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Is there anything you would fancy? Anything that would tempt your appetite?’ ‘Meat. Fresh meat,’ he demanded. He spoke the words without thinking and then fell suddenly silent. He looked up to find her staring at him quizzically. ‘Just a touch of the dragon speaking,’ he said, meaning it as a jest. But he wondered.
‘That will be hard for Malta to hear.’ ‘She is deaf now?’ Fente asked, her curiosity idle. Tats shook his head and gave it up.
The back of her Elderling tunic stirred as her wings struggled to open. She had confided to him that sometimes that happened when she hurried, as if some part of her thought she should take flight. Now as she came toward him, smiling, the wind lifting her hair, he saw how much the wings were changing her. She carried them, a weight on her back, and even folded, their angles projected up higher than her ears.
‘Elderling or not, he has spent too much time in the memory-stone. It is not that he has drowned, but that the memories of someone else’s lifetime have overshadowed his own. I know the man who lives again in Rapskal. Tellator. He was a leader among the Elderlings during a time of war with their neighbours. He was passionate in all things, and bloody-minded in his hatred of those who fought against them.’
‘We would like to believe the Elderlings were always wise and kind, but their roots were human. They had their failings.’
To see a vast city flung wide across low-rolling hills had been astonishing. How could such a place have ever existed, let alone withstood the ravages of time, weather and nature?
So, enclosed, the public announcement of our engagement! Please post it prominently so all may share my pride and joy! One scroll on every tree in the Rain Wilds still could not express it! Reyall – a Very Happy Man
She tightened her grip on Leftrin and struggled to keep her thoughts in this world and time.
Then she began to shake, not a trembling, but a shuddering. Her knees buckled and she would have fallen if Leftrin had not tightened his arm around her. She felt every muscle in his body tighten and his chest swell with anger. ‘Hest,’ she breathed in a choked whisper, confirming what Leftrin had already guessed. ‘If he tries to touch you, I’ll kill him,’ he promised her heartily.
Malta nodded and her smile touched her eyes. ‘I heard. You didn’t even ask me if I wanted to be Queen before you told them all that wasn’t why we had come here.’ Reyn lifted a hand from their child to caress her golden hair. It was coarse under his touch but his memory told him it was spun gold. ‘That was because I was sure you would say “yes”.’ He smiled at her. ‘And they would have let us simply walk in and take charge of all this.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I never want to be the one to say “This man lives and that man dies.” I am glad they think so highly of us and I am glad that they
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When they had first received the news that Tintaglia was dead, Malta had screamed like a madwoman. He had gathered her up and taken her away from all the others, even Tillamon. They had sat together with their doomed child, sat and rocked and wept and ranted behind closed doors. And when it was done, a strange calm had fallen over her.
My Elderlings. Silver. Heal me. She threw the command at them with all her strength, too breathless to trumpet the words as she plummeted the last bit of distance to the ground. Her once powerful hind legs folded under her as she struck, and then she fell to her side on the ground before them. Pain and blackness swallowed her whole.
Sylve spoke quietly. ‘Mercor told me the dragons drank it. Should you pour it into her mouth?’
Long ago, the city had died, and now he suspected he knew why. A cataclysm might have shattered it and sent some of the Elderlings fleeing. But when the Silver had run out, then the end had been inevitable.
What happened to an Elderling when her dragon died? They die, too. Not right away, but sooner than if the dragon had lived. She pushed Sintara from her mind again. She didn’t want to think about that. Didn’t want to think about what would become of Malta and Reyn and their baby.
‘The dragons can’t and won’t stay here for ever. It’s not in their nature, and you, as a hunter, must know that they can’t. They need to move seasonally, to find new prey and give the animal populations a chance to rebuild. Even if we had the herds and flocks here that they need, they were never content to be resident here year round. And they must leave when it’s time to go lay their eggs.’ Those words were not Rapskal’s. She’d never heard him choose such words. She stared at him and he mistook it for avid interest. He smiled at her.
‘You still haven’t come to understand the city completely. Or what it truly means to be an Elderling, bonded to a dragon. But you will, and so I won’t argue with you about it. Time is on my side. You’ll grow into the concept that you can lead more than one life, be more than one person.’
‘You know,’ he coaxed her gently. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to admit it. You do know.’ He paused and looked at her accusingly. ‘Amarinda knew. And so you know.’ You know, Sintara echoed his words. And it is time for you to stop being stubborn. ‘I don’t know,’ she insisted to both of them.
‘The need is great. I love you. Then, and now, I love you. You know that. I have waited as long as I can, as long as any of us can. But we are Elderlings, and ultimately, we serve the dragons.
