“What about Hieba?” He’d watched her grow into a woman, saw her look at Naf with the same love she’d once shown him.
Hazeleye shrugged. “With Naf, I hope. The Red Queen is no kinder to her own sex than to men.”
“Where is he now?” AuRon wondered if he should offer them refuge in the north. Not on his island, of course—men came with trouble the same way dogs carried fleas—but he could settle them on one of the more hospitable coasts nearby. He could use some intelligent humans in the nearest port. If nothing else, just to keep strange parties like the treasure hunters from getting themselves eaten.
“On the Hypatian border somewhere. I haven’t seen him since he sent me north in the company of a traveling circus, some time ago. But I suspect they won’t be safe for long.”
Something poked at his tail. AuRon removed his head from the inn and saw a small boy fleeing toward some chicken huts, where others, equally scruffy, were beating him to the tree line. A dropped stick lay next to his tail.
Insolent little pup. Well, it would be a story for his family over the dinner-meal.
He returned—well, his head returned, anyway—to the common room. “Why? Is Hypatia sending him back?”
“War is coming between Hypatia and the Ghioz. You can feel it building all along the border.”
AuRon didn’t give a loose tooth for humans and their battles.
“The Queen of the Ghioz wanted to know about dragons to use them in this war?”
“I expect. She probably took the idea from the wizard. He laid many strong places low with his riders, and the tales are told everywhere.”
AuRon’s indifference began to melt. These people seemed reasonable, even kindly, and they’d been good to his sister. Hazeleye had been treated cruelly, but she herself had been responsible for cruelty in the past, and the world had a way of putting itself back in balance just as a hot, dry summer was often followed by an extra-cold, extra-wet winter.
As for a war between Ghioz and Hypatia, the more damage their armies did to each other, the less likely either would be to molest the dragons on the Isle of Ice. Let them kill each other off, the more the better, and good riddance to them.
His harsh thoughts, as they so often did, softened the more his mind worked on them, like a wolf gnawing at a tough bone. These humans seemed content to be friends with dragons and let Wistala come and go as she would. Indeed, they seemed to honor Wistala’s memory. Dragons could do with more of these sorts of friends among the hominids. Did this Ghioz Queen allow the same freedom?
“I suppose you will tell me that the Ghioz have Wistala beholden to them and are using her in this war.”
“I know they have at least three dragons. One is a female. I did not get a close enough look to say whether it was your sister.”
“With riders and so on?”
“No. The dragons flew as dragons should. Still, I wonder what hold the Red Queen has over them.”
“Probably a weak one if she sought your knowledge of dragons in order to tame them,” AuRon said.
The arrival of dinner prevented further discourse. The innkeeper had both hot and cold meats, bread, cheeses, and different forms of vegetable matter, mostly mashed and baked or peeled and jelled.
The innkeeper brought out a platter of sausages especially selected for AuRon, some hot and some cold. He talked about the mixes of meats and herbs in each, and spoke of eggs as the perfect companion to sausage in the morning, breads at midday and through the afternoon, and cheeses their favored partner in the evening.
AuRon tasted a few and asked him to continue the discourse.
He then begged AuRon to sample a suite prepared just so, calling for two dozen eggs to be specially cooked so the dragon might eat his sausages in proper order. If all humans were as hospitable to dragonkind, the world’s history might be happier.
“Oh, yes, many’s the sausage I prepared for your sister,” he said, as he filled mugs for his guests from a barrel. “A good friend she was—if she’d not been with us the night the barbarians attacked, I don’t know what would have become of us. Slaves or worse. Luckily we were too small to be of any notice in the Dragon-rider Wars, which I hear you put a stop to. Traffic’s good on the road again, with people fleeing the troubles to the south. Only those with coin to spend make it this far.”
AuRon ate heartily, politely leaving the best bits of roast and stew to the others and devouring the bony leftovers. Giving your stomach something to keep it busy, as Mother used to say.
