 'BETTER SEVEN RAGING DRAGONS AS YOUR ENEMY THAN A SINGLE PATIENT DRAGONELLE.' —Islebreadth

The cloudscapes and air currents, so pleasant to drift across, darkened. Her glittering green scales turned dull and slag. A vast black mass rolled overhead.

Thunder hit her ears, pounding thunder, relentless, unnaturally regular, pursuing her like hoofbeats.

She tipped her wings, dropped, tried to flee the storm, but the darkness overtook her. The feathery dimpling of the clouds below disappeared, replaced by a wet mist of confusion … suffocation. The darkness shot down her nostrils and into her lungs.

Out, out of this weather!

She tried to straighten her neck, form her body into an arrow, to dive out of the storm and take shelter, but her limbs wouldn't cooperate. She twitched, confused, fighting, unwilling to draw a breath of the storm's thick air.

Crack!

Am I lightning-struck? she thought.

Then the air came and she breathed, a gasp that infused her with new life, her limbs with strength. The mists faded, except for the booming thunder; she realized the noise in her ears was her own hearts. No clouds, no storm, no choking mists, just cramp and wet and a maddening irritation like insects biting under her scales.

She twisted, stretched, as though each of her four limbs, neck, and tail were in a contest to get farthest away from the others, and then the world gave way—

—and she found herself on her side. Terror struck. My belly is exposed! and she fought to roll. Then her nostrils smelled it, a rich musky scent that set her at ease. Something sharper in the background, blood …

Blood! The smell of appetite and danger.

Dimpled, irregular surfaces all around, but hard and dark, quite the opposite of the clouds, an agonized squeaking near her …

Come out Wistala, or Auron will have your breakegg meal.

I am Wistala.

She rolled her eye, tried to raise her sii, her tail, but instead of coiling ropes of muscle that could fell young trees, she saw stubby deformities trapped in bits of viscous-sided egg clinging to her like a net. Next to her, another green face, pale-pink fringe rising from her skull-ridge and folded this way and that as it descended along the neck. Her sister had her own problems: a head hardly out of her egg.

Too hard, Momma. I-Jizara cannot get out. The thought-words confused Wistala. Had they come from her? No, from the other green hatchling still trapped in her egg.

Jizara, Wistala, you must come out of your eggs. This is your first test, and you'll learn a valuable lesson. In any crisis, the first scale you must bite through is your own. Master your spirit, apply your mind, harness your body—then you will be able to break through difficulty.

Mother, big enough to be a world herself, rested against a curving wall of stone. She could not be taken in with a single glance. Wistala had to assemble her out of impressions: her endless tail, deep rushing heartbeat, mountainous haunches, softly whooshing breaths, folded wings, arching neck, elegantly fringed head with its shining golden-yellow eyes cut by deep black slits. A loving prrum started deep within Mother's throat, a drum-roll encouraging her daughters.

Wistala quit trying to go in six directions at once. She employed all four limbs and her tail to get out of the confining egg.

Tch-crick-crack!

And she was away from it.

But down again.

Her rear legs couldn't get purchase. A wet mass that wasn't quite her and wasn't quite egg, attached at her underside, entangled newly uncurled toes. She let out a frustrated squawk.

She dragged herself, wanting that blood-smell, using her cleared front legs, pulling foul anchor and bits of eggshell.

Wistala, how strong you are! Mother thought.

The smell also meant death. She saw a red-scaled hatchling lying dead on its side, blood still trickling from its torn throat and stomach, brief life over already.

She knocked an empty broken egg out of her way, freed one hind leg. She could see more of the cavern now. Her mother rested on a ledge halfway up the side of the highest part; the rest was like a dragon's muzzle, narrowing with teeth in the form of dripping stones meeting, though in a haphazard fashion when compared with a dragon's regular rows.

Something moved at the edge of the precipice, and it took her a moment to recognize it as another hatchling. With its head down over the edge and its gray, black-shadowed skin, her sibling resembled a heap of oddly shaped stone.

It had no scales. A moment later she got a mind-picture of a mighty grown gray dragon flying over a mountain that hugged ice between its vast arms—some dream out of the past or from her brother's future?

Her sibling turned on her, baleful red eyes under his shieldlike eye crest wild and staring. He cocked his head at her and tested the air with his tongue. With that, he strode up to the corpse as though he owned the shelf and dug at the succulent fresh flesh.

The fire left his eyes.

If he thought anything of, or at, her, she could not tell.

Help, Momma, please help, her sister thought.

Wistala wanted a mouthful of that feast, but suppose the gray hatchling objected? She looked behind, saw her sister still struggling against her egg. Jizara had managed to get her head and neck out, thanks to the sharp prong on her snout—why, I have one, too—but hadn't so much as cracked through with her back.

Too hard!

Wistala turned, slipped on the drogue still attached to her belly, and pushed herself clumsily sideways, still learning what her legs could and couldn't do, until she stood alongside her sister.

Come, Jizara, come with me to the blood-smell! A fine feast is disappearing down our brother's throat.

Jizara gave a dispirited peep, managed to break a little more eggshell with her neck. At this rate, nothing would be left!

Wistala felt her tail whipping back and forth, seemingly in a nasty mood of its own. She redirected it, and struck the side of her sister's egg—hard.

The egg cracked.

After that first opening, it was easy. Three sharp blows, and the whole side of the egg clung together, thanks only to a thin translucent membrane beneath. Her sister broke free, lay gasping and squeaking with the effort.

I see what you mean about the smell, her sister thought.

Jizara slunk forward, unable even to raise her forequarters and neck off the ground. The mass of broken egg still wrapped half her scrawny long-necked body.

Can you open your mouth?

Yes, her sister thought back.

Then hang on to my tail.

She felt the prick of tiny sharp teeth biting through the hardly-there scales. Using her forelegs and the untangled rear, Wistala pulled her sister free and toward the meal.

Her brother raised a blood-smeared snout, egg horn trailing bits of viscera, and cocked his head in that funny way of his. He let out a satisfied gassy noise that echoed off the egg shelf wall and trotted down to a trickle of water running down the side of the cavern wall. Wistala followed its musical path to a pool at the base, which was rimmed with thick growths of blue-green lichen. The lichen glowed like her brother's eyes, but in a far more soothing fashion.

But he left the feast to them.

Wistala tore into it. Better than any dream of flying, the smells and tastes and textures of meat transmitted by her own buds and nerves made the confusion of her hatching fade. The odd sensation of rended flesh sliding down her throat and the pleasant sensation of a filling belly mattered.

A coppery flash and blazing eyes landed atop the corpse. This hatchling held a bleeding forelimb tight to its narrow chest.

Wistala slid next to her sister, tripping on the cursed thing hanging from her belly, and the closing jaws of the copper just missed the air where her nose had been a moment ago.

She flattened herself against the rock, instinctively covering her vulnerable spots. The copper hatchling pounced on her sister, claws and teeth searing as it tried to drive her away from the meal Jizara was too weak to abandon.

Help, Mother! Wistala didn't know if the call came from one, both, or all three of them.

Wistala let out a challenge, but the battle cry of her dreams came out as a thin peep. It still startled the copper into turning.

It was fast, even with its wounded leg, and didn't have the wretched umbilical sac slowing and tripping it. She put her head down and butted him as hard as body mass allowed.

At least he left off attacking Jizara.

He opened his mouth, glaring at her from behind rows of teeth, and every instinct told her to retreat. Her back end showed its strange tendency to act of its own accord, and she backpedaled—but she showed her own teeth, giving as good as the copper had done.

He turned his head, grabbed a piece of the carcass's tail, and ran.

Her feeling of triumph vanished as her gray brother bounded up, coiling and uncoiling his body in a way Wistala envied, covering ground in a run that was more a series of elastic leaps than footwork.

The copper scrambled off the egg shelf, clutching his meal.

Her scaleless brother screeched down at his opponent, long tail lashing back and forth so that it threatened to catch her across the nose. When he returned to the feast, he sniffed at Jizara's neck—What would she do if the gray male tried to make a meal of Jizara?

Wistala extended her neck—not so long as either of her siblings'—and began to lick her sister's wound.

The gray hatchling gave a snort and returned to his meal. He didn't seem to mind sharing. After eating, Mother lulled him off to sleep with a song, and Jizara dozed, bits of shell and membrane still on her limbs.

Wistala's sharp ears picked up the sound of claws and scales on rock. She crept to the edge of the egg shelf and looked down.

The copper rooted around in the waste near the trickle at the far end of the egg shelf. He appeared to be hunting. She wondered if he'd try to attack her siblings while they slept.

That's a male for you, Wistala. They're always satisfied with a win, even if the victory's incomplete.

He worries me, she thought back.

You're ahead of your brother and sister already. How well-formed your thoughts are! And the way you pulled your sister out of her egg. That ability will help you in the Upper World, when it comes time.

Pulling Jizara with my tail?

No, the ability to improvise.

Wistala wasn't sure what that thought meant. Tell me about the Upper World. Is it like my dreams?

Yes and no. But you should rest, little hatchling. Leave the worrying to me, for now.

The copper stared at her from the garbage pile. If Mother could see the hatred in his eye—

But sleep beckoned. And Wistala hoped that with sleep would come more dreams of flying.

Hatchlings! Your father has arrived. Come and know your sire."

Jizara left off complaining to Mother about having to eat her eggshell—Mother insisted it helped grow healthy scale, and Jizara claimed she just said that to get rid of the messy broken bits. Auron dropped Wistala's tail-tip, which he'd been biting.

The hatchlings smelled Father first, so quietly did he approach the egg shelf. The air around Mother smelled oily but comforting. Father's scent had a harder point as it went into the nostrils.

Wistala listened to the scrape of his scales and realized he was approaching the egg shelf in a back-and-forth manner, as though inspecting the cavern. She caught a gleam as he passed a thick growth of cave moss hanging from a crack in the ceiling.

Dwarves'-eye, Mother had called it.

Then she saw her father's head, six horns, bronze scales a blend of liquid gold and blood. So wide, even with wings folded tight against his spine, he made Mother look like a drakka. He walked oddly, limping, holding one leg up against his chest. Had he been maimed in his youth like her copper brother?

"AuRel, meet your hatchlings," Mother said, inclining her head. "Auron, Wistala, and Jizara, out of their eggs in that order."

Next to her, Auron quivered when Father gave a snort as he sniffed the hatchlings. He barely acknowledged her or her sister. He ground his upper and lower jaw, setting his teeth clattering.

"Wistala is speaking already," Mother said.

"Which is she, again? The thick one?"

Thick one? Yes, she was bulkier than Jizara, who was all neck and tail.

"Greet your Father, hatchlings."

Auron extended his neck and peeped, a bit clumsily in his twitchiness.

"Hello, Father," Wistala said.

"Wel'ome home, Faszer," Jizara added.

"Was your hunt successful?" Mother asked, to break the silence.

"Not very. A sheep and a tired goat. I'm going to have to try in the foothills east."

"That means men," Mother said.

"I remember," Father said.

He reached out with his foreleg and dropped the carcasses. "You have the sheep, Irelia. The hatchlings can divide the goat."

"I'm full up on slugs," Mother said. Wistala only remembered Mother eating one slug, the slimy creatures that ate the cave moss, bat droppings, even dragon waste. "Let them eat. Eat, you three."

The hungry hatchlings tore into the bled-out feast. Not a trace of warmth was left, but their appetites were such that it didn't matter.

"I'm for sleep," Father said, winding himself around a towering stalagmite. But his tail still thrashed and his teeth ground.

"What's the matter?" Mother asked. "I've no appetite, honestly."

"It's not that."

"What, then?"

"There weren't any grays on my side of the family," Father grumbled.

With that they fell into an argument over Auron's merits.

Wistala couldn't think of many, unless being a nuisance counted as a merit. Mother changed his mood by praising him for siring two males—the skulking copper counted, as he seemed to be surviving on his own somewhere in the cavern. As Wistala understood it, all the males fought after their hatching until one became the champion of the nest. She and her sister were afterthoughts.

Auron finished his gorge and then, hearing the copper at the base of the egg shelf, jumped down to chase him off.

Perhaps Mother read her mind. She brought her head close to Father's, began to clean him behind his griff, the armored fans that descended from his horn-crest.

"Oh, of course," Father said. With that he disappeared into the darkness beyond the moss light. When he returned, he had a bulge in the side of his cheek.

"Here you are—"

You can do better than that! Wistala overread Mother think. "—my little treasures," Father continued, a little lamely. He dropped some things before them that rattled as they fell. "Gems for my gems."

They glittered enticingly. They were stones of a dozen different colors, cut and polished to catch light and throw it back broken into dozens of pieces. Jizara squealed in delight. Wistala thought them marvelous, and she joined her sister in placing them into colorful spiral patterns.

Father sagged with weariness, his smell no longer sharp and strange but a comforting shield between them and the forbidding shadows of the cavern. She would grant the Gray Vex that much: he plunged into the darkness readily enough, despite his lack of protective scales.

She and Jizara encircled the dazzle their father called gems, lying snout to tail-tip to form an unbroken wall of hatchling between jealous world and hoard. As they nodded off, Mother sang:

 Daughter, daughter, shining bright

 Precious jewel within mine sight

 Oh, if I could soar with thee

 As you seek your destiny.

 To see with you the caves and skies

 Vistas grand beneath your eyes

 Taking wing to horizons new

 Let us wonder who waits for you.

 A dragon bright?

 A dragon dark?

 Victor of duels with battle mark?

 A dragon strong?

 A dragon keen?

 Singer of honors and triumphs seen?

 Red, Gold, Bronze, and Blue

 To your lord you shall be true,

 Copper, Silver, Black, and White,

 Who will win your mating flight?

 For in your hearts our future rests

 To see our line with hatchlings blessed

 And for those who threaten clutch of flame,

 To feel the wrath of dragon-dame.

The last fragments of eggshell disappeared, and in time the gems did, as well.

Mother neither ate nor slept, as far as Wistala could tell, save for a slug or two, and a whole horse Father brought back along with a dirty-smelling monster Mother insisted was a human. To Wistala he smelled like a two-day-dead sheep not properly bled and gutted. Auron got the honor of hunting and eating him.

Wistala watched the Gray Vex disappear with Father. "Auron's crest must be made of gold, the way you favor him," Wistala said to Mother.

"Don't whine, Tala," she said. "You and your sister have a whole horse to share. That's ten times a man or more." Mother had already consumed hers, and was licking the last runnels of blood from her teeth and lip-line. She sighed, and her golden eyes brightened. "Eat those metal rings from the saddle. They're good for you."

"I'd rather be hunting that man," Wistala said.

"You'll be hunting on your own soon enough," Mother replied. "Practice on slugs."

"They're a bore. Tell us more of the Upper World," Wistala said. "Fish leaping at waterfalls!"

"I want to hear about Father's mating song again," Jizara said. Jizara liked to imitate the tunes, and even Auron admitted that she had a gift for song. "Did he really cause an avalanche?"

Mother's stories always entertained. She mixed words and pictures and sense-memory so skillfully, Wistala felt as though she were living it.

"No, you shall have a lesson."

Both sisters drooped at that. Lessons came only through Mother's words, and one had to form one's own imagery and sensations. Learning about The Hatchling Who Cried "Dwarf " or The Geese That Saved the Seven-Egg Clutch couldn't compare.

"Since you've both seen and smelled a man today, I'll tell you about the Great Betrayal. A man had a hand in that."

Jizara closed a nostril at Wistala. She stifled a snort and tried to clear her thoughts so she might summon her own mind-pictures.

"As you know, the Age of Dreams ended when the ravenous Blighters appeared. The Four Great Spirits of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire each gave a gift to Dragons to make them supreme over the Upper and within the Lower Worlds to tame the foul Blighters. But while fighting over their reward for this deed, they created the Dwarves, Elves, and Men who now come to kill us. Men are the worst. Men, who breed so fast that a single female in a dragon's lifetime can produce a nation, like a small rock falling from a mountain's height can knock two that send six rolling that create a landslide. All of that horde seek to kill us.

"But it wasn't always so.

"For a time, the hominid races were just as terrified of us as the blighters were. Now back in the Age of Sky-Kings, all blighters did was grovel and worship before dragons, but the other hominids helped the dragons build great palaces and towers. The greatest dragon hall of all the kingdoms was Silverhigh, built out of leftover pieces from the creation of the Moon, so white it shone night and day.

"Now the Dragons of Silverhigh were oh-so-pleased with themselves to be living in such glorious palaces. The older, battle-scarred dragons who remembered taming the blighters and cowing the men, elves, and dwarves became fewer and fewer. Their hatchlings grew up thinking the luxuries Silverhigh offered were theirs on account of their being born such fine fellows, forgetting that anything worth the having is worth the effort. They painted their scales and wings in magnificent designs but hardly ever flew anywhere with them, as there was no finer place in the world than Silverhigh.

"Flying off to fight battles and so on does interfere with stuffing oneself with grain-fattened swine and golden coins brought in tribute. So the later Dragon Kings of Silverhigh looked for someone else to do their fighting for them.

"Blighters are quarrelsome, and only a skilled leader can unite them. Dwarves, though resolute fighters, are stumpy and slow moving, and are not given to taking orders without a good deal of back-talk and complaining, and only by the harshest measure can they be cowed for a brief time. Elves, though dragonlike in their intelligence, will stop in the middle of a campaign to feast and sing and praise each other for deeds they've still to do, and forget about battle altogether. But men are easily trained and pop out young like heated corncobs, so they are well-suited to fill armies.

"Thus the Dragons of Silverhigh trained a grand army of men to go and do their fighting. This gave them even more time for play.

