 BEWARE BEGINNING A WAR. WAR TAKES MANY TURNS,

 AND MOST OFTEN BACK ON THE INSTIGATOR.

—Torus (the Elder)

Old muscles newly used tired quickly, and Wistala found herself panting as she circled over the Green Dragon Inn.

The scene below reminded her of a riot she'd once seen outside the Great Arena of Hypat after an underdog victory in a game of Flagstaff when bet payments ran out.

Two houses burned, and through the smoky air, Wistala marked the barbarians as they ran in and out of the other homes in no sort of order. A group of them stood looking sadly at a cart that had lost a wheel after being overloaded with tools and anvils from the smithy. Chickens ran everywhere, to be chased frequently, caught rarely, and then stuffed into sacks and baskets when they weren't dropped in order to pursue a loosed sow or piglet.

The inn had the most barbarians about it. A long low building in back had been torn almost into planking, and the barbarians dipped helms or hands into the mead vats, to guzzle and swill and then stagger off to find vessels to carry some off before others could drink the brewery dry.

Even if the spectacle below had comedic elements, it was a horrifying sort of comedy. Dead bodies, looking like dropped bundles of washing from the sky, lay in the streets and on the doorsteps. Only one or two of the bodies—in front of the inn's windows—were barbarian.

They'd had no luck getting through the narrow windows or stout door, and a flung torch or two smoldered on the tin roof. In the road before the inn, barbarians under the shouted commands of still-mounted leaders were piling tarry barrels and cut pine boughs on a wooden wagon, pointed so that it could be run toward the door of the inn. Others were busy chopping down the notice board before the inn stoop to give it a clear path.

Wistala's back burned like her fire bladder, and she longed to set the Widow Lessup down. The high roof of the inn seemed the safest spot, so she landed—the uncharitable would say crashed—on the Green Dragon's roof, striking first with her tail and then her hind legs, both from instinct and the desire to protect Widow Lessup.

"Cling to the chimney," she suggested, but the woman needed no prompting. She reached out, prostrate on the roof peak, and hugged brick, gasping for air.

Wistala folded her wings—such relief!—and licked at the blood running from the wounds from where her wings had come. According to Mother's tales, the emergence of one's wings was almost bloodless; just a clear, tangy fluid suppurated. She'd known she'd pay a price for cutting them free, and hoped it wouldn't be a lethal toll.

More hoofbeats sounded from the road, but Wistala could see little. Blowing smoke from flaming houses—four burned now—obscured all.

"I will try to return," Wistala said. "If they succeed in burning the inn, slide down to the roof of the well shed and keep clear of the brewery."

"Ohhhhh!" Widow Lessup wailed. "Don't forget the master!"

"I go for him now."

She extended her wings and launched herself off the roof. She left a trail of fire from the notice board to the wagon piled with brush and barrels, which promptly roared into flame and scattered the barbarians. As she flapped up into the sky, she noticed an arrow sticking into the inside of her sii—what difference would this blood loss make when so much ran off her back?

Every flap of her wings seemed like her last. She passed up the road, saw the Dragonblade and his horsemen in a tight formation riding for the inn, but they must have had their eyes to the sky, for they executed a neat turn, dispersing as she passed above them.

But she felt in no condition to face the Dragonblade. Besides, she had her mind bent on Rainfall.

She passed over the outer grounds of Mossbell and saw a throng of men in the courtyard around the statue fountain.

Oh, infamy! They had Rainfall there, hanging upside down from the statue, ropes looped about his ankles and the neck of the representation of law. The barbarians were hurling books—the one household item they saw no use for—at him.

Hammar and his men observed events from a little farther away.

Too tired to flap, she set her wings and glided in, spreading what was left of her fire right and left and scattering the barbarians.

She felt the arrows strike. She never remembered it as a painful feeling, more astonished that she didn't hear them whirl through the air or hit her, but hit they did. A lucky couple bounced off her sides but others plunged into her scaleless underside. The next thing she knew, she was on the ground, nostrils full of dirt and grass, a neck-length from the fountain.

She heard blood rushing in her ears—no, it was the barbarians hooting and cheering, sharp black shapes against Mossbell aflame.

Her breath came with difficulty, and her vision foreshortened. But Rainfall still breathed. She would die beside him. More arrows and a hand-ax bounced off her scale; she noted the strikes uninterestedly. She made one painful crawl toward him, got her nose on the edge of the fountain, smelled blood and water. One of the goldfish came to the surface and looked at her, mouth opening and shutting as it hoped for a tidbit.

Dully, she saw the column of the Dragonblade's men ride up. The Dragonblade pulled up, and the black helm waved this way and that as it took in the scene. The man-boy in leather, staggering and with the side of his face crudely bandaged and a medicine vial in his hand, pointed with the unsteady hand of a drunk at the fountain.

Wistala found she had a terrible thirst and drank, causing the goldfish to flee to the other side of the pool. As she sucked water, she watched events in the courtyard with amazing calm. Even Rainfall's moans as he hung, upside down and red-faced, were just another component of the tableau.

The Dragonblade dismounted. He took off his helm, hung it on the pommel of his horse, and drew a gleaming blade. He strode forward, eyes burning.

This is the end. She wondered what would happen to her head and claws. Would they be sold together, as a set, or separately?

The Dragonblade swung, and she shut her eyes.

Amazingly she felt nothing, heard only a splash—her own head falling into the pool at the base of the statue?

She opened an eye. The Dragonblade had cut down Rainfall, pulled him out of the water and set him down on the ground, propped up so he sat against the fountain pool.

"Thank you," Rainfall gasped.

The Dragonblade glanced down at her, his broad, flat face frowning, gray wisps in his dark hair and thick at his temples, and he turned and walked toward Hammar, removing his thick gauntlets.

She felt Rainfall's hand on her snout. So tired. But the water was helping. She sucked a little more.

"The dragon's finished," the Dragonblade said.

Dragonelle, Wistala corrected rather absently. I lived to fly and by rights must be called a dragonelle.

"More by her own doing than any arrows," the Dragonblade continued as he walked up to Hammar.

The Dragonblade moved so fast, Wistala wasn't sure what she saw, but Hammar fell backwards. Ah, the Dragonblade held his gauntlets aloft; he'd lashed out and struck Hammar across the face. He threw the gloves into Hammar's face.

"I'm a slayer, and I quit whatever feud you have," the Dragonblade said.

"I'm takings her earsh," the man-boy slurred, drawing a blade and moving forward. "My idea to baitsh the creasure with—"

The Dragonblade reached out, caught him by the red shoulder sash and spun him around so hard that he dropped the medicine bottle and fell. The man-boy got to his hands and feet, and the Dragonblade kicked him at the tailvent, so hard that the youth went face-down in the dirt. "Get him on his horse," the Dragonblade said to the line of archers.

"Mount your horse, and let's be off," the Dragonblade said. "Vagt kom trug mid suup-seep," he said to the barbarians, who growled and fingered their weapons. He waited expectantly.

"I thought not," the Dragonblade said, turning.

One burst from the others, howling and waving a short ax in each hand. The Dragonblade whirled, lifted his scabbarded blade and used it to catch the pair of axes under the head. He lifted his arms so the squatty barbarian hung gripping the ax-handles with legs kicking, and head-butted him so that the barbarian dropped unconscious.

With the aid of one of his men, he remounted his armored horse. "I leave you the honor of finishing the beast off, brave and lordly men of Galahall—Ha!" He glanced back at the man-boy, who was sagging in the saddle he'd been hoisted into, and touched heels to horse flank. "Keep the rest of my fee, Thane. Gold from you could buy only wormy meat and ill-fitting shoes."

The thane's armsmen stirred and looked to their chief for orders.

Hammar held up a hand, and his men remained in their places. "You've made an enemy to remember—and regret!" Hammar shouted at the riders filing east. The Dragonblade tilted back his head and laughed. "Drakossozh!" Hammar screamed into the night. "You've insulted a king!" Only laughter answered.

Wistala found she had the energy to climb up into the fountain. She settled into the water, rubbing her back and washing out her wounds but also washing out one of the goldfish, poor fellow. Pleasant warmth suffused her, and she curled in the pool about the statue so her head was near Rainfall.

Not only did the water feel good, but her underside was now protected by the pool's thick lip of masonry, as well. She rattled her griff in challenge and waited.

"Well. You heard him," Hammar said to his bodyguards. "Kill the creature!"

"We need spears for that, Lord Hammar," the closest said. "Longer spears than our allies carry," he added hastily, as Hammar pointed to the spears in dirty hands all around.

"You have your swords!"

A man with a deformed lip curled up to reveal brown teeth shook his head. "It's still moving. I'm not going near those jaws, whatever that dragon-hunter said."

"Then start at the back and work up!"

"The tail's just as dangerous. That boy lost his eye!"

Hammar opened his mouth as if to say something else but thought better of it. "Someone get me a bow!"

Barbarians began to ride across the yard, their horses laden with bags and tied barrels. Some carried off bound women and children.

The barbarians before Mossbell were conducting an informal market, swapping candlesticks for plate, furniture for spice boxes and kitchen implements. Hammar yelled something at one of the brow-tattooed leaders, who shrugged or glanced in any direction but the fountain or scratched their beards as if to say, Dragon … I see no dragon!

Part of Mossbell's sod roof collapsed with a roar.

One of Hammar's riders rode up with a hunting bow, fully as tall as a man. Hammar notched an arrow and drew.

Wistala saw him sight on her eye. She pressed herself flat into the water, which surged and washed over the rim.

At the last instant, Hammar shifted aim and fired an arrow into Rainfall's chest. The elf let out a weak cry.

"That was for practice," Hammar said.

Wistala lunged out of the water. It wasn't a dragon-dash, more of a desperate crawl, and Hammar backpedaled, dropping his arrow—

And Mossbell's south yard-wall exploded in orange and yellow.

Through the dust and falling bricks came three gargants, charging abreast, dwarves tied on their backs holding rein and weapon.

Behind the gargants rode others from the circus, men and women on the show horses who were used to confusion and noise and crowds, and behind them others on foot, carrying everything from mallets to clubs bristling with tent spikes.

Hammar gave them one openmouthed look and ran. Wistala did not have the strength to pursue him.

The barbarians instinctively drew together into a bunch to face the attack, linking wooden shields and raising war-pick and ax, but the dwarves tightened their formation and let the iron-shod feet of their gargants crash through and stomp the barbarians as easily as they would a flower bed. All order left the barbarians, and they ran for their lives.

But the circus was not done yet. The dwarves situated highest on beast-back fired crossbows down into the rout, passing the empty bow back for others to load and taking up another with remorseless precision.

The riders harried the barbarians at the edges, throwing knives or small axes, or hooking men at neck or feet with ropes. Ragwrist himself sent Marlil and her women after the fleeing thane and his bodyguard. They lit red candle-fireworks and rode hard on the heels of the men, shrieking like loosed demons and throwing knives until the bodyguard plunged into the woods—save for the man who was dismounted by a branch.

The battle passed in fury. Dsossa appeared as though dropped from the sky, kneeling next to Rainfall. Those on foot were the last to leave the yard, clubbing their way through the lamed and the wounded barbarians.

Wistala tried to rise to her feet, failed. The front balcony on Mossbell fell in a shower of sparks.

Ragwrist returned, dismounted, ran to Rainfall, fell to his knees. Ragwrist used his thumbs and turned up Rainfall's eyelids. He detached the sobbing Dsossa, placed a hand on Rainfall's heart, then tore out the offending arrow.

"He is dead," Wistala said. She could hear no breathing.

Ragwrist blew his whistle, loudly, and again. He stopped only when he heard answering whistles from the thundering gargants.

"Quarryness is aflame," Ragwrist said. "It would appear the thane had enemies there, as well. That fat low judge is hanging from the Hypatian Hall peak."

Wistala's light-headedness brought a strange sort of clarity.

"You'd better move the circus south of the bridge." She would remain beside Rainfall, now and for eternity… .

Swinging, flying again—no, she was being hauled up onto gargant-back by dwarves with ropes all around.

Through a sticky eye she saw a golden summer dawn. Mossbell still flamed at the end of blackened beams. A door-pull glittered in the char-heap, and the wind was carrying off fine white ash—probably the remains of Rainfall's library.

They passed through the village, better than half the houses were burnt, and the others were emptied, but the inn still stood. The villagers had thrown the few dead barbarians on the burning cart before the inn, and added broken shutters and doors. Some joined the circus column, carrying bundles or pushing household goods in carts, and so passed over the bridge into the next thanedom.

Ragwrist arrayed his house carts to block the bridge, and the last memory Wistala had was of Widow Lessup consoling Mod Lada—Rayg had been at academy outside Quarryness, and none in the despoiled town could say what had become of him.

They buried Rainfall the next day on a cool summer morning of the sort that always saw him long at work in his garden.

Wistala, drinking like a horse fresh from a race, begged Ragwrist to drag a dead horse from the village and a team of dwarves with a gargant went and fetched two so that she might have one the next day. They hung one and she devoured the other despite the flies. With food and water in her, she felt up to a slow, stiff walk up the riverbank to a prominence overlooking Mossbell's grounds.

"He'd rather be rooted with the family across the gorge there," Ragwrist said. "But Hammar is a bitter man, I'd hate to have him take vengeance on a rooting elf."

Wistala watched the procedure. Under Ragwrist's direction they sat the body cross-legged, facing the river and bound up in canvas, then coated him with fresh clay, until he resembled a lumpy, three-sided pyramid. The crown of his head they left naked to the elements. His hair still sprouted there, if anything a little brighter green than before. "He'll like it better on the south bank anyway, the sun catches the river mist, and he'll have rainbows. And a better view of his bridge and lands."

She asked Ragwrist about the custom as Dsossa smoothed the clay sides with her hands.

"The being you knew is dead, certainly. The dormant comes to fore after death," Ragwrist said. "Some elf families bury their dead upright in a hole, others hollow out dead trees and place them in there. With us it is clay."

"Us?" Wistala asked.

"Yes, Rainfall is my brother."

She was shocked into speechlessness. "But you've only shown—"

"To elves family is an accident, Wistala. We are dutiful to our parents and try to pass on all we've gained from the world, in wisdom and wealth, to our children, but as to siblings or cousins or all that stuff humans and dwarves set such store by—" He shrugged. "Just as well, for I've seen feuds start between brothers over family obligation that make the Steppe Wars mild by comparison. It is sad to see another full-elf go. So few are born anymore these days."

"It is the same with dragons," Wistala said, as Dsossa kissed a new bud on Rainfall's head. She planted a handful of Mossbell's green lichen to keep him company. "Why is this? Are elves hunted, as well?"

"If I knew the cause, I'd be in a shell-house, looking out over the water gardens of Krakenoor. We have our enemies, true enough, but that is not the cause. They say the magic is being leeched out of the world. But what do poets know?"

Dsossa touched her at folded wing edge. "Wistala, I know Rainfall would want you to have this," she said, drawing the blue battle sash from beneath her weather coat. "It is a relic of Hypatian Generalhood and should go to his daughter."

The silk was so shiny and smooth, it was as though water had been woven into fabric. "I could not wear it. My scales would tear it to pieces."

"Carry it, then. What has become of your harness and satchels?"

"We lost much baggage in Quarryness," Ragwrist said.

"I will ask Brok to make you something more fitting," Dsossa said.

"Will you come with us south?" Ragwrist said. "If the circus is to continue, we must back to the winter camp and replace our losses. Would that they'd just taken money instead of lives! Money is so easily replaced."

Wistala almost snorted, never having heard money and easy so closely associated from Ragwrist. It took her a moment to answer the question, so conflicted were her thoughts.

Oh, the allure of familiar routine! Drained in body and brain, she could eat the wheel-size fish of the delta—

"I must think on this. I told you I would travel with you until I had my wings. But I must decide what purpose to put them to."

Wistala's wounds ceased bleeding whenever she moved the next day, though she suspected she still had an arrowhead in her, for if she struck her left sii out far forward it pained her.

Despite her fatigue she went across the bridge, and saw Jessup and some of his family rebuilding their brewery. She didn't pause to talk—though she did touch the sign for luck, which caused one aged man sitting on the doorstep to touch a phantom mug to his lips—but instead went to Mossbell. There she took Stog in mouth, holding him as tenderly as a gamesman's bird dog would carry a duck, and crossed Mossbell to the grove of Rainfall's ancestry.

She had to keep her eyes averted from the ruin. Remarkably enough the two trees flanking the front door still lived, though their smaller limbs had been burned they were still green far above.

At the glade of Rainfall's ancestors, she found the remains of days-old campfires and a garbage pile, and noted that the barbarians had carved rude symbols in the tree bark with their blades and left their filth all about the roots. Whether it was chance or purpose, she could not say.

She laid Stog beside Avalanche and gathered rocks, and over the course of the day built such a cairn that not even the strongest badger would be able to dig his way through. When it was done, she sat atop it and looked across the gorge. She could just see a brown dot, Rainfall's cocoon, from which a tree would hopefully emerge.

Utterly sapped by the effort, she slept. She dreamed the trees were whispering to her, soft words made of wind and leaves.

Even before the circus left, Wistala occupied the old troll cave overlooking the Whitewater River west of the bridge.

It wasn't a bad cave. The outer length stank of gulls; the cave mouth looked like a running sore, so thick were their droppings down the rocks below.

Farther inside bats clung to the cave roof. They were oddly comforting, reminding her of the home cave. The more responsible part of her mind, which often spoke with Mother's voice and silenced those bits interested in old Elvish poems, Hypatian architecture, or the taste of sweetwater fish mixed with gar-locque or other herbs—and occasionally considered what composition of length, curvature, thickness, and number might make the most pleasing array of horns on a dragon, told her that the bat droppings would hide dragon odor. Not that the dog had yet been bred who could negotiate the cliff and stick his wet nose in her temporary lair.

At night she would visit burned Mossbell, which now belonged, as all ruins must, she supposed, to the cats. Jessup told her that Old Yari-Tab was sharing an upstairs room with Widow Lessup at the Green Dragon Inn until a house could have its roof and doors repaired.

Jessup also mentioned that the thane's men had already set up a bridge toll and expected their mead and meals free as part of "guarding" the ruined village.

The younger cats ran wild in the ruins and gardens, hunting the birds and mice and rabbits that came for the beans and vegetables, but scuttled away whenever she approached one—as if a rangy cat would make more than a snack!

She climbed the burnt bark of the doorway trees and wrapped herself around the trunk at their height and tried to ignore the yowls of mating cats below. She looked off toward the ridge that shielded Galahall's rooftops from her vision, or the two hills, or the long lines of mountains disappearing north and south—she could just make out one of the peaks that bordered the Wheel of Fire dwarves to the north—and the Dragonblade, if he still lived among them.

"What dragon lives that doesn't count his enemies on more than one limb?" she said to the wind, wishing she had the strength to at least burn Galahall. But Lessup told her that some years ago Hammar had Galahall's roof re-covered with slate and his cornices and towers shingled with dragonscale, bought at great expense from the Wheel of Fire dwarves.

Wistala knew, too well, how they acquired dragonscale. How much was Mother's green, or Father's bronze?

