Page 60 of House of Embers
He finally looked up at her in confusion. “Dragons, of course.”
“Of course. What about them?”
“How many young the elders have decided to put through theTest of the Everlasting.”
“The test of what?”
He sighed. “Look, you are clearly not a dragon speaker. So can you trust that I know more about this subject than likely anyone but the dragons or the council themselves? I go to the mountain. I talk to the dragons. We get dragons for the tournament as often as the council agrees. It’s usually that simple.”
“Usually?”
“Well, obviously the Society has changed, and the current leader has asked me to get more dragons. Early.” He trembled slightly at the thought. “I can’t imagine the Dragon Council would permit their young to go through the Test of the Everlasting early or…”
Lowan continued to prattle on about the impossibility of whatever suicide attempt Bastian had sent him on for more dragons.
Kerrigan, meanwhile, burrowed down into her bond and reached out to Tieran.
“Hey, the dragon speaker here is talking about the Test of the Everlasting. Sound familiar?”
Tieran snarled in her mind. She winced.“We do not speak of it aloud.”
“So it’s not good?”
“We do not speak of it,”he said and then cut off the connection.
Wonderful.
“Look,” Kerrigan said, interrupting the male’s diatribe, “you seem to know a lot about the dragons. More than I do obviously.”
“Obviously,” he said.
“Would you be willing to take us to the dragon meeting you were already going to go to?”
“Of course,” he said with a smile. “Though I don’t know if they’re going to allow us to speak with them.”
“Why not?”
“It’s past the cycle period,” he said in exasperation, as if he’dalready said this to someone and no one listened. “I go every spring. I’ve already been there this year. They aren’t going to take kindly to humans coming to the Holy Mountain without invitation and off schedule.”
Kerrigan hesitated. Well, that was frustrating. She reached out to Tieran again.
“So how much trouble would we be in if we went uninvited to the Holy Mountain?”
Tieran grumbled.“Do you have a death wish?”
About what she expected.
“Is there a way to get there safely?” she asked Lowan.
“It has been done under emergency circumstances. I was planning to invoke the Right of the First,” he said. “As long as you have a dragon to perform it, then we could get inside.” He hesitated before adding, “I think.”
Kerrigan slapped her hands on the table. “Great. I’m going to have someone bring you some food and let you rest. It’s been a long night. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
“The books,” he half shrieked as Kerrigan started across the room. “Can I have the books?”
She stalked across the room and grabbed the first one off the stack. She dropped it onto the table. “We’ll start with that.”
The only thing he seemed to care about were the books. Kerrigan could appreciate that.
