No campfires. No dwarves. No hunting dogs. No men. Elves you wouldn’t see until their bowstrings sang your death. Some wide-winged birds circled above the woods and meadows; others sat on bare tree limbs with a good view of open ground, preening or keeping watch. Their behavior was regular: they didn’t suddenly change course or startle or cry out, as they would if hunters were prowling the woods. To the north, more mountains, a long line of them, snowy tops tinged with morning gold. Father was up there somewhere, but he wouldn’t even be a dot at this distance.
If he still lived.
Wistala sniffed the air, smelled mountain goat droppings in the grassy interstice filling the bottom of a rocky runnel. The beetle would no doubt find the clumps tasty. She preferred the source.
Wistala followed the smells at a slow stalk with a thoughtless—but not senseless—appetite.
Wistala didn’t need to follow the Bowing Dragon during the day, since the mountains appeared to run more or less north. She kept to the dead area above most of the trees but below the snow. Brilliant green moss the color of her scales covered every rock, evidence to some play of wind and weather that meant mists at these heights almost every morning and night.
While moving in open sunlight meant she could be observed, she’d rather see trouble from a distance than worry what might be around the next scraggly pine tree.
Water was plentiful—the mountains were shedding their winter weight of snow, and it came down in innumerable streams. The streams carried more than just refreshing water and bits of bark and leaf on a long journey down the mountain; they were full of tasty frogs that wiggled delightfully as they went down Wistala’s long throat.
By evening she’d crossed over two shoulders and had to face a decision. The mountains curved away west before going north again, and she could save herself a good deal of time by cutting across the valley, going the same distance in a quarter of the dragon-lengths. But it would mean plunging into thick forest. Trees could mean men, or worse, elves.
But trees also meant warm-blooded, furry, four-footed feasting, marrow-filled bones to crunch, and juicy eyeballs for sucking.
Appetite and the desire to hurry north, hopefully to find Father somewhere plotting destruction to the dwarves, won out over caution. She descended into the valley.
Patient trees waited for her. Soon she could see only slivers of sky around the tops of pines.
“Grounddragon look look!” a blue jay shrieked. It fluttered to a lower branch to scream at her: “Nestraider! Nestraider!”
Birdspeech made hatchling babble seem sophisticated.
“News! Dragon lives?” a swift answered from a nearby tree. Wistala couldn’t see it.
“Lives, lives, the grounddragon lives,” the jay called back.
“I won’t raid your nests,” Wistala said. “Why would it be news that I live?”
“Such news! News! Sparrow say grackle say thrush say elf-hawk say elves kill grounddragon,” the swift called.
“Nestraider! Nestraider!” the jay insisted.
“I will raid your nests if you don’t shut that thorn you use for a beak. When was this grounddragon killed, swift?”
“Not-today,” the swift answered.
Perhaps birdbrains had room for only two concepts of time: something that happened today and Everything Else. Auron might still live, somewhere. The birds might be gossiping about a killing in the area from weeks and weeks ago.
But she wondered—and her fire bladder went cold. Could birds keep a thought in their singsong heads that long?
Mother said some elves understood birdspeech. Wistala didn’t want her comings and goings sung about through the whole forest. She knew she couldn’t convince them to lie. Then she’d have to come up with an alternative truth they could understand. “Good riddance. We not-dragons don’t like them.”
“Nestraider! Nestraider!”
“You look like a dragon,” the swift said, and Wistala finally spotted him sheltering in the notch between two thick branches. She’d seen him only because he raised his whitish chin to speak.
“No, I’m a not-dragon. Though we look a lot like dragons and are often mistaken for them, that’s why we hate them so.”
“Nestraider! Nestraider!”
“Not-dragons don’t raid nests!” Wistala said. She marched off into the forest, tail held high, exposing her vent to the still-screaming jay.
“I’ve met a not-dragon,” the swift bubbled. “The sparrows must hear of this!”
The next day she cut through another wooded valley and crossed a low rocky ridge in the middle of the forest. It was honeycombed with caves of assorted sizes and, unfortunately, empty nests. There was good snake hunting in the rocks. All she had found to eat in the forest was a white-eyed possum, which had been wandering around in the daylight in a muddled daze. It stank like disease, but she still ate it. Mother had said that the illnesses that plagued mammals wouldn’t affect dragons.>The copper tipped.