"I'm but one dragon, what can I do? Assemble an army of dragons? From where? I've not seen another of my kind since—"

She could keep neither the promise to her Father nor her private oath of vengeance—the scroll of the family slaughtered now included Rainfall and probably Rayg, for the barbarians could make cruel sport of captives—without knowing another dragon. A dozen would be better, but as far as she knew numbers like that had not gathered since the days of Silverhigh. Even Auron, scaleless and thin, would have been a comfort as an ally with his sparks of inspirational courage.

She would have to improvise.

She almost chuckled, she'd been so long among hominids. At least Auron wasn't keeping the rain off some grasping thane with delusions of kinghood. Did dragons naturally indulge in the humor of the funeral pyre, or had they developed it through dark years of murder and assassination? Poor Auron. She tried to imagine him curled around the tree opposite, probably complaining about his empty stomach or talking of the stars.

Where is his star again? Follow the Bowing Dragon. There. Susiron, always in your spot.

How sad that Auron never learned the joy of flight. She threw herself from the tree and opened her wings—she still wasn't strong enough to take off without a drop from some kind of height, and flapped up into the clouds.

She was still weak. To regain her strength, she'd go far away, and work herself until she was as strong and single minded as the toughest barbarian. She would go north.

"It's as good a place as any for a dragon," Ragwrist said with a shrug.

She had heard the circus was going to leave the next morning and had sent a message through Jessup, and they met at Rainfall's grave on the eve of departure. The clay pyramid now sprouted at the peak like a four-head cluster of broccoli. "But … brrr. Not for me. And the tribes up there, they'll slit your throat out of pure meanness and take your skin for coat-shell."

"You won't find any libraries up there," Dsossa said. "Rainfall always appreciated the volumes you sent, you know."

Wistala hardly believed her eyes, but it seemed the growth atop the clay pyramid tilted ever so slightly in her direction. Had the broccoli bowed to her? No, it was simply responding to the moon above and behind her.

Maybe.

"I must go north. According to the librarians, there are others of my kind there," she said. "But I will come back to visit. Perhaps to your winter camp, so I don't get frozen solid up there when the sun runs south."

"Don't expect to lie around all day stuffing yourself with veal at my expense," Ragwrist said. "You winter at my circus, and you'll be speaking to select seekers at a commanding price!"

"Oh, give it a rest. I'll buy her a bullock or two," Brok said. "If you'll give me a moment, I'll show you your new harness."

He'd made a leather neck pouch, easily expandable, that had stiffened cases all around the sides, about the size of the ones the dwarves used for their crossbow bolts.

"I put a couple vesk-stone of good softmetal in for you. Metal is rare up there, I understand they use bone fishhooks and flint scrapers and such. Or at least that's what the traders bring back."

A transparent blister showed at the buckle on her breast, and a familiar blue sat within. "That's the old elf's battle sash. Safe from weather and wet in there, though honestly I wasn't expecting the cold of the icelands. If you open the latch," he showed her how, "you can unscrew the crystal if you'd like to take it out for some reason, but remember to seal it up again with good wax to make it airtight."

"You raided my ironmonger?" Ragwrist said. "Are you trying to ruin me, Brok? Am I to support the family of every blacksmith in Hypatia?"

Brok ignored the protestations and slipped it over Wistala's outstretched head.

Wistala thought it looked like an oversize gem, and wearing such a thing would make her feel flashier than a proper young dragonelle from her family should—Your wings and scales should be advertisement enough, Mother always said, no need to adorn for Silverhigh aerials—but had to admire the workmanship.

She put it on. It turned on her neck easily enough, and she could reach the cases, probably even while flying.

"Rub some fats into the leather now and again," Brok advised. "It's the finest hardened cowhide, but don't mistake it for steel. It needs care."

"Improvident—," Ragwrist sputtered. "He speaks of care. Care! Have care to my balance book!"

"I don't know how to thank you, Brok," Wistala said, ignoring the byplay. "You should have my coin savings."

"Ha!" Brok said. "I loaded two of these cases with it. Eat them sparingly, good dragon."

"What of you, Dsossa?" Wistala asked. "Will you live near the inn?"

"I will still breed my horses, though on this side of the river, and Hammar won't get one for any price. Old Avalanche left some colts on this side of the river, and I'll see if I can't better the bloodline."

"Stog might suggest a dose of donkey."

"Yes, I'll breed mules too. Less money in mules, but they are more easily sold in any market."

They looked at each other around Rainfall's rooting place.

"I shall be sorry to leave you all," Wistala said.

"That's circus. You've outgrown us," Ragwrist said.

"No. I've learned so much, and I could lear—"

"I don't mean that," Ragwrist said, waving away the dragon breath. "I mean the circus can't afford to feed you any more, or employ an army of shovelers to keep the air breathable."

Wistala slept out the next day in the old troll cave, half a horse inside her—she'd flown up to Galahall and snatched one from an outer pasture as it stood sleeping—and the other half hanging for breakfast, when she heard a faint shouting.

"Wistala! Wistala!"

It was a female voice. She sent the seagulls flying as she crawled out the entrance—from the noise they made anyone would think it was their cave—and cautiously peeped up the cliff.

Lada lay flat on her belly. She waved.

"I hate heights, you know," Lada said.

"You don't look well," Wistala said. "But I'm glad for a chance to say good-bye."

"I need to speak to you. Please!"

"I'd prefer if you'd come after dark. I don't want anyone to know where I am. Speaking of which, how did you find out?"

"Jessup told me. His oldest pointed out the cave from chalk hill. And tonight I must stay with a sick family."

Wistala sighed. It would be easy to fly up there, but any fishermen along the river and every shepherd on the hills would see her.

She climbed. Amazing how much stronger her forelimbs felt with her wings out. In a moment she stood on the thick pasture grass.

"Let's try that little hollow over there, out of the wind," Wistala suggested. Also out of view.

Even without the hat Lada's priest's robes made her look older than she was. A summer ribbon bound her hair with the aid of a bean-stake. Her eyes were dark and worried.

"So this is more than just a good-bye, or a last moment of consolation over our father's death," Wistala said, once in the hollow.

Lada brushed some snails from a rock and sat down. "It's Rayg. His body was never found, you know."

"I saw several carried off," Wistala said. "He was taken at Quarryness?"

"Yes. Another low priest with experience in these matters says he's most likely been made a slave. He's at the perfect age: old enough to work intelligently but still small enough to be overpowered by the least housewoman. Mod Daland believes him to be alive."

"But in barbarian hands."

"I went to see Hammar, you know," she said, her thin lips almost disappearing. "Just yesterday. Just—it took all my nerve."

"He claims to have influence with them."

"His hall is full of their banners, drums with claws and feathers on the heads, and that horrible reeking charcoal they use to toast their flesh. You can scarce see through the glass in the windows. But I threw myself down before him, on those stones full of dog hair and spit, and begged him. I told him that he could have anything—anything—if he'd help find my son. His son."

She hid her eyes under her hand. "He took my offer, took me. Took me and made a sport of my body … I can't describe more. But afterwards when I asked him to get Rayg back, he laughed and said he didn't need another bas—boy hanging about the place, counting on a position or thinking of the throne. He calls it a throne now. He said he'd make inquires so I could go north and seek him."

Wistala watched one of the brushed-aside snails go back up the rock. "I'm sorry to hear your troubles. But if you think I need more reason to hate Hammar—" She began to describe the scene before the fountain, but it so upset Lada that she stopped. "How can I help?" Wistala asked.

Lada wiped her eyes. "I'm supposed to be the priestess—oh, well, an inworld acolyte, I should say. This is so selfish, I've left the world behind but—he's my son! I'm supposed to be the one who helps people with their troubles. The world is wheels within wheels, and each turn grinds … but the words aren't helping me."

Wistala waited.

"I heard you were going north. I ask you to look for Rayg while you're there. If I learn anything about his location I'll try to get word—Copex knows how—but I'll try, and leave word with the circus. Then you can go in and get him and … and—"

"Burn anyone who gets in my way?" Wistala supplied.

"Yes," she said, hard and low and with eyes alight as though she relished the thought. Perhaps Lada had her heart no more in her role as priestess than as a circus performer.

"And if I retrieve him?"

"A temple built in your honor enclosing a statue of bronze and silver, if I have to work the rest of my life toward it."

Hominids and their strange vanities. How many times can you fill your gorge at a temple? "I'm not going to live in barbarian lands. I'm going beyond men, looking for my kind."

"I heard some sailors saw one of your kind. But it is a secondhand story, perhaps they got it wrong?"

"Where?"

"Oh, to the north, while crossing the Inland Ocean. They'd been blown off course by a storm and they saw a dragon aloft. They thought for certain they were doomed and made their last offerings, but the dragon only swooped low over them. They said a man in heavy fur rode its back, but sailors are always telling tales."

"Are they sure it was a dragon? Not feathered?"

"Yes, a dragon, and blue as the sky. Speaking of blue, I must admire that belt around your throat. Wait—if it goes around your throat is it a belt or no?"

"Harness, I call it, but I pity the man who holds on to it to ride my neck. He'll need something thicker than fur to save his skin."

Wistala pulled her griff up and back so the corners of her mouth could rise. Lada laughed.

"I used to hate you," Lada said.

"You were young," Wistala said.

"Fair can be foul, and foul fair," Lada quoted. "Proverbs of Experience sixty-one. That means something to me. Now."

"I'll make no promises about Rayg, fair or foul," Wistala said. "But I will keep my eyes open. I intend to travel at night, though. Your best chance is through Hammar, distasteful as he is."

"He can be charming, as long as he's getting his way and his appetite is sated," she said. "I will dance to his tune, but as a viper does before it strikes the bird. A fair journey, Wistala, and peril only to your enemies."

"If I come south again, I will leave word at Jessup's Inn and the circus winter camp. I fly north tomorrow, but one of my hearts stays at Mossbell."

Wistala flew north in easy stages, more from physical limitations than intent.

Even with her wounds healed over and her blood restored, she still tired easily and needed frequent rests, made all the more difficult by a thirst that seemed to start at her tail-tip and grow from there and a hunger that must have been worse than her hatchling pangs. (It wasn't, but lost memories are sometimes a kindness.)

She followed the road until it broke off into a series of trails or twin ruts, irregularly filled with increasingly crude bridgework. Even the distance posts of Ancient Hypat's short-lived Tribal Confederation, still in use to mark intervals of vesk even in lands where the word Hypat was a curse and Hypatian a synonym for "devil."

Flying mostly at night, but doing what she could to observe the villages and isolated hutments she passed in what felt like a hopeless search for Rayg, she avoided lights below.

Hearth lights and campfires grew less and less frequent as she ranged north, until she began to travel at dawn and dusk so that she had a better chance of dropping on a hoofed-and-horned meal. The snowcaps on the mountains, rich with all the dragon colors when the sun was level with them, marched lower and lower and glaciers hanging between became commonplace.

Then, over the course of a single night, she reached new air currents. The wind ceased blowing pleasantly warm from the southwest, and instead spun down the coast from the northeast, a cold, wet breeze that helped her to glide but she had to fight like an enemy for each hop north. She found that she traveled faster with less fatigue if her track crisscrossed the wind in the manner of a serpent.

Food was plentiful. Out on the coast there were shallows thick with crabs the size of a battle shield and great waddling tubes of flesh and fat that sunned themselves on sandbars and coastal rocks, the fattest often at the top where they could bark at the lesser, but the commanding height just meant they were easily plucked up by a hungry dragonelle.

The exhaustion of flying became too great.

She found a reef-sheltered isle, in seas she guessed were too rough for the boats of men, and spent a dozen or more days happily in the hardy bush and wind-racked pines atop sheer cliffs, taking various multilegged, pincer-armed crawlers from the sea during the day and plucking the occasional barker at night from the sleeping beaches.

While resting there, she saw not one, but three dragons. The sight shocked her, after spending much of her lifetime without so much as a glimpse of her kind. To see not just one, but three, all at once and together, froze her for a moment. They flew almost wing-tip to wing-tip, a slightly smaller silver leading two big reds.

Wistala threw herself into the air, fringe high and stiff with excitement, flapping madly to gain altitude.

Wing-tips rose in unison as they glided. They must have marked her. All turned gently for a better look.

That was when she noticed the riders.

It was so like horses, she glided for a moment, losing altitude, stunned. The dragons had reins, reins! running forward from the riders to the head and out to the leading wing bones.

Dragons fixed and ridden like horses had no appeal, and she didn't like the way they were coming around, spreading out a little.

She rolled on her back, dived, headed for the shoreline, where she wove around her plateau island and changed course a little southward so if they were moving to intercept, they might overshoot. She chanced a glance back and saw one of the riders was in difficulty; his dragon was circling oddly. The silver and its rider dived toward her, then came around in a great swoop, leading the other red, which could not match its turns. The pair headed to the aid of the other.

The last Wistala saw of them, as she plunged into the coastal forest, was the silver and undercommand red flanking the other as they turned back out to sea.

Summer days at the top of the world lasted forever.

Wistala saw patches of ground ice that must linger throughout the year, and inlets where glaciers flowed into the Inland Ocean. Heated by sun and perhaps current, the glaciers would groan and crack and send ice plunging into the water with a rumbling sound like a thousand thunderstorms.

Perhaps it was the rich sea diet, or all the exercise, but she found herself in the midst of another growth spurt and losing scales, despite her careful rationing of coin. But for all her loss of shining scale, her wings grew prodigiously, and she suspected that had she left them alone they would have uncased by themselves at this point.

She came to a marsh country, where the land looked like ocean, patterned into regular waves of higher ground mixed with wet patches below. Rabbits with oversize feet, herds of moss-antlered herbivores, packs of wolves, and little brush-tailed foxes thrived here, along with a few hardy humans who kept to the waterways in flat-bottomed boats.

The wind blew hard here, and Wistala used it. Every day she matched herself against the wind, once after the morning's hunt and again in the evening, every day fighting a little harder for speed, or height, or the length of time she could hang over one spot, gaining strength with each battle against the wind.

And met her second dragon here.

She spotted him while eating on one of the ridges—the wetter hollows were thick with mosquitoes, but the bugs couldn't cope with the wind on the hill humps—splashing through the wet, approaching her from land.

He looked wider than he was long, reminding her of a toad, and had rust-colored scales edged with white cracks and chips that struck her as unhealthy. He approached, nostrils sniffing her as if she were a dinner of venison, perhaps attracted by her smell or the blood.

"You are stranger, welcome," he said. It had been so long since she'd heard Drakine, it seemed more foreign a tongue than Elvish.

"UthBeeyan am I, dragon of the coldwinds. Which wind brought you?" He bobbed his head but kept his sii still. She guessed he meant no harm, but she left off eating so as not to be taken with a mouthful of bone.

His mind held nothing but hunger and an eager lust for her green flanks.

"Wistala am I, dragonelle of whatever winds may bear me. Are there many dragons in the coldwinds?"

"I drive away!" UthBeeyan said, which Wistala found easy to believe, as she was downwind of him. He let out sort of a croaking roar. "You hear my song, we mate now."

"We shall do no such thing," Wistala said.

He jumped at her and she backed up, putting her tail point in between his nose and her, ready to crack him across the soft spot between his eyes, but he settled onto her kill and took a mouthful. "You huntress worthy of spring wind. I take dragonshare. Find another."

Gladly, Wistala thought.

The weather turned cold, bitterly so, almost overnight, freezing the swampy areas and turning the soil on the hill hummocks hard. Snow blew some nights, but could only cling where the wind couldn't reach it, and Wistala returned to the rocky coastline. During the day everything turned a hard, uniform gray: water, shoreline, clouds, the sun at best a whitish circle behind mists.

She happened across a big boat, of all things, hugging the coast as it crept along south, a dwarf at the tiller and four men pulling the oars. All wore hides so thick, they looked like bears, save for the dwarf, who might be mistaken for one of the sausagelike barkers on the rocks, for his booted feet barely protruded from beneath his coat, looking like flippers.

More hides, entire bundles of them, were lined up in the center and bottom of the boat, along with strings of fox tails and what looked like wolf skins.

Swooping low, she saw the dwarf turn the boat for shore and lift a device that looked like an immense crossbow, wider of bow than she was high. She dropped into the water some distance away, upwind so her words might carry and any bolts fired would have to fight a stiff breeze. The cold, after its first shock, wasn't so bad.

"May I ask you a question?" she called across the water in Parl.

The dwarf startled, and the rowers bent over their oars and bowed and chanted and rattled strings of shells.

The dwarf lifted a speaking trumpet. "Question away, though I warn you, I've no coin."

"Do you know these lands, good dwarf?" she called.

"Know them? I love them, and will tell you why: Fools don't survive up here."

"I seek my kind. Are there dragons to be found?"

"None you wish to find," the dwarf said. "Wait! There are some decent dragons, though it is a long journey."

"Where?"

"East, over the Icespine and then across the plains a full two hundred vesk of journey. The Sadda-Vale. I've not been there in years, but once a goodly white dragon named Scabia ruled there with her kin and accepted some trade."

"What is the Icespine?"

"You may know them in the south as the Red Mountains. Cross them and from your heights you may just see the peaks beyond. The Sadda-Vale is pleasant, though rainy, but beware the trolls roaming outside it. They were thick there when last I visited."

"Thank you, good dwarf."

"Any news from the south?"

"Wars with barbarians, in Hypat's northern thanedoms," Wistala said.

"Ah. One's been building for a while. Luckily the Ya-yuit don't go in for such nonsense. Good day, dragon!" The dwarf thickened, and Wistala realized he had bowed. She dipped her head and swam for shore.

She went east with a serious storm, which forced her down to seek shelter in trees. It raged for two days, leaving her hungry and the land thick with snow. She followed a game trail down into a valley and found nothing to eat, save a dead bear frozen solid under a tree, which even her foua could achieve little against without burning the meat to uselessness. She picked at the bits of icy flesh, but it left her with sore teeth.

She flew east in the clear icy day, and came to a river. The local men—was there anywhere men did not go?—had chipped a hole in the ice and were smoking fish in a shack built next to the hole. They ran for a little cluster of huts standing in the shelter of a hill at the bank as she passed over, and so great was her hunger that she raided the smokehouse and gorged—even eating the poor iron fishhooks stored there. She broke the film of ice on the fishing hole and drank, then slept right on the ice, wrapped around the small fire keeping the smoke going, feeling as stuffed and pampered as though she were back in Rainfall's steam-filled health room.

She awoke to chanting and the smell of burning fat.

Downwind on the iced-over river the locals were burning a small fire, with a pot hung over it, and a tent pole stood next to it. When she raised her head, three contraptions went whizzing across the ice, pulled by dogs.

Wistala blinked the crusts of ice and snow out of her eyes and followed the smell, cold muscles only slowly warming to their work. There was no sign of a trap; indeed, if one could imagine a less likely place for a trap than a frozen river one had to put one's mind to it—but she still felt something was wrong. She probed the ice carefully before taking each step.

Back at the houses, the villagers were lined up along the river's edge, and she heard faint chanting.

Something moved at the pole, a little obscured by the waves of heat coming off the fire. She circled round, again carefully probing the ice.

A girl stood tied to the top of the pole, shivering in the wind. Pieces of dragonscale were fixed to its peak, in imitation of a flower. The stuff bubbling in the cauldron was hot fat, she could smell it clearly now. At the base of the pole were three dogs, old and scrawny looking, also chained to the pole. They were barking and trying to hide among each other at the same time.

Curious.

