“Her counsel would be most valuable,” Hazeleye said.

“Then you don’t know where she is.”

“I’m afraid she went off east hunting you, AuRon,” the one called Lada said. “She has been gone for years. But then she was a rover.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” AuRon said. “Couldn’t you have told her you dispatched me to—”

Another yap broke in on his thoughts and the dog dashed away then. He’d come a few paces closer before barking, but shortened his warning.

“I haven’t seen her since before the dark days of the dragon-riders,” Hazeleye said. “Thank you for finishing them and freeing the dragons from their thrall.”

She’d spent her many years in the study of dragons. AuRon believed she was one of the few hominids with any true understanding. And better, sympathy.

“Are you unwell?” he asked.

“I feel the fall wind more than I once did. Do you think we might continue this conversation indoors?”

“You have a barn nearby?” AuRon asked.

“Better than that. An inn. The owner was a good friend to Wistala too. He’s hanging back there in the crowd with his wife. You could get your head through the door in back with ease.”

If this had come from any other hominid but the Dwarves of the Diadem AuRon would have expected a trap, but trusting Hazeleye had always been to his benefit. Hers as well, seemingly. He would trust her one more time.

The dog barked again from just behind the foremost party of humans.

“I’ve no objection. Could we get that idiot dog tied down?”

The tall woman, Lada, signaled to the people behind and a boy retrieved the dog.

The party decamped and headed for the inn. AuRon finally grew disgusted with the litter-bearers and had them seat Hazeleye on his shoulder, gripping the simple strap-harness he wore when traveling. The dwarf trader had made it, inlaying rings of steel held by iron bands for securing packs or bags such as a mule might carry. Hazeleye seemed to have some difficulty with her legs, and kept them well swaddled in their wrap of blankets.

“This brings back happy memories,” she said in her learned but unaccented Drakine. “It has been long and long since I rode dragonback.”

“I would fly, but I fear you’d fall off,” AuRon returned in kind.

“Yes, I would need a saddle.”

“No more saddles for me.”

“That’s certainly your choice,” she said. “But a shared journey is a happier one.”

AuRon was tempted to reply that it depended on who was wearing the saddle, but he held his tongue.

They walked up a path through the pines—AuRon curled his neck high and back so that Hazeleye wouldn’t be smacked by branches—and so crossed a dry streambed and came upon the back of the inn. AuRon smelled tempting livestock. Better still, roasting meat. Also woodsmoke, pitch, horses, bodywaste, straw, and all the other smells that went with hominid habitation.

He picked pine needles out of his crest and horns while the others went inside. A broad man in a leather apron opened the top half of the back door. He had flecks of gray in his thick hair and a drooping mustache.

“Welcome to the Green Dragon Inn, firebreather,” the man said, not at all in awe of a dragon sticking his head through the back door and surveying the great room like a living trophy. If anything, he seemed pleased. “She’s mine, and proudly bears Wistala’s mark on the sign at the front. Any friend to the original Green Dragon, as my Elvish lodger says you are, is a friend to me and my family.”

AuRon warmed to the innkeeper’s manner. He was rather like his old barbarian friend Varl, with the same hearty confidence and eager eye. Were that all men spoke so to dragons!

The innkeeper was saying something about quantities of food that would be ready by sunset, but AuRon didn’t need words. His nose said there was beef stewing, sheep roasting, and best of all . . . sausages. He hadn’t tasted a good greasy sausage in years. His eyes almost rolled up into the backs of their sockets at the thought as the man asked what he might bring hot from the kitchen.

“Sausages, yes,” AuRon said. “As many as you can manage.”

“Ah, you’re a dragon after my own heart. Have you ever had a Thickwurst? Stuffed with garlic and ground liver and onion? And for those with a taste for it, ginger.”

