Page 42 of Dragon Champion (Age of Fire 1)

A man in clothing so bright, it reminded Auron of a dragon’s hide stepped down into the hold the next morning. “So, how is our floating garbleup?” the man said, using an unknown word.

“Well enough, Captain. It’s not my first passage.”

“To the Isle of Ice? Truly?”

“A long voyage, I know.”

“Then you should also know better than to claim you could hire another ship.”

“It got your mate to do what I wanted.”

“This is my third trip in three years. Each time with dragons.” He looked at the cages. “This one won’t live much longer,” he said, eyeing the little one. “The female seems a fine strong one—you’ll get your price for her. But what is this?” he said, coming to Auron’s enclosure.

“A male.”

“Of no color? His Sagacity’ll no more take him than he’d buy a basilisk. He’ll be cut up for fish bait by sunset the day we land.”

“We’ll see.”

“I know the pointy-head will laugh in your face if you try to sell him a birth defect.”

“Then he doesn’t know as much as he claims about dragons. Rumor is he has an idea to breed them. A gray can have any color offspring.”

The captain shook his head. “I think not.”

“Captain, these cages aren’t doing them any good. Can your armorer fix it so they’re chained to the wall?”

“If you’re willing to pay for the damages to my ship.”

Auron saw the elf clamp her jaw shut as tightly as his. “Yes,” she finally said. Funny that hominids could show emotion now and again. It made them almost dragonlike.

“Then I’ll arrange it, kind heart. I might have a goosedown pillow in one of my sea chests, if you’d like that for their precious heads, as well.” He walked back up the entry hatchway, chuckling. The elf said something to herself in her own tongue to the gaily colored back.

She walked over to Auron’s netting. “Were you listening? Were you?” she asked, absently patting him as she looked up the hatchway the other had used. Auron didn’t understand her language, but at her touch, he knew her feelings. They were warm and caring, similar to Mother’s, and lifted some of his misery. She paused in her stroking, drawing her hand away as if he were burning. Her eyebrows came together like head-butting hatchlings. “You were listening,” she said, switching to the Parl she employed with the captain. “I saw your eye. You looked at me; you looked at the captain. Are you one of the dragons who know our tongues? Nod if you understand.”>“You’re not of our clan, Haz. You speak hardly a dozen words of our tongue. How do you know how we’ve suffered from the dragons in the Red Mountains’ dales? Try keeping your flocks and herds with a grown one of these around. Then tell me about giving them a chance.”

She reached out and touched his neck. Her skin was greasy compared with his dry hide. He felt dirty where she placed her hand. “A suffocated hatchling won’t bring us much in trade. We can’t even get a purse of silver for this one’s hide. There’s no market for aphrodisiacs from such a young one. Some magiker might want his bones, but that won’t replace your stolen sheep after we’ve had our cut.”

She spoke into his ear, her tone soft, but he couldn’t understand the words. One sounded like it might be sea, but he couldn’t be sure. She looked up again and returned to her conversation. “I can’t bear seeing any creature tortured. Even dragons.”

The others just shook their heads and laughed.

The sea. Auron had heard of it, had seen his parents’ visions of soaring above its jagged coastline on their mating flight. His first real sight of it was as a choppy bay seen through the angled bars of a cage.

It was mostly obscured by something made of wood, the size of a full-grown dragon floating upside down with its claws pointing in the air. Two trees grew out of the center of the construct, but they were striped bare of branch, twig, and leaf. It must be a ship: the wooden wings that hominids used to cross water. Shirtless men in loose pants stood around, waiting to pull on lines, or helped dwarves carry more constructs on board. All around was man-laid stone, man-cut wood, man-flattened earth. Only the birds retained their natural shape, though Auron wondered if men colored them white to make them more pleasing to the eye against the bright sky.

He smelled the ocean, and he didn’t like it. It smelled like rotted fish and stagnant marsh, overlaid with salt.

Four dwarves picked up his cage, one at each corner, and walked up a ramp to the ship. Auron’s limbs had more mobility; he had lost weight during the wagon ride, and his circulation flowed more freely. It was the closest he had been to comfortable since capture. As he passed along the deck, Auron got his first look at the limitless horizon of the sea, a precise line dividing the world in two. They set Auron down on deck, and he felt the surface move in the harbor. It was a pleasant feeling, bringing memories of his dreams of flight.

“Take the dragon below,” he heard the now-familiar voice of Hazeleye order.

“What, to the hold? He’s riding on deck with the horses—we have enough cleaning to do as is.”

“He’ll die of thirst in this sun. Below, or by Helo, I’ll take it to the captain or find another ship.” She climbed up onto the high deck at the back of the ship and looked out at the quay with her hand shielding the sun from her eyes.

“Ugly elf-witch,” one of the sailors muttered to the other as they picked Auron up. They attached a line to his cage and lowered him into the dark of the hold. Musty-smelling netting lay everywhere: bound around cargo, piled on the floor, hanging limp from the ceiling. They ensnared Auron in another layer of it, securing his cage to the ship’s side, as if the leather bands and cage weren’t enough to keep him captive. Auron smelled rat urine.

He waited a day, a night, and another day in the stuffy hold. Rats nibbled at the sore spots the leather had made on his hide. Hazeleye fed him, and cleaned him by spraying seawater into his cage. The water disappeared into some kind of gutter at the wall of the ship.

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