“Odd, too, that they don’t appear to communicate, socialize. I’m not even sure how they mate, or if they do.”
“They plant a young in a corpse, something big an meaty. I saw a young one once, in a piece of a whale,” Wistala said. She’d cleaned out the troll’s cave after disposing of the troll. Bad business, killing young, but she’d regretted the necessity, not the result. Without the troll, the lands around Mossbell were prospering.
“What’s in its hands?” DharSii sniffed. “My jewel, you didn’t tell me you were wounded.”
“I wasn’t. A bruise or—”
“This is dragonscale, in its claws. Look, there’s another at that mouth-vent orifice. Green.”
“Green? The only other female here is Aethleethia. You don’t suppose—”
“Aethleethia hunt trolls? Not even if our hatchlings were starving. Oh, I’m sorry—”
They had an agreement not to speak of the hatchlings as theirs. Too much pain in that. Better to pretend, like the rest of the Sadda-Vale, that Aethleethia had laid the eggs.
Not that there weren’t still issues with their upbringing.
DharSii and AuRon had almost come to blows about having the hatchlings fight. DharSii believed the tradition, being based on instinct, was part of a dragon’s natural heritage and should be respected.
Finally her brother RuGaard, crippled in his front
sii
since the hatchling duel with AuRon, pleaded with Aethleethia and her mate NaStirath. NaStirath was a silly dragon who treated everything as a joke and had no opinion, though Wistala would always be grateful to her but Aethleethia, who’d been taking counsel from DharSii all her life, defied him.
“The more hatchlings, the better for us,” she’d said.
Giving up her eggs to Aethleethia rankled. Wistala would have liked nothing better than to care for her own hatchlings, but her own position, and her brothers’ as refugees from the Dragon Empire in the Sadda-Vale demanded her to accept the bitter bargain.
Scabia, with some eggs around her in the great round emptiness at Vesshall at last, could not care less how Wistala spent her time once the eggs came. She could spend all the time she liked with DharSii, even though publicly she was NaStirath’s mate.
She even suspected she and DharSii could appear openly as mates, but the suspicion wasn’t strong enough for her to engage in what a human might call “rocking the boat.” Too much depended on Scabia’s good will toward her and her brothers.
“So if it didn’t come from you, who does this scale belong to?”
“Let’s find out,” Wistala said. “We followed the troll-tracks in one direction, I think we may go in the other equally easily.”
“Happily. The sooner we leave this smell behind, the sooner my neck will recover.”
“Poor little drake. Good thing you’re so taut, being stiff-necked about everything was good training.”
“Ha-hem,”
DharSii grunted.
The trail gave out halfway up the mountain.
“Now what?” Wistala asked.
DharSii answered him by inflating her long lungs and bellowing. His bellow was loud enough she tracked echoes even from the other side of the lake.
“That may even bring RuGaard running,” Wistala said.
A faint cry answered.
They found the troll-cave, a little quarter-moon cut in the rock. DharSii made it through easily enough, but Wistala had to twist to fit. She had always been a muscular dragon-dame, stronger than either of her brothers.
They found the source of the green scale. She was a dragon familiar to Wistala, her own sister removed by mating through RuGaard. Incredibly, it was Ayafeeia, of the Imperial Line, one of the most devoted-to-duty dragonelles Wistala had ever known. She’d pledged herself hearts-and-spirit to the Firemaids and had led them in battle after battle.
Wistala couldn’t imagine what kind of catastrophe would take Ayafeeia from her comrades.
Now she lay pinned by a great boulder put across her neck, trapping her on her side in the cave.
Wistala put her spine under the rock, ready to carfully shift it off her former commander in the Firmaids, when DharSii grunted and pointed with his tail.
A horrible sort of leech clung to Ayafeeia’s torn-away skin. It was a newborn troll, or at least that’s what Wistala guessed it was, it resembled a full-grown troll about as much as a tadpole resembled a frog.
It looked to be in the process of burrowing under her skin.
“What do we do?” Wistala asked.
“Get it out, please,” Ayafeeia said. “I think the troll put it there, I thought it was eating me at first. I can feel it moving.”
“Grip it with your teeth, Wistala,” DharSii said.
She did so. Ayafeeia screamed in pain.
“It’s tearing into me. Biting!”
“This is going to hurt. Prepare yourself,” DharSii said, extending his sharpest and most delicate
sii
.
Wistala had to close the eye facing him. She heard more cries from Ayafeeia and the splatter of dragon-blood striking the floor of the cavern.
“If I die, there’s a message—” Ayafeeia said.
“Go’ eh,” DharSii said through locked teeth.
She heard him spit something out and opened the eye facing him. The troll-tadpole lay on the floor, giving a residual twitch now and then.
“And I thought the smell was bad! I shall never get this out of my mouth,” DharSii said, spitting
torfs
of flame in an effort to burn out the taste. “They taste like no other flesh.”
“That bad?” Ayafeeia managed.
“I’d rather eat poison ants,” DharSii said.
Wistala shifted the rock.
“Thank you,” Ayafeeia groaned, able to raise her head.
“Wistala, find some dwarf’s beard for this,” DharSii said. “I believe I saw some on the downed tree where we first saw the troll tracks. Who knows what kind of filth this thing left in the wound.”
