“Come to your perch, if you have one,” Father said. His eyelids drooped and his eyes were dull. Just telling a story had worn him—or perhaps old emotions had drained his hearts’ blood.
“I’m told by the battle-crows, curse their nest-pillaging feathers, that the flames signify dragonfire. Some story lost in the mists of time.”
“Whatever they learned of dragons they must have forgotten, to go murdering hatchlings,” Wistala said, but neither of the pair appeared to hear her. She could almost hear Mother’s voice above as she sang:
And for those who threaten clutch of flame,
To feel the wrath of dragon-dame!
Father yawned. “Time for sleep. A dragon must rest and all that. Daughter, I’ve had my fill of fish. See if you can catch something red-blooded unawares for breakfast, would you?”
Chapter 9
A week’s worth of breakfasts later—mostly fish, unfortunately for Father’s blood-hungry appetite—Wistala smelled smoke in the evening twilight of the forest west of the river gorge.
Game had become scarce in the area around Father and Bartleghaff, who seemed to do little but befoul his perch and goad Father into burning him up like a feathery candle.
Smoke in the forest, with the wood so wet from the constant spring rains, could mean only one thing—hominids. No other creatures save dragons wielded so dangerous a weapon.
With luck, she’d have hers in a few more months. Coming aboveground early had its terrors, but she had to admit she was thriving on the variety of food to be found.
And speaking of variety of food—as she rolled the smoke smell around in her nostrils, she got the mouthwatering scent of charred flesh, which she hadn’t had since Father brought home a burned sheep to the egg shelf what seemed like a lifetime ago.
The smoke smell was as easy to follow as a bright moon on a cloudless night through the trees. After a little casting back and forth, she came to a wide hollow.
It was an unnatural sort of place, like a dry creek, only the bottom was filled with tiny broken stones all roughly the same size, and the overgrown banks carried no smell of running water, though every rill for miles was brim-full with the rains. The hollow bent around the peak of the hill as though a claw like Bartleghaff’s obelisk had scored the hillside. But from the heights, one could both see either end of the streambed-like cut for a goodly length and be out of the wind.
A dwarf had chosen to camp here.
“Great things have small beginnings,” Mother used to like to say when she and Jizara compared their minuscule size to her bulk.
Her vengeance would begin here. As a bonus, the dwarf had a string of ponies. Surely she’d bring down one or two and be able to carry several limbs back to Father before the birds made off with it all.
She stayed downwind in the smoke smell. Examining each sii-and saa-hold as she crept up, she reached a pounce point in the cut of the bank. Perhaps two bounds to reach the dwarf, and if he had an ax, he didn’t keep it beside him. . . .
The dwarf wasn’t even helmed, though he did have a sort of mask across his face and just a few scraggles of beard showing. Her store of dwarf-lore was not great, but she knew that a dwarf without a full beard was either very young or some kind of criminal. The only thing remarkable about him was his riding boots, which rose all the way to his hips.
The dwarf carefully set his frying pan down and stood.
Wistala froze, waiting for him to reach for a weapon.
But he wasn’t looking in her direction.
She tried to follow his gaze, but all she could see was the string of tasty-looking ponies, chewing their meals in bags attached to their noses.
One of the middle ponies had no interest in his meal; instead he stood miserably with one hoof tipped forward.
The dwarf went to his little two-wheeled cart and returned with a bag. She watched the dwarf lift the pony’s hoof and shake his head. He scratched it between the ears, grumbling something in his tongue, and went to work.
Wistala had gnawed at enough horse hooves to know that men sometimes put iron soles on the bottoms of their saa to save their beasts sore-footedness. Perhaps one had come loose. In any case, the dwarf carefully cleaned the pony’s hoof, extracting a sizable rock with a long device shaped like a dragon’s snout, and applied some kind of tart-smelling salve from a covered clay pot. Then he pounded in a fresh shoe, driving nails right into the animal’s foot. The pony didn’t like the hammering, but placed its foot on the ground, happy to rest its weight on all fours again.
Still grumbling, the dwarf refilled the nose bags from a sack and returned to his now-cold meal. The dwarf mopped up a little congealed grease with a lump of bread and left the rest.
The desire to leap and kill left Wistala. Any sort of creature that would leave his own dinner to see to the comfort of a four-legged brute didn’t seem the type to slaughter hatchlings in their cave. Besides, he held no helm or shield with flames; as far as she could tell, he had no sort of insignia on him, unless you counted the strange angular design like the gems Father gave them to play with on the rear doors of his cart.
He removed the nose bags on his ponies and posted them so they could nibble at the grass and growth on the banks or lie down. The nose bags intrigued Wistala, Bartleghaff’s story of men carrying around water in the bodies of animals had stayed with her. They seemed just the right size for fish.
The dwarf cleaned his tools and then sprayed a sweet-smelling liquid on his short, thin beard using a bag that hissed like a hatchling as he squeezed it.