Please. Choose this. Choose this for me, for Rapskal. Because I would not force you. But Tellator would.’
Silver was too precious. The memories of working it were not saved in stone. Some secrets are too precious to be entrusted to anyone except the heir to your trade. Those secrets were only passed from master to apprentice. The locations of the wells could not be kept completely secret, not when the dragons came to drink from them. How the wells were managed, season to season, that was a guild secret.’
He spoke softly but firmly. ‘Amarinda, you have to go down the well. You are the only one who knows how to bring back the Silver.’
She had her husband and their first-born son at her side and the dragon who had shaped all their lives. Life and death merged at this spot, an untidy tangle of endings.
She bent close to study his face in the moonlight. ‘Look,’ she said to her husband. ‘I never realized it before. The tiny scales on his brows? They are the same pattern as hers. Even without her presence, he carries her marks on him. Her artistry would have lived on in him. If he were to live.’
She put the little hand on the dragon’s brows, held it there between Tintaglia’s scales and her still-soft, still-human palm. ‘She would have been your dragon, too, my darling. Touch her once, before you both go. Imagine how beautiful you would have been if she could have guided you.’ She moved the baby’s hand down the dragon’s scaling in a caress. ‘Tintaglia, if you must go, give him something of yourself first. Give him a memory of flight, give him a thought of your beauty to carry into the dark.’
‘If you force me, it will never be the same between us,’ she warned the dragon. ‘No,’ Sintara agreed. ‘It won’t. Just as I haven’t been the same since you left me hungry, with no choice but to face my fear and try to fly.’ ‘That was different!’ Thymara protested.
‘You have to go down there. You are the only one who might be able to find the Silver. You knew how the well worked, you knew how to touch Silver and not die. It has to be you, Thymara-Amarinda.’
The walls of the well were not as blank as they appeared from up above. When the gleam of the medallion met the black, there were markings engraved into the smooth face. There were not many and it took time for her to realize they were dates and levels. The Elderling system of measuring time meant nothing to her. But Amarinda recalled that the Silver had risen and fallen, sometimes seasonally and also over the years. Sometimes the Silver was scant; sometimes it flowed so strongly that the well had to be capped, lest Silver flow through the streets. She passed a notation scribed by Amarinda’s
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The deeper she went, the less she felt like Thymara. She was no stranger to the inside of this well, though climbing a chain down was not how she usually descended.
It was getting colder as she descended. Amarinda had never liked coming here, had never shrugged off as routine the task of managing the Silver. It was not the danger of the volatile stuff. The Silver was always dangerous whether confined to a vial on her workbench or flowing in threads down the street. Casual contact with Silver was always eventually deadly for everyone.
Something gleamed among them. Silver? He caught his breath as she pushed the sticks aside with her bare hands and then peered more closely. ‘It’s a ring,’ she said. She picked it up and her touch woke it. Elderling-made. A flame-jewel lit with a pale-yellow gleam in a jidzin setting. Jidzin. She knew it for what it was now, Silver trapped in iron.
‘I wanted you to be her. That’s true. I still want that. We always dreamed that we would live again in another Elderling couple. That we would walk and dance and dine together. Make love in our garden again. That was why we made the columns as we did.’ He drew a deep breath and sighed it out. ‘But that’s not why I brought you here. I brought you here for the dragons. And for Malta and Reyn and their child. For Tintaglia. For all of us. We need the Silver, Thymara. A bit of dragon blood or a scale can start the changes. But to sustain them, to move them in directions that let us live, that will
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There it was. A large block of stone in the wall was retreating, sliding smoothly away, leaving an opening behind it. ‘The seam valve,’ she heard herself say out loud.
‘Can you believe,’ he’d asked her, ‘that sometimes the Silver pressure was so high, it came into the reservoir at this level? Sometimes, we’d have to come down here and open the drains to let it out. There were pipes that would carry it out into the river and away from the city. And when the Silver seams were really producing, we’d have to shut down some of them, to keep it from welling out the top and running through the streets.’
‘This seam has been dry for decades,’ he continued sourly. ‘And if the Silver pressure keeps dropping, we probably never will open it again. Well, start cranking, girl. It’s a long way down to where the Silver comes in now. We need to measure the level of standing Silver and log it. That’s your job now, once every seventeen days. Can’t ration it if we don’t know how much the seams are producing.’