"Now there was one man who was particularly useful to the Dragons of Silverhigh. His name was Prymelete, and he was not a famous warrior or a great builder or even a man skilled at bringing delectables from near and far to tempt dragon appetites. Prymelete was a soothsayer. He praised the Dragons of Silverhigh even more than they did each other. Many a high vault and gold-walled nesting chamber saw his presence, as he read flattering oracles predicting future greatness.

"Prymelete's tongue arts admitted him to the deepest councils of the Silverhigh Dragons, places no famous warrior, great builder, or clever trader were allowed. They even gave him a seat at the Firepit. Now I'm told the most renowned of the Silverhigh Dragons spat fire into the Firepit when making judgments and rules to show their mind had been made up. So much dragonfire went into the Firepit that it burned night and day. Of course, Prymelete outdid himself with praise for the dragons who met around the Firepit; his tongue left them so muddle-headed, they didn't know tailvent from nostril.

"Then one day Prymelete lingered, watching the fire after the dragons left. He took from his vast cloak a thick steel vessel such as human warriors wear on their heads and dipped it in the dragonfire. Then he ran like a hoard-filch. He left Silverhigh and went to a dark council of men, elves, and dwarves, carrying his dragonfire.

"The dragonfire had cooled by the time he met this evil gathering, and he filled the wine cups of the hominids assembled there. They all drank from it, and it put dragonfire into their hearts that made them brave enough to challenge the dragons. The hominids marched on Silverhigh and threw down its perches and vaults and galleries, and suffocated its deeps and wells and chambers."

"Why didn't the dragons fight?" Wistala asked.

"Some say it is because they'd forgotten how," Mother answered. "Others say Prymelete returned from his trip and put more folly in their heads, pronounced doom and despair at the approach of warlike men, elves, and dwarves, so that they did not go and fight with the parts of their grand army of men who remained loyal to their oaths. Then when the abandoned men were destroyed, Prymelete redoubled his predictions of disaster. The dragons were so used to abiding by the soothsayings of Prymelete that they panicked and fled, or hid in deep holes to be hunted and killed one by one."

"What happened to wicked Prymelete?" Jizara asked.

"There are different stories, but I shall tell you this one: Other dragons from the far side of the world heard about the destruction of Silverhigh and came to seek after their relatives. Finding them slaughtered, they learned the story from some blighters and sought out Prymelete. Since he places himself above dragons, they took him to a high mountain and hung him there by his fine girdle to be pecked at by the great carrion birds who ride the winds of the thin-air heights. When his body fell apart and went down the mountainside, they brought the bones back to the high ledge to give the carrion birds another meal, and there they sit, cold and exposed."

"Tales and terrors, that's a horrible story, Mother," Jizara said. "Dragons hunted and killed in their own homes. I'm scared."

"I tell it to you so you will always be on your guard. Ever since that awful day, the hominids have had fire in their hearts to kill dragons. And so it will be until the happy day, as my mother used to say, when all the hominids kill each other off and the dragons may return from hiding. But I fear that day is far, far off. That is why I'm always listening."

If you're patient enough, and keep still, out of sight and smell, the prey will feed itself right up to you.

Mother's words echoed in Wistala's memory as she waited for a slug above the cave moss. According to Mother, it was spring above ground, and snow was melting and finding its way into their cave, feeding flush new growth of moss. And with the moss came more slugs.

She clung, upside down, content to just roll her eyes as she searched for a pale, slow-moving back. Sometimes you could hear the soft slurp, like dragon tongue against the roof of one's mouth, but with water dribbling and dripping into the cave from a hundred inlets, hunting by ear was impossible. With so many old trails criss-crossing the cavern floor, the nose was useless unless one came upon a still-slimy trail. So that left watching.

Of course, she had more to worry about than being able to properly push off, turn, and land near enough to the slug so she could catch it on the drop or the first pounce. The Gray Vex was prowling and snuffling around near the waterfall whose pool fed her slug. It would be just like him to come blundering through in that off-kilter leaping style of his, scaring every slug away until the next scale-shed.

"With every day closer to drakehood, he'll be more restless," Mother had said. "Then he'll wander out and never return. Or your father will drive him out."

"How many more days?" Jizara had asked, probing the hole left by a missing scale where Auron had pounced on her.

"You'll think differently when he's gone. I know I did with my brother Culekin—Wind Spirit knows what's become of him."

Drakka usually stayed closer to their home caverns until a new clutch of eggs came, or so Mother predicted. But Mother needed at least a year in the Upper World to get her strength back, during which she'd teach them much huntcraft. Then she'd fly with Father—

Snick-snick-snick-snick came the sound of Auron's claws as he tore through the moss patch, nose held to the ground and griff half extended. Probably following the copper's scent again.

So much for hunting.

She aimed, kicked off, and dropped. Twisting as she fell, she landed in a patch of cave moss with half a mind to pounce the Gray Vex, but by the time she gathered herself, his tail-tip had disappeared toward the pool. Whatever else might be said of her brother, he was fast.

Wistala turned, and froze.

Two hard eyes the color of flowing blood stared into hers. The copper!

They stood nose-tip to nose-tip, the copper a trifle smaller and a good deal lighter. His scales had come in small and crooked, and his maimed sii had turned in toward his body, though he propped himself up by the forejoint.

He lowered his griff a claw-breadth or two, pulled back his lips to reveal his rows of teeth. She backed up, sidestepped, and he advanced, matching her, nostrils opposite hers as though she were playing a game in the cavepool, trying to outwit her reflection.

"What's my name?" he asked.

The question, put in simple Drakine, stunned her so she hardly understood what he said. He may as well have spoken one of the more obscure Elvish dialects to her.

"Wha—?"

"What's my name?" he asked again, and this time she found an answer.

"I don't know."

"Out of my way or I'll kill you," he said.

His eyes kept flicking in the direction Auron had taken.

Wistala didn't know what he expected to accomplish. He was smaller than she, and Auron was bigger still, at least in length. Auron had bested the copper in every contest they'd had. She should bleat a warning, scream and have Auron come running as he did when they came out of their eggs.

But the Gray Vex had a big enough head. A bite or two would do him good.

She ate a few dead dropped bats on her way back to the egg shelf, upset for some reason. They made slugmeat taste like fresh horse, but her gut needed something to work on beyond vague worry.

She climbed up onto the eggshelf. Jizara was matching herself against Mother's tail-tip, standing up when it stood, rolling when it rolled, a prrum in her throat.

"Mother, I was hunting slugs, and—"

"Earth Spirit," Jizara said. "You get any thicker, and your tail will disappear!" Jizara proudly displayed her long, lean tail, and she never tired of matching her extremities to those of her stumpier sister.

"Jizara, don't tease. Wistala, you're all latent wingbone, as I was, and short limbs are the stronger for it." Mother, despite the more plentiful meals since the melt began, was breathing audibly from the effort of the tail game.

"Mother, the copper is after Auron."

Mother stared, long and slow, out into the depths of the cave. "I'd hoped he'd left. Auron may kill him. Your father never knows when to back down either."

"Maybe they'll do each other in," Jizara said. "We'll have more food and a little quiet."

"Every hatchling is precious," Mother said. "There are few enough left, and it's the rare drake who grows to dragonhood these days."

"If there are fewer drakes, that means fewer songs sung to dragonelles," Jizara said.

"Well, in the North—"

"Mother! Mother! Mother!" came a hatchling's shout. "Others!

Assassins, dwarves, here in the cave." Auron jumped clean to the egg shelf, his stripes hard and black against his skin and blood running from behind his crest. Wistala heard metal ring against stone somewhere in the cave, felt her scales rise.

Mother swept her tail around Wistala and her sister, putting her body between whatever approached and her daughters. "We are discovered?"

Auron turned this way and that, going in three directions at once. "They're here. With spears, Mother."

Mother looked out into the gloom of the cavern. "No! I'm faint with hunger, and the winter's been so—"

Mother reached up with her long neck and put her mouth about a loose stalactite. She wrenched it free, and Wistala felt air move. "I hope you aren't too big for this, my hatchlings. Auron, take your sisters and go to the surface. At once! Climb, my love, climb." She shoved Wistala up the wall with her nose.

Wistala climbed toward the patch of shadow with the faintly new air flowing down from it.

Wistala looked down at the egg shelf, where chaos ruled. Jizara clung to Mother's leg, all eyes and bristling scales and fluttering griff. Auron stood at the egg shelf, tail twitching, crest-shrouded eyes fixed on ranks of approaching mounds of metal and muscle, short-legged fellows with beards that glowed like fire. Had they drunk some latter-day dragonfire before charging into the cavern?

She almost lost her grip with her sii as she counted the numbers. Behind the dwarves, she saw what she took to be an exceptionally tall dwarf or broad man in black armor. The tall figure wore a winged helm and gestured with a broad-headed spear that sparked and glowed as though it had a life of its own. He pointed it toward the egg shelf, and dwarves bearing some kind of wood-and-metal contraption on their backs hurried up a broken stalagmite. With his other hand, he held the straining lines of a pack of hairy-backed dogs the size of ponies.

Mother, her head level with Wistala and imploring Jizara to release her grip, must have seen them, too. Wistala got a brief thought—Him! Gobold has sold us out!—before Mother reached down and picked Auron up by the base of his neck. She threw him into the air toward the hole. Auron twisted as he flew and struck next to Wistala at the opening. Wistala reached and held him as he found his grips. As he breathed, Auron's ribs moved so fast, they were a blur.

Dwarven climbing poles struck the egg shelf with a klank!

"Climb! Auron, climb!" Mother called.

Jizara, we're up here. Climb with us! Wistala thought, but her sister retreated behind Mother's hindquarters as the first dwarf-helm appeared over the rim of the egg shelf. Jizara looked up at her, stupidly, not even recognizing her. Sister!

Scrring came the sound like an arrow in her ear. She saw blades flash silver in the lichen-light as they were drawn.

Auron drove his crest into her side, and the tenuous connection vanished. Wistala, up and away! came Mother's last frantic thought, and with it a horrible, clawing fear that blinded and deafened. Wistala fled upward.

Ku! Ku! Kuuuuuu! came the war cries from below. The sound traveled through rock and ice.

Dead lichen, ice, and loose rock gave way, dropping onto Auron, who was following below. Vague flashes came through—Blood—spears—Wheel of Fire Drakossozh—Yellhounds! Jizara!

Death cries and madness pursued her up the shaft. Up she climbed, up until there were no more sounds echoing from below, up until sii and saa both burned and quivered and the hatchlings had to cling to each other with tail and mouth, up until blood-taste coated their tongues with each breath and the hammering in their neck hearts made their ears ache. Wistala pushed through bone and dead dry pine needles in utter darkness, no longer climbing but not walking either. The darkness unnerved her. Not even dragon eyes could pick out detail, and at every moment she feared the terrible sound of blades being drawn.

She fetched up against something cold and wet—an ice flow blocked the tunnel. She could still feel air moving from a crack at the top, a crack that could hardly fit her snout. What little remained of her ebbing strength vanished.

"Auron, we're trapped," she said, hardly able to get the words out. A last hope flickered: perhaps the dwarves and that tall wing-helmed man had been defeated. "We have to go back down. Perhaps Mother and Jizara—"

"No," Auron said. Dully, she observed that he was hardly panting, though he moved stiffly. Of course, he was lighter, being scaleless. Auron sniffed at the clean, cold air coming in over the ice flow. "Fresh air. We're almost there."

"That's why you don't want to go back. Your thin hide—"

Auron shoved her aside. Her brother simply went mad. There was no other word for it. He began to pound the ice with his tail. Pieces, tiny pieces of ice compared to the mass, flaked off and slid down to the bones at the bottom of the tunnel. She wondered if this was the raging fighting fury that Mother said took over young drakes. He bit and clawed at the ice whenever he shifted position.

When his tail began to spray blood at each swipe, he spat at the ice. The spittle hissed as it struck, and it ran into fractures, raising a sharp odor of bat urine.

"Wistala, spit!"

"I've no fire yet—"

Excrement and excuses. It is melting the ice, she realized. She tried to squeeze her fire bladder behind her breastbone. Nothing.

"Spit, Wistala!"

"Can't!"

Then she could see. A faint pink light came through the ice flow. It must be the light of the Upper World, the sun.

Two cracks ran up the ice flow, parallel and in a shape oddly reminiscent of the man with the spear's winged helm. She pictured the helm at the base of the cracks—Something spasmed behind her breastbone, and she found she could spit. Found she could—she had no choice. Her tongue pressed itself against the roof of her mouth, and her jaw opened wide—

Out it came, until she felt as though her vertebrae from shoulder-pivot to tail-tip might be running up her neck and out her mouth. An orangish light filled the cave along with the acid smell, stronger than ever.

She collapsed, spent in an entirely new way.

Auron gathered himself, curled tight, and exploded toward the orange glow like a projectile from one of the dwarves' war machines.

He broke through in a shower of yellow-white shards—

And disappeared straight over a ledge.

Wistala struck out from her shoulders, extended her neck even as his tail-tip whipped for a hold. She sank her teeth into it, tasted her brother's blood in her mouth. His momentum dragged her forward, toward the ledge. Impossible distances stretched off in every direction, out, to either side.

Especially down. Her head went over.

A drop, a thousand times greater than that of the egg shelf, lay beneath. The vast distance seemed to reach up and touch her between the eyes. Her head swam… .

Her teeth, however, gripped all the tighter as her short legs found purchase. She arched her thick back, claws dug into ice, rock, and hardened snow, setting every haunch against her brother's weight.

Auron found a grip, and his weight vanished. She didn't release his tail, though, until he rolled beside her on the ledge.

The two hatchlings shivered against each other, panting in the thin air of the Upper World.

Don't think about this big, empty, howling chaos that is the Upper World, Wistala told herself for the beyond-countingeth time. Or how much you miss Mother, even her endless lessons. Or dwarves. Or eager, straining hounds. Don't think beyond the next meal. Just find food, and then rest. Find food, and then rest.

They made it down the mountain, thanks to Auron. His light weight allowed him to test holds for her, and they'd come off the horrid, cold mountaintop and into a slightly less horrid, slightly less cold tree line, where Auron promptly scared away some feeding goats by leaping at them at first whiff. She had no luck hunting after that, and it was only after they developed a system where he'd drive game to her, or she to him, as his skin naturally changed color to match whatever he rested against, that they were able to eat.

Auron had a plan to find Father. She went along with it. Having a goal, "a star to fix on," put hope in his hearts and stopped him from crying in his sleep at night. She listened, learned to find Susiron, the unchanging star, by following the nose-tip of the Bowing Dragon.

Wistala suspected that, small as they were, it was just a matter of time until something got them. The only question was what—and where and when. At one point she thought Auron had died in the night, taken by the frigid wind on his scaleless skin, for when she woke, he was white and cold, until he stirred and she realized he'd just been mimicking the snow.

She hoped that as they traveled west around the shoulder of the mountain toward the main entrance to the cave—Auron had some idea of the topography, thanks to mind-pictures from Father—they'd find a quiet mountain lake where they could spend the coming spring and summer, feeding on frogs and fat bottom-sucking fish. Perhaps they could find a hollow log and enough muck to hide their smell. When one didn't have a cave, one had to improvise. Without a safe refuge, it was only a matter of time before something got them.

"Quit saying that," Auron said. "We're doing all right. We've adapted to the Upper World, at least what we've seen of it."

Auron trotted fearlessly through the Upper World, turning from brown to green to white as the surface he paused over changed. Wistala felt that every step she took was through an endless arena under thousands of eyes peeping at her from treetop and slidepile. Voices relayed what the eyes saw, berry-brained birds tittered about the hatchlings passing beneath, not caring a dead twig whose ears might hear of their movements.

Having every field mouse know of their passing bothered her.

Then there was the dirtiness of the Upper World. As she passed through thickets, pine needles and branches caught under her scales; pebbles had an uncanny knack for working themselves inward rather than out, resisting any but the most determined effort of tooth and tongue to extract them. She lost scales in pursuit of biting and stinging insects, stopping to probe and dig for them as Auron stamped impatiently. His leathery skin couldn't turn arrows, but it kept out the flies admirably.

Then the storm hit. Winds screamed up from the southwest, pursued by lightning and thunder, more terrifying than ten thousand stamping dwarves on the march. They found shelter, if the notch between two boulders could be called shelter, and waited it out.

Auron talked her into trying the rainwater. Its clean taste seemed to clear her mind and wash away the thoughts of danger and doom. It was the first sensation in the Upper World she enjoyed. She stuck out her tongue and let the water run off the boulder, onto her tongue, and into her jowls, where it could be easily swallowed.

And—Sun-bless the Water Spirit—the rain washed her scales clean. She stretched and rippled and lifted her scales to the invigorating flow. Take that, sticky pine sap! Better luck next hatchling, blood-bugs! Even the faint sparking smell in the air from a nearby lightning strike gave her hearts new life.

The rain left the valleys to the south and west clear; individual branches stood out in the storm-washed air. Anything was possible. Finding Father, even. Then the dwarves would taste their own blood and tears.

The rain slackened, and the hatchlings found plentiful soft worms driven to the surface by the moisture. Auron tried to snap his up, but Wistala found that they went down faster and easier if one simply inhaled with one's lips tight around the worm. Auron thumped his tail in appreciation as she showed him the trick.

"Clever," Auron said, giving a faint prrum. "You know how to find a meal's weak spot."

"Father will boil those dwarves in their own skin," she said, more of a mind for vengeance than compliments.

"To do that, he'd have to dig them out of their own holes," Auron said. "I have a mind-picture of a dwarf fortress from Father. It's all sheer rocks and towers and gates and arrow-slits."

"Father shared more with you."

"And Mother more with you."

"Think of it. Think hard. I'll try."