Some of the younger humans held their nostrils pinched shut as they ate—AuRon knew that dragon odor was reckoned unpleasant to those not used to it, though Varl claimed it drove away bedbugs. The tall robed female corrected them before he could compose a joke. The room needed a joke, with this talk of war and those fleeing it, and he never was good at them. Only the innkeeper seemed to be enjoying himself; Lada was grave, Hazeleye thoughtful, the members of the innkeeper’s family harried.
“Did my sister give any indication of when she might return?”
Lada sighed. “She said she would probably be gone for a year or more. It’s been six. I hope nothing has befallen her.”
“She’s a mature dragonelle. Perhaps she found a mate,” Hazeleye said. “The lead male the Ghioz had, he seemed a fine specimen.”
“I’d like to visit this cave of hers,” AuRon said.
“She left her books at Mossbell, where they’d be looked after,” Lada said.
“She reads?” AuRon asked. Strange how they’d both picked up the habit.
“Wistala holds the title of librarian,” the innkeeper said. “There’s another story there, getting that title.”
“Title?”
“It’s a Hypatian rank,” Hazeleye said. “The Hypatians are fond of their various ranks. Military, priestly, judicial, scholastic, and of course governing. You can get honorary titles for sport or artistry.”
AuRon itched himself under the chin with the bottom of the doorframe. Some greasy, sausage-scented saliva had found its way down there. “How interesting.”
“It was a trick of my father’s, for the preservation of his estate,” Lada said. “Wistala owns most of this land, in a manner of speaking.”
“There was talk of making her thane,” the innkeeper said. “That’s an ideal thane, to my mind, one who’s never around to collect his taxes.”
The room chuckled at that.
“My full belly asks for sleep,” AuRon said. “Thank you for the sausages, innkeeper.”
“Jessup does for friends,” he said.
“Would someone aid me in finding that cave you spoke of?”
“I know the way,” Lada said.
“Can you ride a dragon bareback?”
“I’ll have to shut my eyes the whole way,” she said. “I’m not one for flying.”
“That wouldn’t be much help in finding the cave.”
“It is not a long trip on foot. I’m used to walking, and these woods are no longer dangerous.”
They said their good-byes. Hazeleye seemed lost in her pipe, shifting her blanket-covered legs this way and that before the fire.
Lada led him out across grassy hills. AuRon smelled horses and cattle, but saw only a few of the latter, who shied and milled nervously when they smelled him. Now and then he heard hoofbeats as groups of horses fled his approach.
AuRon liked the smell of Lada. It had been long since he had had a human female tickling his nostrils, so to speak. The scent excited him; though he was hundreds of years from being counted an old dragon, her scent made him feel young, as though he’d just uncased his wings.
“So, by those robes you are a person of importance,” AuRon said, passing the time. To talk he’d have to keep close to her. “Do you have a title too?”
“I wonder if she will return,” Lada said, as though she hadn’t even heard his question. “It seems I always lose my loved ones a year or two before I learn to value them. I’m a foolish, foolish woman.”
“That cannot be true,” AuRon said. “These people look up to you.”
“They look up to me because they looked up to my grandfather, an elf of great mind and experience, yet who looked beyond even his own faculties and experiences for greater wisdom still.”
She’d pushed Parl to the limit with that last speech. She knew how to wring every drop of meaning from a trade tongue, whatever her imagined failings. “Elf. So you’re partly elf?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me. What is Hazeleye hiding under that drooping hat?”
“She loves dragons, you know.”
Could this human never answer a simple question?
“She’s found different ways of expressing that love.”
They walked in silence past some sweet, almost rotten-smelling vines, which she told him were “hops.” Her grandfather, and some elf relative named Ragwrist who now lived on his old estate of Mossbell, had advised the innkeeper that along with the sweet honey-mead he offered he should give his patrons a choice of bitter beer. AuRon listened attentively and remembered none of it except her smell. And so they came to a cliff-top with a good view of the moonlit bay. Only the faint susurration of moving water and a gentle fall wind broke in on his thoughts.
