she felt nonetheless. Perhaps for not making more of an effort on her brother’s behalf. Jizara had once spoken to her about their Copper brother, that perhaps they should make an effort to meet with him and feed him, in secret as they hunted for slugs on the cave floor, but she’d seen him then as another mouth and there was already little enough food to go around.

“AuRon, you come here like a messenger-thrall, and you don’t even do that task properly,” the Copper said. “You’ve given us no words from Ghioz. Or was the Queen’s message that the dragons of the Lavadome should doubt and despise their Tyr? I wonder why she might wish for that?”

Wistala could no longer read her brother. The stripes on his gray skin darkened—in layout they were not that different from DharSii’s, perhaps a little thicker. He shifted his weight from one side to the other.

The Copper raised his head high and asked the assembly: “Does any dragon here have a complaint about how I carried out my duties in the Drakwatch?”

“No,” a few dragons murmured.

“I’ve never had luck in duels. I did not fight for this throne, but for all the dragons of the Lavadome. They trusted me with this title, and if they want it back, knowing all this, I will quit it.”

At this Queen Nilrasha raised her snout, glancing around alarmed as though afraid of a fight or a challenge.