Auron's eyes screwed up in concentration. Wistala got a flash or two, grim towers around a mountain lake, an overhanging rock, a pounding sound, craft on the lake like water beetles—and then it left.

"Now it's going fuzzy," Auron said.

"Stop trying. I got some of it. Who are they?"

"They're some dwarves Father saw at some point. To the north of the cave."

"Dragons must kill them one day. Or they'll come into other caves."

"The only day we can count on is today," he said.

She nuzzled her brother. She'd never felt this close to Jizara, and even Mother had been more presence than person. Perhaps it was the way they depended on each other.

She settled down next to Auron as he made himself miserable and tore up the turf with his sii. She formed a resolve—perhaps a silly one, with her being so young, but she would grow, and the resolve would not die unless she let it. Auron would have to take care of their line. She'd protect the lines of others:

 And for those who threaten our ancient fame,

 To feel the wrath of dragon-dame.

The horse smell the next day made Wistala hungry. But they weren't wild horses. They came with blankets and saddles and lines and other accoutrements of the hominids. She also smelled a cold fire, which could only mean hominids—dragonflame, even old, had a greasy smell. Auron counted better than thirty horses in a high meadow, and they decided to climb to avoid the chance of running across sharp-eyed elves in the mountainside forest.

By Auron's calculation, they were on the same part of the mountain as the western entrance Father used. They moved, taking extra care, staying low behind brush or fallen timber. That approach limited their vision of the landscape, but more important, it also limited their enemies'. As the sun set, they crossed another high meadow, bellies tight to cool earth.

"Nearly there, Tala," Auron said when she tired. "See that point of rock? Like a claw held out? The cave mouth's just on the other side."

Wistala saw Father first, high to the north, his bronze scales shimmering in the sun.

"Auron! Auron … look," she gasped.

With limp four-leggeds clutched in his sii, Father tipped his wings and began to descend, floating down through the air like water feeding into a cavern crack.

Auron let out a glad cry and leaped away, dashing for the stone prominence. Wistala stood and waved her neck, trying to catch Father's eye, but the dragon kept his head to the dangerous dark just inside the cave mouth, examining his landing spot from a variety of altitudes and angles. Why wouldn't he just look round?

She caught up to Auron in time to see him sag against the outcropping, neck and tail drooping.

"Father didn't see me."

Wistala choked back a wail.

The cave mouth showed signs of ancient construction, ruined battlements and cracked towers about wide creeper-hung mouth. Father must have considerable flying skill to land inside without disturbing the overgrowth.

Spilled rock covered the whole mountainside beneath the cave mouth. Moss grew thick out of the wind between the rocks.

Betrayed! The Wheel of Fire!

The power of Father's mind sent a shudder down her long spine. Not so precisely modulated as Mother's mind-speech, Father's was all emotion and imagery. Auron's mind-picture of the dwarf hold, though this time as clear and painful as naked sunlight, burned into her brain. A roar she felt through the rock as much as she heard emerged from the cave, as though the mountain itself were screaming from its broken-toothed mouth.

After the roar came the dwarven battle cry she'd heard before: Ku! Ku! Kuuuuu!

Father's pain and need came through to her, as hard and bright as his gemstones they'd thoughtlessly gobbled. She felt wounds as Father emerged, a dwarf with legs set tight against his neck, hacking at Father's scaly spine with a bloody ax as though trying to cut a tree dodging out of the way.

Off, off my back, you klut!

Wistala could feel the dwarf on her back, winced at the blows. She threw herself off the rock, rolled in the meadow as battle horns blew in the valley below.

"Above you!" Auron shouted in a voice louder than she'd have given him credit for. Then Auron, too, gave in to Father's pain, and he rolled himself into a ball.

Flee!

She saw Father flapping north, plucking spears from his hide, got another flash of the dwarf halls around the lake. He couldn't mean to go into battle again!

In the valley below, from hiding places in the mossy rocks, elven heads watched him go.

"Wistala, lie flat!" The words came fast as Auron told her to let him lead the elves away. She would go north and find Father.

Her hearts almost ceased beating at the thought of her brother leaving her. "Blades and raids, let's run. I want us to be with each other, no matter what."

"One of us has to make it, Wistala. You hunt better than I. You have a chance of making it alone in the wilderness."

"I don't know the way!"

"Follow the mountains north. You can't miss this lake—it's on this side of the mountains and very big." He gave her his fuzzy mind-picture again, but it didn't matter. She'd never make it—

Auron touched her nose, managed a choking prrum as he pushed her into a crevice.

He listened to the hoofbeats of the approaching elves. "Go to Father. Follow the Bowing Dragon. Follow Susiron. Father is there!"

"Auron, I can't—"

"Yes, you can. Don't waste time."

Auron hurried into the meadow, in the open for everyone to see. High above, wheeling hawks altered course and moved to fly over him. They cried out, and were answered by horns from the valley.

He can't be leaving! He can't he can't he can't …

She called to him with her mind, called him brave and good and sent all the love she couldn't find words for, reaching to touch his mind if not his soft gray skin.

"Good-bye, sister."

He'd never called her sister before.

He never would again.

Wistala cried, alone, and not one living thing in the Upper World cared.

Darkness settled on the mountainside before Wistala moved again. All the time she waited, she had to choke back little peeping hatchling cries. A day ago, she would have put her neck on an oath that she couldn't keen like a still-wet hatchling anymore, but the sight of her brother leading the elves away from her and to his doom brought the sound—whether she liked it or not.

She waited until long after dark, hoping that Auron would return, galumphing out of the mountainside mists with eyes ablaze and a tail-thumping story of outwitting the elves.

She looked into the valley in the direction Auron had disappeared. Campfires dotted the area around the meadow where they'd come across the unsaddled horses. She heard no baying of hounds, saw no torches in the trees indicating a hunt still on. But Auron was quick, perhaps—

No. You're alone now. They're all assassinated.

Except Father. Gone north, to some dwarven fortress by a lake. The clouds thickened; another storm might be working up.

She couldn't just leave. She and Auron deserved some mark to show they'd lived and breathed and seen. She went to the ledge where they'd watched Father fight the elves and dwarves. She extended a thick saa-claw and scored a pair of marks into the lee side of the stone.

Though she took her time, the result certainly didn't match the fabled artistry of Silverhigh—it looked like something a bored blighter might carve into his cave wall: two dragons, mirror images, circling each other as though guarding the other's back.

"We'll always be together here, Auron. This stone won't forget."

She crept up the hill, moving away from the rocky prominence.

Going up a mountain can sometimes save you travel around its base, but that wasn't the case for Wistala. Without a second pair of eyes to keep watch as she moved, she had to pause every hundred lengths or so, to watch and listen and pick a route for her next creep.

The cave also drew her from the heights. This time, instead of screaming, the mouth of the cave seemed to call to her. Home … home … home, the egg shelf, the trickles, the patches of moss and easily caught slugs.

And she had to know.

Perhaps at the last moment Mother had shoved Jizara into the chimney, the way she tossed Auron. Or both sides, having torn each other to pieces, had retreated to lick the blood from their wounds.

She hazarded an entry by the roof. The elves and dwarves would be less likely to watch the top. While difficult and tiring, it would be infinitely safer to go that way.

Once closer to the mouth of the cave, traveling through knots of creeper where a hominid could barely crawl and cling, she examined the ancient battleworks. Dwarves or blighters had broken up pieces of mountain and rebuilt them into walls and chambers, sealing them with something that felt—and tasted, she explored a crack with her tongue—like long-dried mud, only harder.

The view from the top of the cave mouth made her dizzy and disoriented. Not so much from the distance she could see even in the dark, for dragon eyes opened wide, or from the height to the rock spill below, but from the sense that she'd seen this view before. Sensory impressions from Mother, no doubt.

Below and at the bottom of the rock spill, a tiny campfire guttered with hominid forms sleeping around it. Woven bags containing some kind of prize gleaned from the fight—perhaps dragonscale? The nets were too widely woven to hold Father's gems from the small hoard Auron had told her about and which she and Jizara had played with before greedily devouring. If a sentry watched the cavern, he was well concealed.

She reversed herself and entered the cave at slug speed. There were no end of grips for her probing sii and saa, and if her tail wasn't so long as Auron's, her rather stumpy limbs were a good deal stronger than his. The great hump of muscle on her back that would one day power her wings—assuming she survived the passage of the season-circles—took over when she clung to just rest.

Detritus of a battle could be smelled below. Dragonblood—dwarf loathsome reek!—and fainter scents like bruised mint-herbs that may have been elf.

The cave twisted and turned, and at one corner, she descended to the cave floor to pant and rest her muscles. She might have become lost on the way down, as the cave branched out twice, but thanks to the spatterings of dragonblood, the trail was easily followed. When she started to come across cave moss again, she returned to the ceiling.

She let out a hatchling mew—the noise took her by surprise—as she entered the cave, a tiny skulking shadow of one of Father's glad returns with sii full of feast for his hungry hatchlings.

Alarmed at the noise, she spent a long time looking, listening, and smelling. Except for the odor of dragonblood and the faint foreign smell of dwarf, the cave smelled no different; indeed, it was achingly familiar, so much so that it was all she could do to keep from running to the egg shelf.

The familiar patterns of the faintly glowing cave moss pulled at her. How could the splashes of light remain unchanged when everything else had? It should re-form itself into spear points and daggers and arrows and—

Something lay on the egg shelf.

She lost her grip, didn't even right herself as she plummeted, and only a patch of cave moss saved her serious injury.

The egg shelf shielded what lay up there. Most of it, anyway. She crept, mindlessly as a slug, toward the shelf. A broken ax-blade slid as she trod on it, and she froze, listening. Nothing but her own heartbeat answered.

She climbed up to the egg shelf.

It wasn't Mother. It was mother's size, certainly, but mother had skin, glowing green dragonscale that changed color as it rose and turned according to mood and body temperature.

Mother also had a head. And sii. And saa. And tail. And great leathery wings that could cover the whole egg shelf when extended. Not tendrils of cave moss exploring and thriving on what it found as it crept up her back.

She stood in the cave moss consuming Mother, engulfing her like a growing, grasping soft claw.

Wistala's body no longer obeyed her. It jerked and shook as she walked, walked away, turned her back, and shut her nose to the sickly-sweet smell, tripping clumsily like a hatchling fresh out of the egg. She hurried to the trickle at the end of the egg shelf, sat under it, let water fall and wash her scales clean.

Then she saw her sister.

They'd done the same to Jizara, then tossed her on the dragon-waste pile. The thing that had been her sister was mostly obscured by devouring cave moss, but even moss couldn't hide that the tail she'd once been so proud of, her lovely elegant tail… .

A shrieking, whistling cry came up her throat, and she didn't care if the dwarves came again. Once her head was off, she'd have no more images of this, this butchery. How could her mind carry this for the remainder of her life?

She ran all the way to the egg shelf, where it turned into hardly a ledge, drove herself against the cave wall, vaguely aware of a racking sound coming from somewhere deep in her chest. She rubbed her fringe against a sharp rock. Some old scales were coming loose up there, and it would be just as well to be rid of them sooner, and the pain wasn't bad at all; in fact, it was a bit of a relief as—

"Sister?"

Auron?

She looked off the shelf, heart leaping and body ready to join it—

And saw the copper. Thinner and more haggard than ever. The copper stood, leaning a little as he balanced on his crippled limb's joint.

"They killed her, Jiz—" His voice was only superficially like Auron's after all; he still had some hatchling inflections.

"I'm Wistala. You're no brother to me. You had a tooth in this." She felt her fanlike griff expand. Though she had no crest to rattle them against, they could still flutter angrily, she found.

"They lied," the copper said, but she launched herself off the ledge, jaws agape and sii reaching for him. "A bloody cave, no hoard—"

He dodged as she landed, took advantage of her being off balance to throw himself across her neck. "We need to overcome this, put it behind. Unite. The past can't be changed!" he said.

Wistala squirmed, couldn't break free. She gathered her limbs under her body. "No. But it can be avenged." She lifted herself with all four limbs and her tail, pushing forward.

The copper tipped.

And she struck him, sii, teeth, even dealt shoulder blows, trying to tip him so his vulnerable underbelly would be exposed, gutted and thrown on the waste heap to feed the lichen!

She tried to claw at his eyes, but her sii just rattled off his crest and griff. She found something soft, drove her digits in with claws extended.

The copper squealed, so loudly that it shocked her into releasing him, vague memories of wrestling with Auron during one of his attacks triggering instincts—

Face smeared with blood, the copper scrambled away, striking her between the eyes with his tail as he turned so that she saw dragonflame explode for a moment. She shook her head to clear her vision, and he was gone.

Liquid gurgled and pulsed behind her breastbone, and she spat after him. Her fire bladder bile had a sharp, unpleasant smell, like vomit and sulfur.

She sniffed out the blood trail and followed it. The dribbles led her to the biggest of the cave pools, the one with the waterfall next to it. A fissure in the wall had been widened, and she saw a forgotten spike or two still resting in a piece of wall that had come down and fallen into the pool.

Had he gone to get the dwarves?

I'll meet that cripple and his dwarves again when I have real dragonfire, instead of bladderbile.

But until then, she had to survive. She took a deep drink of the water from the pool; her brother's blood could just be tasted on it. Or perhaps it was simply a loosened tooth from the fight. Wistala turned and left her home cave forever.

Wistala used the walls and ceiling again on her way out, now sure of the route and good places to rest. She wasn't afraid of being taken unaware by pursuit; the bloody-handed dwarves might as well bang their shields against the walls for all the noise they made.

She feared and hated them. It would be hard to say which emotion was the stronger—perhaps her fear, that she would end up another headless, sii-less, saa-less corpse robbed of life and skin itself.

Her body wasn't equal to the anger she felt. It hung above her, vast and thick, like a storm cloud. One day she might be able to inhale that cloud, take it into her body and use it to fuel her vengeance for a butchered family.

One day. When I am strong. I'm too weak now.

Weak wasn't the word for it, more like exhausted, drained … Every muscle in Wistala's body ached as she climbed out of the cave. She inched forward as she emerged, not knowing what sort of help her brother might have summoned. Furtive creeping was her only defense. She wouldn't be able to put up any more of a fight than a slug, thanks to her weariness and the cold despair in her hearts.

The smell of fresh air steeled her limbs and gave her a last burst. As she climbed up through the creepers at the mouth of the cave and squeezed into an old crack in the battlements, she felt as though her body was sloughing off her limbs to puddle beneath her. She joined it, slid down a rushing slide of fatigue, and slept.

Wistala awoke to alarm that she couldn't smell Auron. The events of the previous day came back in a rush, along with the tumult of emotions. Not true emotions, rather echoes of them. The fear, the anger, the disgust, the despair all felt cold and dead and dark, leaving her spiritless.

Was it just yesterday she had lost one brother, and fought another?

I'm done for. The world's too much for me. It'll have me, too, in the end.

She would have laughed at the dreams of were-blood taken from the dwarves were it not too much effort. Never to smell Mother's rich, comforting scent, spin gemstones on the egg shelf with Jizara, listen to Father's approach with awe and a little fear at the bloody odors …

A beetle probed the dirt of a crack in the battlement above her eye. She could pick it with a flick of her tongue and crunch it down, but it still sought sustenance with the determination of one who knew only instinct. It knew nothing of doom or enemies or the vast indifference of this uncaring, friendless world.

"I shall be you for a time, beetle."

The beetle hunted so that it might eat, unaware of its own near destruction. And so should she.

She crept out of the cold crack. Everything on her hurt, especially the gripping maniples of her sii. She got behind an old wall, or perhaps it was a paved path; it was wide and low, and thick brush almost turned it into a tunnel.

It was morning on the other side of the mountains, she guessed. Here the land lay shadowed and cold under a purple sky. The clouds above slowly warmed, and she took advantage of the twilight to explore a broken tower. From an arrow-slit next to a stony ledge, she examined the approaches to the cave.

No campfires. No dwarves. No hunting dogs. No men. Elves you wouldn't see until their bowstrings sang your death. Some wide-winged birds circled above the woods and meadows; others sat on bare tree limbs with a good view of open ground, preening or keeping watch. Their behavior was regular: they didn't suddenly change course or startle or cry out, as they would if hunters were prowling the woods. To the north, more mountains, a long line of them, snowy tops tinged with morning gold. Father was up there somewhere, but he wouldn't even be a dot at this distance.

If he still lived.

Wistala sniffed the air, smelled mountain goat droppings in the grassy interstice filling the bottom of a rocky runnel. The beetle would no doubt find the clumps tasty. She preferred the source.

Wistala followed the smells at a slow stalk with a thoughtless—but not senseless—appetite.

Wistala didn't need to follow the Bowing Dragon during the day, since the mountains appeared to run more or less north. She kept to the dead area above most of the trees but below the snow. Brilliant green moss the color of her scales covered every rock, evidence to some play of wind and weather that meant mists at these heights almost every morning and night.

While moving in open sunlight meant she could be observed, she'd rather see trouble from a distance than worry what might be around the next scraggly pine tree.

Water was plentiful—the mountains were shedding their winter weight of snow, and it came down in innumerable streams. The streams carried more than just refreshing water and bits of bark and leaf on a long journey down the mountain; they were full of tasty frogs that wiggled delightfully as they went down Wistala's long throat.

By evening she'd crossed over two shoulders and had to face a decision. The mountains curved away west before going north again, and she could save herself a good deal of time by cutting across the valley, going the same distance in a quarter of the dragon-lengths. But it would mean plunging into thick forest. Trees could mean men, or worse, elves.

But trees also meant warm-blooded, furry, four-footed feasting, marrow-filled bones to crunch, and juicy eyeballs for sucking.

Appetite and the desire to hurry north, hopefully to find Father somewhere plotting destruction to the dwarves, won out over caution. She descended into the valley.

