Page 91 of Dragon Fate (Age of Fire 6)

“Poor old Hypatia is corrupt, thanks to the dragons,” AuRon said.

“We can’t fight them here.”

“Obviously. We’re only two.”

“Then back to the Sadda-Vale? It’s advantageous ground. Those fogs would work to our advantage.”

“Even if we could get Scabia and the rest in the air, it wouldn’t be enough.”

“Our brother is up to something. While I slept, I wore my dragonhelm. He’s in a deep plot—I’m sure of it.”

“That’s a little like being sure the sun is moving. When is our brother not up to something?”

“I have a sense that’s he’s in difficulty and there are dragons involved. A tall tower on a jagged peninsula overlooking water.”

“Dragons and a tall tower, eh? He’s in Juutfod.”

“Do you know it?”

“A little. It’s the last remnant of our family’s old enemy, the Circle of Man and the wizard who needed hatchlings so bad he hired the Dragonblade and the Wheel of Fire to hunt for them.”

“I thought that story was long since ended. You took care of the wizard, I avenged our family name upon the dwarfs, and our brother killed the Dragonblade.”

“The story continues as long as we live,” AuRon said.

Wistala stretched her wings. “I can manage more flying now, I think. Let’s continue the tale.”

Chapter 10

Scabia the White had more than the usual Sadda-Vale burdens on her mind. The Outside World, which she’d done her best to avoid and ignore, had intruded on her precious hall.

She welcomed her troubles in a way. In the long years of just her daughter and her insipid but well-formed mate eating a long march of similar meals, over conversation as unvarying as the drips through the hole in the great rotunda of Vesshall, they might as well have been three statues frozen in time and space with a group of blighters polishing them and keeping vermin from moving into cracks and crevices.

The arrival of the Exiles, as she styled them, had forced the statues to move. There were hatchlings now—she still thought of them as hatchlings, half in wonder at the word, despite their breathing their first fire and showing thin skin where their wings were coming in. Her senses, exposed to new smells of dragonkind, new voices entering her ears, woke up as if from a dream. Colors struck her as brighter and the smells of the blighters roasting sheep made her as hungry as a dragonelle after her first flight. The Sadda-Vale seemed to be blossoming.

She was even starting to like DharSii again. Before Wistala visited, briefly, all those years ago, she grudged him his trips into the world outside the Sadda-Vale. Now she realized he was just trying to avoid becoming another dusty statue, issuing the same words to the world as though they were engraved beneath their claws like aphorisms. Had he not become intrigued by her—an odd object for affection, she was so muscular as to be ungainly, and her wings never managed to fold up in the neat, tight, attractive manner of a high-blooded female—they never would have had the hatchlings.

Even the idea of setting her home against the power of RuGaard’s former dragons excited her. She’d exercised unlimited (well, limited by good manners and tradition) power in the fogs of the Sadda-Vale for too long. Having an outside power to defy and subvert added spice to her life.

Ultimately, the dragons in this Empire would come around to her way of thinking. The lessons of Silverhigh had been forgotten everywhere but in the Sadda-Vale. If she could only speak with one of the better-bred dragons. They could sit down and talk over fish and fowl. Perhaps a sturgeon, suitably fried with breading and a brace of Vale hares. Even the most arrogant or silly dragon came around to her thinking with sufficient discourse—look at NaStirath and DharSii. Dragons must retreat to the most inaccessible corners of the earth and live with as little disturbance to the outside world as possible. If the hominids come, let them come exhausted by long marches in bad weather across bleak lands, hungry and covered in boils and bug-bites. Then let them taste fire and go back to remind future generations of the pain that crossing dragons brings.

This NiVom and Imfamnia might think they were atop a pyramid of domination, controlling the Hypatians, who drew enmity and discontent away from their dragons the way vinegar and soaping fats drew flies away from your feast, but all they were doing was going soft and offering their bellies to those below. The dragons of Silverhigh thought themselves clever beyond hominid ken, too, but they still woke too late to the throat-cutting party gathering about their beds.

No one but stupid NaStirath knew of the emissary who’d come from Tyr NiVom within a few months of the Exiles’ arrival, all those years ago. Before Wistala’s hatchlings, before the death of that stolid yet beautiful avian bodyguard of the former Tyr.

She and the Empire dragon met on a rocky outcropping overlooking the crossed pylons outside the Vesshall. She arranged it so he squatted facing both her ancient hall and the sun, though the Sadda-Vale’s usual overcast interfered with that element of her tactics. The emissary had blustered and threatened that they turn the Exiles out to starve in the far north, or face the wrath of all of dragonkind . . .

All dragonkind. Were all dragonkind gathered, they could probably learn most of each other’s names and histories in a few days.

Scabia had the blighters carry off the welcoming food, drink, and ore she’d offered to the emissary. Orders given to me under my own roof mean that you must be on your way back to your Tyr. My contempt for these demands I’ll have you to carry back shouldn’t prove too heavy a burden. I decide who enjoys hospitality in my own home.

As long as it is your home, the emissary had replied.

I heard this dialogue in one of the dwarfish epics, didn’t I? Now I’m supposed to ask ‘Is that a threat?’ and you reply that you were stating a fact or making a promise or some other coolly superior remark . I am most displeased. I am famous for not seeking trouble in the world beyond this mountain ring. But if trouble comes storming in, know this: The Sadda-Vale is the last fragment of the glory that was Silverhigh. Break a glass vase and you will learn. The beauty is gone, but the fragments are more dangerous than they look. You will not be harmed if you leave now and do not alight again until you are beyond the mountains. This audience is at an end.

The memory of the conversation still thrilled her. Too bad her mate was dead—after seeing the emissary snort and turn wing, she felt so invigorated she would have given the old eleven-horn several turns in the clouds.

It did a dragon good to get the blood up now and again. No wonder that Wistala was fertile. Perhaps she’d coddled Aethleethia too much over the years. Well, that was fish heads down the kitchen chute.

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