Page 217 of Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire 2)

Ragwrist arrayed his house carts to block the bridge, and the last memory Wistala had was of Widow Lessup consoling Mod Lada—Rayg had been at academy outside Quarryness, and none in the despoiled town could say what had become of him.

They buried Rainfall the next day on a cool summer morning of the sort that always saw him long at work in his garden.

Wistala, drinking like a horse fresh from a race, begged Ragwrist to drag a dead horse from the village and a team of dwarves with a gargant went and fetched two so that she might have one the next day. They hung one and she devoured the other despite the flies. With food and water in her, she felt up to a slow, stiff walk up the riverbank to a prominence overlooking Mossbell’s grounds.

“He’d rather be rooted with the family across the gorge there,” Ragwrist said. “But Hammar is a bitter man, I’d hate to have him take vengeance on a rooting elf.”

Wistala watched the procedure. Under Ragwrist’s direction they sat the body cross-legged, facing the river and bound up in canvas, then coated him with fresh clay, until he resembled a lumpy, three-sided pyramid. The crown of his head they left naked to the elements. His hair still sprouted there, if anything a little brighter green than before. “He’ll like it better on the south bank anyway, the sun catches the river mist, and he’ll have rainbows. And a better view of his bridge and lands.”

She asked Ragwrist about the custom as Dsossa smoothed the clay sides with her hands.

“The being you knew is dead, certainly. The dormant comes to fore after death,” Ragwrist said. “Some elf families bury their dead upright in a hole, others hollow out dead trees and place them in there. With us it is clay.”

“Us?” Wistala asked.

“Yes, Rainfall is my brother.”

She was shocked into speechlessness. “But you’ve only shown—”

“To elves family is an accident, Wistala. We are dutiful to our parents and try to pass on all we’ve gained from the world, in wisdom and wealth, to our children, but as to siblings or cousins or all that stuff humans and dwarves set such store by—” He shrugged. “Just as well, for I’ve seen feuds start between brothers over family obligation that make the Steppe Wars mild by comparison. It is sad to see another full-elf go. So few are born anymore these days.”

“It is the same with dragons,” Wistala said, as Dsossa kissed a new bud on Rainfall’s head. She planted a handful of Mossbell’s green lichen to keep him company. “Why is this? Are elves hunted, as well?”

“If I knew the cause, I’d be in a shell-house, looking out over the water gardens of Krakenoor. We have our enemies, true enough, but that is not the cause. They say the magic is being leeched out of the world. But what do poets know?”

Dsossa touched her at folded wing edge. “Wistala, I know Rainfall would want you to have this,” she said, drawing the blue battle sash from beneath her weather coat. “It is a relic of Hypatian Generalhood and should go to his daughter.”

The silk was so shiny and smooth, it was as though water had been woven into fabric. “I could not wear it. My scales would tear it to pieces.”

“Carry it, then. What has become of your harness and satchels?”

“We lost much baggage in Quarryness,” Ragwrist said.

“I will ask Brok to make you something more fitting,” Dsossa said.

“Will you come with us south?” Ragwrist said. “If the circus is to continue, we must back to the winter camp and replace our losses. Would that they’d just taken money instead of lives! Money is so easily replaced.”

Wistala almost snorted, never having heard money and easy so closely associated from Ragwrist. It took her a moment to answer the question, so conflicted were her thoughts.

Oh, the allure of familiar routine! Drained in body and brain, she could eat the wheel-size fish of the delta—

“I must think on this. I told you I would travel with you until I had my wings. But I must decide what purpose to put them to.”

Wistala’s wounds ceased bleeding whenever she moved the next day, though she suspected she still had an arrowhead in her, for if she struck her left sii out far forward it pained her.

Despite her fatigue she went across the bridge, and saw Jessup and some of his family rebuilding their brewery. She didn’t pause to talk—though she did touch the sign for luck, which caused one aged man sitting on the doorstep to touch a phantom mug to his lips—but instead went to Mossbell. There she took Stog in mouth, holding him as tenderly as a gamesman’s bird dog would carry a duck, and crossed Mossbell to the grove of Rainfall’s ancestry.

She had to keep her eyes averted from the ruin. Remarkably enough the two trees flanking the front door still lived, though their smaller limbs had been burned they were still green far above.

At the glade of Rainfall’s ancestors, she found the remains of days-old campfires and a garbage pile, and noted that the barbarians had carved rude symbols in the tree bark with their blades and left their filth all about the roots. Whether it was chance or purpose, she could not say.

She laid Stog beside Avalanche and gathered rocks, and over the course of the day built such a cairn that not even the strongest badger would be able to dig his way through. When it was done, she sat atop it and looked across the gorge. She could just see a brown dot, Rainfall’s cocoon, from which a tree would hopefully emerge.

Utterly sapped by the effort, she slept. She dreamed the trees were whispering to her, soft words made of wind and leaves.

Chapter 22

Even before the circus left, Wistala occupied the old troll cave overlooking the Whitewater River west of the bridge.

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