Patient trees waited for her. Soon she could see only slivers of sky around the tops of pines.

"Grounddragon look look!" a blue jay shrieked. It fluttered to a lower branch to scream at her: "Nestraider! Nestraider!"

Birdspeech made hatchling babble seem sophisticated.

"News! Dragon lives?" a swift answered from a nearby tree. Wistala couldn't see it.

"Lives, lives, the grounddragon lives," the jay called back.

"I won't raid your nests," Wistala said. "Why would it be news that I live?"

"Such news! News! Sparrow say grackle say thrush say elf-hawk say elves kill grounddragon," the swift called.

"Nestraider! Nestraider!" the jay insisted.

"I will raid your nests if you don't shut that thorn you use for a beak. When was this grounddragon killed, swift?"

"Not-today," the swift answered.

Perhaps birdbrains had room for only two concepts of time: something that happened today and Everything Else. Auron might still live, somewhere. The birds might be gossiping about a killing in the area from weeks and weeks ago.

But she wondered—and her fire bladder went cold. Could birds keep a thought in their singsong heads that long?

Mother said some elves understood birdspeech. Wistala didn't want her comings and goings sung about through the whole forest. She knew she couldn't convince them to lie. Then she'd have to come up with an alternative truth they could understand. "Good riddance. We not-dragons don't like them."

"Nestraider! Nestraider!"

"You look like a dragon," the swift said, and Wistala finally spotted him sheltering in the notch between two thick branches. She'd seen him only because he raised his whitish chin to speak.

"No, I'm a not-dragon. Though we look a lot like dragons and are often mistaken for them, that's why we hate them so."

"Nestraider! Nestraider!"

"Not-dragons don't raid nests!" Wistala said. She marched off into the forest, tail held high, exposing her vent to the still-screaming jay.

"I've met a not-dragon," the swift bubbled. "The sparrows must hear of this!"

The next day she cut through another wooded valley and crossed a low rocky ridge in the middle of the forest. It was honeycombed with caves of assorted sizes and, unfortunately, empty nests. There was good snake hunting in the rocks. All she had found to eat in the forest was a white-eyed possum, which had been wandering around in the daylight in a muddled daze. It stank like disease, but she still ate it. Mother had said that the illnesses that plagued mammals wouldn't affect dragons.

Snake hunting was all quickness, and it appealed to Wistala. One good thump behind the head, and a snake's back was broken, leaving a thick feast that fit neatly down one's throat. She got one bulging black-cave serpent that had recently eaten a large rat or a baby raccoon, judging from the size of the bulge in its midsection, thus giving her two meals with one jump.

She felt dirty, and found a rock where she could bend and stretch and extend her scales to the afternoon sun. Sunlight cleaned the crevices around the scale-root almost as well as water but felt a sky's worth warmer, especially with a snake dinner inside.

A prrum might even have been forming in her throat, until her memories betrayed her: Auron would have been a fine snake-hunter, quick as he was. Why couldn't he be with her?

Stop it, Tala. Auron is in the past, gone save for a scratch on a rock and your memories.

Except for his head and his claws, perhaps. What sort of wretched hominid ritual are they being incorporated into? Mother said the hominids used dragonkind for medicines and magic, if they were lucky enough to get one down.

"Stupid hearts. Give him up."

Or did they know something she didn't?

Wistala looked to the sky, to the late afternoon sun, now disappearing behind a bank of clouds. There'd be a rain tonight, if not a storm. She should nap on the ridge, and then shelter from the storm in one of the caves.

And lose half a day finding Father.

She picked her route down the ridge.

Wistala would have avoided the great claw-shaped cave, for it smelled like bears—but for the sounds wafted up from it. A breeze blew out of the cave. Perhaps it was another chimney from the Lower World, similar to the one she'd climbed with Auron.

As this one didn't have to travel most of the way up a mountain, the path to the Lower World must be shorter. It conducted sounds, strange rhythms that couldn't be natural, unless the air was moaning on its way up thousands of individual channels.

She ventured into the cave, found a bone-strewn ingress that had been collecting odds and ends since the forming of the world. But a trio of cracks sent air and sound up from below.

Voices.

She couldn't pick out individual words, and indeed she could hardly swear that the voices she heard weren't in her imagination rather than some trick of wind. But the rhythm repeated itself again and again every hundred heartbeats or so.

A song.

No dragon song—that, she'd be able to comprehend. Probably dwarves, singing as they worked or buckled on helm and shield to go kill more hatchlings. This was not a light, glad sound like that of a bird happy to get the morning dew off its feathers; this was a dirge such as a mother dragon might sing over empty, broken eggs. She hoped Father had given the dwarves reason to lament.

Dwarf voices meant dwarf tunnels, chambers, and mines. She must be getting near the tower-girded lake.

And Father.

 Sing-song a dragon's dead!

 No more wingwinds, no more dread,

 Sing-song, a firestarter's dead!

The song awoke Wistala from her predawn nap beneath a fallen tree. Some surviving branches still held up part of the bole, and a fresh start emerged from one of the roots—a testament to the resiliency of oaks—and she'd taken shelter beneath it, waking to find fresh spiderwebs all around and the birds cheering.

Wistala's chest heart shrank to the size of one of the wrapped flies in the web by her nose.

Curse the birds and their tinder-dry nests. "What news?" she called in birdspeech.

"Great news, giant log-turtle," a grackle chirped. "A dragon's down by the river-gorge."

"I don't believe you."

"Look under the buzzards, then. Already they gather."

Wistala came out from under the log, and the birds went silent. She heard some tiny frightened peeps.

A tall pine stood nearby. She ran to it, climbed its regular, neatly spaced rungs as high as she dared. She saw mountains and many treetops and butterflies and an overcast pushed up against the snowcaps but—

No. There they are. Oh for my wings, for just one hour's use of my wings!

She went down the pine recklessly, headfirst, in a series of controlled falls, letting the springy wood and interlaced branches catch her, not caring how the needles stuck or the sap clung to her.

She landed with a thump.

Wistala hurried through the forest, crashing through bramble and sending dead leaves flying, leaving a trail a blind elf could follow by touch. The first hot rush wore off, and she settled into an agonized dogtrot, her breath now louder than her footfalls.

The ground became treacherous and thin soiled, with pines and beeches clinging to strips of earth between rocks flattened and rounded and moss-bitten. She jumped, reached a prominence where she could see through the scattered trees, and corrected her course across blue-green stone with sharp edges that bit her sii.

Dragons aren't built like horses or wolves, though their legs can get them over short distances at speeds that surprise—and kill—the unwary. They walk over long distances easily, resting tail and head on the ground frequently with weight otherwise divided between their four powerful limbs. But they are poor runners beyond the limits of a dragon-dash.

Wistala, though thick-bodied and strong, was no exception. After the first burst, all she had to give in her run was determination. She matched it against the fire in her lungs, the pain in her high-joints, the fatigue in her muscles. Her field of vision shrank until she saw the forest as though through a long dark tunnel. Hearing was gone save for the sound of her hearts pounding; all she could smell was blood-tinged saliva flowing from her mouth, thanks to stress-ruptured vessels in her long lungs.

White froth hung from her dry mouth.

She hit the gorge first, crashing through bushes, scattering berries that bruised into sickly scent. Only a quick saa-dig saved her tumble down the hillside.

Steep-sided, fern-covered fells flanked a river of frothing white and mist. Just beyond a rainbow created by the rising water, the river threw a wide loop around a prominence that resembled the upper half of hominid leg bone. A long wall of rock ran out to a knoblike point, surrounded on all sides by water.

The carrion birds circled above the stony bulge. Every now and then one would dip its wings and go lower and the others would follow; then it would rise again, but never quite so high as when she had first marked them.

Just when her body needed to hurry most, it betrayed her. She tripped, she stumbled, lost in a yellow-and-pink fog that played tricks on her vision.

Then she stood on the peninsula, the river rushing in opposite directions a dragon-length to either side, the peninsula riven and notched like vertebrae. Her run became a stagger on stones treacherous with green slimes and gray lichens.

Then to the knob, a scarp like a castle keep with ferns clinging to the side as though they were freshly hatched spiders drying themselves on the egg sac. The birds no longer whirled above.

Wistala smelled dragonblood, and the mists cleared. Ancient irregular steps were cut into the side of the rock prominence, but ferns had taken over. She climbed the stairs on a carpet of green.

The rock was somewhat flatter at the top, stonework like that of the battlements outside the home-cave crowning it. Three mighty toothlike obelisks stood upright, rough hewn, with lichen blurring glyphs carved into the sides facing each other. Had they all been standing, they would have made a roofless cage, but the rest had fallen with broken pieces strewn all about. They lay on their sides, half-covered by jagged pines all leaning upstream.

The ruin of her father lay in a depression in the center, his own blood in a pool all around. Feathered spikes thrust into riven scales covered his back like fur. He had but five horns now, one was broken off at a great notch in his crest, and he couldn't fold one griff thanks to an ax-head stuck in it. Blood ran from under his sii.

"Father!"

Brown-and-white carrion birds, perched at the tops of the obelisks, took wing at her cry.

She dashed to him, licked at a dimpled wound under one closed eye that hardly even bled. She didn't begin to know how to manage the rest.

His other side was just as bad. The hilt of some mighty weapon, notched like an arrow but the size of a spear, projected about the length of her tail from his side. The back was attached to a chain, and the chain to a heavy round ball that had cracked the ancient stone where it landed. Had father flown dragging that?

"Ayangthe, I've hurt myself on the slate pile. Jumped too far down. Is Mother asmelled?"

"Father, it's Wistala. Wistala."

Father grimaced. "You're a star, Wistala—I saw you twinkling beneath dear Irelia last night. You, Auron, and Jizara all in a row. I'll be up there soon. Wait."

"Do open your eye, Father."

"Can't. Light hurts."

"What do you think you're doing?" one of the condors croaked. "He's done for."

Wistala ignored the judgment, though she admired his birdspeech. It had a loftier tone than the grain-brained bush-hoppers.

"You're only making it harder for him," the condor continued from his high obelisk.

What had Mother told her to do with wounds? Oh, it was in one of her Lessons. The hatchling and the wounded tiger, of course! Dwarf's-beard! It loved rotting old logs, especially damp ones.

"Father, I'll be right back. I'm going to help you."

Novosolosk, the little black dragon, had just ventured above ground. …

She looked up at the condor: "Fair warning! I see any of you pecking at him, I'll be venting feathers for a week."

"Perish the thought." The condor fluffed up his feathers and settled. "I'm eager to see how you manage this."

While hunting rock rats, Novosolosk found himself trapped atop a low jungle kopje by a great tiger. The tiger prowled round and round the base of the kopje, growling and panting.

She looked off the east side of the knob at the river-turn. Sure enough, masses of logs had washed up against the rocks at the base of the peninsula, wetted by the constant spray of white water. Along with more mundane lichens, tufts of gray hung from cracks and knotholes in the logs.

Novosolosk tried to bargain with the tiger for safe passage out of his territory, but the tiger just spat abuse in return. He noticed an arrow through the tiger's neck, broken shafts sticking out either side of his coat, the orange and white gone brown with blood and green with pus.

"Tiger, tiger, I can extract that arrow… ."

Hope gave her tired body new life. She eschewed the cut rocks for a quicker climb down the side of the knob. Going down would be easier than coming back up… .

Novosolosk went to the swamp, the tiger padding along just behind, its hot breath on his tail and drops of saliva falling like rain. He expected the tiger to jump at any point …

Sure enough, a few of the logs had thick growths of dwarf's-beard. The plant appeared to like broken-off ends, for some reason, or split trunks. It spilled out of the rotting black wood in a thick thatch of gray, interlaced and layered and almost woven in a way that made it difficult to tell where the growth began and where it ended. It reminded Wistala of the hair shirt from the man Father brought back to the cave for Auron to learn hominid-killing. One final test.

As the tiger groaned away, Novosolosk broke a piece of the moss at a thick joint. It was joined by a whitish band. He blew on the band. It stretched and waved in his breath but did not break. …

She tore off two hunks of moss, carried it in her mouth back up the stairs, feeling a bit like a bullfrog she'd seen croaking away in a stream with his windbag expanded under his chin. She took the stairs in a series of leaps.

Novosolosk crushed the moss in his sii and pulled out the arrow with one quick motion. The tiger yowled and swatted him across the crest, but he pressed the mass to either side of the hole the arrow left. Dwarf's-beard both staunched the flow and cleaned the wound, so powerful is its magic, and the tiger's angry fever came down… .

She listened to Father's heart when she crept under his wounded sii. Father would not move his limb; she had to wedge herself into the gap between body and arm like a river clam and then flex her back so she could get at the wound.

The ugly red gash gave off a pulse of blood from one end, a steady flow from the other. She packed the wound with dwarf's-beard, crushing its laced branches with her sii until they were sticky with the whitish gunk. It had been a brave dwarf that came so close to his sii to open the bronze dragon's breast with his ax.

Father looked relieved as soon as she wiggled free of his armpit, although whether this was from instinct at being able to press the wound closed again or comfort brought by the dwarf's-beard, she couldn't say.

The stream of blood feeding the pool Father lay in slowed.

Wistala sank to her joints.

"Thank you, Novosolosk."

I still say he's going to die," the condor insisted.

Most of his cousins had left by the time the sun set, but a few still circled far above. The old yellowbeak chuckled every time Wistala limped up the long, long staircase, bearing another mouthful of dwarf's-beard.

Wistala worked from nose-tip to tail, crushing the growth and placing it atop Father's wounds. Sometimes it fell out again right away, and every time Father shifted his position, he exposed new wounds.

"Prophecies and fallacies, I'm starting to enjoy proving you wrong," Wistala said.

"Ah, but there I've got you, if you'll take the high view. There's no hole so deep or airs so lofty for any of us that old Father Death doesn't visit. He's more reliable than even your fire. We, his humble retinue, clean up after him. How about giving us a taste and letting me warm my chilled grippers?"

"I've no fire yet, and even if I did, I wouldn't waste it on a grouser like you."

"Grouse! I'm a High Mountain Condor, hatchling. Barring your kind, no one matches my wingspan save the lost Rocs of the east. And once you dragons are gone—"

"What's that you say?"

"Please, take no offense. We carrion birds value our manners. If I spoke on a delicate subject—"

"I should have asked you to explain yourself. Do you mean once Father and I leave the river, you'll be the skyking?"

The condor clacked his beak. "I rarely see a dragon anymore. In the time of my father's father's father's egg, I'm told your kind were thick in these mountains, and there was good feasting on the remains of your kills, for kind dragon lords always offered fresh, delectable heads with eyeballs intact to us of lesser wing."

Wistala wondered how many other caverns hid butchered, moss-covered families. "Who is driving the dragons away?"

"Perhaps you should ask your father that, if he ever speaks again."

"You must see everything. I've seen you soaring as high as a dragon."

The condor straightened a little; birds were as vain as dragons sometimes.

"So who can master dragons and bid them depart?"

"The hominids, I suppose. They do shape the world to suit themselves, don't they?"

"The world wins back, in the end," Wistala said, thinking of the toppled, overgrown battlements around the home cave.

"We condors look to the day of the Last Swancall. Do you know what a swancall is?"

Wistala twitched her nose. "No."

"It's a great metal thing shaped like a dragon's neck, and it makes a call as loud as the white swans you see on the lakes of the north. The hominids blow them before slaughtering each other. We carrion birds wait upon the war of the Last Swancall, when all the hominids kill each other off; then there'll be the vast battle feast in celebration and the world will be given over to we of talon and feather again."

She sniffed at the wound around the great shaft. It smelled evil. While waiting and dreaming of the condor's last swancall might be pleasant, she'd have to venture along the slippery banks of the river in search of more dwarf's-beard.

A clear morning sky brought rainbows to the waterfall upriver. If Wistala weren't so weighted down with worry, the bright colors would have made her hearts glad. But Father still seemed to be worsening.

"Wistala, I'm so thirsty," Father panted. "I'll perish of it before I can move again."

River, river all around, and not a drop within reach. Father chose a good location to collapse, for it would be difficult and dangerous to cross and climb all the slippery rocks for a hominid bearing arms, but he couldn't reach the river swirling below as it bent back around the knob.

"But you must move!" She didn't have enough digits to count how many times she urged Father to move. The blood around him had dried into a brown stain, still claw-deep and sticky under his scales.

Father pressed his back against a horizontal slab at the center of the knob, not a fallen obelisk but obviously a cutting of some importance, judging by how it stood on a little platform. His claws slipped against the stone. He rolled a little, got his claws under him.

Wistala had to look away; she couldn't bear to see Father's limbs trembling under him again. Father's mighty head fell.

Gluck-glk-glub …

Is Father crying?

"He must have water," Wistala called.

The watching condor looked at the sky, checking for rain clouds, perhaps. "Were you speaking to me?"

"No … yes."

"Water flows up to down, not down to up. What you need is a train of pack-dwarves carrying waterskins."

"Waterskins?" Wistala asked, thinking it was some sort of plant.

"Hominids make them. They scoop out the insides of sheep and lambs and fill them with water to drink on journeys."

Hominids must have stomachs stronger than the condor above to drink water stored inside rotting flesh. Disgusting creatures.

Why did the condor spew such a useless detail? He might as well have said, "You need a good rainstorm," or "A spring bubbling up through these rocks would help." She wouldn't begin to know how to scoop out a dead animal and fill it again with water. They had nostrils, throats, tailvents, never mind the holes one made while killing it. If she could reach up and grab the condor, she'd be tempted to try it with him … squeeze it out like mother bringing up a tenderized sheep for hungry hatchlings.

Would that work?