The girl was young, perhaps Lada's age when she was returned to Mossbell, and well coated with fragrant fats to keep the wind off her skin.

Or to make her more appetizing?

Wistala decided she was some sort of offering, perhaps a trade off to keep the newly arrived dragon from raiding any more fish shacks. A dragon could destroy a village in other ways than eating the inhabitants or burning them out of their homes. What the dogs were for she couldn't imagine, unless they were meat to serve as an appetizer or dessert in the manner of the fancy tables Rainfall set.

The girl had her eyes closed, her face turned away, red hair—the only spot of color in the endless whites and grays in this land—whipping in the wind. Wistala reached up a claw and cut the bonds. She fell to her knees but made no attempt to escape.

"Go back to your people," Wistala said. The girl didn't move, probably not understanding Parl.

Wistala pushed her by the shoulder with her sii, and the girl finally came alive, struggling against her claws, pounding against her scales. Wistala knocked down the pole and stood on it with her other leg, as the dogs tried to run, still giving a whimpering bark now and then. Wistala put the girl's hand on the dog chains and broke them away from their fixture on the pole, and as she was pulled away in a shower of ice particles thrown up by the scrambling dogs, she looked at Wistala in wonder with bright green eyes.

After a quick taste to make sure it wasn't poisoned, Wistala tried the hot fat. Now this was a meal that readied one to face the winter winds again! She even ate the chains that suspended it over the fire before flying off, but sadly the kettle was too large to swallow.

One advantage of a cold wind is that it makes exercise a good deal more agreeable. Wistala managed to cross the line of mountains in a single day, thanks to a strong wind at her back shooting between the mountaintops. Then she was out over dry, treeless plains that she remembered from the day she and AuRon had escaped up the chimney.

Only colder and more barren.

There was nothing to eat on the steppe-lands, as far as she could see. She saw some goats on the mountainside at a distance, but when she flew closer they disappeared, flowing into cracks and behind stones like water. No herds of sheep, no files of elk, just odd two-legged birds that could turn like a zephyr when she swooped in on them, running with bobbing heads and spiny feathers flying. She finally managed to brain one with her tail—by accident—as she pursued another, and got a thin, bony meal that was all skin, tendon, and feathers.

But she could see her objective in the distance, which gave her heart to go on through hunger.

She wondered what the trolls ate until she saw plots of torn up earth around discreet holes in the turf.

The peaks weren't so high as the Red Mountains, and resembled dry rockpiles, with evenly layered lines stuck up this way and that, as though someone had broken up the upper world's crust. These mountains were thick with pine and littered with caves. She saw a few sheep with horns like helms and a huge wildcat or two, and smelled troll waste.

But she was now a match for a troll, unless one caught her unawares, and she had no intention of letting that happen. She watched the sides and floors of the canyon as she passed over trees, out of reach of even the longest troll arm from treetop below or concealing rock to the side.

Unfortunately, its attack came from above.

Later she visited the spot, and guessed where the troll had climbed when it saw her course. Perhaps it had been sitting on a high ledge, surveying the western slopes of the rock-strewn mountains, and climbed up a little farther when it saw her coming.

It was a good thing the sun was high when it jumped, for some piece of her noticed the shadow of its fall on the mountainside below, and she turned to avoid it before the rest of her figured out why. The hammer-blow of its arm therefore fell on her side rather than her wing or spine.

The troll grappled her with its awful rubbery fingers and she felt a tearing at her wing edge. She instinctively folded it down and out of the way, and her careen through the mountains turned into a one-wing plunge into the stony slopes. She had just enough sense to roll over so the impact struck the troll—mostly—and her tail rather than more vital limbs.

The impact knocked the wind from her, and for a second she did not know where she was.

Fury took over when the troll's fingers locked around her neck, trying to twist, trying to throttle, and she clawed at it, but it moved with that horrible, rubbery mobility she remembered. She batted it about the body with her wings, and may have struck the sense organ cluster, for it backed off and swung up a rock, leaving smears of blood as it squeezed into a crack. She righted herself and spat her hunger-weak foua after it, but did not know if she hit it or not.

Fearing another sudden jump from above, or thrown boulders, she backed down the hillside, watching the black smoke of her fire disappear into the winter sky.

She flapped her wings experimentally. The right was sore but worked. She launched herself into the air and saw the troll wedging itself through a crack. It retreated beneath an overhang like a wary spider.

"Call it a new throw," Wistala said, using the slang of the Hypatian dice pits for when a bet is neither paid nor lost. She was breathing and unharmed, and wouldn't risk her wings going after a troll on a point of honor.

Her injuries allowed only a short flight before she had to stop and rest, but she made it to the other side of the mountains. From a prominence she looked out upon the Sadda-Vale.

The vale reminded her of a half-filled cauldron. Water filled the center of the valley, though unlike the Ba-drink, green flats and low hills surrounded the water. The water was calm and the color of polished steel, the grasses around a deep green that reminded her of seaweed. Forests grew in the spaces between the toes of the mountain.

Capping the cauldron were low-hanging clouds, made of mists rising from the water, or so it seemed from the sheets of moisture rising in slow spirals. The rock face on the inner ring of mountains was black with moisture. Wistala felt the cold wet on her face.

The temperature had risen considerably on this side of the mountain; Wistala no longer felt frozen and windstruck, but simply chilled and damp. She didn't like this much wet in the air, it fed itchy growths that lived under your scales.

As she rested she counted waterfalls. It seemed every mountainside had a trickle or two running down, more easily spotted at a distance, as they cascaded between the thick fern growth—higher up they looked like faint veins against the rock face.

An orange flash caught her eye, a gout of flame that welled and slowly faded. The odd shape to it was evocative of a dragon's—no, there was a dragon there, on a ledge where the mountain was broken by a crack, like a smashed plate unevenly repaired.

So excited was she—hope died hard in Wistala—that she immediately launched herself off the prominence, flying for the dragon as fast as sore wings would carry her.

The dragon—she saw it was a male by his distinctive coloring: a dull orange like a fading sunset that alternated with stripes of black. The pattern intrigued her; in her experience scaled dragons were usually uniform in color. Auron sometimes showed stripes like that against his gray, but he'd been born without scales.

She landed a little up the ledge from him—she folded her wings as she came in, absorbed the impact with her tail and settled with only a slight slip. She wanted the advantage of height just in case.

Though she thought it a well-done landing. But the dragon ignored her.

He nosed in a pile of broken rock, grasping pieces with his tongue and swallowing them. He had four horns, and two more buds, rising from his crest. Older than she, younger than Father, and there was a strange gold behind his griff: he had a ring threaded in the skin of his earhole.

He extended his long neck, took a big mouthful of water, then swung his neck to the other side, where the mountain face was broken. Wistala looked closely at the rock—there were threads of metal in the rock, like bits of ragged sewing.

The four-horn spat water into the broken rock. His head bobbed as he read distances, then he spat flame where he'd placed the water. The rock flamed and hissed, cracking, and with a suddenness that surprised her and made her edge back, he whipped up his tail and struck the flames. Pieces of broken rock slid down and hit the ledge, and he commenced nosing again, still ignoring her.

"I take it there's metal in that stone," Wistala said.

He swallowed a piece, and rolled an eye toward her as he sniffed over more shattered rock. "What is your name?"

"Wistala," she said.

"We don't know each other."

"No," she said. "May I have your name?"

"DharSii." He swallowed another stone.

The name struck her ear funny. If the word were rendered in the simplest form of Parl, a human would have called him "Sureclaw."

"Do you live here?" she asked.

He made a strange throat-clearing sound: Ha-hem. "As little as possible." He kept eyeing her leather carry-harness and the blue emblem at the base of her throat.

"How is the metal?"

"Adequate, though you have to eat a good deal for it to do any good. Cleansing, though."

He took another mouthful of water and spat it into the cracks in the rock face.

"I've come to find others of my—our kind." He said nothing in reply. "The water helps break the stone up, I take it."

"I doubt you'd understand."

Wistala felt her fringe rise a little. "I suppose when your foua strikes the water it vaporizes into steam. The sudden expansion in the confined space of the crack, combined with the heat, shatters the rock."

DharSii left off his mining and turned his head so he could fix her with both eyes. He seemed about to speak, his mouth opened anyway, shut again, and finally he said: "If your design is to meet the others, please follow." Then he launched himself off the mountainside and flapped away on wings long and thin that reminded Wistala of knife blades.

She couldn't say whether she'd been insulted or not, but she flew after him. He sailed off north, crossed the hills that Wistala noted held red, wide-horned, high-backed cattle, and was soon skimming the misty water of the vast lake. The lake was so wide, the trees upon the other side were an indistinct green smear; and so long to the south, the waters ate the horizon.

It felt distinctly warmer over the lake, and some of the mountains to the east smoldered from vents in their sides, adding to the overcast trapped between the mountains. The mist layer hanging above was tinged with green, gold, and even blue depending on the thickness of the murk and its nearness to the vents. Wistala saw more of the long-horned cattle with the mountainous humps projected up at the base of their necks. They grazed on the thick grass, stupidly oblivious of the dragons overhead.

Wistala caught up to DharSii, flying a little below—yes, he was scarred around the right pocket of his arm, and the outer toe was missing from his left saa. Not so scarred as Father, but not so old either. And his snout only showed the barest hints of white fangs—Father's had seemed permanently on display.

He rolled an eye toward her, and she felt embarrassed to be watching him, so she fixed her gaze ahead.

She marked a white construct of some kind on the northern shore, well above and back from the lake. Or was it some trick of geology? A spur of the mountain came down and divided, and from the divide on down the mountain was scored with white, far too regularly for the marks to be snow or ice.

The lake here steamed, tendrils of moisture danced across the smooth, clear water before dissipating into the chill. She saw a head rise from the water, dripping, and a golden dragon made a leisurely climb to a mushroom head of volcanic rock, where he scratched his belly on the stone and stretched out neck and tail with a bit of a yawn as his snout turned to the fliers.

Wistala dropped back a little, not knowing if there would be a battle between the dragons. Her striped companion paid the wet dragon no more attention than he did the fork-tailed birds zipping around the masses of rock. The stones here looked shaped, but to dragon proportions rather than hominid, progressing down into the water like irregular, broken steps.

Her guide continued on his way toward the point between the divided spur.

Closer now, Wistala could see a "garden" of thick thorn trees—she thought of it as a garden because it was, precisely edged both inside and out and regularly shaped, a great crescent with the points running up the outer edges of the divided mountain spur, thinning somewhat as they climbed the thin-soiled heights. The thorn trees were thick and intertwined, so it wouldn't be a matter of just cutting down trees, for they all supported and wound around each other; sever trunk from root and the rest would hang. She guessed a team of dwarves with axes could hack through it in a day or two—under a tasking leader—and it would be a remarkable thief who could negotiate that wall without becoming hopelessly lost or torn to pieces and waste much time backtracking out of blind alleys.

The thorn wall guarded a vast courtyard, almost as big as all of Mossbell's cultivated grounds, between the two mountain arms. Instead of wild cabbages and berry bushes, this plaza was paved with broken and irregular bits of masonry. Even the odd statue fragment of a hominid arm or face showed here and there, placed to fit between an old fountain rim or some unknown chunk of temple wall.

Two pairs of blighters walked here and there and swept up some long thin leaves fallen from the thorn trees. Judging from the size of the courtyard, when they finished they'd have to start all over again where they'd began.

She forgot the blighters as soon as she saw the arch.

The stone of the mountain had been formed and carved into a great gallery leading into the darkness between the spurs of the mountain, going up an interlacing like a woven basket of round reeds, meeting like snakes hooking at the neck. The stone had been carved so it evoked bones, or tree roots, or dragon tails, anything but dull and lifeless rock. It was supported both from the courtyard and the mountain ridge by pillars, all shaped to match the whole and etched with scale patterns. At the outer rim of the stony lattice there were holes big enough for a dragon to climb through, but the spacing grew tighter and tighter as it approached what looked to be a cave mouth, though the most regular and finished Wistala had ever seen.

It was wide enough for a dragon to fly into it and pick a comfortable, well-lit landing spot before the cave. DharSii glided in, widening and then slowly folding his wings as he alighted. Wistala tried to imitate him and made a clumsier landing, not expecting the smoothness of the courtyard paving. It wasn't a sprawl, but it could have been one if her tail didn't catch on a fortunately placed crack.

"Welcome to Vesshall," DharSii said, letting his griff give an elegant little flutter. "I will take you to the dragons within, but I shan't stay."

"Do you have enemies here?" she asked.

"You ask a lot of questions. Scabia will be delighted with you. Make your queries sound like praise, and you'll share endless hours of chatter."

A cave entrance, wide enough for two dragons to pass abreast, stood just above a ledge about the height of one human seated on another's shoulders. A ring of stones, chiseled and filled in with a black material like glass forming unfamiliar glyphs like thorns crossed and arranged, decorated the entrance.

"I don't know that script," Wistala said.

"It's the old iconography," DharSii said, rearing up to climb into the tunnel mouth. His tail gave a little twitch; perhaps he was pleased at her ignorance. "It reads 'Welcome is the dragon who alights in peace.' " They passed down a short passage, arched above to match the stone lattice outside, filled in with six-sided colored chips in all the colors of dragonhood, making patterns interlaced and winding above and beneath in such intricacy that Wistala wished she had an afternoon just to let her eyes travel the path.

But DharSii did not stop, but moved on into another cavern.

This one was vast and round, by far the biggest interior Wistala had ever been in. The far walls were so distant their old footfalls bounced back at them from the walls to join the fresh noises they made, waiting to take their turn to visit the other side of the cavern and return.

The convex ceiling curved high enough for Wistala to flap her wings and fly if she wished, and went up like an inverted bowl to a circular gap that admitted the outdoor light and aired the room. It wasn't big enough to fly out, she'd have to fold her wings to pass through it. A shallow pool of water stood under the skylight, and the floor under the light was much edged with bands of green copper, one of which the edge of splash of dim sunlight rode even now.

Around the walls of the cavern—or chamber, rather, for while there was mountain muscle to be seen there was no rock that was not shaped by artistry—long blocks of basalt stuck out of the wall, narrowing and rising to a softened point like an inverted dragon claw. At the far end, two scaly forms reclined.

Wistala saw more blighters at work beneath the smaller, scrubbing the tiled floor.

DharSii struck off straight across the floor toward the pair and Wistala followed, hearts hammering. The place smelled of dragons, rainwater, and fresh air; she relished every breath, took it in through her nostrils and clamped them so the homey smell might never escape.

There were still dragons in the world, not skulking and hiding but living in grandeur and peace!

At their approach the blighters carried off their implements, flattened and squeezed themselves through a thin gap at the base of the wall like escaping mice before a prowling tom.

They caught her eye only because of the motion. The two dragons on the jutting lofts of rock had her attention.

Both were dragonelles, one rather undersize, her green scales pale and almost translucent, well formed of limb though in a delicate way that suggested little in the way of gorge or exertion.

The other was a white dragonelle, formidably huge and perhaps a bit more massive than DharSii. Wistala had the odd sensation of knowing her without having ever been introduced, probably some vague echo of a mind-picture from Mother. But there was, yes, a half-familiar shape to her short, proudly curved snout, the challenging arc of her eye ridge … Her scales had thinned a bit around her jawline and above her eyes, the flesh sagged in a little where her saa met her spine; she was a dragonelle of long years but still formidable.

"I bring a visitor, Damesister." It took Wistala a moment to work out the relationship; she'd only heard the word once before from her Father in one of his battle-stories … a man or a dwarf would have said aunt. "I humbly present Wistala, a dragonelle out of the south, who seeks ha-hem succor and solace."

I never said that, Wistala thought.

The striped dragon turned to her. "Wistala, this is Scabia, Archelle of the Sadda-Vale, and her daughter Aethleethia, my ha-hem beautiful uzhin."

Both dragonelles fluttered their griffs at Wistala with that same bird-wing delicacy. Wistala thought she should fit in and tried to imitate it, but her griff rattled off her scale, and the dragonelles glanced at each other.

The white dragon extended her nose just a little and sniffed the air in Wistala's direction, her pink eyes as cold as the glaciers Wistala had passed over.

"Will you not make her welcome?" DharSii said, and Wistala liked him a little better.

"Who were your sire and dame?" Scabia asked.

"AuRel of the line of AuNor and his mate Irelia." Wistala decided to make her introduction formal, and spoke as Mother taught: "I was first daughter and fourth out of the five eggs."

"Ah," Scabia said. "I thought I recognized your wing-points. I knew your mother somewhat. You are how long out of the egg?"

"These thirteen winters."

"And already wide-winged! I'm amazed."

Aethleethia extended her long neck and scratched herself under the chin with the claw tip on her loft, and DharSii turned away to inspect a piece of iconography etched on the floor in a manner similar to that ringing the entrance. He brushed away some dust with his tail so that the black glass might shine.

A shadow darkened the splash of outside light and the golden dragon dropped through with wings folded. He opened them again with dramatic suddenness and alighted. "Ah-ha! A visitor!" he trumpeted, folding his wings.

"Ha-hem," DharSii said, his eyes and nostrils half-closed. "Wistala, you meet the dragonlord of Vesshall, NaStirath." A certain airiness highlighted the words, but what he meant to imply, if anything, Wistala couldn't guess, not knowing him well.

"My daughter's mate," Scabia added.

NaStirath loosed a short but loud prrum in the general direction of Aethleethia's place. The lord of Vesshall was a finely formed fellow, long and well fed, not a scar on him or a scale out of place, and he smelled of steam and hot scale, being fresh out of the lake.

He spoke: "Just like you, DharSii, to guide a female over me without an introduction. Don't tell me you're finally courting a mate."

"I hope not!" DharSii said. "Too wide of wing, and her tail is so much longer than her neck."

The arrogant, two-colored—

"My dear uzhin always gives an honest opinion," Aethleethia put in. "It startles those who are not much used to him."

"Ha-hem. I'll be about my business," DharSii said. He fluttered his griff, but when Wistala met his eyes, fire bladder pulsing, he looked away. He turned and made for the entrance.

The tap of his claws played off the walls as he crossed the chamber.

"Two visits to the Vesshall from DharSii in one winter," NaStirath said. "I feel so honored, I'm having a hard time not yawning."

"Tell us your troubles, dragonelle of AuNor, so that we may comfort you," Scabia suggested.

"I'm the last of my family," Wistala said. Was that quite true? The copper still lives, for all you know. "Dwarves of the Wheel of Fire slaughtered them and took from their bodies as trophies. Elves and men were also involved, but I cannot say which for certain. One called the Dragonblade was almost certainly aiding them in the assassination."

"We've heard this before," NaStirath said, in a bored tone as if to indicate he was not much troubled at the news.

"We are sorry for your loss," Scabia said, though she was the only dragon in the room that much looked it, for nothing remained of DharSii unless he lurked still in the shadows of the entrance passage. "You may claim a loft here for as long as you like; there are ample to spare."

"I heard they got CuSanat and his mate, Virtuthia, in their cave as well," NaStirath said, stretching. "Such a shame we won't be seeing them again, even if they weren't exactly uzhin. The Red Mountains are being quite cleared of dragons. Is it bullock again for dinner, or fish?"

Wistala wasn't sure she was hearing right. Did these fools not realize—?

"We must take vengeance on these assassins!" Wistala blurted.

