Cries and shrieking voices like birdspeech broke out all around. The sounds were kind of a pidgin Drakine mixed with clucks and hoots and croaks, a jamboree of mismatched winged creatures.

She recognized the dragon-name NooMoahk.

“Mizz! Anklamere’s grook cracker works bakka still, ptuck! Dragon-dropper, yak?”

“Yak! Cluck-glug! We braaak NooMoahk! Chukku-na.”

“Nip! Nip! Dulg mak NooMoahk, got us dragon-she!”

“Nie-hruss, ventwipe.”

The motion resolved into dancing forms seen through eyes incapable of focus, but she felt rather easy about it. Something fixed about her snout. She smelled a hot melted-metal scent. She recalled stories of killing dragons by pouring hot lead in their nostrils and other horrible hominid tricks, but she felt oddly complacent about the idea of it happening to her.

One eye focused and she saw a heavy leather band, studded and reinforced with hot rivets, stuck about her nose.

A bent-over shape, almost folded over on itself with an assortment of strange plates and spines and bits of creepily soft-looking flesh showing beneath and violet eyes brighter than any wildflower she’d ever seen stepped forward. It supported itself on a curved stick studded with what looked like hatchling teeth.

She heard a clattering above and rolled one eye up. Some cave above, with false cave-wall broken away . . .

A trap. She’d stuck her head right in.

Other hominids, vague in the dark, not quite so curled up but still bent, with legs that stuck out sideways and up more like spiders than men, rushed here and there with lines and chains.

“Ye speak to Paskinix, dragon,” the creature said. For a moment she couldn’t say which language it spoke.

“I’ve lived four generations, dragon, four!” it continued to her in competent but unaccented Drakine, tearing off a piece of raw and bloody goat-haunch with teeth like broken rocks, “waiting for another crack at NooMoahk. Didn’t expect that greased projection and the undermined crack when ye climbed down the shaft, did ye? Well, thy recklessness cost ye a wing. Thy Tyr thought he’d sneak in the back door after bashing in the front, eh?”

Wistala couldn’t have responded if she’d wanted, since the band was fixed too firmly about her snout. She wondered which one of DharSii’s dragons called themselves Tyr—an old title from the tales of Silverhigh, wasn’t it? His Drakine was odd. Either he didn’t know proper word order and emphasis or he’d picked up some dialect or archaic form.

The thing, which Wistala decided must be a deman—it was definitely a hominid, if a bizarre-looking one, and certainly no dwarf—straightened, supported by its toothy prop.

“Aye, ye’ve driven me out of my gardens and streams to this forgotten corner of the higher darks.” It grew animated and splattered her with goat-blood as it gestured. “Trading bits of glass for a goat-meal when once I dined on tender young griffaran. Ney more sulfur-soaks for Paskinix, thanks on thy cursed sisterhood. And yon Tyr, acting all lofty and demanding I come call him and negotiate,” Paskinix said. “Well, I’ll let him know I’ve my own token in play this game, ye can be sure.”

He looked up and down her uninjured wing as other demen fixed lines to it. Another did something abominable about her hindquarters and hiccupped out a few words.

“Ney eggs coming, eh? Well, bad for us,” Paskinix said.

Wistala found the strength to swallow the drool accumulating in her mouth and began to feel a little better in body—but much, much worse in spirit. Taken by some deman with a grudge against dragons that she knew nothing of—

She heard a grating sound and a sort of sculpture of metal and wheels like a cart—but all backwards, for the wheels were at the top, spinning as uselessly as an overturned turtle’s legs—was dragged up next to her by the demen. A deman clad in greasy-smelling leather and thick gloves thrust a sort of bright two-headed spear at her and . . .

Kzzzzzt!

Her whole body jumped within the restraints even now being secured without her willing it, and consciousness faded—rather pleasantly—to the sound of the old deman cackling.

Chapter 6

If it weren’t for the bridge, AuRon would have never found the place.

He traveled at night, resting at rocky, inaccessible coves on the Inland Ocean. He hoped he’d find that inn before too long. The fall winds were kicking up and storms would soon come out of the northwest, cold furies of wind and sleet, coming ashore as though angry for having to pass over all that water.

