“Are mine to avenge, daughter. If I can ever get aloft again.”
Father spread his wings, wincing at the pain in his ax-hacked neck and shoulders. He beat his wings, stirring hardly enough wind to blow Wistala’s fringe to the other side of her neck. One long black fringe-point dropped to the corner of her eye, and she reached up with her left sii and snipped it short with her claws.
“That’s a terrible habit, Wistala,” Father barked. “A long fringe means a healthy dragonelle.”
A failed attempt at flight always leaves Father irascible. But his tone still stung, no matter how many times she told herself that.
“You’re just wearing yourself out,” she said. “I smelled deer spoor in the woods. I’ll try to find you a yearling.”
“What I really need is some metal. Look at these scales coming in! A snake would be ashamed.”
“Deer wouldn’t carry gold and silver,” Bartleghaff said.
“I saw a . . . a . . . ,” Wistala said, searching for the word, “. . . road. Might riders carry gold?”
“They’d carry weapons, as well,” Father said. “I thought I saw some ruins in the forest to the southwest, probably Old Hypatian. There might be iron to be plucked. I’d settle for nails. You could carry them in your neck contraption.”
“How far?” Wistala asked.
“Too far for you to find it on foot. You’d spend weeks searching,” Bartleghaff said.
“Exactly,” Father said. “Listen, old vulture, you’re getting fat on all those fish heads. Fly and guide her so your wings stay in training.”
“Why?” Bartleghaff asked. “I need nails like I need a captive hawk’s hood and tether.”
“Call it a favor to an old friend keeping an eye on his daughter. Two, if you can spare a glance down now and then.”
“High flier! Not an errand-wing,” Bartlegaff cawed.
“Smoldering pile of feathers for taking advantage of her hospitality,” Father said. He spat a globule of fire off the steep rock-side facing the river, watched it fall and hit the froth in a hiss. It rode the waves for a moment, still burning, before succumbing to the white water. “She’s been catching and hauling fish for you for weeks. And you fair bubbled with gratitude last night over that rabbit. Or did the gratitude get coughed up along with the bones?”
Bartleghaff worked his trailing wing feathers with his beak. “Oh, very well.”
“Have a few mouthfuls of metal yourself, daughter. You’re growing, and you need your ferrites. If you come across any quartz or fine sand, a mouthful or two wouldn’t hurt. Scours the teeth and aids the digestion.”
“So you and Mother have told me. Over and over,” Wistala said. But she couldn’t hide her excitement at the errand.
Bartleghaff’s guidance consisted of a few visits throughout the day, mostly to tell her she was heading in the wrong direction. He always picked out landmarks that she couldn’t see, even by climbing a tall tree! She’d follow a ridge he put her on for an afternoon, only to have him swoop down and tell her she’d been making too easterly for hours, and she had to veer back south. She felt her fire bladder twitch at some of the abuse he employed—birdspeech had no end of colorful calumnies.
“You could come down and correct me more often,” she said, her fire bladder pulsing in time to her angry hearts.
“You could rest in a clearing now and then so I might see you through these confounded trees.”
She guessed it was a young forest. Now and then she passed a stone wall that led nowhere and divided nothing but its mossy side from the bare. She found a tall brick building on a bank. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to divert the stream years ago so that it flowed close to the building; now all was overgrown and inhabited by raccoons who retreated to tight holes in the bricks and bared their teeth when she sniffed at them. According to Father, where one man came, soon there would be ten and then hundreds, but whatever men had lived here, they’d long ago abandoned the land to the thriving trees, leaving the waterfall and pool they’d crafted to tasty frogs and fish.
She chased some smaller crows away from a dead groundhog and decided the meat was too noisome to interest her, but Bartleghaff thought it palatable.
Greenstuff filled every nook and cranny of the ruins, but where wind and water contested the mosses and lichens, marble still gleamed. Wistala crept to the edge of the forest, swarmed up a tree looking out over the ruins, and tried to put a mental map together.
Wistala watched men graze their sheep in the wide grassy lanes of what must have once been a city as their women and children gathered nuts and berries. Dogs, more interested in disturbing the cats sunning themselves atop ruined walls or in the gaps between decorative friezes, trotted from man to sheep, learning whatever might be discovered in each other’s tailvents.
The fallen city had three clusters to it, each atop a hill, linked by low walls between, like three spiderwebs sharing a hollow log. A marsh stood at the very center of the three hills, but ancient vine-wrapped columns projected from it, showing that it hadn’t always been a wetland. The village of the men stood a few dozen dragon-lengths off, outside a fallen gate that admitted a stream into the ruins. The stream fed the marsh.
She decided to hunt and rest for the day, and then explore the ruins at night. Metal would smell the same day or night, and she’d just as soon poke around after the men had retreated to their hearths. She just hoped they didn’t loose dogs in the rubble.
She released Bartleghaff. Retracing her steps would be of no difficulty now that she knew the landmarks. She could find the brick ruin by the stream, and from that the ridge, and from that the wall corners, and from that—
“Keep clear of those men,” Bartleghaff warned. “If you smell stewing lamb, just shut your nostrils. ‘Temptation hatches instigation which hatches assassination!’ ”