"I've no dead to avenge," NaStirath said. He climbed into a loft on the other side of Scabia. Odd that he didn't sit to the side of his mate—

"Be quiet, NaStirath," Scabia said, pronouncing his name in a way that labeled him still a wingless juvenile. "And have some feeling for our guest's sorrow."

"I shall achieve both through a nap, where I will dream awful, sorrowful dreams," NaStirath said, closing his eyes. "I rejoice in your survival and arrival, Wistala of the line of AuNor." He twitched his griff as he turned on his side.

Wistala remembered how Father had once caught Auron sleeping on his side, and though her brother was scaleless, punished him with a series of roars that left the hatchling quivering.

"Rest your wings," Scabia said. "Pick any loft, and wait for your nostrils to waken you."

Wistala crossed the room to be away from the others and climbed into one of the giant projections. One could arrange one's body so the head and tail were at almost any height for comfort. She hated Vesshall a little less, and slept.

Her nostrils did wake her, as the blighters brought out huge platters of pan-fried fish and dumped them before the three dragons, with much falling to the knees and arm-waving with palms held toward the dragons. Only the faintest light came down from the circle in the center of the ceiling.

Wistala felt horribly stiff from the troll fight even as she wondered why DharSii didn't join his relatives for dinner. Not that she cared to see him, of course, only that his absence struck her as odd.

She crossed over to the others.

More platters of fish arrived and Scabia pointed with her tail toward Wistala, shook it three times, and they made a mountain of cooked, blackened fish before her.

"It's quite safe," Scabia said. "The blighters look to us for protection from the trolls, and of course the other races of the world who have superceded them."

Wistala ate, but the charm of prepared food was nothing like that of Mossbell, with lively conversation and the friendly banter with Widow Lessup about the cooking. She felt like a pig at a trough.

"How many trolls have you killed, lord?" Wistala asked NaStirath.

"Hmmmmm. Killed? I set one aflame once and he made quite a spectacle rolling back to the mountains, but I don't care to close and kill. Awful, the stench of trolls. I'm not sure that burning improves the odor."

"I know DharSii has killed several," Aethleethia said. "Every time he does it, the blighters talk of nothing else for moons."

"Keen on sports, my good uzhin is," NaStirath said with a belch. "Shall we have molasses elixir tonight, to celebrate our happy arrival?"

"No," said Scabia firmly.

"Why do you care so little for the fates of other dragons?" Wistala asked.

The other three stared at her.

"Now see and hear, thirteen winters," Scabia said. "You're a guest, and welcome as long as you will be accommodating, but I don't want challenges or lectures and twaddle about what we must and must not do, or you'll find me a terrible enemy who'll drive you from this home cave with fire and tooth and claw. This vale is safe and distant, and those wise enough to stay here do well. As to other dragons' affairs, we keep out. It was a lesson dearly learned. My father? Dead. My brother? Dead. My mate? Dead. My sons? All dead. DharSii only just survived out there, was even a captive once, and it seems every time he crosses the mountain ring or goes down the river, he comes back with a new scar.

"We give no cause to the Ironriders or the wildhairs or the blighter bands on the steppe to feel aggrieved, and the trolls on the outer slopes of these mountains keep other hominids from the so-called civilized lands at bay. I don't look for trouble in the wider world, and the wider world comes for no trouble here. Am I making myself understood?"

"Perfectly," Wistala said. In different circumstances, would she have become Scabia?

"Oh, I don't care for this sort of talk," Aethleethia said. "Now let us have a pleasant game to aid the digestion. Wistala, how are you at add-a-couplet? We have a poem about dancing gems that is quite without a decent end."

Wistala woke to the sound of dragon claws on the floor below her loft. She came instantly awake, but it was only Scabia, with NaStirath fidgeting behind.

There was a little light, but just a little, coming in from the ceiling hole.

"Good morning, Wistala," Scabia said. "I came to say that I regret some of my words from last night—no, don't apologize."

Wistala wasn't about to. "You're most kind," she said, which was true, to a point. She'd been foolish to seek an alliance with other dragons.

"I'm really here to ask you if you wish to stay, to live with us," Scabia said.

"It is quite the most marvelous home cave," Wistala said, watching blighters clean up dragon waste about the pool.

"We would like you to be uzhin," NaStirath said.

"Wistala, I am like my uzhin DharSii in that I've no patience for disguise. My beloved daughter is the best of dragons but barren, and I would have hatchlings in this cave again."

Wistala stiffened.

"Don't look alarmed, I'm not asking for you to take wing on a mating flight now," Scabia said. "Nor even call any male here your lord. NaStirath is a fine dragon and would sire strong hatchlings. You would have a home and honor and, yes, even precious metals here for the rest of your moons if you would leave a few clutches for Aethleethia to sing over and raise as her own. Don't look so shocked—it was not an uncommon practice in ancient Silverhigh. You're obviously healthy; I've never seen such thick scale on a maiden before, more like that of your grandsire AuRye, who was always stuffing himself with well-armored dwarves and golden hilts from broken battle-axes. I will condescend to say that such a famous line will improve the blood around here."

Scabia cast a pointed glance back at NaStirath.

She'd always meant to keep her promise to Father; in fact, she'd dreamed of a clutch of restless eggs last night for some reason, but this, this—"Unnatural," she said. "It would be unnatural."

"No more unnatural than a dragon wearing hominid jewelry and a carrying harness," Scabia said. "Were you born with that icon on your fringe, perhaps? Or growing up among hominids, as I suspect you did. Tell me I guess wrongly."

"I … ," Wistala said, groping for words. "I didn't come here to find a mate."

"Is it a song you want?" NaStirath put in. "I know one or two:

 "There once flew a maiden of AnFant

 Whose mind was as pure as her vent

 But when—"

"You're not helping your cause, NaStirath," Scabia said, again employing the juvenile—deservedly so, Wistala thought.

Scabia turned those faintly pink eyes back on her. "Now, dear, we shall have breakfast soon. Let's have you join us for a few more meals and we'll speak no more of this while you recover from your fatigues and hurts. Get to know my darling Aethleethia, and I'm sure you'll come to feel, as I do—"

"I must go," Wistala said, hopping from her loft and running for the exit. Grand, Vesshall was, but it was also hollow. Hollow of honor, hollow of feeling, hollow of—

She almost bowled DharSii over as she sprang out the tunnel mouth, leaped from the ledge, and spread her wings beneath the stone canopy that suddenly seemed as dreadful as the thorn garden below. He began to say something, but Wistala didn't hear the words in her eagerness to get away, flying south as fast as she could.

Is this a joke?" Ragwrist said.

Wistala sat with him in the equestrian theater, a riding arena outside Hypat, where his riders practiced during winter camp.

She'd come south in easy stages, keeping to the west side of the Red Mountains and not raiding livestock. She slept only on the loneliest hilltops, and drank snow she melted with her foua, with an eye to avoiding the barbarians. In this way she made a long and ultimately fruitless search of the Red Mountains, even passing into the southlands and the borders of the Empire of the Ghioz, without meeting another of her kind, finding nothing but bats and bears and a horrid troll or two in likely caves. If any dragons did lurk there still, they were being quiet about it.

I am but one, and my enemies can't be numbered. I shall have to improvise. Perhaps the Dragonblade and the dwarves have a weakness only one familiar with their habits could exploit. Cunning is required, treachery even. What would Prymelete do?

"It would be a terrible risk," Ragwrist said after she outlined what she wanted him to do. They'd gone to some trouble to find a place where they could talk quietly. The new apprentice fortune-teller, Intanta's great-granddaughter Iatella, had been hanging about getting an eyeful of Wistala and peering at her through the crystal shard. Though she was a skinny little girl, Wistala didn't like being overheard, even by someone almost small enough to be gulped down in one swallow.

"I know. If the dwarves suspect me, they will kill me at once. And they know how to do it. I've seen the proof."

Ragwrist did not ask her to elaborate.

"No, I don't mean that. This Fangbreaker fellow is offering me so much money for you, I can retire to an estate and sell the circus to pay for the finest velvet cushions for my sore feet and sit-upon. I am afraid to trust myself. Especially since if your plot does not come off, I shall have made a powerful and implacable enemy."

"You may always plead ignorance and desperation brought by poverty," Wistala said. "You've had ample practice."

"You're getting as cynical as Brok. Where is the kindly green giant I once knew?"

"Still freezing her tailvent shut in the north, perhaps. Ah, I shall trust you. Perhaps my fate can balance out your desire to become a landlord like your brother."

"Canny of you to mention him. But remember, elves have no particular feeling for their siblings, and evoking his memory awakes in me no desire to help avenge him. All I want to do is forget that unpleasant night."

"Odd that you would send money to Lada to help her get Rayg back, then. Yes, I've been to the Green Dragon Inn and heard the latest from Forstrel. He's raising bees for Lessup's honey-mead now, near an old cave I sometimes use, and complained much of the share Hammar demands from all production. He also told me that you paid out of your pocket to fix some of the damaged houses. And that you raked the old ferry-bell out of the ruins and kept it."

"Rumor, rumor, rumor. I'm interested only in facts and expenses and how much I might get from the dwarves for you."

"I shall ask you to drive a harder bargain than you know. I want several conditions on the sale, all in the interest of my health, of course. Is Brok still with you?"

"Of course."

"I need him to forge a very stout collar for me, something that even a troll couldn't break."

"What, so that the dwarves may better chain you? Suppose you wish to break away and escape?"

"I didn't say that I wanted to break it. I just want to be able to open it."

Wistala stood in her new collar at the Ba-drink landing, a tiny escort of circus folk with her.

They'd set up a tent around her, specially sewn for the purpose, purple and patterned with powerful symbols, for she came to the Wheel of Fire dwarves not as an abject slave, but a great treasure, one to be guarded and protected and honored.

Wistala listened to the spring melt pouring over the dam spill and waited.

The collar itself was a thick ring of steel, leathered at the inside and edges, with two forged-steel loops, one at the top and one at the bottom, for the attachment of chains, though only the tiniest wisp of azure blue silk bound her to a silver peg in the floor. There was no latch or spot for a key, and if you ran your hands around the inside only hardened leather met your fingers. Only Wistala knew where, if you opened the stitching, you could insert a claw point and open the lock, which then left only a false weld to break before the collar fell away.

At last she heard the creak of oars in their locks, and shouts and orders and calls of dwarf voices.

"King Fangbreaker comes. Sound the trumpets! Beat the drums!"

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

Something took off with a whistling whoosh and exploded far overhead, Wistala guessed it to be a firework. A thundering tattoo broke out on the drums, it sounded like boulders coming down the mountains, and the trumpets pealed so high and clear, it was like sunshine had been turned to music.

Wistala, hearts hammering, waited for the audience.

The tent flap opened, letting in a little fresh air that Wistala welcomed, as Ragwrist was having incense burned to abate the dragon- smell for the honored guests.

"Winged, as you see. And a little grown, a little more appetite at mealtimes, but the same Oracle," Ragwrist said as he ushered three dwarves in. Wistala saw prostrate dwarves outside, who looked as though they'd been felled or struck by sleeping spells.

Wistala noted the changes in him even as the mighty dwarf looked her over.

Gobold Fangbreaker wore a silver mask now, emblazoned with a four-pointed star, two slits for his eyes and two more beneath flanking the ridges of the star, whose shining points extended beyond the dull plate of the mask. Below, his beard had swirling designs of gold and silver dust worked into it, and a golden cord bound it into a tuft at the bottom from which hung a piece of glass Wistala guessed to be a magnifier. He was somewhat thinner but still broadly built, in a cuirass of silver and leather cushioning, oddly like her own steel collar in its padding, only with more elaborate flourish down the centerline, evocative of spear heads. King Fangbreaker now wore purple caping at back and throat and sash.

The most obvious difference, though, was the absence of his right leg. An inverted half skull—Wistala guessed it to be a hominid's, though she knew not what branch had such strangely long fangs and a ridge at the temples that almost resembled horns—capped the missing limb at the knee. Projecting out of this and running to the floor was a rod of white crystal, like lighting frozen into immobility. A mundane steel-shod horse hoof at the base gave him some stability on the ground.

He still wore the helm capped with dragon fangs, only now overlarge horn-tips projected from its sides, gilded and filigreed.

Evidently the crown of Masmodon still eluded him.

Behind King Fangbreaker stood two more dwarves, one bearing a tall banner he had to dip somewhat to fit in the tent. It was the old ruby-tipped staff Fangbreaker had carried before, only now grown and with a crossbar added at the top to support a small purple banner, and the ruby was the perch of a stern-looking brass eagle. The other dwarf lugged chests and bags tied on either side of a steel shoulder pole.

Wistala dipped her snout until it almost touched the ground. "I see changes in you, Gobold Fangbreaker. Did my oracle come true, or have you come for my head and claws?"

Why, why, why did you say that? It sounds like a challenge—

"Hmpf," King Fangbreaker said. "I come to do this, though there are many who will swear, when the tale is told, that it is an impossibility."

He approached her and threw his strong arms about her neck, and patted her three times with his right hand hard enough to make her scales clatter.

"Yes!" King Fangbreaker said. "So happy am I that I embrace you like a sister! For no sister ever gave brother such encouragement as you gave me. You set my heart afire as though you had spat flame into it! And look!" He cast his arms wide and lifted his purple robes. "Results speak louder than any words."

He spun on his horse hoof, then stepped over to Ragwrist. "Elf, let us settle the accounting. Name your price, and if it's her weight in silver, I'll melt every plate and goblet on both sides of the Titan bridge to meet it." He turned back to Wistala. "I do not come to buy you, Oracle, but to free you. I would not have one who has done such service choking in the wake of gargant flatus." He extracted a knife from his sleeve with such speed that it almost looked as though it had grown there and moved to cut the blue silken cord.

"No, I beg you, mighty king," Wistala said. "That twist could be broke at the slightest pull. I would keep it as a souvenir of happy journeys under the kindest of masters."

"I've never known a dwarf to begin negotiations at such a disadvantage as saying 'name your price,' " Ragwrist said. "I'm quite befuddled. But if that is the case, the negotiations shall be brief. I seek only assurances as to her treatment."

"Treatment!" King Fangbreaker said. "She may go where she likes. But if she will reside with the Wheel of Fire, she'll want for nothing as long as I have voice to call for it to be brought to her. I would ask only her counsel in return."

"Let us adjourn to my tent, if you will accept my hospitality, great king," Ragwrist said. "It would be unseemly to name a price before the object of the negotiations, methinks."

"Elves and their protocols. Of course, Circusmaster, of course, but I am tempted to simply behead all present and free the dragon."

"My king, no!" Wistala said.

King Fangbreaker laughed. "I joke, of course. Let's get this over with, Ragwrist. It's too nice a day for tents and incense."

The party left, and Wistala sagged. Her spine had been tightening, her body closing on itself like a telescope all through the audience, yet she could not account for her fear.

"Shall I read your fortune?" a tiny voice squeaked.

Wistala looked down to see Iatella crouching between brazier and piles of pillows, cradling Intanta's old, saucer-shaped crystal in her lap as though it were a very fat doll. The girl was on the fire-keeping staff and had come along to work the camp kitchen and get road experience.

"Certainly. Practice away," Wistala said.

The little girl stood before her gravely, then knelt, all seriousness as is the manner of hominid children when hard at play. She drew designs around the crystal, then found something wrong with its placement, and inclined it a little so it faced her better.

"I see tragedy in your life," Iatella said.

This was no great secret to anyone with knowledge of Ragwrist's circus, but it showed the girl had some skill, for you always wanted to start out on firm footing.

"Wonderful," Wistala said. "I'm most impressed."

"Elves, dwarves, men—you have seen a good part of the Hypatian Empire," Iatella went on, pulling at her lip in thought.

"Amazing," Wistala said.

"Birds, too," she added. "Birds and death."

How … Where was she going with this?

"I see you. Something in shadow, a dragon with a scarred face the color of an old soup-pot. And one of many colors, turned white as snow. You thought him dead when he turned white."

How was this possible. Auron? How on earth could she know about Auron, or that morning on the mountainside she thought him frozen to death?

"Oh," she said, and her voice was no longer that of a little girl, but something older and croakier than even Intanta. "A terrible reckoning. Three dragons, opposition, and the fate of worlds in the balance."

And then she screamed, such a scream that it seemed to shoot right through Wistala's body, the tent, the soil itself, and fainted.

A circus dwarf, one of Brok's staff, and a pair of the Wheel of Fire dwarves rushed into the tent.

"What happened?" the circus dwarf asked, after a dwarvish expostulation from the others.

"We were playing a game. I coughed," Wistala said. "I think it frightened her."

They patted Iatella on the cheek, and her eyes fluttered open. She claimed no memory of what caused her to faint, and picked up her crystal and fled.

Ragwrist entered next, and the same questions were asked and answered. The dwarves wandered back out, leaving her and Ragwrist alone. "No matter. The bargain was easily struck. You have been 'freed' by the generosity of King Fangbreaker, Wistala," he said, untying the azure band of silk.

"Dare I ask the price?"

"I kept it low, saying that his good opinion would one day be worth more to me than any gold, and he looked pleased, though I think sometimes dwarves wear those masks as much to hide their emotions when bargaining as to keep out the light. I or others may visit you at any time, though the dwarves, as always, hold the right to decide who will be admitted to their city, and you are free to fly as you will. But I wonder. He told me to strike off your collar, by the way. All that effort wasted."

"Ragwrist, you are good to run this risk," Wistala said, quietly.

"Ha!" he said, patting her shoulder, and her scales were happy to have a memory to replace the embrace of King Fangbreaker. "You still hold Mossbell's lands, should true Hypatian law ever be reestablished across Whitewater. It's the land I've got my eye on. So having let you know my true motive, will you take this last opportunity to turn back? This is no arguing council of dwarves. If Fangbreaker senses a threat, he will deal with you … harshly."

Wistala ran her tongue along her teeth. "Then I will share the fate of my family."

She crossed the Ba-drink in splendor, on the dwarves' largest cargo-barge, pushed and pulled by smaller barges filled with lines of rowers.

The blue silk stood in place of her collar, the long sash tied loosely so as not to grate on her scales more than was unavoidable. Her little triangular diadem of the librarians dangled at the front of her fringe, sparkling in the mountain sun.

King Fangbreaker stood beside her as they approached the Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock. Tall Rock stood sheer-sided all around where it met the finger of water, but Thul's Hardhold climbed more gradually like some sort of fantastic staircase. Only to the east, where it faced Tall Rock across the Titan bridge, was it as sheer as its companion.

Sheer or not, the sides of the rock were cut with galleries and balconies, precarious outer stairways, even gardens beneath jutting stonework houses holding still more balconies and galleries.

And every one was lined with cheering crowds of dwarves, dropping dried flowers (or bits of torn paper or waxen wrapping if they could not afford flowers) as they passed across the water between the Hardhold and the Rock.

"Not a dwarf lives that doesn't aspire to a balcony of his own so that he might take fresh air and skylight," King Fangbreaker said, waving vaguely to the crowds. "We value it more than the elves, since many of us see so little of it. Some add gold leaf to the railings, but I prefer the natural look of traditional sedimentary stonework, don't you?"