At first he flew up the wrong river. When he reached a fork in the river without the bridge appearing and explored both branches just to come upon an old ruin he’d once camped under with a now-dead dwarf friend, he knew he’d gone wrong.

He explored farther south, flying up a vast river-mouth that for a while was indistinguishable from the Inland Ocean itself. Then it narrowed into true river, though a wide one. Just before dawn he came upon the bridge, a massive construct with a patched span in the middle. He vaguely remembered this bridge from his travels in Djer’s cart.

It seemed the sort of place humans frequented, so he flew a little farther upriver and found a forbidding cliff with a nice stretch of sand under it. The river had retreated somewhat because of the season, but there was good fishing in the pools and the tangles of water-weed were thick with pinchy-crawlies. He hadn’t had the freshwater variety in years, and he enjoyed himself before settling down for a brief nap.

He woke in the afternoon. It was a pleasant fall day and the air beckoned. He took off and rose high in the sky and flew back toward the bridge. Once there, he followed the road north and came to what might charitably be called a town on the edge of some vast collection of fields and pastures, with forest to the west and what looked like some mining cuts to the north near another tangle of roads.

He checked the smaller of the enclaves first, circling slowly lower and lower so as not to alarm the population with too quick a descent.

Nevertheless, he saw cattle and pigs driven into the woods and sheep scattered in the hedges under the frantic efforts of boys. Fools. If this was a livestock raid he wouldn’t dawdle so.

Dragon-eyes had their uses, and he spotted a sign out in front of the inn, just as that strange collection of hominids had promised. A green dragon, sure enough, though they’d rather stylized the icon.

He found an obliging field, grazed short within sight of the inn’s roof-peak, and settled down to wait. The woods were kept far enough back that he would have plenty of warning of arrows if they shot, if they had bows strong enough to cross the field, that is. An open hill behind guarded his rear.

Boys, probably shepherds’ sons, crept from tree to tree with what they thought cunning stealth and woodcraftiness. A summer running with the wolves to the north would do them an improvement. He watched a fistfight break out among four or so and the loser went running home—or perhaps was dispatched with a message.

Downwind, dogs barked endlessly. He couldn’t help his odor. If the dogs didn’t like it that was just too bad.

The field smelled mouthwateringly of horses and cattle, but there was no helping that. He’d wait.

When the locals finally showed up he understood the delay. They came in some numbers, in fits and starts and with much discussion at each advance. The collection dribbled away as it crossed the field. A tall female, with comely hair by human standards and evidently well able to feed her young, judging by the fit of the long robe, stood next to a figure swathed in blankets and a heavy, droopy velvet hat, carried on a litter by two stout-looking men.

“My name is Lada, dragon. May we approach in safety?” she said, enunciating carefully in Parl. The figure swathed in blankets seemed to find her pronunciation funny, as she heard a rather raspy chuckle.

“I came for converse,” AuRon said. “Parley. Please.”

The one who called herself Lada made a gesture in the air with her right hand and they stepped forward. The two litter-bearers kept glancing back at the others hovering nearer to the inn or in the middle of the field. A local dog dashed halfway out into the field, let loose with a terrific bark, and ran back to his humans with tail tucked.

How Blackhard’s pack would have snickered at such behavior.

They came a little closer into an easy distance for humans to speak.

The one swaddled in blankets tipped her head up. “Here I was waiting on the wrong dragon. I waited for the green and the gray shows up.”

AuRon recognized the face beneath the droopy hat, mostly because it wore an eyepatch. Hair like winter birchtwigs supported the brim of the hat. It was the elf, Hazeleye, both his capturer and his rescuer. Happily, she’d collected the debt for freeing him long ago, which had resulted in the overthrow of the dragon-riders of the Isle of Ice and his mating with Natasatch. The wizard who’d organized and purposed their race war against the other hominids had once told him that elves were like tree bark on poplars—peel back one layer of plotting and a new one appeared underneath.

“Wistala. Her name’s Wistala.”

“I know that. She’s a good friend to this place and we all long for her return.”

“Why is that?” AuRon asked.