“In a moment. What do you need to tell us, Ayafeeia? Why did you come here? What’s happened to the Firemaids?”
“Lavadome. Tearing itself . . . apart. Firemaids—broken up,” Ayafeeia managed.
Had she gone mad from the pain?
“We can talk later,” DharSii said. “Let’s see to the wound.”
Wistala squeezed herself out of the troll cave and flew downslope.
She, who’d as Queen-Consort once directed the defense of the Lavadome against an invasion, who’d held the Red Mountain pass with a handful of Firemaids against the Ironrider hordes, now waged campaigns against trolls and hurried to find dwarfsbeard to patch a painful but minor wound.
The terrible methodology of war, the chaos and life-and-death decisionmaking, the ceremonies over the dead and the praise to the heroic living . . .
She didn’t miss any of it one bit.
She’s so much rather be trading philosophy with DharSii after a good dinner, or watching birds go about their clockwork routines, or trying her voice at poetry.
Alighting at the fallen tree, she searched for the ropy mass of dwarfsbeard. Yes, there it was, a thick tangle like hair run wild on an ancient dwarf. When broken and pulled apart, the thick white glue, like a thicker and stickier dandelion milk, acted on wounds, both cleaning them and speeding healing.
Unlike on her long-ago errands with her father to gather dwarfsbeard, she simply broke off the rooted end of the trunk, thick with the where water was pooling and rotting out the wood, and flew back holding the piece of tree tight under her chest. They could pluck it off the stump at leisure.
She returned and found Ayafeeia unconscious.
“Just as well,” DharSii said. “With that skin missing and torn, it must be painfull. She won’t have an easy recovery.”
“I doubt she’ll be able to move,” Wistala said. “We’ll have to fly some blighters up here to tend to her wounds and sew her up again.”
“This is my old warwing Imfamnia’s sister, is it not?” DharSii asked.
“Her name’s Ayafeeia. Her Firemaids rescued me from the demen.”
“Was she part of the conspiracy against RuGaard?” DarSii asked.
“She’s never been interested in politics. She’s in charge of the Firemaids. Really in charge, I mean, back when I served as Queen-Consort I was their chief by tradition.”
“Strange of her to leave them, then, if there’s war building,” DharSii said.
“I’d heard from more than one dragon that the reason my brother had any success at all in the Lavadome is that he wasn’t part of any faction. No one could tell which line of dragons he sprang from, and he favored none, so they accepted his rule. The new Tyr and his Queen must not be quite so acceptable.”
“Ooo, glad that’s over,” a new, high-pitched voice squeaked.
DharSii and Wistala turned and sniffed.
A huge, leathery bat emerged from behind Ayafeeia’s ear like a groundhog coming out of its hole.
“Beggin’ your pardon, your worship. M’name’s Larb, one of Tyr RuGaard’s faithful servants. Oooh, I’m chilled, no bat was ever meant to fly so high, I’m frozen from ear-tip to fantail. I’m not askin’ too much by supposin’ you could—”
“Don’t listen to him,” the exhausted dragonelle said, opening a bloodshot eye. “He’s one of your brother’s dragon-blooded bats.”
“Then he can leave off begging us, and go to work on your wound,” Wistala said. “No opening up a fresh vein while you’re in there, either, you little flying rat, or I’ll toast you with some mushrooms.”
“No need for threats, now,” Larb said, scuttling behind Ayafeeia’s crest for cover. “I’ll lick the wound clean, I will. Jes’ I’m so stiff and sore from the cold of the airs.”
The bat scooted across Ayafeeia’s flank and buried its nose in the wound, licking and snipping ragged flesh with sharp little snaggleteeth.
Bat saliva, Wistala had learned, brought a pleasant numbness to minor wounds.
“We’ll need to close that up as soon as possible, dwarfsbeard or no,” DharSii said. “Perhaps, Ayafeeia, you can make it out into the light. Fresh air and what passes for sunlight around here will help keep it clean until we can get you stitched up. I know instinct is to retreat to a cave to lick your wounds, but in the interests of hygiene—”
“My love,” Wistala interrupted. “Your turn to run for help. Go back to the hall and get some blighters who can stitch wounds, won’t you?”
“Of course,” DharSii said. “I shall return with help before the sun peaks.”
He exited and Wistala listened to the fading beats of his wings before returning to Ayafeeia. She nosed more dwarfsbeard into the trail left by the cleaning bat.
Ayafeeia winced as the bat incautiously planted a wing on raw muscle beneath torn-away skin.
“What brought you such a distance, through cold and winter storm and danger?” Wistala asked, both curious and eager to divert her relative by mating from the bat’s not-so-tender ministrations.
Ayafeeia managed to raise her head. “Another civil war’s begun. Struggle for power between NiVom and Imfamnia against the twins. Skotl kills Wyrr. Assassin hominids kill protectors in their resorts. It will be the death of all of us.”
It all sounded dreadfully familiar.
More war, more deaths, more pain. RuGaard would be in agony of the fate of poor Nilrasha. And AuRon, on his way to one of his secret meetings with Natasatch—what was he flying into?
All that could wait. Once more, she had duty to attend. It wouldn’t do to have Ayafeeia fly all this way just to die on their doorstep.