"I'm overcome," Wistala said, flowers and bits of paper catching all over her scales and gathering in the folds of her wings. The rock walls to either side seemed to be coming together at the top, closing like a pair of vast jaws. But it had to be a trick of eye and distance, she'd seen their shape from across the Ba-drink.

"Now, a tour of what your advice gave me the courage to break loose, like a gem in a mine wall," Fangbreaker said as the barge docked. They tied to a wharf next to a cave with water flowing out of it. "Had we taken the royal barge, we might have gone right in, but I fear all you would have to do is scratch your ear and you'd capsize it."

More dwarves threw themselves on their faces and another firework shot up between the sheer cliff faces as King Fangbreaker hopped onto the wharf. The cheering didn't stop until he took a short set of stairs up and entered a wide gallery. Court officials—at least, that was what Wistala guessed them to be, for they wore cockades of purple—met him on the stairs, approaching with a sort of permanent, cringing bow and rose only to speak quietly into his ear.

"Yes, yes, I'll attend to that later," he said, passing through the herd of bent dwarves. They clustered and swirled about him so that Wistala was reminded of bloodsucker bats in the hotforests around Adipose attempting to latch on to a fast-moving bullock.

Fangbreaker led the swarm around corners and came to a cavern bridge inside, where a narrow crack leading up to the top of the Hardhold inside had its walls thick with mosses and clinging ferns. Water ran down the sides of the rock in a thousand tiny trickles to a sea of ferns below.

"Thul's Garden," King Fangbreaker said, passing over a short wide bridge. Wistala tested it with a sii. "Oh, come now, Oracle," Fangbreaker said. "This is dwarf work of the highest order. We could stack dragons all the way to the sky above on this little bridge."

There were dwarves in blackened steel at the opposite end of the bridge, with tufts of purple-dyed fur at boot-top and helmet lining. King Fangbreaker used the guards to shake off the courtiers, the way a whale of the Inland Ocean's cold north might use a rock to scrape barnacles from its belly.

Wistala passed over the short bridge, her head already in the passage beyond before her tail-tip left the gap behind.

He went up another short, wide flight of stairs, luckily for Wistala, then turned a corner where dwarves in soft leather shoes opened a set of double wooden doors. Wistala just squeezed through into a room about the size of the presentation tent where she'd awaited the dwarf that morning.

A huge, polished black table that looked like it had been carved out of the mountain itself stood in an oval of curved marble walls. There was a great deal of writing chiseled into the walls, and more on columns that had evidently been added to the room. Wistala counted twenty oddly shaped chairs around the table, draped in black velvet so that their spikiness was softened and hidden.

"Oh, the years I sat at this table, arguing over nothings," King Fangbreaker said, gripping the table as though he wished to lift and overturn it. "Motions, countermotions, oppositions, reconciliations, none of them worth a pot of passed water. The war with the de-men was being lost on the darkroads, and all we could do was sputter at each other. Until—after your words—I took control.

"I said what was needed was a King with the Old Powers to forge our divided houses into a single spear." He pointed with a finger at a notch in the table. "That's where Barzo put down his fist in a Rock of Opposition. So I whipped up my sleeve-ax and cut it right off. Arterial blood all over the meeting notes. The others fell into line once I rolled his head down the table. Gnaw, what a day. Felt light as a feather after. Follow me."

As she bowed to let him pass back to the doors she lifted one of the velvet coverings to the chairs, wondering if they hid bloodstains, and was aghast to see green dragonscale. She suddenly realized what the unused velvet hid—dragon claws, opened and digits bent so the dwarves might lean in comfort against stiffened sii and saa.

She gulped down a sickening mixture of sadness, rage, and regret, and fixed her gaze on Fangbreaker's back. One short jump and—

But these chairs had stood around this table since long before Fangbreaker, most likely.

The king brushed more of the soft-shoed dwarves aside. "Oh, it's as if I've no staff at all," he grumbled, and led her to a tall, narrow hall, sort of an echo of the garden they'd bridged before.

There were paintings all over the smoothed wall, some old and flaking, some almost unrecognizable, but he led her to a new one, so broad it partially covered two others of dwarves linking arms, or shaking hands, or pointing in various directions and talking.

The new painting depicted some sort of ghastly underground fight in hip-deep water, with canoes like hollowed-out trees filled with dwarves firing crossbows at blighters and other hominids with what Wistala took to be exaggerated evil features.

"The Battle of Domlod," King Fangbreaker said. "I wasn't actually riding the outside of one of the ramkaks, mind you, which is a fine way to get your head knocked off, but artists do insist on their frills and flourishes for dramatic effect. Lost my leg but won the war, and the de-men will be giving us no more trouble on the darkroads."

He let her admire it for a moment, and as they stood in silence one of the black-armored guards, this one with a purple half-cloak covering his shoulders, approached noisily and spoke in Fangbreaker's ear.

"Oh, I lost track of the time," King Fangbreaker said. "If the barge is already out, let's not keep the crowds waiting. Come, Oracle. By the way, do you have a name?"

"Those close to me call me Tala," Wistala said. "I would be glad to hear it from you, King." For the best place to strike an enemy is close enough to gut, as Father used to say.

"Very well, Tala, up the Hall of Invention and to the balcony over Thul's tomb."

They passed along another wide hall with many short antechambers, each filled with devices of metal and steel and cable, some even in motion, though whether it was to amuse or accomplish something Wistala could not say. She saw daylight ahead at the opening of a very finely wrought gallery atop a huge slab of solid red granite that read THUL in both Elvish and Hypatian scripts. There were other icons and scriptings, as well, though she did not know the tongues.

Curving stairs ran up the sides of the tomb to the gallery above. Dwarves in splendid cloaks and caps were already gathered there, and bowed low but did not throw themselves to the floor as King Fangbreaker climbed up to join them.

Not a few looked at her in wonder as she approached, but most of the others jostled for a place next to the king at the balcony rail, draped with purple velvet, Wistala noted.

She climbed atop Thul's coffin and some of the dwarves leaned their heads together at that, eyes heavily shaded, but most were still throwing elbows and hip-blocking to gain or keep a position near Fangbreaker at the rail.

Wistala looked out and down at the finger of water running between Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock. A small barge looked to be fixed just downstream—if current flowed in the lake—from the Titan bridge where a crowd, but nothing like the crowd at the King's barge trip, had gathered to watch events.

"None at Vassa's balcony, you see, my mighty king," one of the dwarves said in Fangbreaker's ear.

Wistala didn't know which was Vassa's balcony, and didn't care. She looked down the sheer side of rock at the barge. A dwarf, shorn of his hair and beard and stripped to a loincloth, was staked out in the daylight, no mask on his face. It looked as though he had something wrapped around his head, but it was at the mouth level.

Five dwarves in black capes, with black great-axes, stood around him, at each limb and the head.

A dwarf on the Titan bridge was reading from a scroll box, but Wistala didn't understand the words.

"What is this?" she asked Fangbreaker. A long neck had its advantages for reaching over crowds.

"Justice. That fellow spoke against me in his guild hall. Dozens of ears heard it; there's no doubt as to his guilt. Oh, the poor fool. It's like a madness; it's struck some of the best families with balconies on the Ba-drink."

"He's gagged?" Wistala asked as the ax-men, at some signal, lifted their blades.

"We used to let them say last words, but it led to tedious and insulting speeches. Now we open their mouths and give them just enough time to scream."

The dwarf at the staked-out figure's head nodded at some signal from above, and bent to remove the gag. Wistala heard a shout in Dwarvish from the staked-out man, and Fangbreaker thumped the balcony rail.

In quick succession the ax-man at his right arm brought down his blade, severing the limb, and four regular strikes followed on the stained wooden deck of the barge. The assorted bits danced a little, like landed fish.

Some cheering broke out, loudest at the king's balcony, or so it seemed to Wistala's ears. She wondered what his limbs might be used for, but they were simply dumped in the Ba-drink.

"A traitor's burial," one of the lordly dwarves said in Parl, perhaps wanting to please the king by explaining.

"Hmpf," King Fangbreaker said. "Dismembered and dead in five tics. And with his last words he called me brutal!"

The dwarves took her across the Titan bridge to the sloping top of Tall Rock and established her in the second highest tower there. The only higher tower was that of the watch-guild, who kept the time of the hour-bells and looked for riders at each end of the pass through secret optics.

She found herself in the care of a blighter slave named Yellowteeth. Yellowteeth indeed possessed oversize incisors the color of dried hay, top and bottom. He kept them polished by dipping his finger in ash and rubbing his teeth, then rinsing his mouth out with water.

He grumbled a good deal in Parl, for the dwarves spoke their tongue only among themselves and taught few its secrets, save for a claw-count of pleasantries and greetings and oaths that were public knowledge anyway.

She soon learned that the dwarves used three different languages, and not surprisingly to anyone who has spent much time around dwarves, ranked them.

The lowest was Parl, the language of servants, slaves, and those who engaged in commerce. Above that was Dwarvish, "the golden letters that unite us all," according to a dwarf-philosopher Wistala had read somewhere or other. The dwarves of the guilds spoke specialized dialects—there seemed to be guilds for everything, from armor-making to woodworking. Wistala even heard whispers of a Guild of Assassins—she guessed the Dragonblade headed that one. The choicest and most talented dwarves studied the high language, that of mathematics, according to dwarvish legend the only remnant of the perfect world that existed before darkness filled the holes.

Her tower had once been an observatory. Like the council chamber she was trying to forget, writing covered the walls, at the top star charts, moon graphs and planet tracks, beneath them explanations in the cryptic styling of the dwarves.

The star-guild had left not only numerous charts and symbols painted on the floors but on her high perch, as well, a platform designed to be lifted right up and out of the tower.

She could just get her head out the hole in the roof, which could be shut by a sheet of reinforced tin by working a bezel running around the ring-hole. (The dwarves and Yellowteeth used a pole with a hook to work it, Wistala could reach it without rearing up on her hind legs.) There were eight windows with thick shutters and curtains set around the observation room. A fixture directly beneath for some sort of apparatus stuck up from the floor below the platformlike toadstools, but all had been disassembled before they moved her into the perch.

It was a high, lonely place and appealed to her—unless a storm worked up. The tin covering on the hole rattled like a drum when rain or hail hit it, which was frequent at that altitude.

She could not fly from her room, however, without descending the center of the tower on which the blighter sat, and then moving to the Titan Bridge or squeezing herself out through a tunnel which led to one of the workshop chimneys, rising hundreds of dragon-lengths up from the heart of the mountain. Whenever she did that she ended up with soot on her scales.

The dwarves of the star-guild, who were few in number as their only employment was making maps and charts for Wheel of Fire dwarves planning a long journey, attended to her needs. Soothseekers sometimes talked—or bribed, she imagined—their way up into the observation tower and got her advice, but those visits were but rare.

So she had a good deal of free time for thought.

Thought about the Wheel of Fire and the Dragonblade, Hammar and the barbarians, the Hypatian Empire and, sometimes, the dragons of the Sadda-Vale.

On days of clear weather and light wind she explored the mountain pass the dwarves had been occupying since Thul, a General of the Hypatian Empire at its height, had guarded its mountain borders. To the east, where the steppes of the Ironriders stretched farther than even an eye on dragonwing could see, a narrow road hugged the north side of the mountain. It saw so little traffic that when Wistala saw a pack train, a rider, or a file of walkers on it she stopped to guess at their mission. Herds of cattle or horses, so long that they filled the road from its origins at the foothills to the Ba-drink, were brought in from the east by the Ironriders to trade for trade-good-quality blades and shields and helms, and the butchers-guild would work days at a stretch slaughtering and smoking and the Ba-drink would see a scum of blood from their offal.

Hardy mountain fish with knobs like horn-buds all across their sides disposed of leftovers, and were in turn pulled up and eaten by the dwarves.

The track up the west side of the mountains was not as formidable, but there the dwarves had the low wall anywhere an army could possibly march, and watch-guild dwarves in other places. Just coming to the cusp of the Ba-drink would be a feat of generalship for any invading army.

But no army could reach Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock without crossing the Ba-drink, and the dwarves kept all the barges in their inlets. Unless they could somehow fly over the steep, snowy mountaintops to the north, the attackers would not come within bowshot of the Wheel of Fire.

Father had been mad to attack this place.

She knew there were other roads, up from the Lower World, but could find no guides willing to take her below some of the lower chambers, and any investigating she did on her own was inevitably stopped by narrow, one-dwarf ladders or passages she was too big to climb. The dwarves working underground chuckled and told her they were not fools, the lower way was shut to keep out blighters and dragons and the foul de-men Fangbreaker had dispersed.

The dwarves would never be destroyed by invasion. Only a long siege might humble them, but dwarves were legendary siege-breakers, and had been known to eat each other rather than relent, according to Yellowteeth.

He could talk, after a fashion, though his Parl was broken and thick.

"Father taken long ago in battle, became tunneler. Father die in collapse. I born water-bearer."

Bear water he did, up the long stairs, to arrive panting and empty his buckets into a barrel. But the dwarves hurried to install a clever system fed by a tank added to the roof; its pipes gave her clean, cold water in a brass cistern, as much as she liked, leaving Yellowteeth only food and coal to carry.

He had a platform in the tower hollow below hers, little more than an antechamber off the stairwell that had once held ropes and pulleys, and it struck Wistala as a dark and cold place. She let him bring his mat up by her fire, and he smiled as he settled in by its glow each night.

As he slept, she had ample time to study his physiognomy. There was something of each of the other hominid races in the blighter, though half-formed and rudely constructed, like an apprentice's clay imitation of a master's sculpture. He seemed to take three times as long to accomplish anything when compared with one of the accommodating dwarves, and burned himself once or twice in a stupid fashion on the coal furnace, which struck her as strange for one who'd been fetching and filling coal all his life, especially since he did most of his other duties intelligently. His intelligence might also account for the lack of scars on his hairy back; most of the other blighters Yellowteeth's age she'd seen elsewhere had bare patches on their shoulders and backs from the lash.

When alone she looked out the windows and dreamed as lazily as Yellowteeth shoveled waste. She kept thinking of the hacked-to-pieces dwarf, feeling somehow responsible for placing this dread monarch at the head of these dwarves, who she hated to begin with but now felt a little sorry for. After all, the whole nation of them didn't storm her home cave.

She knew what she wanted to do; she simply had no idea how to go about doing it.

In the end, as the summer sun reached its zenith, she decided to start small, like Mother's single rock that created an avalanche.

"I must see the king! I must see the king!" Wistala told Djaybee, the dwarf of the star-guild and the most senior of those who resided in their small house carved into the top of Tall Rock below the tower.

Djaybee looked through his off-center mask at the half-sun crawling up between the mountains to the east and scratched his underchin. "For one so insightful, you know little of the habits of King Fangbreaker—a golden garland upon him, long may he lead."

"You would deny—"

"Not deny, good dragon, not deny. It's just that he often works all night and is not to be disturbed until after the noon-bell tolls, and usually then only with his mornmeal."

"Can you arrange an audience, then?"

"We've not much influence in the king's hall—may it see no evil deed."

"Try and I will praise you to him, good Djaybee."

Djaybee bobbed down to one knee. "Then I will endeavor to get you a place in the line."

Wistala got her audience that very afternoon, though whether it was through Djaybee's exertions or the King's interest in hearing from her she could not say.

Djaybee took her across the Titan bridge and through the passages to Fangbreaker's throne room. Yellowteeth trailed along at the back in case during her wait anything needed to be cleaned up and disposed of, for she was too large to use the dwarvish comfort rooms hygienically.

The throne room was long, high, and austere, formed into a tunnel that narrowed at the top into a triangular arch like a shovel-tip. Squared-off pillars running up the sides created a series of alcoves. In each alcove stood a member of the king's bodyguard.

A long, slightly raised walkway ran from the door wardens to the steps leading to King Fangbreaker's iron throne, forged from the melted weapons of those he vanquished in single combat, or so Djaybee told her. To either side of the walkway were wooden benches of dwarf-size, positioned so the bodygard could look out over all.

Long files of dwarves filled the twin bench areas, snaking back and forth in long lines, many carrying sealed scrolls, or gifts. (Baskets of food seemed to be the most popular—Wistala smelled one surreptitiously; it was filled with sausages and cheeses and tiny bits of hard-baked salty bread.) The older or expectant mothers sat, others stood, some talked to their fellow petitioners across the raised walkway and made jokes about having joined the slower-moving line, according to Djaybee.

Upon reaching the front of one of the two lines, the petitioner would speak to a purple-garbed dwarf seated at a little half-desk. The one to the left was male, the one to the right female, her face hidden under elaborate draping. Sometimes the officials would write, sometimes they would lay a waxen seal upon the petition, and sometimes they passed gifts up to the king through his guards.

King Fangbreaker sat on his throne with his artifical leg off. He toyed with the skull-and-crystal, his heel resting on the horsehoof which had been detached somehow, and used it as a baton to point, or offer a sort of salute of acknowledgment to those who brought gifts, or to wave the very few of the petitioners up who would be granted a personal audience.

Behind King Fangbreaker sat a line of the dwarf nobles, some dozing against their fellows. She recognized a few of them from the balconies, but thanks to the masks, it was hard to tell one dwarf from another.

"I shall wait in line for you, Oracle," Djaybee said, moving for the back of the left line, which stood three-quarters of the way toward the entrance.

But King Fangbreaker turned and called to one of his nobles, who rose and hurried down the raised central walkway. He bobbed and gestured for Wistala to come directly up the center aisle.

As she approached, she noticed that one of the sets of stairs was in fact an overhang. There appeared to be a room under the dais. She saw helmets in the shadows within and some sort of war machine with a good view of those waiting in line, and especially the central walkway.

"Tala, step up! Tala, it is a pleasure to see you," King Fangbreaker said. "Are your accommodations lofty and airy enough for your comfort?"

"They are admirable, my king, and I could fill your afternoon with a thousand thanks, but I've had visions that I thought I should bring to your attention."

"Shall we speak privately?" King Fangbreaker said, his eyes narrowing.

"Oh, no, this is good news for you and all your people. But I fear I must ask that all who participate in the discussion speak Parl that I may weigh their words, for I have no knowledge of Dwarvish."

"Easily done. Do all hear?" King Fangbreaker said.

The nobles behind stirred, and the two attendants to either side set down their pens and seal-wax. All listened.

Wistala spoke loudly enough for all—at least all who could understand Parl—but she kept her snout fixed on the king: "I've had troubling dreams the last week, but I thought they only applied to me. It was of tasty dishes, gold, all things a dragon's stomach desires. But they came in one door and out the other all while I slept unaware."

"Opportunity passing you by," King Fangbreaker said. "The lowliest soothsayer could tell as much."

"Ah, but then last night came a very specific dream. I saw a great triumphant parade, celebrating dwarves, fireworks, marching up a street paved with gold toward you, Good King. I believe an opportunity is coming your way."

"Can you add anything more helpful?" King Fangbreaker asked, twirling his leg.

"The one who led the parade was a human boy, a boy of fair hair and wide set eyes, bronze skin. But he was in manacles, my king. You embraced him, struck off his manacles, and took him to your breast, and the broken pieces of manacle turned into an ancient crown, and the boy put it on your head, but as he hesitated, the crown began to fade, and I woke up.

"I fear this opportunity may be brief, Great King."

"This is not helpful at all. There must be a million boys—"

"He was aged eleven years or so. Garbed like a barbarian, somewhat dirty about the face and hands. Perhaps he is a slave."