The common room itself seemed comfortably stuffy after the manner humans liked. Everything, from shutters to furniture, was stoutly hewn, planed smooth, and a bit smoky. Faces of—oh, what were they called—cats, that’s it, stared at him from the warm corner between hearth and dried woodpile and atop the chimney mantel. Between the chairs around the fire and the bar, a big round platter that looked like it had been made out of a barbarian shield held broken nutshells. Another cat scratched at the shells, sniffing suspiciously at a mound.

Hazeleye settled herself in a chair by the fire and took up a long white pipe of the kind AuRon had seen sailors smoke when at their ease.

She cocked her bright eye at AuRon. “Never used to smoke. Filthy habit. But it’s soothing, now that my last seasons are in sight. Herself over in the great house is a fair herbalist and her mix doesn’t half take my aches and pains away.”

Hazeleye drew deep on her pipe and sighed out a thick cloud of rather sickly-sweet-smelling smoke.

Lada, standing quietly at the door, smiled. AuRon didn’t know hominid expressions well enough to distinguish pleased from wistful.

“What can you tell me of my sister? How did she come to this place? When did you last see her?”

“That’s some tale, dragon,” the innkeeper said.

“She went off years ago, before the Dragon-rider Wars,” Lada said.

“For all we know she’s returned,” Hazeleye said. “Perhaps to those librarians in Thallia.”

“Not without calling back here,” the innkeeper said.

“Her old cave is unoccupied, save for a few kestrels and such,” Lada said. “Perhaps she left some sign or instructions there we wouldn’t deciper, or even recognize.”

“She went in search of her brother. I know that,” the innkeeper said.

“I am her brother,” AuRon said. “I’m AuRon. Auron, as was. Known briefly as NooShoahk on the Isle of Ice.”

“So it is true then,” the innkeeper said.

“Strange fates have befallen all your family,” Hazeleye said.

AuRon wondered about the use of the word “all.” She’d been partly responsible for the destruction of much of his mother and sister, in an ancient pact between mercenary egg-hunters and wicked dwarves.

But she’d freed him from bondage and a probable death on the Isle of Ice.

Wrimere Wyrmmaster, the Wizard of the Isle of Ice, once told him that elves wove truth and lie into invisible strings through which they manipulated the other races. AuRon didn’t believe him—elves spread out across the world spending all their time manipulating others would have difficulty knowing who lied about what to whom. But Hazeleye’s motives for anything, from freeing him to asking him to find the Isle of Ice and kill the wizard, were her own.

“Why are you waiting for Wistala?” AuRon asked.

“You may not believe this, but it was to pass news of you. It’s come to my ears what happened on the Isle of Ice, that you’ve mated and so on.”

“How did you hear that?”

“Shadowcatch. He’s become quite the sea dragon these past two years.”

AuRon wasn’t sure he wanted events on the Isle of Ice generally known. He switched over to Drakine.

“You wanted to give her news of me?”

“Yes,” Hazeleye said. “At one time or another I’ve thought each of you dead. I’m happy to be proven wrong. I’d like to know more about both of you. I’m at work on my last book, and I doubt I shall write the last word before this form dies.”

“So you’re still interested in dragons.”

“Few can claim to know more about them than I.”

AuRon decided to ask what was on his mind. “What happened to your legs?”

“I’ve lost most of the use of them. I can stand, just. I need assistance to walk.”

“I am sorry for that,” AuRon said. “An accident?”

“No.” She drew deep on her pipe. “I was tortured. Those fools in Ghioz thought you could break an elf’s spirit by breaking her body. That Queen of theirs. You’d think one of her kind would know better.”

The Copper remembered his friends there. “Naf allowed such a thing?”

“It was Naf’s fault I was brought before the Queen. I was living quietly in the mountains and she had need of an expert on dragons. I was fooled once. Never again.”

“Naf—Naf didn’t . . .”

“Of course not. He helped me escape. He’s an outlaw now. If he still lives.”

“Outlaws! He’s one of their great commanders.”

“He disobeyed the Queen. That put an end to his rise among the ranks of the Ghioz.”