She hurried down to the river, gulped down mouthful after mouthful, felt her stomach swell until she became sick with the fullness… .

The water came back up easily enough, a little sour-smelling, thanks to her empty belly.

But it worked.

She filled herself even fuller, until it seemed as though she could hardly draw breath from the liquid in her stomach—dragon innards were built for gorging—and learned a lesson when it came back up of its own accord on the stairs.

She took in less for her third load and made it all the way to the top.

"I've got something for you, Father," she said.

He opened a weary, bloodshot eye.

She cast about and settled on the central slab Father braced himself against when he tried to move. It had a gutter running down the center, perhaps designed to catch and hold rainwater? She hopped up onto the edge, and with a loudish belch almost filled half the trough with water.

Father sniffed. "Tala! You're a miracle!" He lapped at the water. "You are your mother's hatchling, no doubt about it," he said on the second trip.

"This is doing me wonders," on the third. All the gorging and retching were exhausting, but she pressed on.

As she filled her stomach a fourth time, she felt a little woozy; the climbs up and down the rock were trying. She needed a meal. Would fish live in water this rough?

It turned out they did. They liked to wait behind the bigger rocks, sitting in the calm, waiting for a meal to be swept to them by the current. But they scattered when she dived in after them and disappeared into the bubbling water.

She thought it over and tried steering herself through the current.

This was far trickier, but with a little practice, she found she could shoot into the calm waters with water-lids lowered and snap down a fish quick as thinking.

But if her stomach was digesting fish, it wasn't helping Father. He had blood and scale to make up. The juicy fish would help. Weren't they shiny little bags of water, after all?

She dived into the river upstream, and after a wild ride round the reversal at the knob—and a bloodied nose on an unexpected rock—she had five fish in her belly. She took her time climbing the steps.

Father was asleep. Was his breathing less labored? Hard to tell. Wistala decided against waking him for a meal; the fish just felt too good in her gorge. Besides, they'd give her strength for more fishing. When Father woke, she'd try a few trips with a belly full of fish.

Two days—and a countless number of trips with fish swallowed whole—later, Father wasn't his old self, but he could reach the river on his own in order to drink and wash the clotted moss from his wounds.

They'd extracted the oversized spear—Father called it a highpoon and told her dwarven war machines fired it to weigh down a dragon and bring him to earth. At one point, he'd had two in him and was plunging toward the lake around the dwarves' battlements, when luckily the second tore free and he could just fly with the other… .

"They got me on that great bridge between those towers of rock," Father said as he spat gobs of fire onto the chain links, which Wistala pounded with an edged rock under Father's instruction, feeling that her shoulders would give way long before the chain. "There are caverns big enough for a dragon to get in at them, but they had the war machines concealed in decorative galleries, all woodwork and flower beds and curtains. I was hit before I heard the roar of the chains. Clever blighters."

Finally the links gave way, and Father drew the highpoon out his other side, where it projected from his scale—the barbs on it made any other kind of extraction impossible.

Wistala almost swooned during the gory extraction. How did Father manage the pain?

Flying was beyond him, of course. He crept ever so slowly down the knob, shuffling his sii and saa and keeping grip with three while one explored the next step. Wistala fretted as he moved—this was almost as bad as seeing him lying in a pool of his own blood. An honorable death after battle had a twilight dignity to it. Seeing her strong, confident father, lord of her home cave, reduced to a slug's pace down the gentlest slope of this rock pile brought new anguish.

The trip back up took all afternoon, it seemed.

"I never knew there could be such a fight," he said as the sun set behind fire-edged clouds.

The old condor still waited above, looking a little droopy. Wistala wondered if he was molting at the thought of his feast living on day after day. She liked his companionship, though, and brought him a whole dead fish she found washed up on the riverside.

The condor didn't mind the ants.

"The Wheel of Fire?"

"Where did you hear that?"

"Mother and Auron."

Father bowed his head, nostrils shut. "I saw her. What happened to Auron?"

Wistala told him. The shouted warning … the elves chasing him … the story came slowly. She tried to give him mind-pictures but had to fill in the fuzzier parts with words.

"And here I thought he took after the grandsire on his mother's side. That sounds like something my father would have done. And you, scales so thin they hardly keep out the raindrops, went on alone?"

"Yes."

"You might have done better to have found a nook in the home cave and waited another year until you had your flame. A mouthful like you would be easy pickings for wolves, leave alone the hominids. But perhaps the wolves have been driven from these woods, too."

"I wanted to find you. We're all that's left." She didn't— couldn't—mention the copper and his betrayal. Father had grief enough.

"Perhaps," Father said. "Some pair. A hatchling and a half-dead dragon. The hunt's probably on already, you know."

"In this wild country?"

"There's no country too wild if there's a wounded dragon down. I tried to confuse them by flying hard south and then circling around through cloud layer, but my wings gave out. An elf will pick up a piece of bird-gossip or those hounds will find me. That dragon-hunter will have a new piece of scale for his harness, and our line will go unavenged."

"I'll avenge it, Father, if it comes to that."

"Were-oaths and corpse-curses are for drakes and dragons, daughter. Dragonelles get their vengeance by seeing clutches of eggs laid to take the place of the assassinated."

"I told you that you should have left him be," the condor said.

Father blew his nostrils out at the condor. "Only thing that'll change the mind of a dragonelle of Irelia's line is herself, Bartleghaff," Father said.

"You know that old buzzard?"

Bartleghaff squawked: "Condor!"

"Know him?" Father snorted. "He's my oldest friend."

"Friend? You were waiting to eat him!" Wistala said to the condor.

"Of course he was," Father said. "I wouldn't want some stranger getting the best bits. Who better than an old skymate to serve the dragon-wake."

"What a feast!" Bartleghaff said. "And my son's got a hatchling of his own now, first year in the sky. Such a gobble we'd have, we'd all be too fat to fly for a week. You'd have been remembered fondly at every cliff-sit for a hundred years. We were gathering to see you off properly." He fluffed his feathers again. "Till she came along."

"For someone who dines on lips and vents, you offer complaints a plenty," Father said. "That legendary politeness of your kind—if it ever existed—is on the wane as your years advance."

"Tell me about the dwarves, Father. Why do you say they betrayed you?"

"They broke a bargain they struck with your mother. Strange, for of all the hominids, dwarves are the only ones who can be trusted to keep their word without crabbing. Serves us right for believing legends. Perhaps dwarvish honor, like so many of the other old truths, has been brought down by poisoned arrows." He sent a significant glare Bartleghaff's way.

"What was the bargain?" Wistala asked.

"It came from our need for a decent cave. Your mother and I had already seen our share of tragedy. For our first clutch, we were too high in the mountains and in too shallow a cavern. A bitter freeze took the eggs. Your poor mother. The next cavern had a seep of bad air, odorless, clinging to the floor. Again, no hatchlings stirring after the first weeks. I was inconsolable at that and gave up hope—all those years of searching wasted. While flying the southern reaches of these mountains, we came across a band of blighters, half of them hurt, and made an easy meal of them. While I chased the survivors off south, your mother nosed through their belongings for digestible metals.

"Up popped a dwarf. Your mother thought him well scarred from battle and a stout, strong sort, even for a dwarf. Now had I been there, I would have made an end to him, but your mother knew we were strangers to the mountains this far from the sea, and she conversed with him. He gave his name as Gobold of the Wheel of Fire clan.

"'You're unusually bold for a dwarf abovegrounds,' your mother said.

"'I'm in your debt,' Gobold said, pouring out the contents of a small purse he carried. There was a goodly mouthful of silver for each of us to be had. Just the thing we needed to put the sparkle back in our scales after the long flight.

"'Silver and salivation, what service have we done you?'

"Gobold replied: 'You've finished a battle commenced days ago. The blighters outran us. Yea, they even outdug us.'

"Your mother let him talk, and he spoke of the decay of the human empire that once circled the Inland Ocean the way cave moss circles a pool. They'd given up their outposts in the southern mountains, and blighters filled some of their old caves and tumbles. The blighters were plaguing the dwarves' trade routes and taking over mines.

"When he spoke of how the blighters filled several caves at the end of the southern mountains, closed them off from the dwarvish tunnels and roads in the Lower World so that the dwarves couldn't get at them, your mother began to hatch an idea of her own. She told the dwarves that in return for six chests of gold and twelve of silver, we'd drive the blighters from those caverns and see that they never returned.

"'Such a deed would long be sung at our Memorials, Queen of Dragons,' Gobold said.

"'I must consult with my husband before formally pledging tooth and claw to bargain. Perhaps you should seek the agreement of your clan?'

"'That will not be difficult,' Gobold said with a chuckle.

"In the end, the bargain was formally struck with many words and an etching on a silver war-shield. She had the dwarves pay us half in small sums as we brought back heads for counting. When it came to dealing with hominids, your mother was fond of the old dragon-saying: Trust, but keep an eye open.

"So we fought the dwarves' war for them. I would have just forced my way into the cave and set fire to all within, but your mother demanded a more patient war that allowed us to build our strength even as we weakened theirs.

"We attacked their herds and their flocks, burned their Upper World crops, and took such blighter parties as were easily consumed by two dragons hunting by day or night. Such feasting we had—"

"Oh, yes … ," sighed Bartleghaff.

"And when they sent out hunting parties or tried to trick and trap us, we got away without too much difficulty, and sometimes got a chance for our own tricks and traps, for your Mother has—had—a fine mind for that sort of thing. Many of the blighters left in despair, but a hard few stayed within their cave, scratching a living from the Lower World. Soon we made them afraid to cast a shadow outside their cave."

"Did you destroy the battlements around the cave, then?" Wistala asked.

"Oh no, daughter, time is fiercer even than dragons. Hatchlings think the world began when their egg cracked—eh, Bartleghaff? Those old works date from the Age of Wheels, when the blighters first ruled the world before dragons tamed their appetites."

"You must have gone in the caves eventually."

"When we were fat and strong with full fire bladders and fresh iron-fed scales, we challenged the blighters in their own caves and drove them out. In a deep chamber, we found a place that fulfilled all our hopes.

"The blighters had diverted melt and underground springs to feed cave moss plantations and slug herds. It was deep enough to be out of any weather. Even a nice shelf in case of bad air! We let nature take its course and didn't even object to a few bats' helping fertilize the cave moss."

"A triumph," Wistala said, but wondered why there was no light in Father's eyes, the way there had been before, when he spoke of his battles.

"Save for some hard words with the dwarves. Gobold sent some shifty bargainer who showed up with one chest of silver and one chest of gold and a great bag of gems and jewelry. His name was Quizzilick and he was a pogt if I ever met one. He gave us treble praise and precious little metal when we spoke to him on the shores of that great icy moat that guards the approaches to their twin halls.

"'O dragons mighty, strong, sure, fierce (this went on for some time, daughter, until you began to hear the bats drop of boredom), your work shall be rewarded beyond even our bargain, for we bring you not monies but riches.'

"'Riches to some, dross to others,' I said. 'A few gems are always welcome to a dragon's appetite. They make for healthy, shining scale, but what we need are soft metals to replace scales lost in our joined war.'

"'And our hatchlings must have some,' your mother said. Her desire must have unguarded her tongue, for I'd never heard her make such a mistake when talking to dwarves. For even slow dwarvish minds might start turning at the thought of families of dragons being bred on their borders.

"In the end, Quizzilick slightly increased the amount of gold and gave us more jewelry that had rich strands of it, and a great deal of silver besides, but there was no end of grumbling. But we'd kept our part of the bargain, and when we quit them, we never troubled the dwar-lands."

"How do you know it was the Wheel of Fire and not some other group of dwarves?" Wistala asked.

"I did not lose my head and attack the nearest dwarfworks, Tala. The etchings on their round shields and helm-circlets told me their tale of betrayal. The Wheel of Fire take pride in showing their flame-winged eagles."

"Ironic," Bartleghaff said. "So eager are they for eagle feathers and heads, they've killed off almost every one in these mountains. I'm glad they don't have condors perching atop their standards."

"Happy thought," Father said. "I'd hear fewer complaints. But why bring up iron? Fault them for much, but not for the quality of their weapons. Finest steel, as I know too well."

Bartleghaff preened his neck-tuft. "How can such wingspan be powered by so small a brain, you scaly sheep-roaster? I meant their insignia is ironic—irony, a form of elvish humor. Like having your tail burnt by your own fire."

"Come to your perch, if you have one," Father said. His eyelids drooped and his eyes were dull. Just telling a story had worn him—or perhaps old emotions had drained his hearts' blood.

"I'm told by the battle-crows, curse their nest-pillaging feathers, that the flames signify dragonfire. Some story lost in the mists of time."

"Whatever they learned of dragons they must have forgotten, to go murdering hatchlings," Wistala said, but neither of the pair appeared to hear her. She could almost hear Mother's voice above as she sang:

 And for those who threaten clutch of flame,

 To feel the wrath of dragon-dame!

Father yawned. "Time for sleep. A dragon must rest and all that. Daughter, I've had my fill of fish. See if you can catch something red-blooded unawares for breakfast, would you?"

A week's worth of breakfasts later—mostly fish, unfortunately for Father's blood-hungry appetite—Wistala smelled smoke in the evening twilight of the forest west of the river gorge.

Game had become scarce in the area around Father and Bartleghaff, who seemed to do little but befoul his perch and goad Father into burning him up like a feathery candle.

Smoke in the forest, with the wood so wet from the constant spring rains, could mean only one thing—hominids. No other creatures save dragons wielded so dangerous a weapon.

With luck, she'd have hers in a few more months. Coming aboveground early had its terrors, but she had to admit she was thriving on the variety of food to be found.

And speaking of variety of food—as she rolled the smoke smell around in her nostrils, she got the mouthwatering scent of charred flesh, which she hadn't had since Father brought home a burned sheep to the egg shelf what seemed like a lifetime ago.

The smoke smell was as easy to follow as a bright moon on a cloudless night through the trees. After a little casting back and forth, she came to a wide hollow.

It was an unnatural sort of place, like a dry creek, only the bottom was filled with tiny broken stones all roughly the same size, and the overgrown banks carried no smell of running water, though every rill for miles was brim-full with the rains. The hollow bent around the peak of the hill as though a claw like Bartleghaff's obelisk had scored the hillside. But from the heights, one could both see either end of the streambed-like cut for a goodly length and be out of the wind.

A dwarf had chosen to camp here.

"Great things have small beginnings," Mother used to like to say when she and Jizara compared their minuscule size to her bulk.

Her vengeance would begin here. As a bonus, the dwarf had a string of ponies. Surely she'd bring down one or two and be able to carry several limbs back to Father before the birds made off with it all.

She stayed downwind in the smoke smell. Examining each sii-and saa-hold as she crept up, she reached a pounce point in the cut of the bank. Perhaps two bounds to reach the dwarf, and if he had an ax, he didn't keep it beside him… .

The dwarf wasn't even helmed, though he did have a sort of mask across his face and just a few scraggles of beard showing. Her store of dwarf-lore was not great, but she knew that a dwarf without a full beard was either very young or some kind of criminal. The only thing remarkable about him was his riding boots, which rose all the way to his hips.

The dwarf carefully set his frying pan down and stood.

Wistala froze, waiting for him to reach for a weapon.

But he wasn't looking in her direction.

She tried to follow his gaze, but all she could see was the string of tasty-looking ponies, chewing their meals in bags attached to their noses.

One of the middle ponies had no interest in his meal; instead he stood miserably with one hoof tipped forward.

The dwarf went to his little two-wheeled cart and returned with a bag. She watched the dwarf lift the pony's hoof and shake his head. He scratched it between the ears, grumbling something in his tongue, and went to work.

Wistala had gnawed at enough horse hooves to know that men sometimes put iron soles on the bottoms of their saa to save their beasts sore-footedness. Perhaps one had come loose. In any case, the dwarf carefully cleaned the pony's hoof, extracting a sizable rock with a long device shaped like a dragon's snout, and applied some kind of tart-smelling salve from a covered clay pot. Then he pounded in a fresh shoe, driving nails right into the animal's foot. The pony didn't like the hammering, but placed its foot on the ground, happy to rest its weight on all fours again.

Still grumbling, the dwarf refilled the nose bags from a sack and returned to his now-cold meal. The dwarf mopped up a little congealed grease with a lump of bread and left the rest.

The desire to leap and kill left Wistala. Any sort of creature that would leave his own dinner to see to the comfort of a four-legged brute didn't seem the type to slaughter hatchlings in their cave. Besides, he held no helm or shield with flames; as far as she could tell, he had no sort of insignia on him, unless you counted the strange angular design like the gems Father gave them to play with on the rear doors of his cart.

He removed the nose bags on his ponies and posted them so they could nibble at the grass and growth on the banks or lie down. The nose bags intrigued Wistala, Bartleghaff's story of men carrying around water in the bodies of animals had stayed with her. They seemed just the right size for fish.

The dwarf cleaned his tools and then sprayed a sweet-smelling liquid on his short, thin beard using a bag that hissed like a hatchling as he squeezed it.

The dwarf turned in. Once she heard snores, she crept up and licked the contents of his pan. Then she picked up two of the nose bags in her mouth. The startled ponies shifted and whinnied in alarm.

She shot into the brush as the dwarf came awake, still with the grease on her tongue. Once out of hearing from the dwarf's camp, she dropped the nose bags and licked her teeth, searching for lost tidbits. Delicious.

Father didn't like her playing with the nose bags: "The Four Spirits gave dragons everything they need to survive, and your mother's wit will fill any gaps." Once dragons started relying on hominid artifice, they'd be painting their scales and wing tissue again like the decadent dragons of Silverhigh.