King Fangbreaker set his chin on his hand and thought. "Still a search for a nugget in a riverbed."

Wistala cocked her head, the way Auron used to when he had trouble understanding one of her ideas. "What do you mean—you must know the name! Is no one talking of it? Did you not hear the eagle?"

She saw the whites of King Fangbreaker's eyes. "Eagle? What eagle?"

"A most remarkable eagle flying at sunrise circled over Thul's Hardhold, my king. Purple it was—"

"Purple?" Fangbreaker thundered.

Wistala continued: "And as it circled it called the name Rayg in so mighty a voice, I can't imagine anyone didn't hear it. But now I fear it was part of the dream, as well."

"Did anyone see this eagle?" King Fangbreaker said, hopping off his iron throne and standing on one leg, using the throne-arm to balance.

"Eagle … perhaps … bird high up and far off … dark, possibly purple," the Lords of the Wheel of Fire said.

"A feather fell from it, and landed on my doorstep, purple it was," said one lord, falling to his knees. Another at the other end of the group slapped himself on the forehead as if to punish his wits for not being quicker.

"Hmfp! Very unhelpful, Lord Lobok, that I am only hearing this now," said the king, turning a hairy eye upon the kneeling lord.

"My wife thought it suitable to, ahem, set it in a bed of flowers, or preserve it in glass. I shall get it at once," he squeaked, and bowed himself down the stairs, and then hurried up the walkway, jumping over Wistala's twitching tail.

"A man-child. A man-child," King Fangbreaker puzzled.

"The boy's face was alive with intelligence," Wistala said. "Perhaps he will serve as an emissary, or a craftsman."

"I'd rather Hypatia come to the mountain," King Fangbreaker said. "But if we can find this boy, we'll decide then. An odd sort of vision, Tala." He scratched at his beard. "Hmfp! If it brings happiness to my people, I am satisfied. Let every one of our trading houses know to make inquiries about this boy. Say he is being ransomed through us, that none may learn his value before we acquire him. When it comes time to bring him here, I imagine I must let Lobok handle it, as the duty seems to have fallen on his doorstep along with the feather—though he is the nervous type."

"I will take no more of your time, Lord," Wistala said.

"And keep that out of my court," Fangbreaker said, fixing his eye about Yellowteeth, who lurked behind Wistala.

Oddly enough, the blighter smiled back at the king as he gave a nodding bow. Wistala might even have called the expression defiant.

Wistala flapped in the night sky above Galahall, a cold fall wind from the northwest helping keep her aloft as she turned circles, falling in a glide and then rising with a few hard wing-beats, wondering what transpired within.

Hammar had new hutments on the edge of his lands, the round structures of the northern barbarians with their roofs like a single-pole tent.

She accompanied the expedition at King Fangbreaker's request. He was nervous about Lord Lobok, who'd set out from Thul's Hardhold with an armed force some of the dwarvish lords laughed at as being oversize, especially considering the small amount of money borne as the agreed price for the youth.

"He never was the steadiest warrior, and always called for more axes and artillerists, whatever his situation," Fangbreaker said, watching the barges set out from his balcony ten days before.

"But the feather fell on his doorstep," Wistala said. She'd seen the purple feather, produced after some delay for the King's court; it smelled like a white one freshly dyed. "In case of treachery, would it not be better to have a large, well-arrayed force at hand?"

"This is the simplest of transactions. Why the word treachery?" King Fangbreaker asked.

"I cannot say. I speak what comes out of my mind; why it was that word instead of another is as much a mystery to me as to you."

"Hmpf," he said in return.

"Are there commanders to see that the force is well handled, whether it is a peaceful march or a warlike one?" Wistala asked.

"From anyone else I'd call that an insult, Tala," he rumbled. "But you've little opportunity to learn decent manners."

"May I hazard my manners with another question?"

"Of course."

"What happens to those gift baskets of food given to you in your throne hall? Do you eat them all?"

"I eat not a one," King Fangbreaker said. "I've a queer stomach, and mostly eat gruel a-mealtimes, which is easily digested and nutritious. And I have a terrible sweet tooth at night, which is responsible for this," he patted his paunch. "The baskets go to the poor of our city. There are many widows and orphans without a dwarf in a guild to support them. Can't have young dwarves growing up all stoop-backed and knockkneed, coughing and feverish from malnutrition."

Wistala felt the lordly dwarves moving about her flanks, some were pointing to her underside and talked among themselves, perhaps discussing assorted methods and tactics of dragon-killing.

"How did you get the title Fangbreaker, my king?" Wistala asked.

"I was cheated by a pair of dragons," he said. "They were a wretched, misfortunate pair, who we helped restore to health and vitality with foods and metals. In return they fought for us, as some of the mercenary Ironriders do on the eastern side of this mountain, but they abandoned us to start their family without taking proper leave and asking permission to bear eggs. For we had a market for those eggs, a rich market, and they'd agreed that their bodies would be ours for a period under contract.

"Now I was not unreasonable. I just asked for one clutch. After that, they would be free to go where they wished, to the ends of the breaking earth in the west or the jeweled kingdoms of the east for all I cared, and hatch as many eggs as they liked. But I'd promised a full clutch of eggs to a buyer, and he would have them.

"The dragons argued that their services included only flying and fighting, not eggs, and when I stood firm, they fled. The laying time must have been close, for they did not flee far, though they turned up in an unexpected cave, one we'd gone to much trouble to seal from below to cut off the blighters within from the darkroads.

"I caught up to them in the end, so that I might turn over hatchlings to my buyer, if not eggs. Though that Dragonblade got overzealous in the fight and in attempting to pinion a hatchling killed it. I poked a hole in the female who'd lied to me, spilling her fire bladder and rendering her harmless and gasping, and smashed in her lying mouth with my gauntlet for defying me, turning her teeth into bloody ruin. She died cursing me through a broken jaw. Does this talk sicken you, Tala?"

Wistala, wondering how King Fangbreaker's body would dance as flame consumed it, took a deep breath. "There are good dragons and bad dragons, just as there are good and bad dwarves, Dread King."

"But so I was titled and given a place at the council table, for we managed to hunt one hatchling down and the Drakossozh killed another with his dogs."

"Bad luck, for the Dragonblade to kill two while trying for capture."

"You're a dragon yourself. You must know that it is not the easiest of tasks. But I feel for you, at the unfortunate loss of others of your kind. Would that more dragons grew up to live useful lives!"

Would that more dwarves did the same, Wistala thought.

"How can I ease your mind about Lobok?" Wistala said. "I can go to my tower and try to force a vision. Perhaps if you gave me some personal tokens—"

"No. I wouldn't care to force a wrong reading from you. But hear! You could act as a courier between my throne room and Lobok's camp. You can bring a message in a few hours over a distance that a rider would take a day to cover."

"Nothing that would make me happier," Wistala said. "Than to be able to set your mind at ease."

So she'd gone to Lobok's camp twice carrying messages from the mountain king, carrying reassurance that all was going according to plan—and made a side trip or two to the vicinity of the Green Dragon Inn to speak to Forstrel among his honeycombs.

"I wonder why he asks for word?" Lord Lobok asked. His hands kept coming together and then running up his arms and back down again as he paced and thought, as though the right was worried that the left had eloped with an elbow.

"I do not know all the messages King Fangbreaker, high may he remain, receives. I only do my duty," Wistala said. "You have ample dwarves for a march through enemy territory."

"Enemy?" Lobok asked. "Lord Hammar is a good friend, we've had much commerce with him. The dwarves just come to guard our prize on the way back."

"I've heard he's been calling himself King Hammar," Wistala said, and flew off back to Fangbreaker with Lobok's reply.

So as she hung in the darkness over Galahall, seeing the lights go on within and the carpets laid on the doorstep, she turned and made a careful approach to the nearby stream where the dwarves were camped at the base of the ridge she'd crossed so many years ago in the company of Stog.

She asked for a meeting with Lord Lobok, busy dressing for the court dinner celebrating another successful transaction, for the boy Rayg waited at Galahall to be sold to the dwarves. She was admitted with the expediency one would expect of a courier from King Fangbreaker, and found him buttoning a formal robe over a chain shirt. He wore a mask of red silk stretched under and over a decorative wooden frame, like a child's kite.

"Lord Lobok, are you going yourself?" she asked, putting her head in his tent so as not to crowd him and the servant-dwarf helping his lord dress.

"Of course. It's a welcoming dinner, and as leader and emissary I'm expected. You don't—"

"The night feels wrong to me," Wistala said. "Are your soldiers arrayed well?"

"We're on the thane's land," Lord Lobok said, fingers fluttering against his chain shirt. "There's nothing to fear here."

"As long as the thane is true. I've had horrible dreams, but they must be wrong. They must be."

Lobok left off dressing, turned his silk-masked face to her. "Why do you say your impressions must be wrong? You are King Fangbreaker's, honors upon his name and so forth, famous Oracle."

"Who could mistake such omens? The feather landed on your doorstep. The Fates have chosen you."

Lobok and his servant exchanged a glance. "Of course."

"Yes. I am overwrought, seeing those barbarian encampments around the thane's hall. I'm imagining things." She began to shake. "But beware, O lord; if anyone speaks of a blood relationship between Hammar and the child you are receiving tonight, blood will be shed. A dagger at your back."

She let her eyes roll wildly and then flopped over, closing the water-lids over her so that she would look glassy-eyed.

"Oh! Oh! Oh, no," Lord Lobok said, his hands clasping and unclasping, then gripping elbows tight. "Someone. Ummm. Is it safe to dump water on dragons?"

Wistala rattled her sii and lifted her head. "Nur … what am I doing here? Ia, I'm happy for you, Lord Lobok, you live again …" She blinked, shook her head. "I beg your pardon, my lord, were you saying something? I seem to have fainted."

Lobok gestured to his servant, took a quavering gulp of wine from a proffered cup. "You didn't have another vision, did you?"

"Oh. No, I don't think so. Hazy, so hazy. My eyes vex me. There's a mist about you, my lord. It must be the scented candles. Excuse me, I am obliged to fly back to the throne room."

She left Lord Lobok calling for more wine.

Three days later King Fangbreaker's throne room was lined with many of the most noble families in the mountains, hearing the report of Field Commander Djosh. Wistala waited for it to be read again in Parl, having begged to know what the message she carried read:

 Noble King and Assembled Select and Lordly Dwarves,

 I write you to report a most satisfactory outcome to an attempted treachery by Lord Hammar and his barbarians on the two hundred ninetieth of this year. I thank the Fates for the eagle and his feather landed upon Lord Lobok's door, for were it not for him not a dwarf of this expedition may be returning.

 Lord Lobok insisted on our arrays being placed within hearing distance of Galahall, ready to answer a cry for assistance, and I can only marvel at his foresight, inspired, I'm told, by our lucky dragon, who sensed matters amiss.

 I am told that during dinner an unusual number of barbarian leaders were present, as the infamous Hammar was building around himself a court of scoundrels. As the servants poured wine for a toast, Hammar gave some sort of code word that he was letting his illegitimate son—I shall not sully the throne room with his coarse discourse—be sold for little more than the song that wooed his mother. At this there was some stirring at the priests' end of the table and Lord Lobok let out such a shriek of warning that we would have heard it were we camped two vesk away. Lobok drew blade and flung himself sideways behind the table, knocking over a server who was making to bring the cask of wine down on Shieldmaster Dar's head, Lord Lobok's bodyservant tells me.

 At the calls of alarm and assistance from Lord Lobok I sent my hardhanded dwarves forward and they stormed through the windows of Galahall in good order. The barbarians made some semblance of a fight but clearly intended for the dinner to be a slaughterhouse, not a battle hall, and seemed not much experienced at close quarter fighting under roof and among furniture. Our dwarves, used to such environs, secured the boy with some loss of blood, almost all of it on the part of our opponents, and no loss of the treasure we brought to purchase him, for treachery abrogates any deal. I hope the throne will approve.

 Barbarian cavalry, long prepared to finish off the villainy indoors, made an effort to harry our retreat, but our catafoua made them fall back with loss.

 Wistala smiled, for she'd had Lessup's mead-deliverers start rumors of warlike preparations in the dwarf camp where they'd just sold their honeyed brew.

 I close this dispatch by saying we have lost few dwarves as we retreat in good order for the Ba-drink. I write to you in Lord Lobok's stead, for he travels with the healing wagons, and is so dosed with medicines after his experiences he is currently unable to write legibly. If you have any orders beyond returning to the Hardhold with our young prize, they will be immediately carried out by

 Your faithful Field Commander,

 Djosh Scarchin

As the words were read in Parl, the dwarves grumbled and swore all over again, and King Fangbreaker paced before his throne.

"What do you say, Oracle?" a dwarf called.

Fangbreaker glowered. "This is a military matter, Guildmaster Cyoss."

"Great King, though we would hear the dragon, you must decide, of course," another called.

Fangbreaker turned to Wistala. "What do you think, Oracle?"

"I have not a military mind. But shouldn't this sort of treachery be punished?"

The assembled select dwarves growled in agreement.

"I am very tired from my flight, and you all have weighty matters to long discuss," Wistala said. "May I be excused from council of war?"

"Of course," Fangbreaker said.

"Three cheers for the lucky dragon!" a dwarf at the back shouted.

Wistala bowed backwards out of the throne room, but she saw the fixed stare in Fangbreaker's eyes, and trembled.

Lord Lobok's expedition returned with Rayg in triumph and glory.

It must have been strange to the thin little youth, to be borne across the Ba-drink in a garlanded boat, flanked by lordly dwarves and rowed between Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock, under a rain of tiny white mountain flowers—and bits of paper and wax wrapping—thrown from the balconies and the Titan Bridge.

Even as they returned a new expedition set out, under three of the Wheel of Fire's greatest generals.

Wistala heard from the star-guild that King Fangbreaker had decided to launch a "punitive expedition" into the barbarian lands, to teach the barbarians a real lesson for the treachery at Galahall. They were keeping their exact plans secret, but the star-guild had provided detailed maps of Kark and the Blacklake area, for barbarians from that region had been identified as among the slain around Galahall.

Wistala hung about, asked if she'd be needed to relay messages, and was told that the sight of a dragon in the sky might give away the column's presence.

When night fell, she flew away from the Wheel of Fire with all the speed she could manage and almost tore her wings off making it to the Green Dragon Inn. There she dictated a letter to be given to Hammar, and a much longer one to be sent to Ragwrist.

 Lord Hammar,

 You and I have had our differences in the past, but the enemies of my blood, the dwarves of the Wheel of Fire, are marching on Blacklake and Kark, intent on destruction and murder. Whether you tell your barbarian allies to move their women and children away from those areas or plan an ambush is entirely up to you.

 A Daughter of Hypatia

Jessup looked at the note after he finished writing it in his chicken-run hand. Wistala pressed her librarian medallion into some very ordinary red wax he helpfully dribbled at the bottom.

"This is a dangerous game you are playing, Wistala."

She stretched her aching wings and back muscle. "It's no game, I assure you, and the stakes are beyond anything that can be placed on a table or dice-rug."

"Mod Lada would like news of her son, if you have any. She saw him seized up from table after that treacherous dwarf-lord started attacking the wine stewards and signaled his ambush."

Wistala told what she'd heard from the astronomers' guild: "I have not spoken to Rayg, but I am told he's been apprenticed to the Guild of Inventors. Evidently he showed some intelligence in the Hall of Inventions as he passed through it, and recognized some piece of artifice and its use, which much impressed the keepers there. It is a high honor, only the brightest dwarves gain an apprenticeship in that guild. I can assure her those dwarves are the best-treated of the Wheel of Fire."

Jessup pulled back a lock of his remaining hair. "It is a strange road we've traveled since that day we buried Avalanche."

"And there are still more trolls to slay."

"I'll let you deal with the trolls. I'll keep my inn and tell your story to anyone who asks about the sign."

"May it not have an end for a long time," Wistala said.

Jessup reached up, tickled her under the chin. "I've always wanted to do that. I never tire of looking at you, Wistala. There's something about dragons. All power and dread symmetry."

"I must be off. I have much more flying to do, yes, all the way to the Imperial Library at Thallia. I hope they don't panic and think I've come to burn it. I need to speak to a librarian."

"What will you do there?"

"Learn about dams."

When Wistala returned to her tower a score of days later, she found all of the Wheel of Fire were aquiver. The punitive expedition had not sent communication in many days, and not a few wondered at the silence.

She received a most odd note shortly after rising the next day. Yellowteeth hurried to get her minder, who hurried to get his guild-chief, who read the note and sent for the escort Wistala requested.

So it was in the company of the star-guild that she went to meet the Dragonblade on the Titan bridge.

He stood in the center, in his armor but with sword in scabbard and cloak about him, helm hanging from his belt. His broad face was much as she remembered it, perhaps a little wearier.

"I've long been curious to meet this Oracle dragon for some time now, but was occupied on the other side of the Inland Ocean." For some reason Wistala was relieved. As soon as he said occupied on the other side, she feared a mention of the Sadda-Vale.

"So you've seen me, Drakossozh. Is there to be a duel here, under the eyes of the Wheel of Fire?"

"A duel? With vermin? Spare me your wit, creature."

"Then I will go about my business—," Wistala began.

"No. Walk with me. I will start no fight with you here. You have my word."

Wistala wondered if she could trust the word of an assassin.

"I must be growing old. You are the second dragon to slip through my fingers," he said.

"Who was the first?"

He turned toward the Hardhold. "Come. I wish to show you something, Oracle."

He led her down many sets of stairs, across chambers filled with trophies and statues, and finally down a shaft where one traveled by having the floor descend rather than going afoot. He gave a password to guards in a workshop filled with the sound of hammers and deeper pounding, and Wistala smelled hot metal and burning coal.

She passed a group of young dwarves, their faces unmasked, listening to another older dwarf talk as he pointed with a stick at various features of a hose that fed water into a series of smaller and smaller pipes, until it shot out the bottom with tremendous force. She recognized Rayg among the apprentices, the only human other than Drakossozh this far in the Hardhold.

"We're deep in the Guild of the Armorers," the Dragonblade said. They passed racks of weapons and stacked helms, with dwarves bent over workbenches on all sides. The symphony of noise was as chaotic as a battle, and the air thick with the tang of heated metal. "Have you ever wondered how the Wheel of Fire got its name?" he asked.

"You see the burning shield here and there," Wistala said. "It's an emblem."

"They were called the Wheel of Fire before that. Here, follow."

He passed into a quieter gallery. The ceiling here was wide but low, and Wistala smelled an oily smell like lamp fats overlaid with other workshop odors.

Long ranks of machines stood in little bays. Some had wooden platforms next to them, one or two had been wheeled out so the dwarves could work. A few of the workers gave Wistala a startled look as she crouched to get through the doors.

The pieces of craftsmanship were like great walls on wheels of assorted sizes. If there was an average, she would put that wheels were fully dwarf height and the walls perhaps twice that, but it seemed some walls and wheels came taller and some shorter, some wider and some narrower. But on each two spars jutted out from the axles of the wheels behind the wall, with handles at irregular intervals. Wistala watched a team of dwarves move one by having four dwarves stand at each spar and lift, then push it forward. Behind the shield were big tanks like water-cisterns, only with hoses and glass devices like clock faces fixed to the joints, along with assorted levers and cables connecting wheel to tanks.