As she lifted her hand from the block, it seemed to tremble under her fingers. Then it suddenly shot out, past her hand, to land with a clatter at the bottom of the shaft. A square of liquid Silver followed it, pushing out thickly, at first keeping its shape and then turning into a fat worm wriggling down the wall. She stared at it, trying to make sense of what she saw. The seam had replenished itself. And the old valve had given way. Stone grated as two adjacent blocks swung out unevenly from the wall as the heavy Silver forced its way out and into the shaft. A slow bulge began around the
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He nodded and turned to look at the gloved hand that gripped his shoulder. He scowled. ‘What is that made from?’ he demanded. Thymara didn’t look at him or it as she put the second gauntlet on.
‘Dragon-hide,’ she said. ‘The only thing impervious to Silver.’
‘She heard me,’ she told Reyn. ‘At the last, she heard us. She Changed him.’ Tears ran down her face and followed the curves of her smile. She leaned forward to touch her dragon. The breath from her nostrils barely stirred the fine hair on Ephron’s head. ‘He’s going to live, Tintaglia. He’s going to live, and I will see he remembers all I know about you.’
‘I think they know. And soon Kalo will be here to take what is left of her.’ Reyn asked the dreadful question they had both wondered. ‘Will that make him of her lineage, if he takes her memories? Will he know how to help Ephron again if he needs it? Or if we have other children?’
Tintaglia was shrouded with moving Silver. It slid over her skin as if caressing her. She saw it boiling in the dragon’s wounds and cried out in low horror at the sound and the smell it made. It sank into the dragon where it coated her, vanishing like ink absorbed into a cloth. Like ink, the colour remained on her, a silver haze over her blue scales, like fog on a window. Malta held her breath.
The thundering of her hearts as her blood raced through her healing body became an audible thumping. Her eyes opened, wide and staring, and she opened her mouth to gasp in deep breaths of air. ‘It’s killing her!’ Reyn voiced their fear. ‘No.’ Mercor’s thought was reassuring. ‘We think she is strong enough to endure this. And if she is not, well, we have done no harm.’
Briefly, Malta was more aware of them. They radiated vitality now. The glamour of their beauty was effortless. So magnificent were they.
Tintaglia, blue queen, crouched and then sprang into the air. The wind of her wing-beats staggered Malta and stung her eyes. ‘She flies!’ she cried aloud. Pride filled her heart. ‘The most beautiful of all queens flies!’ I am that, Tintaglia agreed, and winged toward the hunting grounds of the foothills.
You might be a bit nicer to me. I voted that we shouldn’t let the dragons eat any of you. Might start a real bad habit, was my thought. Though when I’m dead, I’ve decided, it’s fine with me if they eat me, and remember everything I’ve ever seen or done. Spit’s the one I’d choose to eat me. That mean little devil is full of spite and vinegar. I’m betting he’ll outlive all those other bigger dragons.’
You know about that armoury they found?’ ‘I do.’ Not even to Leftrin had she mentioned that she had discovered it a long time ago but never mentioned it to Rapskal. Her discovery of it had further changed her image of Elderlings. And dragons. The battle gear for the dragons had been mostly decorative, with rings where perhaps riders had once secured themselves. Sintara’s assertion that dragons had never been ridden by humans had seemed disproven to Alise, but the blue queen had insisted that carrying an Elderling into battle was not the same as being ridden like a donkey.
‘Your knuckles are bleeding.’ ‘Are they?’ Sedric held his hand up for his own inspection. ‘No.’ He wiped the blood off on his cloak. ‘They’re just bruised.’ ‘Let me see.’ He took Sedric’s hand, studied the puffing knuckles, then lifted it to his mouth. He kissed them gently, gravely. ‘All better,’ he told him. Sedric bit his lower lip to keep it from trembling, but didn’t try to hide the tears that rose in his eyes at Carson’s tenderness.
‘IceFyre.’ Sedric spoke the name aloud. ‘It has to be the drake that Tintaglia spoke of. But why does he come here?’
‘I understand you, human. And I think I will give you a special name, too.’ The words rode a low rumble of sound from the beast. Extraordinary. But an excellent sign of how swiftly they were bonding. Hest smiled at his dragon. ‘Shall I help you, Blue Glory? You could call me Glory’s Master. Or Silver Rider.’ The dragon still looked down on him, considering each name carefully. His eyes spun faster and faster. ‘No. I think not,’ he said, and amusement shimmered in the rumbling voice. ‘I think I will name you “Meat”.’
The dragon had not missed him. His leg was bleeding badly. No. His leg was gone. He screamed then in the full horror of what had befallen him. Hest with one leg? Hest a pathetic cripple that others would mock? ‘NO!’ he shouted. ‘Yes,’ rumbled Blue Glory. The open jaws closed on him, and his last scream was engulfed in the scarlet and yellow cavern of the dragon’s maw.
