I will, Sunniva promised. She ached all over, her face throbbing where Giels had hit her and her muscles painful from fatigue.
She bent over and kissed first Rafe, then Marcus. A promise, and a commitment. Marcus slipped an arm around her and she leaned against him, taking comfort from his solid presence.
Unexpected, both he and Rafe. And wholly welcome.
Rafe’s eyelids were beginning to dip closed. In a moment she’d get up, Sunniva thought hazily, sort things out, check that Marcus’ modifier no longer worked, think about the humans and the mines and the worldgate, and everything…
Marcus hugged her. “Later. You can decide what to do with your aerie tomorrow.”
Sunniva met Rafe’s sleepy gaze, and then Marcus’ marginally more alert one. She reached out to take a hand in each of hers.
“Not my aerie,” she said, and she felt her dragon echo it, in sleepy contentment. “Ours.”
Harriet lives in New Zealand, where despite all evidence to the contrary she has yet to encounter any dragons.
Penny, Clover, Rabbit Foot
Larkin Dailey
Callam watched the dragons’ tributes filing in, as he had every year since he was a boy who dreamed of being one of them. Usually the tributes came in with some small amount of fanfare, proud to be sent, their home places proud to be sending them and wanting to show it. Wanting to prove them worthy of being chosen, as if the fineness of their clothes or the swiftness of their travel or the number of their escort had anything to do with the dragons’ choice.
There was a pleasure to be had in watching them – a pure pleasure in their brave beauty, and a meaner one in the irony of that unnecessarily expensive pageantry. The tribute he now watched, however, had none of that.
When Callam first saw the solitary figure, straggling up to the Tribute Gate in the wake of some other candidate’s mounted company, he wondered if the lone pedestrian might be there by mistake. Meant for the Public Gate, perhaps, and took the wrong turning off the high road, following the company ahead rather than the signage. Perhaps not literate enough to follow the signs. Though universal basic education had in theory been restored in recent generations, Callam knew that theory and practice were oftener more like distant cousins than like eggs under the same hen.
It seemed that the guard at the gate shared Callam’s doubts. He watched the guard wave the mounted group past after a few words of greeting, but hold the solitary traveler back. They were too distant for Callam to overhear but he could imagine the gist from their body language. The guard questioned the traveler, perhaps a bit patronizingly, placing a guiding hand on the traveler’s arm: You don’t mean to go in here do you? This is the Tribute Gate. You must be turned around. Suppose you tell me where you were trying to get to and I’ll point you in the right direction, hmm?
The traveler twitched it off like a horse shaking off flies, made a calm and resolute gesture of their own. I know what it is, thank you. This is where I mean to go. May I pass?
After a bit more discussion, the guard yielded, with an air of amused resignation, as if to say, Fine, go to your doom if you’re so determined. Greater powers than I will judge you and decide your fate hereafter.
With no more than a nod of acknowledgement, the solitary traveler walked on.
Callam decided not to linger watching for the rest of the day’s tributes to come in, but go to meet the candidates who had already arrived. The bounds of his duties could be stretched so far—really, it was almost his job. And he was curious.
He was not alone in his extracurricular interest. Elsewhere in the citadel another watcher climbed down from his own vantage point and made his clandestine way toward the Precinct of Tributes, where that other had even less call to be.
Callam noticed nothing amiss when he came among the tributes. In the small courtyard close inside the city wall that was set aside for their use, the recently arrived were dismounting. A few guards and proctors were always about in this season, to receive the new arrivals and show them to their places. Now the season was so far advanced that many tributes had already arrived, and the earlier arrivals joined in welcoming the later.
They were obliged to take leave of their escorts and turn over any tithes or gifts, any personal weapons or valuables they would have no need of until their fates were settled. Some took the loss of their advantages better than others. It was a kind of test, the first and mildest of the trials they would endure here on their way to being—perhaps—chosen as dragons’ companions. What other trials of selection they had undergon
e before coming here would only be known by their effects.
After a few moments looking, Callam found the object of his curiosity: the lone traveler, standing still alone near the edge of the courtyard. The welcome extended to the others hadn’t extended that far. And didn’t seem likely to. The singleton approached first the cluster in the middle of the yard, and was ignored, as if the dusty and ragged undyed homespun clothes made the wearer invisible in such a bright-colored crowd. Then the lone one turned to a door guard who was looking unapproachably fierce with the beaten-metal breastplate and closed helm hiding his face.
Callam thought it was brave of a country bumpkin to walk right up to that imposing figure of gleaming muscle and metal. The guard at least acknowledged the traveler, but his shrugged response indicated he couldn’t answer what was asked.
So Callam was glad he’d let his curiosity lead him out of his way. If no one else would, at least he could offer this curious shabby traveler a greeting befitting the city of dragons, and find out what business brought such an unlikely character to the Tribute Gate. He strode over and introduced himself—Callam Booker, proctor for the trials of the dragons’ tributes—and asked the guest’s name and business.
Then he was almost too surprised to register the answer, when the traveler pushed back her wide-brimmed hat to show her face, pale and freckled as an appaloosa pony’s hide. Her eyes were gray, her hair a light reddish brown, sun-faded to the yellow of hay at the ends. Her voice answering his introduction was low and a little rough, perhaps from the dust of the road.
But it was her speckled face that made Callam stare. In these parts most folks were some shade of tan or beige or brown, if not as dark as the ebony shade of Callam himself and his kin. He’d never seen a human with skin that could fairly be called white, even if the palest parts were only a background between freckles. That explained the deep hat. Such fair skin must be terrible in the sun – and in fact the tip of her nose was pink and angry-looking like a scald, and her cheeks and forehead bore blister scars.
She was an oddity, rare as a shooting star or a two-yolked egg, or an agate tumbled downstream from distant mountains. The kind of thing that might change the luck of whoever finds it.
“I’m sorry,” Callam apologized, for the double rudeness of not listening, and of paying more attention to appearance than to the person wearing it. His Mama would make his ears ring if she caught him behaving so, never mind he was a man grown. “Would you say your name again? I was too busy looking to listen, and I should know better. Will you forgive me, and give me another chance?”
“It’s no offense,” she answered. “I know I must look strange to you as you do to me. I am called Edit. I come from Palacha—” hundreds of miles away; how long had she been walking? “—and we don’t have much to do with outside. My kin worse than most. They’re Anavaxists, so we didn’t even go to school or doctor half the time, let alone to fairs or cities or dragon meets. Just kept to ourselves and did for ourselves, such as we could. And,” this wryly, “of course we all had the pox.” She gestured at her scarred face. “When I was a child I thought this is just how adults looked.”