But the objects at the front caught her attention more than anything.

Pipes projected from slits in the great wheeled shields. The slits, indeed the shields themselves, reminded her of overlarge dwarf battle-masks with their thin gaps so the dwarves could see and still have their eyes shielded.

Open-jawed dragon heads, horribly real, had been fixed to the front of the pipes, their faces forever frozen into snarling fury. Their eyes had been replaced by painted crystals, but otherwise they looked ready to come alive. There were heads with eight horns and heads with none, heads with green scales and heads with bronze, heads of hatchlings, drakes, drakka, dragons, dragonelles… .

Some were familiar.

The world spun about her. She fixed her eyes on the Dragonblade, who stood with hand on sword hilt, helmet cradled at his elbow. His knees were bent just a trifle, as though he were waiting to leap into action. Wistala noticed shadows, heard excited breathing, the alcoves just ahead.

"I'm not aware of all the mechanics to their operation," the Dragonblade explained from somewhere on the other side of the Endless Steppe, or so it seemed to her ears. "But the turning of the wheels forces air into one of the tanks, and that air is then used to drive flame, like dragonflame, out of the other tank and through the pipe at the front. It's ignited by a coal gas-flame there. Certainly not what a dragon is capable of, but I hear it's terrifying in tunnel warfare."

The dwarves had all frozen in their labors, watching her as though fixed by spellcraft.

"Most interesting," Wistala said. "Is there another stop to the tour, or am I done?"

"You hold your anger well. Here's another test." He extended his gauntleted palm. In it rested two ancient Hypatian coins, one of gold, the other of silver. "I found these in the jowls of a bronze I killed on the banks of the Whitewater. There was also a female hatchling there. That hatchling wouldn't have been you, would it?"

Wistala shot out her tongue, but the Dragonblade was quicker of hand, closed his fingers around the coins and withdrew them.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were offering me a treat," Wistala said. "Speaking of which, I am late for my dinner."

"A dragon who can hold her temper," the Dragonblade said.

Just, Wistala thought.

"There's something about you that frightens me," the Dragonblade said, eyebrows together. His horridly flat face wrinkled in thought. "A dragon who can keep her temper could be a deadly enemy. Or—"

"Or what?" Wistala asked.

"I won't misjudge you again," the Dragonblade said, not answering her question and crossing to the opposite gallery. "You've escaped me twice. There won't be a third."

"No," Wistala said. "I expect there won't."

"And even if I fall, I have a son and a daughter to avenge me."

"I've met your son. I hope he gets his chance."

"Ah, yes. Not his finest performance. I thought I'd try him on an easier target his first night out. I never thought you'd chew your wings open. They've grown out nicely."

Wistala took a breath. If she kept her eyes on the Dragonblade, she couldn't see the heads, except he kept strolling around so she couldn't help but view the machines.

"I wonder if Fangbreaker knows all your history," the Dragonblade said.

"I wonder if he knows you've disobeyed him, and killed when he told you to capture."

She turned and moved back through the workshops, keeping one eye on him just in case. But he stood there, helmet at his hip, chuckling. "You may walk away, dragon. Even fly. But wherever you go, you cannot hide forever. Dragons are noticed, you see?"

As she retraced her steps back dwarves seemed to be rushing about everywhere, or standing on stairways talking and gesticulating. Something had them dreadfully agitated but Wistala did not ask what. Her head hurt, perhaps from the fumes in the workshops, and she wanted to retire to her tower to sleep.

"Dhssol."

"Oracle, what do you think?" some asked, but she passed in a daze.

"Dhssol! Dhssol!" the dwarves said, one to the other. Dwarf wives wailed it from their balconies as Wistala crossed the Titan bridge.

"Who is this Dhssol?" she asked one of the leather-slippered court workers.

"Not a who, a what," he said, pulling at his beard. " 'Disaster,' it would be in Parl. An evil star is on our house."

The dwarves of the star-guild told her the terrible news when she returned to her tower. A tradesdwarf of the Chartered Company had made a rare appearance at the Wheel of Fire to bring tidings of sorrow and fear: the punitive column had been wiped out almost to a dwarf.

After a bloody march through villages where the dwarves left burned bodies in wooden cages, they'd been betrayed by their hired scouts, supposedly belonging to a rival clan to the lands they'd been traversing. The false scouts led to a flooded river, and while attempting to cross, they had been attacked during a snowstorm from both sides and by forces shooting down the river in narrow boats.

Hammar, now called the Dwarfhanger by his barbarian legion, was reputed to be on the march for the Wheel of Fire, destroying what remained of the column as the survivors retreated.

Some important voices were calling for Lord Lobok to be put in charge of the defense of the city, he'd had his share of luck against the barbarians and Hammar before.

"And he's cautious, and would not improvidently expose his troops to destruction," Djaybee said. "He can stand against this Hammar, for years if need be. The barbarians always lose interest in war after a season. It'll be over by the summer flowers. Should he assume command?" the scientifically minded dwarf, who'd never asked her advice before, wondered.

"I would like nothing better," Wistala said.

They were interrupted in this discourse by a visitor. This time Gobold Fangbreaker himself came to her, rather than going through the delay of having her brought to the Throne Hall.

"Tala, you have heard the rumors?" the king said as he arrived, surrounded by his black-armored bodyguard.

"Yes. Is it true, my king?"

"True enough," he said. "Though not quite so bad as some losing their nerve would have it. Battle Commander Vande Boltcaster has a full maneuver array of dwarves left, and they are fighting as they turn back. But they've been forced to abandon their train and are short on supplies and have no time or capacity to seek more. I've had an idea. How much do you think you can carry?"

"The weight of several dwarves," Wistala said. "Over short distances."

"This will be a long flight of short hops, then. I need you to bring him food, medicines, and above all crossbow bolts."

"My wings are at your command, Great King," she said.

"There's been talk of you being absent for some time," King Fangbreaker said. "To where did you fly?"

"To see my friends at the circus. They go into winter camp about this time each year."

"Hmpf," said King Fangbreaker, from behind his shield. "You seem the type to keep friends long. How about enemies?"

"I've set out to make no enemies, my king," Wistala said. "I made more friends than enemies with the circus. Of course, there are those who felt they were cheated—"

"I don't mean that. Ach, I don't know what I mean. I'm overwrought, imagining things. You put new heart in me. Eat a good meal and be ready to fly by tonight. The star-guild will supply you with a map based on our best information."

Wistala lowered her head to the floor, and King Fangbreaker left. She later learned he'd walked all about the city, calming the citizens on both sides of the Titan bridge, answering questions from the lowliest porter to guild-heads.

That night she came to the Titan bridge, where she was loaded with milk-powders, sugarcubes, crossbow bolts, slabs of honey, medicines, even rolls of needle and thread for stitching wounds. Dwarf wives came and stuck flowers in her scales or tied ribbons with messages inked on them about her sii and saa. She was asked to look for so many dwarves that the king's bodyguard had to push away the supplicants.

She tried a short practice flight, and returned to the bridge.

"I can carry more," she said, not altogether sure that she could. More bundles were strapped to her back and chest, everywhere but where her wings could flap.

The King himself drank a toast in her honor and gave her a heaping handful of gold coins to eat, slathered with something sweet and hard the dwarves called cocolat. It gave her a rush of energy, and she launched herself again, and even gliding seemed somewhat of a strain.

Behind her, they set off red fireworks.

She had to relearn to fly, laden as she was, and it was slow going until she learned to better angle her wings. After an hour she dropped, exhausted, sure she could never reach the sky again, but she did.

And so she fought her way north, an hour's flight, a half hour's rest, another hour's flight, a quarter hour's rest, another hour's flight, a drop from exhaustion into sleep that ended at daybreak.

The next day she passed over the track of the punitive expedition. The snow had covered the burned foundations, but crows poked at charred heaps here and there, extracting unburnt marrow. She'd never heard of war like this in the Hypatian books of tactics and maneuver, parley and honorable surrender. The dwarves had struck with a heavy, vengeful hand.

Or had she?

Wistala landed in a crowd of cheering dwarves the next dusk. Their eyes burned so bright behind their masks that they glowed. Beards were shorn to show loss of comrades and officers, and they hadn't had time or energy to clean the caked blood from their armor.

Battle Commander Vande Boltcaster moved with a limp, walking with the aid of a broken bow. His officers untied and distributed the messages bound on her legs and tail—many would never be read by the eyes for which they were intended.

"Can you carry out wounded?" Boltcaster asked her. "I have three hero-dwarves we've been carrying since the Norssund."

"Oh, for some wine," she said.

"Gone," Boltcaster said. "Like much else. There's toasted horsemeat and boiled entrails galore, if you like. They were to be breakfast, but there's not a dwarf here who wouldn't give you his portion."

"Can you make it back?" Wistala said. The dwarves were taking turns to slip away from their lines and write notes on everything from wrapping-paper to bits of wood, in blood if nothing else would serve, and tying it to her. She submitted, hating herself for what she was about to do.

"I'll know when we reach the Shoulder-Fell. How long before the king marches to our aid?"

"I have not seen a dwarf set out beyond the outer wall," Wistala said, honestly enough.

Some of the dwarves growled at that.

"Silence, there," Boltcaster barked. "I've still reports to send, and you have families."

"How do you move?"

"Loose march-square. If the barbarians come, we fall in tight. The cavalry hasn't been trained that can break a Wheel of Fire shield wall."

"Where are the barbarians?" Wistala asked.

"Where aren't they?" a dwarf answered.

"They mostly follow our trail, scavenging discarded metalwork and despoiling the dead," Boltcaster said. "We've had demands for surrender, and each time they've ridden from that direction. Good treatment. Ha! What do you expect, fighting savages such as these. Blighters would puke at some of their deeds."

Wistala took off down the path and winged over the dwarven defenses—felled trees, mostly—to halfhearted cheers. She saw some horses in the trees beyond and loosed some fire, more for show than for effect, and cast about until she saw tightly knit campfires. She swooped in low over the tents.

Barbarian chieftains called for their archers and pointed. A few desultory arrows sang through the air around her.

"Tell Hammar they make for the Shoulder Fell," she said, flying upside down to keep out the shafts. She repeated it again over another group of tents, before turning back for the dwarves.

They stuffed her with horse entrails before she took off the next morning, with the three wounded dwarves tied across her back. The burden seemed light compared with the supplies she'd carried in the previous day.

By the time she returned to the Titan bridge, one of the wounded had died. The other two were untied and rushed into the Hardhold.

Wistala lay on the bridge like a dead thing as the dwarves untied the messages. One of the lordly dwarves took the courier-pouch from her neck and rushed it to the king.

Fangbreaker himself came down to the bridge to see her, stumping along on his horse hoof, which clomped on the wood planks of the bridge.

"They are in bad shape, my king," Wistala said. Some in the crowd cried out, and she heard mutters of dhssol. "I fear I am, too."

"Boltcaster's need is great," King Fangbreaker said. "I must ask you to fly again as soon as you've rested. He needs more supplies."

"You go," Wistala said.

"What?"

Wistala raised her head, too tired to do much but speak. If the bodyguard closed on her, it would be all she could do to roll off the bridge. "You go. Gather your forces and go to his aid."

The crowd went instantly silent.

"No," said the king. "Boltcaster must rely on his own skill and courage. We cannot take that risk. Every dwarf will be needed here."

"Or you could return with your number of warriors doubled," Wistala said.

"She's exhausted," King Fangbreaker said, loudly. "The dragon is mazed. Pay her no mind. Go, good Oracle, go to your tower and rest." He reached for a handful of cocolat-covered coins to place in her mouth and evidently thought the better of it. He tossed the bag down before her.

"Eat these—you'll feel better."

Wistala picked the bag up but did not eat them. Instead she bowed to the king and turned for her tower, trying to forget the masked faces of the doomed dwarves in Boltcaster's column. They were getting what they deserved. Would she?

The bodyguard closed around the king behind her, seeing the hard stares of some in the crowd.

Wistala slept, and ate, and waited.

The news finally came: Boltcaster and his remaining dwarves had been defeated on the slopes of a mountain, evidently the barbarians had prepared and then rolled rocks down on them from above, breaking the shield wall just before a charge.

Fangbreaker called their end "glorious" and a credit to the Wheel of Fire. But there were mutterings against him, arrests, even an assassination or two, and suicides that some said were not suicides.

One of these was the son of Lord Lobok, who finally agreed to take command of the outer wall at the edge of the Ba-drink.

The star-guild whispered of threats to her life, and Yellowteeth grew afraid to go down for coal. Wistala shrugged off the danger. The dwarves needed every warrior who could carry a spear and would not waste any on a dragon that could be dealt with later.

Then came a dread winter morning when word spread that a barbarian horde was on the foothills below the Ba-drink. With them were Hypatian mercenaries, cavalry, even gargants. Will-making became a popular diversion, there were parties of a desperate nature on the balconies as the dwarves who would defend the walls spent one last night with their kith and kin.

Wistala watched, from her high tower, the barges creep across the Ba-drink, disgorge the dwarves for the walls, and then return for more. Control of the Ba-drink meant control of the herds on the south shores of the lake, and access to the east road for supplies, so the wall had to be held to avoid a bitter siege.

She looked at the sheer walls of Thul's Hardhold. Many were the balconies that hung black banners, mourning their losses.

Djaybee joined her at the thin window slits.

"I think you should know, there's a dozen of the king's guard at the base of the tower. They don't want you to leave," Djaybee said. Yellowteeth hung about the passage down, as if fearing a rush of footsteps, but what he could do other than slicken the steps with shovelfuls of dragon waste she did not know. "Hard words passed between us, and I was cautioned against keeping counsel with you. I fear another night of knives is coming."

"Night of knives?"

"As there was when our noble king, a curse be upon his name, claimed all power. Those who opposed him never woke again, but were found dead behind their bedcurtains."

"We'd best take turns keeping watch," Wistala said.

Her sleep was uneasy that night, and the tower went cold, for Yellowteeth was too terrified to descend the stairs to get more coal. Wistala finally let him sleep in the corner farthest from the door while she and Djaybee took turns at the stairs.

She awoke to a tickle behind her chin, dreaming that Jizara was poking her with her tail-tip. She opened her eye and froze.

Yellowteeth stood next to her neck, his shovel handle somehow transformed into a spear pressing against the interstices between her scales above her neck heart.

"Greetings from the Assassins' Guild," Yellowteeth said, his Parl-pigdin markedly reduced. "The king has a message for you as you die: Where is the crown of Masmodon, Oracle? Where is my crown?"

Wistala smelled blood in the tower room.

Near the stair, Djaybee sat hunched over, a dark stain soaking his back. He'd never more gaze at the stars and draw maps with their aid.

Yellowteeth might have been a good assassin, but he hadn't learned all he could of dragon anatomy.

She twitched and lowered her griff above the spear point in an eyeblink, knocking it aside as Yellowteeth threw himself off balance trying to ram it home. The point scraped across the floor instead of burrowing into her neck.

She helped him off his feet by lashing him between the shoulder blades with her tail as she came to her fours. She put a sii down on the back of his head, grinding his face into the geometry of the floor.

"In my experience, a good courier always asks if there is to be a return message," Wistala said. "Will you be good enough to carry an answer back for me?"

"Mmpfh," Yellowteeth snuffled.

"How thoughtful of you. Tell Gobold to come himself and try to break my fangs, if he wishes to deliver death. Now run, before I breakfast on roast blighter."

She let Yellowteeth up, and he made better time for the stairs than he ever had running coal. If nothing else, he would muddy matters below, and he might even claim the job was done in order to effect an escape from the Wheel of Fire.

A fine cold morning of clean air and mists clinging to the Ba-drink had begun outside. She would not be taken like a rat in a mountaintop cage. The only passage out was down, but she did not want to fight her way through tunnels filled with dwarves, where she would run out of foua before they ran out of spears.

She needed the sky, and to learn if Ragwrist hovered at the edge of the siege or not.

On other days she'd examined her tower room, there were hours of leisure to do so, and the stone was most worn to the northwest, where the wind blew coldest in winter and ice accumulated. There were a multitude of tiny cracks in the masonry between the spaced windows.

She went to her water cistern and took a full mouthful of water, and imitating the unpleasant DharSii, spat it up and down around the masonry, did it once more with a fresh mouthful until the stone was well-wetted.

Then she employed her foua on the wind-chilled stone.

Loud cracks sounded through the flames. Wistala breathed through another window and smashed her tail against the wall, over and over again, as Auron had in the escape chimney, only this time a thousand times the strength was behind it.

A great piece of wall fell away between the two windows.

She could not quite squeeze through yet, but it was far easier to open it wider by pulling at the broken edges and exposed brickwork. A few more bruising tail strikes and she was out, even as footsteps sounded on the stair.

Wistala took wing above the city of the Wheel of Fire.

She roared and dived between the Tall Rock and Thul's Hardhold, aiming for the Titan bridge. She extended her claws and tail as though to land, then stopped herself with swift beats of her wings just above the bridge.

A highpoon trailing chain, fired by a mighty war-machine, shot across the bridge. As it fell the chain caught and Wistala slipped sideways to grab the chain. A second highpoon lanced out from the other side, but she was watching for it, and reared out of the way.

Father, your pain was not wasted, even if your head now sits on a war-machine.

She flew into the air, as hard and as fast as she could, as other spears whizzed toward her. One pierced her wing, another glanced off her saa, but scale thickened by dwarf gold kept the worst of the damage out.

She swung the round iron weight at the end of the chain, back and forth, back and forth as she rose, with each swing building momentum. She let it strike the Titan bridge, breaking off a massive chunk which spun as it fell into the Ba-drink.

She flew off, flying oddly, fighting to the counterweight on the end of the chain, but her wing muscles were equal to the weight. She smashed a tower on the Hardhold where dwarves fired crossbow bolts. Two swings of the ball, and the shattered tower collapsed and slid down, smashing balcony, gallery, and garden on the way to the wharf.

Wistala noted that there were arrows sticking out of her scales and wing-leather, but in the heat of combat, she felt no pain.

She carried her burden to the far side of the Ba-drink and let the weight go at the flat part of ground by the landing. She flew over the lines of dwarves. Their war-machines were hurling missiles down the mountainside at a wave of barbarians coming up.

"Dhssol! Dhssol!" she wailed as she passed over the lines of dwarves at the wall. "All is lost! Dssol!"

And so she called over the lines of dwarves until she spotted Lord Lobok, standing with a few nobles and commanders on a prominence behind the wall at arrow-shot.

"Oh, Dhssol!" Wistala mourned as she landed. "I have seen it. There are too many! All is lost, see how they approach. You must fall back to the city, we are surely defeated on these slopes."

"Terrible thought," Lobok said, wringing his hands as a few ineffective arrows flew over the wall and landed near them in the rocks. "It goes badly for us, Battle Commander! These dwarves are the Wheel of Fire's last hope."

"Who needs a last hope when there's a battle being won? Your imagination has you counting each one thrice," the commander said. "Step back and let veterans command the fight. The closer they come, the more we kill, see? Our losses are but few."

But some of the troops had been unnerved by Wistala's cries, and were running for the barges.

"Hold hard there," the battle commander shouted through a speaking trumpet. "Groundholders, get those skulkers back in line. To the line!"