But Mother's wit told her to improvise. The nose bags were big enough to hold rabbit and pheasant or several fish. When she dumped a meal of squab—oh, the thrill of leaping on them as they took wing—out for Father, he bent so far as to say that circumstances permitted a temporary utilization of the nose bags.

They were so clever! Leather straps designed to hold them on the ponies' heads had little brass latches like dragonclaws poking through holes punched in the straps, and a rope drawstring closed them like the leg coverings she'd examined on the man Auron ate. Wistala, after a good deal of trial and error that was more error than trial, fixed the straps so they hung across her shoulders just where the neck-dip began. They swung about a little, which was a bother, and snagged on her scales. She wished she could find that dwarf again and convince him to fix the bags together somehow.

"Tell me again about burning the bridges at Sollorsoar," Wistala urged her father.

"You've heard that one before," Father said.

"I like the part where the elves either must jump into the river or burn," Wistala said. It was easy to place the faces of wide-eyed elves who rode after Auron upon the group of warriors trapped at the center of the bridge.

"You're an odd sort of dragonelle, Wistala. Those saddlebags, and now war stories. Even your Mother only asked for my battle anecdotes when she wanted to be lulled to sleep. You gobble them like gold."

"She's a young Ahregnia, or imagines herself one," Bartleghaff said.

Curse that condor! Every time he mentioned Ahregnia, Father went into one of his lectures. She felt her sii extend as Father cleared his long throat.

"My sire knew her as sister, Wistala. A bitter female, consumed by revenge for her lost mate. Scarred she was, poisonous of mind, with tongue as sharp as her claws. Leave battles to dragons, and save your hearts for husband, hatchlings, and home cave."

"Jizara, Auron, and Mo—"

"Are mine to avenge, daughter. If I can ever get aloft again."

Father spread his wings, wincing at the pain in his ax-hacked neck and shoulders. He beat his wings, stirring hardly enough wind to blow Wistala's fringe to the other side of her neck. One long black fringe-point dropped to the corner of her eye, and she reached up with her left sii and snipped it short with her claws.

"That's a terrible habit, Wistala," Father barked. "A long fringe means a healthy dragonelle."

A failed attempt at flight always leaves Father irascible. But his tone still stung, no matter how many times she told herself that.

"You're just wearing yourself out," she said. "I smelled deer spoor in the woods. I'll try to find you a yearling."

"What I really need is some metal. Look at these scales coming in! A snake would be ashamed."

"Deer wouldn't carry gold and silver," Bartleghaff said.

"I saw a … a … ," Wistala said, searching for the word, "… road. Might riders carry gold?"

"They'd carry weapons, as well," Father said. "I thought I saw some ruins in the forest to the southwest, probably Old Hypatian. There might be iron to be plucked. I'd settle for nails. You could carry them in your neck contraption."

"How far?" Wistala asked.

"Too far for you to find it on foot. You'd spend weeks searching," Bartleghaff said.

"Exactly," Father said. "Listen, old vulture, you're getting fat on all those fish heads. Fly and guide her so your wings stay in training."

"Why?" Bartleghaff asked. "I need nails like I need a captive hawk's hood and tether."

"Call it a favor to an old friend keeping an eye on his daughter. Two, if you can spare a glance down now and then."

"High flier! Not an errand-wing," Bartlegaff cawed.

"Smoldering pile of feathers for taking advantage of her hospitality," Father said. He spat a globule of fire off the steep rock-side facing the river, watched it fall and hit the froth in a hiss. It rode the waves for a moment, still burning, before succumbing to the white water. "She's been catching and hauling fish for you for weeks. And you fair bubbled with gratitude last night over that rabbit. Or did the gratitude get coughed up along with the bones?"

Bartleghaff worked his trailing wing feathers with his beak. "Oh, very well."

"Have a few mouthfuls of metal yourself, daughter. You're growing, and you need your ferrites. If you come across any quartz or fine sand, a mouthful or two wouldn't hurt. Scours the teeth and aids the digestion."

"So you and Mother have told me. Over and over," Wistala said. But she couldn't hide her excitement at the errand.

Bartleghaff's guidance consisted of a few visits throughout the day, mostly to tell her she was heading in the wrong direction. He always picked out landmarks that she couldn't see, even by climbing a tall tree! She'd follow a ridge he put her on for an afternoon, only to have him swoop down and tell her she'd been making too easterly for hours, and she had to veer back south. She felt her fire bladder twitch at some of the abuse he employed—birdspeech had no end of colorful calumnies.

"You could come down and correct me more often," she said, her fire bladder pulsing in time to her angry hearts.

"You could rest in a clearing now and then so I might see you through these confounded trees."

She guessed it was a young forest. Now and then she passed a stone wall that led nowhere and divided nothing but its mossy side from the bare. She found a tall brick building on a bank. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to divert the stream years ago so that it flowed close to the building; now all was overgrown and inhabited by raccoons who retreated to tight holes in the bricks and bared their teeth when she sniffed at them. According to Father, where one man came, soon there would be ten and then hundreds, but whatever men had lived here, they'd long ago abandoned the land to the thriving trees, leaving the waterfall and pool they'd crafted to tasty frogs and fish.

She chased some smaller crows away from a dead groundhog and decided the meat was too noisome to interest her, but Bartleghaff thought it palatable.

Greenstuff filled every nook and cranny of the ruins, but where wind and water contested the mosses and lichens, marble still gleamed. Wistala crept to the edge of the forest, swarmed up a tree looking out over the ruins, and tried to put a mental map together.

Wistala watched men graze their sheep in the wide grassy lanes of what must have once been a city as their women and children gathered nuts and berries. Dogs, more interested in disturbing the cats sunning themselves atop ruined walls or in the gaps between decorative friezes, trotted from man to sheep, learning whatever might be discovered in each other's tailvents.

The fallen city had three clusters to it, each atop a hill, linked by low walls between, like three spiderwebs sharing a hollow log. A marsh stood at the very center of the three hills, but ancient vine-wrapped columns projected from it, showing that it hadn't always been a wetland. The village of the men stood a few dozen dragon-lengths off, outside a fallen gate that admitted a stream into the ruins. The stream fed the marsh.

She decided to hunt and rest for the day, and then explore the ruins at night. Metal would smell the same day or night, and she'd just as soon poke around after the men had retreated to their hearths. She just hoped they didn't loose dogs in the rubble.

She released Bartleghaff. Retracing her steps would be of no difficulty now that she knew the landmarks. She could find the brick ruin by the stream, and from that the ridge, and from that the wall corners, and from that—

"Keep clear of those men," Bartleghaff warned. "If you smell stewing lamb, just shut your nostrils. 'Temptation hatches instigation which hatches assassination!'"

The old condor had perched over Father too long: he was starting to sound like a dragon.

"Tell Father I'll be back in a day or two."

"Wasted air. He'll send me back to watch you," Bartleghaff grumbled. He took to the skies, wings wider than she was long beating the air as he rose.

Wistala flattened some tall grass and let the sun clean her scales. As twilight fell, she found a pile of old timber riddled with termites and tore open the pieces with her claws, taking up the crunchy tunnelers three at a time with her tongue.

Insect eating, once started, is difficult to stop, and it was a very lucky termite that escaped into the fallen leaves. The next thing she knew, the sun had disappeared in her silent fall, and the night belonged to her.

It was a warm summer night, with red clouds purpling overhead. The air had a thick softness to it that promised a hot day tomorrow.

Wistala started her search, mostly following her nose from corner to alley to stoop.

She found a few nails, almost unrecognizable for their rust, and found it was easier to break up the wood where they still lay than it was to pull them out. She ate one—it tasted almost like blood. She found what might have once been a cutting tool beneath some broken shards of pottery. It smelled like bad steel.

She chased a smell down and dug at the base of a wall, but found only bits and pieces of mixed metal and glass.

"What-t-t on earth-th-th are you?" a voice said to her in rather breathy birdspeech.

A pair of yellow eyes, slit like hers, watched her from a deep shadow.

"A scaled snaggletooth. Are you a cat?"

"Look, learn, and give in to the awe!" the owner of the eyes said. Wistala found her easy to understand, her body and throat issued patterns sisterly to dragonspeech.

The eyes came out into the moonlight, walking along the wall. Wistala read the thin orange-striped silhouette from whiskers to long twitching tail. "A word of advice: Never ask a softstalker whether she's a feline or not. If she is, you may admire at leisure. If she isn't, you'll just shame her. My name is Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter, born this spring here in Tumbledown, and I've never seen anything dumb enough to swallow metal before. Even dogs are brighter. Did you think it a beetle?"

"No. I have strange appetites."

"I'll say," Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter agreed. "Have you a name?"

"Wistala. Here hunting metals."

"I prefer rats, myself."

"I don't smell blood on you."

The cat licked one of her black paws and rearranged the hair on her ears. "The moon hasn't smiled on me yet tonight. I'm a free spirit. All the big males have the best spots staked out for their mates and kits."

The cat seemed terribly thin to Wistala. "I hate rats. My brothers could swallow them whole, but those tails …" She shut her nostrils.

"You must know these ruins, then," Wistala said.

"Of course."

"Do you know where I can find more metal?"

The cat turned a neat circle, looked Wistala up and down. "You've got short thick claws. Almost badgerlike. How are you at digging?"

"I—I don't know. I've clawed through ice."

"The rats have a place under Tumbledown here. They call it Deep Run. A network of tunnels. Not built by them, of course. Supposedly there are outlets in the swamp, but no self-respecting feline will traipse around in there for fear of the channelbacks. I know a hole that leads to Deep Run. If you enlarge it, I'll show you some metal coin. It's old and crusty, but metal nonetheless. Nice little mouthfuls. Of course, you'll have to dig again. I don't think you'd fit."

Wistala considered. At the rate she was going in the ruins, her improvised nose bags would take days to fill. The men had obviously picked the surface clean of anything useful.

Anything worth the having is worth the effort, Mother used to say.

"It's a bargain."

"It occurs to me," the cat said, "that once underground, you could make a meal of me."

"Can you keep something from the birds earthbound and ditch-gossips?"

"Of course. Felines are full of secrets."

Wistala drew herself up on her stubby legs. "I'm a dragon, feline, and I give you my word as Wistala Irelianova that I'll keep a fair bargain if you will."

Whiskers twitched. "And what would a dragon be?"

Wistala froze for a moment. The cat seemed perfectly worldly, well-spoken and felicitous of fang. Apart from the chopped-short neck and face, she was almost drakine after Jizara's elegantly limbed fashion. How could she not know what a dragon was?

"We are old, falling between mountains and man, gifted by the Four Spirits with strengths to order the world."

The cat's back rose in a graceful arc. "Order? Order is the enemy of the feline. We thrive on chaos, and if there's not enough about, we instigate some. I hope you haven't come to bring order to Tumbledown."

"Nothing like."

"I should think a creature meant to bring order to the world would be bigger."

"I'm young."

Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter turned her alarmed pose into a casual stretch. "Make me this hole, Wistala Irelianova, and I and my kits will be in your debt and keep your secret that a dragon has come to Tumbledown."

"Bargain."

"Then let us touch whiskers … errr …"

Wistala extended her griff. "Will these do?"

"How beautiful! Yes, of course."

The cat approached and stood nose-to-nose with her, then put her head alongside Wistala's. Wistala felt the cat's whiskers tickle as they flicked along her scales and probed the gaps. They prrumed at each other, and Wistala felt a warm affinity.

"I fear I shall have to like you for your mind, Wistala Irelianova. You are too hard to perch on for a comfortable nap and smell like that furnace the men use to cook their metal."

"It's Tala to my friends."

"Then I'm Yari-Tab to you. Follow."

The cat jumped away, tail flicking this way and that in excitement. Dragons and felines must be related somehow! Even their naming customs bore some resemblance.

"What's catspeech like, Yari-Tab?"

The cat spoke from deep in her throat: long garble garble hrrr hunt and fair garble garble hrr blood.

Why, felines used words of Drakine!

"Beware blighters bearing gifts," Wistala said back to her in Drakine, quoting an old dragon-proverb.

"Watch out for—ummm, dirty presents?" Yari-Tab said, as she trotted up a leaning column that reminded Wistala of a windblown tree on a mountainside.

"Close. That was dragonspeech."

"Well, I never! I feel like I've got a new tchatlassat."

Wistala thought she knew the word. "A … clutchmate?"

"More like a—umm … cousin. A distant blood relation who is also a friend."

What was the word for that in drakine? Ah yes, kazhin. "My mother never told me about felines."

"Mine taught me to hunt, and that's about all. But that's felines for you. Great at telling their own tales and looking out for same, indifferent to anyone else's. We've got to find that basement now. Ahhh."

Yari-Tab jumped down from the column to a protruding branch, then to a broken windowsill, and then to the ground in a sort of controlled fall. She landed a good deal lighter than a dragon.

"Can you fit down this, Talassat?"

Wistala looked down what appeared to be an overgrown hole. Brambles trailed over an overhanging pile of rubble.

Yari-Tab ventured in and turned so her eyes glittered from the darkness. Above it three ancient arches, all broken open at the top, hosted a tangle of spider-legged plants.

"It widens out a little way down. Can you smell the rats?"

Wistala stuck her head in, smelled the rat urine mixed with old leaves and wormcast. The gap yawned bigger than it looked; it was mostly closed off by roots and their attendant mosses and trapped leaves. She pushed her head down and through, catching bits of lichen and dry air-root in her scales.

She found they were on stairs, Yari-Tab already down and through another hole, a half-filled passageway.

She tracked by smell and sound—the cat's footfalls were as silent as morning mist, but Wistala could hear her breath and sniffing.

"I wish I had my fire," Wistala said.

"Fire?"

"Yes, dragons can spit fire. I don't like not being able to see. A torf here and there makes all the difference."

"That's part of the fun, hunting by ear and nose. Though all this talking has sent the rats running."

"Sorry. I like being underground—I just want to explore thoroughly so I can feel safe, and unless dragons live long out of the sun, their eyes can't work on nothing."

"It's light you want? Want to see a bit of magic?"

"Cats and rats! You can do magic?"

Yari-Tab purred. "Oh no, but I'm fond of pretties. See this, my all-nose-and-no-smellsense-tchatlassat."

Wistala heard the cat scamper up a wall and more prruming.

A faint glow, like an angry dragoneye, threw a faint amber light across the chamber. With a modicum of light to work with, Wistala could now see the passageway they traversed.

She reared up and sniffed at the light source. It was some humble gem, perhaps enchanted in a fashion, for it held a glowing liquid within. As her nostrils breathed on it, the light grew brighter.

Yari-Tab extracted a clump of dirt from her paw and a cobweb from her whiskers. "There you are, Talassat. Some bit of forgotten magic—they're here and there in odd corners in the underground. The men have stripped them from the chambers they can get at. No one's found this one."

"How do you know about it?"

"My mother showed me this chamber and the trick, and I imagine she got it from hers. Rats aren't very clever—if you put a little light in a room, they're far braver about traveling the shadows than they are when it's holefill black."

"Did your father ever teach you at all?"

"Never knew him." She made another light descent and trotted to the far corner of the passageway. "One of a dozen possibles and not much for hanging about goes the feline proverb."

Wistala tried to imagine what the home cave would have been like with other hatchlings and mother-dragons about. Other male hatchlings pouncing her—she got a pang as she thought of Auron.

So much less to eat!

Wistala found herself liking Yari-Tab, though once she began talking, she was like a mountainside stream on a warm spring day, running always.

They entered an arched chamber, dead-ending in a collapsed cascade of dirt and masonry. The cut-off passage was about the size of Father if you didn't count his neck and trunk, cobwebbed above and rat-fouled below.

"You're sending the rats running," Yari-Tab said, hearing scrabbling sounds from a series of holes at the edge of the room. They were choked with dirt, broken stone, and everything from bits of bark to twigs.

She paused at one that stood under a crack in the wall where a good deal of masonry had fallen away, showing dirt behind mixed in with chunks of man-cut stone, both enlarging and blocking the passage. "There are bits of tunnel beneath this. Lots in other places are filled with swamp water, but this one has so much rat-scent coming up out of it, I think it's got to lead to the Deep Run."

"How do you know the Deep Run exists?"

"The rats squeak it to each other when they're being chased."

With every word, it became easier to understand the cat. Wistala wasn't sure if they were speaking Feline or Drakine or some simplified version blending the two. Their slit-pupiled eyes regarded each other in the darkness.

Wistala sniffed at the blockade. Only the tiniest glimmer of light came from the stone in the other room, but it was enough for her eyes to work on. "The rats have dug a hole. Why don't you just enlarge it?"

"A feline? Dig?" Yari-Tab flipped onto her back and rolled around in delight, batting at a bit of old cottonwood seed that had drifted down somehow, fighting it like an enemy. "Digging's for the rodents," she said as she sat and reset her fur.

Wistala thrust her snout into the hole, widened it enough for her sii, and went to work. Soon she sent showers of dirt in either direction, extracting or shoving the bigger pieces out of the way.

Yari-Tab found a perch out of the way of the digging and settled down to watch.

Her claws struck metal, badly rusted. Some kind of bars had been set into the tunnel, which trapped sticks, which collected leaves, which stopped dirt and blockaded the inlet.

The bars vexed her even after she dug her way through. Though rusted, they were too hard to bite, and all her claws could achieve against them were a series of scorings. Just beyond, a mound of dirt blocked the inlet, but a rat path ran up toward the top of the sluice. She backed out of the tunnel.

"Finished already?" Yari-Tab yawned.

Wistala blew dirt out of her nostrils. "See if you can get through the rat hole now."

The cat disappeared down the hole and returned, mud tipping her whiskers. "You're almost there. Beyond the bars is a hole, and beyond that I smell fresher air and hear lots of water drips."

"Except I can't get beyond those bars."

