Page 100 of Dragon Fate (Age of Fire 6)

The young dragons and dragonelles clamored for it to be sounded again, but NaStirath cautioned them that the alarm-horn was deadly serious business, not a toy. Their clamor silenced at once—he’d never spoken sharply to them before.

To tell the truth, he felt a little guilty. So to make amends, with youthful enthusiasm checked in one direction, he gave them something important to do. They were to do their best that night to sneak into the Vesshall past the sentinels. No fighting, not even play fighting, allowed, and as soon as they were marked and pointed out, the game was over.

They had an opportunity to test it a few days later, when the horn sounded long and loud. It rattled exercise-loosened scale.

“Dragons come!” came the shout from the Black Sentinels.

NaStirath felt his firebladder pulse. When was the last time that had happened? When Wistala startled him at the pools when she first arrived, all those years ago?

He found himself trembling.

Black Sentinels assembled, bearing their spiked wooden clubs. The blacksmith was at work on short curved chopping blades that would make the most of blighter musculature and Vesshall ironmongering capabilities without breaking.

He hurried up to the watchtower balcony, stood just below, and looked to the south. Blighters were running every which way, reminding him of the time a wild dog made it into the chicken coops.

He saw two dragons flying across the lake, making use of the warm air rising.

Just two? He looked across the Sadda-Vale from end to end to make sure there weren’t more approaching low through the mountains. Satisfied, he turned his neck and examined the arrivals again.

A green with enormous wings and a gliding, more slender dragon approached from the south. NaStirath looked away, then looked back again, refocusing his eyes, to be sure of his identification.

“It’s AuRon and Wistala,” he said. It occurred to him that they might need to set up a signal for canceling the alarm.

He couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed that there wouldn’t be a battle. His blood was well and truly aroused. Was he, against all his inclinations and attitudes, fierce?

Wistala landed, hard enough that a loose tile on the vast, stone-paved expanse before the entrance to Vesshall shifted noisily under her.

AuRon was a tough companion to fly alongside.

She remembered, rather grimly, that Natasatch once told her that she’d long since given up trying to keep up with her mate in the air and so she landed to rest and let AuRon’s anxiety to reach his destination go off with the winds. Wistala took pride in her strength and reserves of energy. She limited her pleas to asking AuRon to slow down, lest she burst a heart struggling to keep up.

AuRon had apologized repeatedly, and he remembered for a day or so to set his speed on hers, but he liked being lead dragon—it let the follower relax a little, riding in the air that his wings broke. But his natural pace always crept back in mid-flight and she had to once again gasp for him to slow down.

The process had been repeated over the week it took them to travel north from the Sunstruck Sea back to the Sadda-Vale. They alighted in a gray dawn, with AuRon’s scales almost colorless from fatigue. DharSii set the blighters to work bringing them fresh-plucked chickens with the blood still warm within.

“We came here to warn you,” Wistala said, tearing into shredded chicken flesh. The blighters had left the digestive track in the birds, but she was too hungry to complain about the taint. “We’ve shown ourselves as enemies of the Empire.”

“They moved before you,” DharSii said. “Or perhaps faster than you. No way to know which.”

They gratefully accepted food and wine hurriedly set out in Vesshall. Scabia greeted them and promised they’d talk in the morning, once they were rested. Then she slept like the dead.

Scabia ordered another overlarge breakfast. Wistala sensed that something had changed at Vesshall. Scabia was subdued—what in another dragon would be called deferential, but it was hard to apply that word to the white matriarch she’d known for so long.

Things seemed different between Aethleethia and NaStirath as well. She was less captivated by her hatchlings and more eager to settle down so that her tail rested against his.

But the greatest change was in NaStirath. He still joked, but his jokes revolved around trivial matters such as the weather or the state of the drains in the Vesshall. He talked sensibly about ways to increase the food supply should more dragons arrive, and wondered what the chances were of getting some dwarfish artisans in to set some matters straight in the kitchen and food storage. She kept expecting him to fall into his old role of Vesshall fool again and demand to know who fell for the new, masterful NaStirath and who knew it was an act.

A little blood spilled in the Sadda-Vale seemed to have created a world of change.

“We won’t stay long,” Wistala said, finishing her breakfast. “I go in search of my brother.”

“I go along,” AuRon said. “More for Wistala’s sake than my brother’s. I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

“He might say the same of you,” DharSii said. “An open attack on the Empire by two dragons?”

“Sometimes all it takes is one blow to give others courage,” Wistala said.

“You’ve been reading Ankelene sagas again,” DharSii said, referring to the intellectual strain of dragons who kept records, knew strange tongues, and served as a learned caste in the Lavadome.

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