"Nothing can stop them, Oh, Dhssol!" Wistala said, as a mass of barbarians came up the hill. Many to the front fell as the dwarves fired, but others behind came on… .

"Shut up!" the Battle Commander insisted. "Someone muzzle this fool lizard."

"The Oracle is right," Lord Lobok shouted, lifting his own speaking trumpet. "They cannot be held here! Back to the barges, dwarves—we must fall back to the city!" He set an example to his soldiers by hitching up his robes and running toward the barges as fast as his legs would carry him.

The dwarves, many untested in battle, agreed with the sentiment, and the lines fell away like laundry carried off by a strong wind. Dwarves of all descriptions ran, even as the more experienced ones at the war-machines shouted and gesticulated at them.

The battle commander reached for his ax, and Wistala thought it best to take wing. Pebbles flew up into the eyes of the commanders and nobles as she took off.

They, too, ran for the barges as the barbarians leaped up the wall with wild cries.

The battle paused for a moment as the barges pulled away, firing crossbows at the barbarians, who fell back from the water to the wall and continued to hoot.

Wistala flew down to Ragwrist's gargants. She saw Lord Hammar there, in a thick fur coat that hung to his bootheels, helping with the blasting kegs being handed down from gargant back.

"Place them to either side of the spillway, and on those two supporting columns, right where they join the dam," Wistala said.

"I hope this works, Wistala," Ragwrist said as the circus dwarves and riggers went forward with climbing poles and lines. "These casks weren't cheap."

"And good morning to you, too," Wistala said. "Would you rather have King Fangbreaker hunting you up and down the Inland Ocean?"

"The risks I run for my circus."

"Stop running risks then. I give Mossbell to you, if Hammar agrees."

"Hammar has other matters to attend to," he said. His beard still looked like the poor effort of a youth, even in the fullness of manhood. "First let us win the battle. Then we'll divide the spoils."

The circus folk climbed up each side of the dam and pulled and tied the blasting-casks into place. Wistala plucked crossbow bolts from her scale and nursed her javelin wounds.

"What about a fuse?" Hammar asked.

"I'm the fuse," Wistala said, licking a spear hole in her wing clean.

When all was ready, and more barbarians had the time to come up the road and array themselves behind the wall, Wistala took flight.

She saw that perhaps half the barges still dueled with the barbarians at the waterside, ready to destroy canoes or any other light boats the savages might have brought up the mountain to cross the Ba-drink. The others, undoubtedly led by Lobok, were almost at the Hardhold.

She saw that the gargants and circus folk were well out of the watercourse down the spillway, and dropped down, summoning her foua.

She loosed it against the dam wall, and it ran down toward the packed and tied kegs. Wistala flew up and out of the way.

The explosions came, a gentle hand shoving Wistala higher—crack crack huhoom!—sending rock and masonry shooting out across the mountainside, along with bits of timber and line.

For a moment after the cataclysm, all was silent, or perhaps it was just that it sounded so to battered eardrums.

Both the masses of barbarians and the dwarves in their barges left off their gesticulations and challenges, insults and catcalls, arrows, sling-stones, and bolts—frozen as though the icy wind carried a spell across all.

It seemed to Wistala that the fate of worlds hung in the balance of those few moments, as the mountaintops tossed the sound back and forth.

Nothing happened. Water still cascaded over the spillway.

Then came more noise, a cracking, crashing sound of rocks sliding, followed hard on its heels, as wagon-wheels follow horse hooves, by the water.

When describing the scene later, Wistala always said there was no word big enough for how the water moved through the gap, opening it wider and deeper as pieces at the edge fell away—a torrent of water, an avalanche, as though the mountain had sprouted a new shoulder falling into a steep cliff.

The dwarf barges pulled like mad across the surface of the Ba-drink, but the water fell away from them, sloped under them as first one and then the next fell away, carried sideways toward the gap.

The barbarians stood transfixed as the barges fell one by one into chaos. Whether they felt for the doomed dwarves, pulling at their oars, throwing anchors in desperation, even leaping into the water to swim as though their arms could accomplish what joined oars could not, Wistala couldn't say.

The lake drained away a claw's-breadth at a time, but soon there was a path along the side of the lake to the Hardhold. The barbarians splashed into the fresh shallows, stomped through mud, a black sea of hide-cape, helm, and round shield replacing the receding waters.

It was not a charge of ode or poetry. The barbarians came in a ragged line, a few at the front so crazed to outrace the others that they threw away their weapons as they ran, others slipped in the mud and the fortunate got up again before they were stepped on by those behind.

The dwarves did what they could, barricaded the landings and docks, but the barbarians climbed above to the galleries, or uprighted stranded barges and longships and climbed up the staves at the hull bottom as though they were ladders.

Screams, and over all the cacophony of steel on steel, the growled hurrahs of the dwarves matched against the wild catlike screeches of the men.

Wistala caught sight of a long, thin barge flying purple pennants, oars worked by black armored beetles, pulling away from chaos east across the receding waters, a one-legged figure at the center. She took a deep breath and went down to the landing and retrieved the ball-weight and chain.

Wistala rose into the air, all four limbs holding the burden to her belly. Up, up, up toward the sun, racing only herself and her exhaustion. In all likelihood, she would never have a mating flight. This would have to do. The air grew thin and cold, but she kept her eye always on the barge below, heading for the eastern road.

When she could go up no more she closed her wings somewhat and went down.

It was dizzying, a little frightening, she felt hurried by the weight of the iron ball, but she needed time to adjust her dive. The surface of the slowly receding lake rushed up to meet her at a frightening speed. She angled a little, then closed her wings more so she dropped almost straight down.

Here is your crown, King Fangbreaker—

Perhaps at the last moment he looked up from his position at the center of the barge, urging his rowing bodyguard on—Wistala didn't know, for she released her weight and opened her wings, sick from the change in air pressure. Pain tore at her joints as she leveled off, streaking across the lake surface at an impossible speed.

Kra-sploosh!

She dipped her wings and looked back. The barge had folded in on itself, and a fountain of water rose from the center like the jaws of some sea dragon shutting on a bird. Flung dwarves spun through the air before splashing down into the Ba-drink.

She flew back toward the battle, saw that flames were pouring out of some of the balconies and galleries in the Hardhold. Tall Rock seemed still to be holding, and the dwarves manned that half of the half-shattered Titan bridge.

Wistala flew with aching wings back to the outer wall. Ragwrist and Hammar stood in one of the towers with a few elderly barbarians, and she alighted next to them.

"Glorious, glorious, glorious," Hammar said, smacking his fist into palm. "Have you ever seen such a fight? Wistala, you're a marvel. With you at my side, there's no stopping me now. We'll ride your wings to Hypatia herself. 'Twas a happy day when we settled our enmity."

"It's Nuum Wistala, bookburner. I don't remember settling anything with you," Wistala said. She beat her wings and rose into the air, seizing Hammar by his fur cloak.

He hung there, struggling and swearing, and reached for his blade. Wistala beat him about the body with her wing-tips until he dropped it.

She flew up to the top of Tall Rock, where a few dwarves still manned war-machines, firing down at the barbarians fighting on the Titan bridge.

She swooped low between the towers, and dwarves scattered. "A parting gift from the Oracle," Wistala called. "Here's King Hammar the Dwarfhanger." She set the former thane down gently. "Dangle him from the Titan bridge or use him to negotiate, I care not."

And with that she flapped away, leaving Hammar lying bruised in a ring of desperate dwarves.

Now there was only one more account to settle on the balance sheet of her life.

The Dragonblade's home was easy enough to find. It was the only one with a dragonscale door and fire-shutters, carved under an overhanging rock that resembled a closed clam. The rest of the dwellings were humble shepherd's huts or fishermen's wharfside homes.

Wistala landed in the mud of the fallen-away lake to the barking of hounds from all around the house.

She waited out of arrow-reach and warily examined the small square windows. The flower boxes and hanging mountain ferns might hide war-machines, for all she knew.

"I call for the Drakossozh," Wistala roared. "Let him show his face if he dares."

Silence from the house.

"Well? Daylight is burning, as will this home, if I do not have an answer."

The door opened, and a long-limbed young woman stepped out. There was some of the Drakossozh in her broad face, but she had a sensitive mouth. Wistala realized she was the womanly version of the girl glimpsed watching the circus leave years ago.

She came only half out the door, seemed ready to jump back inside and slam it at the first sign of flame.

"I speak for the household," she said, voice quavering only a little. "If you've come for vengeance, my father is not here. If you've come for murder, there are children within."

"I've come for neither," Wistala said. She sat, the mud squelching against her backside. Had she ever been so tired?

"What is your name, girl?" Wistala asked.

"Adaska," she answered.

"I'm—"

"The Oracle-dragon."

"No. Well, I was. Now I'm just Wistala, a dragon who has had enough of fighting."

"What can you mean?" she asked, stepping a little farther onto her doorstep. Someone hissed at her from inside, but she ignored the comment.

"I don't know when all this started. Did my grandsire kill yours, or did yours kill mine? Your father killed mine, and I should kill yours, but I expect you or your brother would come after me. Am I right?"

"We would. But dragons must be slain."

"Must they? Size put aside, I'm not certain we're so very different."

"Dragons bring ruin and fear wherever they go; look what happens across the lake," she said. Wistala looked, the carrion birds were already gathering. She wondered if Bartleghaff or his relations were among them. "This was always a peaceful place until you came."

"As was my home cave until the dwarves across the lake came. Let us put an end to this feud. At least the one that exists between your family and mine."

"I don't know."

"You'll know when you have children of your own. Where can I find your father?"

She hesitated. "He rode with his armsmen and dogs, answering the call of the mountain king to hunt you down. He took the north trail."

Wistala sighed. "I'll make it easier for him to find me."

"You shouldn't. He will kill you."

"Perhaps," Wistala said. "Will you consider what I said?"

"Yes," she said.

"Now I go to convince your father."

With some pain she rose into the air and winged across the lake. She found a trail, an old sort of road winding along the lakeside and over little chasms on bridges and between thin, wind-bent trees. The road was nothing compared to Rainfall's, it was little more than a paved goat trail. It looked old enough for blighters to have built it. Old as war.

But also old as bridges. She alighted on one, and looked to where her eye caught a glint of metal. She retreated to the far side of the ancient bridge and waited.

The file of riders soon came over the rise and down the path toward the bridge, which leaped across a chasm to waters that lapped where her tail would reach if she let it dangle. Instead she wrapped it about the bridge; the masonry looked loose enough to be pulled apart if she exerted herself.

The men spotted her and let out halloos. They dismounted and clapped visors across helms, notched arrows into bows, and the Dragonblade came forward with spear and sword.

With a shout, one of his handlers released the dogs, who poured across the bridge in a bristle-backed river.

Wistala flapped her wings, hard, held fast by her tail. The force of the windstorm sent the dogs plummeting off the bridge into the waters below—some with a knock or two, but they swam to rocks and climbed upon them to bark up at their now impossible-to-reach prey.

The Dragonblade stepped forward, looked down at the vociferous, dripping pack, pulled back his visor and laughed loud and long. He had to lean on his spear shaft.

"Dragonelle," he said, wiping his eyes. "You are hard on my dog packs."

So he did know the name for a female dragon!

"Your daughter told me I could find you on this road," Wistala said.

The Dragonblade's face went white, and he raised his spear for a throw. His son behind came forward with a bow ready. "If you've—"

"I haven't touched so much as a winter cabbage," Wistala said. "I was all politeness to your girl."

"I will still kill you," the Dragonblade said.

"Let me speak first," Wistala insisted. "Our kind have shed rivers of blood, matched against each other. I would have the flow stopped. Shall it always be thus, one family slaughtering another, until the ending of the world?"

"Or the ending of dragons," the Dragonblade said. "Calls for peace are always made by those at a disadvantage."

Wistala hugged the road, covering her belly with stone, readied to parry blade or spear with wing-points. "Come then," she said. "Let's start the madness afresh."

The boy raised the bow, sighted with his good eye, but his father held him back. "You must let me finish, as well." He plunged his spear point-first into the dirt beside the road. "There's been enough killing for one day. You came to my doorstep and did no harm—"

"You would believe a—," his son said.

The Dragonblade glared at him. "I believe this one. And my eyes. I see no smoke at our part of the lakeshore. And shut it, you fool hounds!"

Drakossozh looked thoughtful for a moment, and the dogs, silenced for only a moment, started up again. "The dwarves will pay no more hide-bounties, at least not for a long while. Perhaps I should take up chickens. They taste better and do not singe off one's eyebrows. You have your peace. What is your name?"

"Wistala."

"Ah. You are only the second dragon to ever escape me, Wistala. Wear that with pride, as you do that little bauble between your eyes."

"Who was the first?" Wistala said.

"A drake, a young gray."

Wistala's hearts stopped. "What? When?"

"A dozen years ago or so," he said. "I've heard no more trouble of him, I expect he died raiding some farmer's pigpen. No scales, you know. He would be—wait, you two must be related."

"I hope so," Wistala said, wishing the Dragonblade's dogs would cease barking. It detracted from the solemnity of the moment.

"Now I do fear to let you go. Were two such resourceful dragons to meet up again … but something in my heart says it will not go ill for me, or my family. Go, Wistala. No blade or arrow of mine will touch you."

The boy fired, and the Dragonblade threw up a blur of an elbow that knocked the arrow off its path. It skittered harmlessly down the rocks. Wistala gulped, it was just as well they had not fought.

"Eliam, you vex me. But we will talk at home. Go, Wistala, and let my dogs quiet, before I finish off the pack myself."

Wistala took a deep breath and launched herself into the air. She watched the spear point until she was out of range.

The old dragon proverb: Trust, but keep an eye open.

[ Epilogue ]

Wistala sat in the old troll cave, near the entrance where the air was cleaner, and dictated her memories of the battle that destroyed the Wheel of Fire, and much of the combined barbarian power in the north, to Lada.

Of Rayg she had no happy news. A great many dwarves fled down their mysterious holes to the darkroads as Thul's Hardhold fell, and as Rayg hadn't been carried off by the barbarians or been found among the dead, she assumed he'd fled for his life with them. The barbarians had caused so much destruction, it was doubtful that he could return through Hardhold, even if he wanted to. But he was in the company of dwarves who would respect him, very different circumstances from abject slavery in the north.

The thaneship had passed to Ragwrist, of all people, as Mossbell was the largest estate in the thanedom with Galahall divided between Hammar's barbarian relations. Wistala had sold him Mossbell for a song—literally, for he had a wonderful voice. Now Ragwrist complained of his generosity to his tenants, driving him to the poverty of only drinking wines from the less renowned vineyards.

The circus went to Brok, who kept it out of barbarian lands, where dwarves were increasingly unwelcome, perhaps justifiably.

The Green Dragon Inn still stood, and tall tales had grown up around it and its sign. People in later years reached up to touch it for luck, and heard stories so bizarre and inaccurate, Wistala would have smiled to hear.

Widow Lessup retired with Yari-Tab in the modestly restored Mossbell hall and devoted herself to feeding and supervising the surviving cats, who kept the mice from nibbling the hooves of Dsossa's "north herd" of white horses.

What remained of the Wheel of Fire Dwarves came under the leadership of Lord Lobok, who, if he ever led his fighting dwarves out of the mountains again, would be assured an entertaining place in the annals of military history.

Speaking of which, Wistala had no particular desire to accomplish a war history, but the librarians had asked for a dragon's-eye memoir, and they would get one. It was the least an Agent of Librarians could do, before setting off in search of her brother.

As she talked, chose phrases, and answered the occasional question, Wistala's thoughts kept returning to the dilemma of dragons. On the one sii, there was the sort of grasping survival of dragons like that smelly wretch in the far north—scattering, hermitage, or worst, assassination—and on the other a useful servitude, a survival that depended on being of use to others, like the man-carrying dragons more and more sailors of the northern part of the Inland Ocean reported.

Could dragons cooperate, form an order like the old city-states of Hypat? Certainly an extended family could, as the odd dragons of the Sadda-Vale proved. And if they did, suppose a Masmodon or a Fangbreaker or worse arose at the council table? Selfishness and greed were not the least of dragon faults.

Oddly enough, she wished she could talk the matter over with that dragon DharSii. He had unpleasant manners, to be sure, and was the most arrogant creature who ever cracked an egg, but she could trust him to give an intelligent opinion. And perhaps even more important, an honest one. For in obtaining his opinion, she'd have to sum up her life and actions—she wondered if she'd done right or wrong, though why she should care what he would think of her past she did not know.

The Wheel of Fire would butcher no more hatchlings in their home cave, and Hammar's half-Hypatian, half-barbarian plot to gain power in war and conquest had vanished in the catafoua mouth, and the Dragonblade had hung up his spear, even if he wasn't exactly raising chickens. She'd kept her promises—

Save the last one to Father.

But felt little satisfaction in were-blood. Avenging her own was a grim duty, like breaking a bullock's back in a dive so that you could eat, and just as necessary to survival. Ignoring those who kill others in the hope they won't get around to you only means that when they appear to take your head and scales, they would apply all they learned in other victories, making your chances against them so much the worse.

"Does that have to go in?" Lada asked.

"What do you mean?" Wistala said, brought back to the dictation.

"The battle. Betrayals. Incompetence, even cowardice. Boats falling, mud everywhere, blood running from balconies, carrion birds poking marrow from bones, dwarves hanging from bridges, burned corpses, but worst of all, no hero whose courage and skill is put to the ultimate test."

"They asked for a history, they shall have my history. If someone else will have the battle take place on a spring-green field with pennants at the lance points and songs sung over the honored dead, let them write it thus. This history is a story of death begetting death, and should end with carrion birds, for they are the only ones who come out the better at the end.

"Speaking of which—steaks and cakes, but I'm hungry. Enough of this wordplay. Let's head over to Mossbell and eat!"

Glossary - DRAKINE

FOUA: A product of the fire bladder. When mixed with the liquid fats stored within and then exposed to oxygen, it ignites into oily flame.

GRIFF: The armored fans descending from the forehead and jaw that cover sensitive ear-holes and throat pulse-points in battle.

KAZHIN: a dragon related to you on unfriendly terms.

PRRUM: The low thrumming sound a dragon makes when it is pleased or particularly content.

SAA: The rear legs of a dragon. The three rear true-toes are able to grip, but the fighting spur is little more than decoration.

SII: The front legs of a dragon. The claws are shorter and the fighting spur on the rear leg is closer to the other digits and opposable. The digits are more elegantly formed for manipulation.

TORF: A small gob from the fire bladder, used to provide a few moments of illumination.

UZHIN: a dragon related to you on friendly terms.

DWARVISH

DHSSOL: an "evil star" or catastrophe.

COCOLAT: a dwarvish sweet made from rare tropical beans and milk.

POGT: a dwarvish curse.

ELVISH

GAR-LOQUE: a smelly but flavorful bulb of the lily family with a slightly dragonish odor.

HASPADALANESH: The final, rooted stage of an elf's life.

SENISOTE: music.

FELINE

TCHATLASSAT: a close friend.

HYPATIAN

BALAGAN: a sort of crane.

MOD: Hypatian low-priest title.

NUUM: Hypatian librarian or professor title.

VESK: a Hypatian mark of distance based on the amount of distance light infantry can cover in an hour—about three-and-a-half miles.

YEO: an informal title for those who act as retainers for Hypatian nobles.