"Surely your neck can get through," Yari-Tab said, cleaning herself.

"I can't dig with my head."

"Well, don't look at me."

Wistala's tail swished of its own mind, and she crawled back down the sluice. She put her head through the bars and felt around with her nostrils. At the bottom joins, the water had worn away masonry, and it was quite crumbly on the other side. She extracted her head and went to work with one of her claws.

When she cleared off chunks all around the bricks holding the bar, she pushed again, but still it wouldn't yield.

"Stone and bone, what a bother!" Muscles convulsed in her chest, and she spat at the bar. A rope of spit clung to it, as ineffectual as her claws. But it gave off a sharp, hot odor.

Am I getting my foua this early?

She heard a rat make a yeeking noise and scuttle.

If she could only part the bars a little so they'd offer more room, like—

Wistala remembered sleeping between Auron and Jizara. Jizara always took the warm spot against Mother, and Auron would sleep to the outside, leaving her cramped in the middle. Sometimes they pressed so close, she could hardly breathe. When they did that, she turned on her back and used her short, strong saa legs to part them.

She wedged her hindquarters sideways, pressing her tail through the gap, and backed as far as she could between the bars. She pressed with her legs at the center of the bar, just as she used to do at the center of Auron's back.

It bent!

With that achieved, she repositioned herself between the bars facing the other way. She bent that one, as well. Now she had enough space to really put her legs and back into it—

Craaak!

The sudden release of pressure shocked her into thinking she'd broken her back instead of the bar for a moment, but sure enough, the bottom join had broken free of the rest of the clawed-away masonry. With half its strength gone, she could get down on all fours under it.

Ten heartbeats later, it was done—she could get through.

"Done it done it done it!" she called up to Yari-Tab.

"I knew you would," the feline called back, sounding half-awake.

With the bars out of the way, clawing earth seemed like pushing through nothing more than a pile of fallen leaves. She spun as she dug, all four limbs working once and tail helping shove out the loosened earth, and then she got through. Her nostrils filled with fresher-moving air.

And the smell of rats.

A smooth-sided tunnel yawned beneath, water and muck filling the bottom. Other arched-off tunnels branched off it, some dry, others trickling a bit of water and algae. A green lichen grew at the rim of the water, some weak cousin of the growth from the home cave. Or rather the stuff living in the lichen—Mother had told her that the lichen itself didn't glow; rather, the light came from tiny creatures that thrived on its fuzzy surface.

"Come and have a look, sister," Wistala said.

Her water-lids fluttered up and back down when she realized what she'd said.

Yari-Tab crept easily between dirt pile and a tangle of roots holding the earth that hadn't fallen.

"Such scents! Such hunting! I'll never suffer an empty belly again." Her tail stood straight up as she looked out over the water-bottomed tunnel. Walkways big enough for a man stretched to either side of the main channel; other passages branched off everywhere.

"Watch yourself. They can be savage when cornered. If they're anything like cave rats, that is."

"Oh, to be sure."

"The coin?"

"But, of course."

Yari-Tab tore herself away from what Wistala suspected were dreams of bloody rat livers and climbed back up the sluice. This time she went to the glow-room, reignited it by rubbing herself round the stone again, and took off down another passage. She passed under a low arch and came to a badly cracked wall.

"Someone took a lot of trouble to seal the metal behind this wall and make it look like just another stretch of passageway. It's just inside that hole at the bottom."

Wistala could smell metal through the hole. She thrust her nose in, following an instinct that wasn't quite hunger and wasn't quite lust.

But nothing but dusty darkness met her exploring tongue—though the dust did taste of refined metal.

"Where is it?" she asked, withdrawing her head.

Yari-Tab bunched up in the darkness, eyes widening.

"Where's what? The hole's full of it!"

"No, it isn't. What kind of trick is this?" She felt her griff drop and begin to rattle, and the cat backed away.

"I wouldn't play a trick on a tchatlassat! Never!"

"Take a look," Wistala said.

"I … I can't seem to move."

"Fears and tears, I'm not going to hurt you."

Wistala lay down in hungry despair, feeling frustrated. After a long moment, the cat padded to the hole and entered.

Yari-Tab reemerged. "The rats. Wouldn't you know it."

"What would they use coin for?"

"I've never made it past wondering why they eat tail-stinkies that are better off buried, myself."

"Well, might as well ask them."

"Ask who?"

"The rats, of course. They took it."

Her ears went flat. "The rats? Are you frothing? They can only just vocalize. Hardly more sense than mouse-jibber."

Wistala picked herself up and started back for the sluice. "Are you coming?"

"Do you even understand Rodent?"

"Err—"

Yari-Tab bounded after her. "Then I'm coming. Someone sensible ought to come on this expedition. This story will be worth yowling till it echos, if you pull it off."

They returned to the opening to Deep Run. They heard rats flee ahead of them as they climbed the dirt pile.

"Inspecting your claw-work."

"Where to next?" Wistala asked once they climbed down to the pathway beside the muddy water. She saw glittering red rat eyes on a high ledge that ran near the top of the tunnel.

"I don't know. You instigated this dogbrained hunt. Follow the strongest smells until we corner some."

This underground felt wrong to her; everything was even and proportioned and unnatural. She felt vaguely tense and unsettled as she explored.

They came to an outpouring of water from some aboveground entry. The fall was about as wide as she was long and fed a swampy mass of tangled water plants, here and there sending out buds on long stems like dragon necks.

"Can you jump that?" she asked, looking at the waterfall. The rats slipped through it under a low, wet overhang of fallen-away masonry.

"No. Too long," Yari-Tab answered.

"Then hang on to my back. You're going to get wet."

"Oh, bother," Yari-Tab said. Wistala winced as she felt claws dig into the base of her scales.

Wistala plunged through the spray and came out the other side into a join of passages.

Yari-Tab hopped off her back and made a great show of flicking her tail this way and that and kicking up her rear legs as she shook off the wet, a good deal of her grace and all of her dignity gone. She was even bonier than Wistala had imagined, obviously—

A ripple broke the pool, and the water exploded as a blur of a long-nosed shape lunged for Yari-Tab. Wistala saw snaggly yellow teeth and open mouth—

Once when Wistala was just out of the egg, a stalactite had cracked in the home cave, and Mother came to the edge of the egg shelf in a flash, putting her scaly bulk between the hatchlings and the gloom of the cave before the echo faded. Mother explained it later as "the fighting instinct," and something very similar must have happened in some same depth of Wistala's brain that kept her hearts beating.

Wistala jumped forward, threw herself into the jaws, felt them close on her scales and belly. An irresistible force dragged her into the water and under into darkness.

Whatever had a hold of her was perhaps surprised at her size, for it tried to shake her, but managed to only wave her back and forth in the black water filled with tiny strings of water roots. Wistala clawed with both sii and saa, lashed with her tail, brought her head round, and bit whatever held her at the join of its jaw. She got one saa into the teeth and tried to pry the jaws apart.

The pressure vanished, and the beast rolled, pulling her around it like a constricting snake as she left its jaws. It was perhaps the weight of a pony, though all jaws and tail, limbs smaller even than hers—

Since it had released her, she returned the favor, and it swam off into darkness. As she broke the surface of the water, she saw a thick tail with a serrated fringe like leathery teeth swirl the water and capsize the podlike blossoms of the water plants.

Wistala hugged ground and pulled herself up beside Yari-Tab, spat out a loosened hatchling tooth.

"That was a channelback!" Yari-Tab said from a perch at the top of the wall. For a half-starved cat, she was quite a jumper. She hopped down and landed softly next to Wistala.

"It fled. I was too big a mouthful anyway."

"If you miss on your first pounce—," Yari-Tab said.

"Try, try again elsewhere," Wistala replied, paraphrasing an old dragonelle proverb. A creature that lived by hunting could ill-afford fights with prey; a lost eye or a broken limb could mean death by starvation.

"Thank you, tchatlassat," Yari-Tab said. They turned and climbed away from the tunnel lake to a drier path, only to be attacked again.

Wistala felt a pull at her saa as she saw a trio of rats leap down from the ledge above—she lashed out instinctively with her saa and swished with her tail.

Two rats landed on her back, one on her head. It went for the eyes, and she panicked, whipping her head and rolling. Yari-Tab squealed as her body weight rolled over the cat.

She felt a bite in the naked flesh under her sii-pit. She whipped her head down, pulled the rat up by her teeth as she might a tick, crushed it, and flung it back into the channel water. Something bit at her hindquarters again, and she kicked—

Then they were gone as quickly as they'd come. She smelled blood and rats thick all around.

Yari-Tab had one pinned, both claws digging into its shoulders as it kicked out. The feline opened her teeth—

"Wait!" Wistala said.

"Whyever? The foul beasts bit my—"

"I want him to show us to the coin."

The rat squeaked in fright.

"Ask it," Wistala urged. "Ask it where the shiny metal is."

Yari-Tab squeaked out something, and the rat chattered back.

"He says he knows just what you mean and that there's lots. Don't believe a word, though. Rats will say anything once you've got your claws in them."

"I'll take the chance. Tell him to show us."

"He'll bolt down the first hole or dive—"

Wistala bent down and took the rat in her mouth. She held her jaws just open enough for the rat to see the tunnel through her rows of teeth.

Yari-Tab purred. "That'll keep him in line." She squeaked up at the rat.

"He begs you not to swallow."

Wistala tried to form words but couldn't. She tilted her head and rapped a claw on the stepstones.

"Oh. Of course." She squeaked out again. "He says straight ahead for a while."

To any rats, or perhaps cave toads or bats lurking in the tunnels, they must have made a strange procession. Wistala walking with her head aloft, jaw set in its grimace, a rat nose protruding from between prominent fore-fangs. An orange-striped cat walking beneath, hopping over mud and rat droppings, occasionally rising up on its hind legs to squeak into the hatchling's mouth, in and out of mottled moss-light.

Eventually they climbed up a pile of fallen brickwork and into a chamber roofed by the remaining masonry and tree roots. The tree roots ran down the sides of columns, rose out of statues of human figures like bizarre hair braids, explored crumbles and cracks and dark ends of holes.

Rats filled the chamber, not in a smooth sea but rather in little puddles of brown fur, constantly shifting according to whim. Wistala had found some piles of bat droppings in the home cave that smelled worse—but not by much. Light came down from above in a pair of shafts, large and small, through some kind of half-clogged well in the roof.

The rats retreated from their entrance, disappearing into innumerable holes and cracks in a flurry of naked tails. The stouter-hearted bared fangs at the cat from beneath piles of fallen brick.

Wistala spat out the rat. It scampered away, shaking saliva from its hind feet.

"Better hop up on my head," Wistala suggested as a braver group of rats gathered on a pile of rags and bones at the center of the room.

It wasn't easy to hold the weight of the cat at the end of her neck, especially with the taste of rat in her mouth—the hairy beast had fouled her tongue in its terror—but she did her best to raise Yari-Tab up.

"Tell them we come to make a bargain, if there's any such word the rodents use."

Yari-Tab yeeked out something.

That set up a storm of chittering like crickets.

More questions and answers passed back and forth. Wistala hoped Yari-Tab wasn't committing her to driving the men away in exchange for the coin or anything mad like that.

Her head swam, and she lowered it. The rats backed away and returned, easily frightened, easily encouraged.

"Just a moment—they're calling for someone," Yari-Tab said. She made a pretense of nonchalance, licking mud from her paws, but her tail twitched.

Wistala stilled it with a sii.

A creeping, cloud-eyed rat appeared, white all around the eyes and snout. The other rats jostled it as it came forward. A big brute of a rat dashed from the shadows and bowled it over, before scampering around them in a quick circle.

Wistala felt Yari-Tab instinctively lunge after the rodent, drawn by the motion, but held her back by the tail. The cat let out an outraged hiss.

The cloud-eyed rat would not be discouraged. It approached and yeeked.

"What did he say?"

"I can't make nose or tail out of it. I know we were called nightstalkers."

"Just say what I say: I've come to claim coin rightfully mine, mistakenly taken by the rats."

With a great deal of halting and repeating, Yari-Tab chirped out the message. More rats had gathered, until they surrounded the pair like a gray-brown field.

The big rat that had jostled the cloud-eyed one stood up on its haunches and chattered. Wistala noted that the brute had a patch of fur missing from its shoulder, pink scar tissue with a few spikelike hairs had replaced brown fur. The older rat yeeked in return.

"Well?" Wistala asked.

"What do you suppose 'finders keepers' means?" Yari-Tab asked.

"They have it, anyway. Ask them what they could possibly use hominid coin for?"

"Oh, my aching head." Yari-Tab chattered back. After that, only the cloud-eyed rat spoke, and at length.

Yari-Tab stopped to scratch the back of her ear. "I think I'm getting a perch on this. The rats seem to think if they get enough coin together, men will come and fight over it and leave bodies strewn about as they did long ago, and the rats will have great feasting."

"Tell them—tell them it does no good to just gather it if the men don't know about it. If they'll return the coin from behind the false wall, only enough for me to fill my bags, I'll spread rumors among the men about their hoard. Then the men will come and fight."

Yari-Tab yeeked, but was cut off by the big rat, who ran up to her and stood nose to nose, baring his teeth.

"You've just been called a lying every-name and then some."

"Tell them this: I intend to find or replace my coin. I'll dig and I'll dig, looking for more. Who knows how many holes I'll open up, and then these tunnels will be crawling with cats."

Yari-Tab's eyelids went so wide, Wistala feared her eyeballs might roll out of her head. "We might not want to threaten—"

"Just say it," Wistala said, widening her stance and lowering her belly as the feline translated.

At that, the big brute rat screeched and jumped. It had courage; Wistala had to grant it that. It landed on her back and started to clamber up her neck, all awful sensation, rat claws digging into the base of her scales.

Yari-Tab disappeared under a wave of rodents as others jumped on. The feline let out such an earsplitting yowl, the mass of rats around them froze for a moment.

That worked so well, Wistala added a roar of her own, not so sharp to the ears, but a good deal louder—even if it came out as a strangled cry. The tide of rats turned, save for a few locked in combat with hatchling and cat. The rat sank its teeth into the soft flesh beneath her jaw. Wistala whipped her head to and fro, but the brute hung on, digging in. Wistala opened her mouth and swung it so its hindquarters flipped up and into her mouth.

Even in death, the rat's teeth didn't relax.

Yari-Tab, blood-smeared and wild-eyed, exploded out of the rats and jumped to the top of Wistala's broad back, clawing up by way of the canvas bags. From there, the cat lashed out with her paws, swatting rats even as she hung on to the twisting hatchling. Wistala bit the rats clamped to her friend's haunches.

It was over in a few heartbeats. Wistala and Yari-Tab stood panting, the torn rat still dangling from the hatchling's neck like a blood-dripping ornament.

Only the cloud-eyed rat still stood its ground. Perhaps it hadn't seen the bloody contest.

"Well?" Wistala asked it, prying the dead rat loose with a claw. It came away with no small amount of flesh and blood between its jaws, its scarred shoulder red with her blood.

Yari-Tab trembled so on her back, it reminded Wistala of the beating wings of her dreams, only hundreds of times faster.

The rat yeeked heartily.

"Did you catch that?" Wistala asked.

"What?" Yari-Tab said. "Oh. My apologies, noble rathunter." A conversation ensued. Wistala tried licking out her wounds as the noises passed back and forth. Though shallow, the bites hurt abominably. A great forest boar wouldn't have been able to draw so much blood with its tusks against her scales as the rats could with tiny sharp teeth.

"The meal of it is, he's going to give you the coin," Yari-Tab said.

"What's his price for the rats we killed?"

"Nothing. He thinks it's good for the hotheads to kill themselves off now and then. More room for the rest."

Wistala swallowed the remaining half of the brute rat. It wasn't so bad after all, and she was as hungry as she'd ever been eating bones and claw-thin, fresh-spawned slugs in the home cave. "Even so. No sense leaving bodies lying around to remind them."

A procession of rats led them to a dank, dark room at the meeting of two sets of stairs where a metal cistern, big enough to hold a clutch of dragon eggs, lay half on its side.

Wistala's wounds still stung, but less now, and the pain was being replaced by a warm itch that in a lot of ways was worse than the sharper hurt.

Gold and green-covered coins lay within. The spill of metal didn't shine or glitter or gleam, but even the most tarnished coin made Wistala briefly swish her tail and stand with head erect, saliva suddenly thick at her gumline. A hoard!

Kill the rats! Kill them all! Kill the cat! Kill anything that so much as makes an echo near my glitters!

"Tchatlassat!" Yari-Tab squeaked as Wistala dragon-dashed forward, bowling her over. "Sister!"

Wistala stood with hindquarters to the coin, the shadows around her dark and red and angry.

The rats scattered, but Yari-Tab stood her ground, though she stood sideways, back arched, ready to flee.

"Sister!" she repeated, sounding passably Drakine.

Wistala blinked. The red faded. She took a mouthful of metal, more to give the wet in her mouth something to work on while she set her thoughts in order. She'd never expected the glamour of gold to be so strong!

"Oh! Sorry, tchatlassat, I came over funny. The rat bites are making me moody."

Yari-Tab said, "Your eyes went all red and fiery. I was worried for a moment that you had the froth."

"Better now." She took another mouthful of coin, rolled it around with her tongue until it was good and slimy, then let it slip down her throat. A brief, pleasant tinkle sounded from within as it clanked into the first bit.

"Let's see how much I can carry."

The rats regathered to watch.

Within a few moments, she had both bags filled—the pile looked hardly touched. Wistala looked around the chamber. Not a bad spot, actually, with water near and ample food. In the form of rats. But a dragon vow couldn't just be shrugged off like a dropped leaf. Besides, Father needed the coin worse than she.

