“Very well,” the Copper said. “SiHazathant is hungry and already offered to perform the service. With the word of one of our most respected young Anklenes to guide him, I’m sure he’ll have no qualms, and if something should happen, well, Regalia’s legendary for her forgiving nature.”
Regalia settled her griff. Not quite a warning rattle, but her brother shut his nostrils and raised his head away from the hatchling.
“Yes,” LaDibar said. “Well, in circumstances like these, I think it meet to test your caution, and take caution in your tests, as we say in the temple when probing the unknown. Our Queen’s wishes should be respected, in any case.” He tilted his head complyingly at Nilrasha.
Nilrasha scooped up the hatchling, and for a dreadful griff-tchk the Copper feared she would swallow the corpse herself in her misery. But she merely made for the grand stair.
“I’ll be at the Firemaiden cairn in mourning for some time,” she said, forming the words out the side of her snout with difficulty.
Her coterie bowed deeply as she left. Essea raised herself up for a moment as if to follow, then thought better of it. Or maybe she just wanted to discuss the Queen’s strange behavior with the others.
Nilrasha mourned through several lightings. Two more old dragons died. Rayg’s strange, inverted manner of obtaining fluids allowed the remaining sick hatchlings to recover with the resiliency of young blood, with the exception of one poor little soul who hardly breathed as Rayg attended her.
Privately, the Copper credited Rayg with more than a score of lives saved against that one which would have been lost anyway. He must think of a suitable reward—one that didn’t deprive the Lavadome of Rayg’s services, of course. The offer of having his own (golden!) chair installed in the throne room didn’t impress the quirky human. Much of the rest of the Copper’s thinking as to rewards was met with a shrug.
The Copper suspected that Rayg chose the gesture just to revolt him. The humans’ tendency to apparently dislocate their shoulders at will turned the stomach.
Rayg, when the crisis was past and after a good deal of work and experimentation, discovered that washing and boiling wouldn’t remove the strange blight, but long roasting in a dry pan rendered it harmless—and made the kern almost indigestible.
Nilrasha struck the Copper as less eager for bows and baubles afterwards and more attentive to the hatchlings of the Lavadome.
Whether this was a passing resolution or a real change he couldn’t say.
He liked seeing her so concerned with the hatchlings. It was part of her duty as Queen. He would like to see it become more than duty—he would be gladdened by some hatchlings of their own.
They hadn’t had any luck with eggs so far, but between the two of them they had battle injuries that might make a clutch an impossibility.
If they did have a clutch, he would try something new with the males, separate them somehow until they could be made to understand. He and Nilrasha could set the style. Perhaps others would follow. Females in the Lavadome outnumbered males on the order of two to one or more. They always had, but did that have to mean they always would? With another hundred males, the other dragons wouldn’t be so puffed up with their own importance. He could establish real dragon settlements in other places in the Lower World—the Star Tunnel, for instance. And perhaps dragonkind could look once more to the surface and put an end to lurking in the Lower World in fear.
He spoke about it once to Rethothanna. She was his favorite Anklene. She’d completed the first, and so far the only, history of the Lavadome. It was like a lifesong, only horribly long and complicated. You couldn’t even listen to the whole thing in one sitting, and he had patience for stories.
“Yes, others before you have had the same thought. In the days of Anklamere it was enforced, of course, but dragons weren’t much better than thralls back then.
“Tyr FeHazathant, glory to his name, had the same thought very early in his time. It fractured the Lavadome again. EmLar and his back-to-nature group quit the Lower World entirely and took off for the surface.”
He sounded NoSohoth out on the matter, and the old courtier’s head dipped as though his hearts had stopped. The Copper decided that he would cross that chasm when he was more secure. As it was, he waited for word from Anaea. He sent a message to his fool of an Upholder with a report of the bad kern and a request to look to the next crop with extra care. He also asked for full details about the last batch—had it been planted in an unusual place or had some trick of weather or infestation given the Anaeans difficulty?
He doubted both—Anaea’s high-altitude plateau enjoyed mild, sunny weather the year round, cave-like in the cool of the night and pleasantly cleansing brightness in the day.
What he really waited for was news from Wail and Gnash. Three more fourth-generation bats were coming along nicely—Nilrasha offered up her blood regularly, saying it helped her sleep—but they were still learning the hills of the Lavadome and the holes of the principal dragons.
One worry dominated all the others. What would happen when the supply of even the old kern ran out? It would mean long, slow debilitating illness and eventual madness.
Oddly, none in the Lavadome talked of it. At least not that he heard.
Chapter 5
Years later, when Wistala thought back on it, that last summer of peace and quiet isolation that stretched into fall remembered better than it had lived.
At the time she was surfeited by the blighters and their endless celebrations. They celebrated that year’s calves maturing, the winter’s births who had survived to take their first steps and yap their first words, the fruit and crop harvests, the extraction of the fall’s honey from the hives, the young females becoming maidens, and the young males taking their first real warrior-spear. The festivals blazed loud and vigorous and colorful and musical and all that, but one was very much like the other to her senses, and she preferred the peace of NooMoahk’s library to massed dancing.
In time, even the library galled her. She couldn’t read quickly enough to get through, and each scroll parsed out increased her sense of frustration.
Her mood was the crystal’s doing, she finally decided.
Wistala distrusted the crystal. Delightful as it was for casting light on her reading, fascinating as it was to stare into, since the slightest shift of one’s head brought different images—at times she thought she saw dragons, at other times a great tower, not quite circular and flat-headed as an anvil—it sometimes made her doubt her own mind and will.
She’d heard and read stories, of course, of travelers too long on their own who became crazed. At first she wondered if her own mind was the one at fault. The crystal, though smaller than a troll, reminded her of the one she’d fought on Rainfall’s bridge. The way it leaned forward, as if inspecting her, watching what she was doing over her shoulder, the way Auron used to try and sniff out whether she was concealing a juicy tidbit or just a dried-out old slug under her sii.