Wistala nodded to the rats and trudged back the way they'd come. Yari-Tab jumped on her back and rode, claws dug into the crosspiece for the bags.

"It's going to feel a long way back carrying this load," Wistala said.

"Why leave?" Yari-Tab asked. "The hunting's going to be good with that run open. Next tailswell, I might even treat one of the local lazeabouts and have a litter of kittens. Deep Run will be our little secret."

"I'm already overlong," Wistala said, as they rejoined the sewer. It took her a moment to get her bearings, but only a moment—she still had her Lower World sense.

"Will you come back for more coin? I mean someday."

"I can't say."

"You've got a funny smell and a clumsy foot-way about you, Talassat. But I must admit you're the most interesting creature I've come across since I pounced my first mouse. I'll be sorry to see you leave Tumbledown."

Wistala sniffed the passage with the glow-crystal before reentering it. Full daylight shone outside, and there'd be men up and around. Perhaps she should sleep for a while and go back into the forest by dark. Yes. She was very tired. And the rat bites itched.

"I'm for a nap."

"Always a good idea," Yari-Tab agreed.

Wistala found an out-of-the-way corner with good air carrying smells from the entrance and settled down on a patch of dried mud obscuring some kind of tile artwork.

After a few tries, Yari-Tab curled up against her belly. "Your skin's about as comfortable as a riverbed," Yari-Tab said. "Warm belly, though."

Together, they slept.

Yari-Tab wasn't much of a sleepmate. She got up and went off to prowl at least four times that Wistala remembered, then returned and made a production out of finding a comfortable spot.

But she did bring Wistala a dead snake a for breakfast. Wistala had no appetite, as she felt dry and sick from rat bites. Wistala wondered that the bony feline could carry the serpent, which looked fully half her weight, from wherever she'd caught it. Unfortunately, she'd have to carry the onerous weight of the coin much, much farther.

Time to be off.

"A good jump and a full belly, Talassat," Yari-Tab said as they made their good-byes.

"A good jump and a full belly, fur-sister," Wistala replied. The cat rubbed the side of her face against her folded griff and gave her forehead a lick.

As Wistala sniffed her way out of the ruins, she looked back at her feline friend, who found an old headless statue to sit upon and watch her leave. Wistala flicked head and tail up, and the cat raised a paw. Far off, a dog barked at the motion, and Wistala scrambled to the other side of a fallen column to put its bulk between her and the noisy dog. She looked back once more at the bottom of the hill, but Yari-Tab atop her statue was nothing but a lump against a multitude of other lumps filling the hills.

Wistala didn't relax until she was far from the smell of burning charcoal with a forest of shadows behind her. Only then did she cast about for a meal.

She had no luck—the clanking coins atop her back sounded a warning of her approach—and she went hungry that night.

She heard the first bay from the ridgetop, her halfway-home mark, as the morning sun turned the western mountains of her birth into blood-edged teeth.

At first she guessed it to be a distant wolf cry, but when the call wasn't answered from any quarter of the horizon, but rather taken up by other canine voices behind her—quite precisely behind her, she realized with an anxious gulp—she knew it had to be dogs.

Perhaps the dogs were after some poor stag or fox. She'd kept clear of the flocks of Tumbledown to avoid a vengeful hunt, and in all likelihood, she'd roused one anyway.

But time, she had time. Time to improvise.

Keeping to the ridge had its advantages. She could hear or see the pursuit—and it was the most direct path home. But a series of lakes to the morning side and a stream to the evening side might delay the dogs. She didn't know much about canines except that they couldn't smell their way across water.

Wistala trotted along until she found a sharp-sided ravine on the lake-littered side of the ridge. She let a little urine go to give it a strong dragon scent, then slid down its muddy sides. She trotted to a reed-infested pond, scattering waterfowl this way and that. She drank deep and thought for a moment—she had to get this just right.

First Wistala loosed the rest of her urine at the pond's edge, allowing most of it to go into the water. With a little luck, it would spread and filter through the whole pond until the dogs would detect it on every bank.

She left a confusion of muddy tracks and knocked over reeds at the bank, then rolled in waterfowl droppings, smearing her sii and saa thoroughly with them. Then she backtracked and climbed the ridge to her original path at a different spot, and carefully avoided the well-marked ravine.

All the climbing made her legs weary. The heavy yoke of coins across her neck felt heavier at each step, even as her stomach felt emptier despite the water.

At the thought of the coins, her mouth flooded with the slimy drool she'd had when she first came across them. Father wouldn't notice a mouthful or two gone—and they'd carry lighter in her stomach.

Once clear of her dog-dodge, she hurried as best as she could along the ridgetop, carrying tail high and doing her best to keep from snapping branches or trotting through muddy hollows. When her breath left her, she paused and ate a big mouthful of coin from each bag, more to take the desire out of her mind and mouth than because she actually needed it… .

An hour later, she came off the ridge, fixing her snout on the mountain notch that marked the source of the river gorge. If she traveled hard, she'd reach Father before nightfall. The rat bites were itching worse than ever, not quite pain, but adding to her bone-deep weariness.

She tore the loose bark off a fallen tree and managed to get a few insects, but they only made her hunger worse. Oh, for a sick porcupine or a one-winged pheasant!

A noise behind, light footfalls …

Wistala caught a glimpse of a hairy back, thinner than a bear's but not much smaller. She jumped up a bank and turned into a concealing patch of milkweed.

A black dog, with foam-flecked tongue and yellow teeth, padded out of the brush. Its eyes were wide and nervous as it put its long pointed snout to the trail. It had an odd sort of fur, extremely short at its head and limbs, thick and spiked like a badger's about the shoulders and upper back. It bore no tail that she could see. A leather collar, fixed high about its neck, and studded rings showed it to be domesticated. Even more oddly, two matching red runes were painted on its flanks. They reminded Wistala of flames or lightning bolts.

It sniffed the air and turned a nervous circle.

Wistala held her breath.

The dog trotted along her trail, nose pointed down but eyes watching the way ahead, passed her little bank upwind. The dog, like most fur-bearers, smelled like a dungheap. A faint smell of blood came from it, too.

Leap on it leap on it leap on it!

But she couldn't. All her body seemed capable of was shivering beneath the white-yellow flowers of the milkweed.

The dog turned, obscenely bulging eyes with their evil round pupils fixing on her location. It gave one querulous bark and looked right and left, as though searching for allies among the tree trunks.

Wistala shot forth to the edge of the bank and planted her feet, extended her griff and hissed at the beast:

"Go away!"

If it understood her, it gave no sign. Instead it let loose with a deep-throated snarl and came straight at her.

Fast, so fast, it was on her in an eyeblink. They came down the bank, rolling together, the dog's long limbs tangled with her own, teeth clattering against teeth. It yelped as she landed on its hindquarters but still sunk its teeth into her sii-shoulder joint. The upper teeth had no luck against her scales, but the lower went home.

Wistala raked it with her rear claws and felt blood and sinew. The dying dog hung on, closing its eyes to the pain… .

She resisted the urge to tear it free from her skin; that would do more damage. She waited until its heart stopped and then gently pried its jaws open.

Distant dog barks from the ridge told her at least one of the canine's yelps had been heard. She nosed into the dog's claw-torn belly and found the liver. Mother always said, if you could just eat one piece of an animal, it should always be the liver.

The body twitched as she chewed and lapped at dripping blood. It was an old dog. There were white circles about its eyes, ears, and nose. Perhaps it had become confused and broken away from the rest of the pack—

Then she licked the bite wound clean and pressed on.

Despite the meal, she'd come off worse from the engagement. Her front limb was horribly sore; she could hardly stand to move it, so she hobbled along as best as she could using the other three, now heading up into the foothills of the mountains.

She found a dry gully full of thick thorny brush and plunged into it, snaking along with half-closed eyes. The thorns rattled and snapped on her scales, red flowers above like wounds in the sky—those wretched dogs with their thin-furred muzzles would be miserable following her through it.

A tear—one of the bags had ripped open, caught on a thorny branch that had the tenacity of an iron hook. She turned and sniffed at the coins already falling from the sack.

Nothing to do but eat them.

When she came out of the thornbushes she found that her load was unbalanced, the remaining bag kept sliding over sideways—her makeshift contraption didn't have much in the way of stabilizing straps. She ate mouthful after mouthful of coin from the other bag as she rested, greedy for each deliciously metallic swallow.

She staggered on, sick with fatigue, the coins in her gut clattering. Step after wretched step after wretched step uphill, until she thrust herself forward using only her hind legs, the front ones folded flat against her side.

The bags were too heavy; that was why her limbs gave out. She abandoned them, ate a few more coins so that they wouldn't go to waste—maybe her last pleasure in life would be that of silver and gold rolling around in her mouth. Besides, the men would just have them anyway, and go buy themselves new mates or flocks or boots or whatever it was that men did with coin.

But, Father! She tore off one tiny pocket of canvas and spat two remaining coins into it, gripped it in her teeth as she pushed on, keeping three of her four limbs moving on into darkness.

Roaring in her ears now. She felt wet on the interior of her nostrils.

The river!

She could see the prominence ahead. The battered columns, the rocks where Father would perch and fish, the jagged spur he always used to help himself back to the sleeping spot at the old meeting place or whatever it was.

She gave a glad, trumpeting cry and staggered on—at least she wasn't leaving a blood trail anymore. She'd failed this time, but she knew where to get more coin now, she'd be trebly-careful, cross the man-road by tree limbs above, there wouldn't be rat bites next time …

Wistala limped out onto the peninsula, climbed up to Father's prominence.

He looked dispirited and sleepy; blood seeped from a reopened wound. Perhaps he'd tried to fly again. "Father!"

"Tala! Back so soon? Bartleghaff's only just left to see how you were doing in the ruins. But perhaps he marked you—here he comes."

"I … ," Wistala managed to gasp. Her throat felt too dry for words.

Your contraption didn't survive the trip, I see.

Wistala squinted against the setting sun. The old condor waggled his wings this way and that on the confused air currents of the gorge as he approached.

A baying like a thousand wolves broke out from the banks of the river, louder even than the sound of water crashing into rock.

"What's this?" Father asked.

Wistala could manage thought-pictures: "Some dogs smelled me. I killed one."

Bartleghaff swept low over the peninsula but didn't land. "AuRel: it's the Dragonblade and his pack!"

Father blinked, let out a deep breath. "So he's found me," he said to no one in particular.

"The Dragonblade?" Wistala asked.

"The dwarves would hire him, I suppose." His wings drooped a little farther, and he searched the banks. Wistala saw black shapes bounding through the thick mist-washed ferns. Hunched shapes moved in the lengthening shadows of the woods beyond.

"They're coming off their horses now!" Bartleghaff shouted on another low sweeping pass.

"Fathered by a wolf and mothered by a bear, it seems, with the memory of a tortoise to boot, for his sire was killed by dragons long ago, and he's been seeking vengeance ever since."

"Do you suppose he was at our cave?" Wistala asked.

"Dragons must land sometime, and he always finds their refuge," Father said.

He straightened and got to his feet, a new light in his eyes. He cocked his head at Bartleghaff and flicked a griff up and out. "Go gather your relatives for that feast, old croaker."

Wistala didn't like any of this. Father's words set her trembling with the worst fear she'd ever known. If only she weren't so small, fireless. Useless, useless, useless. "Father, I did find you some coin." She spat out the canvas bag-bottom; her spit made it smell faintly of oats. She nosed out two tarnished coins: one of gold, the other of silver.

"Marvelous, daughter," Father said, nuzzling her fringe. "A pair, alike and yet not twins. Like you and Auron." He took them up with his tongue, carefully placed them to either side in his mouth.

The dogs let out another joined cry.

Must get away … "Are we going to run from the dogs?"

"Tala, I'm never going to fly again, in the air or on land. This fellow's killed more dragons than you have teeth, but he's never tried his luck against me. If I can—"

"Let me help you. I'll draw off the dogs."

Father stamped the ground, hard enough to cause Wistala to bounce.

"NO!"

His roar echoed off the gorge walls, louder than the rushing water, louder than the baying dogs.

Frightened, she tucked her head down into her wounded joint.

"Tala, you're too young for this fight. The best way for you to avenge your brother and sister is to have clutches of your own. Each hatchling of your own who lives to breed avenges them thrice over."

"The dogs—they'll bite and hold."

"I'm not afraid of the dogs or anything else that walks or crawls or swims. Now go."

The dogs must have caught a fresh scent, perhaps Father's blood on the wind, for they set up an eager clamor.

She stood there, shaking. She'd led them right to Father! That was why they'd sent a single old dog to nudge her along! "I won't. I can't."

"Promise me, Wistala. Clutches of your own. Lots and lots of hatchlings."

He nosed her over the edge of the precipice and looked once more down on her. His eyes crinkled, and he no longer looked fearsome and angry.

Love. Wistala'd seen it before when he gazed at Mother as she slept.

"Thank you for the coins, Tala."

With that, he turned. She saw his tail whip briefly overhead, its bronze catching the last of the setting sun. She heard him growl something to Bartleghaff, but couldn't catch it over the churn beneath.

No. She'd climbed up and escaped before. She wouldn't climb down this time. Not even the pain in her dog-bitten sii could stop her.

She slipped over the lip of the cliff and wormed between two pieces of fallen masonry. From the crack, she watched Father advance down the ridge of the narrow peninsula, choosing a rocky outcropping difficult to approach.

Dogs ran toward him in a mass of limbs and white-rimmed eyes and teeth. Behind the dogs, a file of men approached, led by a tall, broad figure in black armor. He was carrying a spear in one hand and a great sword in the other, helm with wings reaching up and almost touching above his crown.

The Dragonblade?

As the dogs approached, Father roared:

 Foe and friend 'tween cave and sky

 All hear me now before I die

 Fire and blood this night will see

 When filial vengeance I take of thee!

If any of the assassins understood his death song, they showed no sign of it.

Father ignored the dogs as they swarmed around him, leaping to reach his joints and claws. Barbed shafts flew from the archers and broke against his crest and scales. Father sent a great jet of fire up and across the crest of the peninsula, striking man and pine woods beyond. As the trees exploded into flame, she heard men's voices cry out. Wistala saw flaming figures fall down the steep sides of the pathway.

The dogs—all alike and bearing the same painted design on their sides as the old one she'd killed by the bank—jumped and bit and hung from Father's belly and limbs, planting their feet and pulling, arching their backs as they tugged at his flesh. Father was screaming in pain and turned into a whirlwind, biting and lashing at the dogs with his claws. But there were so many, and new slavering beasts jumped up to take the place of each one he killed.

The man in the black armor advanced, raising his spear. It sparked and flashed like distant lightning, lighting his armor and throwing shadows all around.

A hot lump burned in Wistala's breast. Father couldn't kill the Dragonblade with dogs pulling at him from every direction. She dragon-dashed forward, squeaking out a roar.

She'd never smelled such a thick blood odor in her life, if anything made sharper by the oily smell of burning dragonflame.

Mad-eyed dogs came at her, and she recoiled, but as her head came up, muscles in her breast took over, and she spat. A thin jet of flame arced out at the dogs, but they jumped aside or over the pathetic puddle of flame.

The dogs, moving so fast they seemed shadow rather than flesh, piled on her.

A white-tipped spear erupted from Father's neck, and he turned mouth wide and roaring at the black-armored figure who stood atop a rock, silhouetted against the burning trees behind. Arrows that glowed as they flew struck Father all about the neck and jaw and burned there.

Wistala staggered forward, feeling the dogs pull at her. She spat the last of her flame at dog haunches clustered at Father's back leg and pulling him over, and was rewarded by agonized yelping above the snarls of the three dogs dragging at her.

Father rolled, crushing the dogs, sending others spinning off into the darkness, the spear lodged in his throat like a great bone. The Dragonblade leaped forward and slashed at Father's belly, opening a wound fully the length of Wistala.

Other men stood at some kind of machine on the peninsula. It sent an oversize arrow into Father's side, punching through scale as easily as her claw-tip could go through a leaf.

"Father!" she cried.

The Dragonblade ducked under Father's bite and swept up with his sword. Father's head and neck crashed down, almost severed.

Wistala forgot the pain, forgot the dogs trying to pull her limb from limb.

She looked into Father's eyes as the battle fire faded and they went dry and glassy. AuRel, Bronze of the Line of AuNor, had joined Mother in the stars above.

Wistala wailed out her pain to the sky.

The Dragonblade knelt and kissed the pommel of his sword, and his men broke into some manner of song.

Wistala bit into a dog, exchanging pain for pain. It howled, and the Dragonblade's men left off his victory song and turned toward her.

Other men, some carrying two-handled saws, gathered behind.

She wouldn't end up on these rocks, her head and claws sawed off. Wistala gathered what remained of her strength and managed to stand. She tottered a few steps toward the edge of the cliff, dragging dogs at every step. The dogs pulled back, at war with her body.

Perhaps the Dragonblade read her intent. He ran forward, bloody sword held out, waving on the others, who stood gaping at Father's bloody wounds.

The two still-living dogs snarled and fought her every step, their muzzles covered with blood, the spiky hair on their backs standing straight up. They dragged her back, away from the ledge, toward the Dragonblade.

"You shan't have—," Wistala grunted. She swung her tail, knocked a dog off its feet, and lunged at the ledge. She got the claws of one sii over. Now she had some real traction.

Tearing—pain.

Fly! She'd fly once before she died.

She got a saa at the edge, and the dead dog fell over the side, its jaws finally relaxing. Freed of its weight, she coiled her spine and jumped.

Wistala felt light as one of Bartleghaff's long tip-feathers as she spun through the air. She struck the prominence Father used to climb up from the river, rolling over on a growling dog and hearing a snap, and felt free air one last time before she plunged into the cold, roaring river.