“Harness, I call it, but I pity the man who holds on to it to ride my neck. He’ll need something thicker than fur to save his skin.”
Wistala pulled her griff up and back so the corners of her mouth could rise. Lada laughed.
“I used to hate you,” Lada said.
“You were young,” Wistala said.
“Fair can be foul, and foul fair,” Lada quoted. “Proverbs of Experience sixty-one. That means something to me. Now.”
“I’ll make no promises about Rayg, fair or foul,” Wistala said. “But I will keep my eyes open. I intend to travel at night, though. Your best chance is through Hammar, distasteful as he is.”
“He can be charming, as long as he’s getting his way and his appetite is sated,” she said. “I will dance to his tune, but as a viper does before it strikes the bird. A fair journey, Wistala, and peril only to your enemies.”
“If I come south again, I will leave word at Jessup’s Inn and the circus winter camp. I fly north tomorrow, but one of my hearts stays at Mossbell.”
Chapter 23
Wistala flew north in easy stages, more from physical limitations than intent.
Even with her wounds healed over and her blood restored, she still tired easily and needed frequent rests, made all the more difficult by a thirst that seemed to start at her tail-tip and grow from there and a hunger that must have been worse than her hatchling pangs. (It wasn’t, but lost memories are sometimes a kindness.)
She followed the road until it broke off into a series of trails or twin ruts, irregularly filled with increasingly crude bridgework. Even the distance posts of Ancient Hypat’s short-lived Tribal Confederation, still in use to mark intervals of vesk even in lands where the word Hypat was a curse and Hypatian a synonym for “devil.”
Flying mostly at night, but doing what she could to observe the villages and isolated hutments she passed in what felt like a hopeless search for Rayg, she avoided lights below.
Hearth lights and campfires grew less and less frequent as she ranged north, until she began to travel at dawn and dusk so that she had a better chance of dropping on a hoofed-and-horned meal. The snowcaps on the mountains, rich with all the dragon colors when the sun was level with them, marched lower and lower and glaciers hanging between became commonplace.
Then, over the course of a single night, she reached new air currents. The wind ceased blowing pleasantly warm from the southwest, and instead spun down the coast from the northeast, a cold, wet breeze that helped her to glide but she had to fight like an enemy for each hop north. She found that she traveled faster with less fatigue if her track crisscrossed the wind in the manner of a serpent.
Food was plentiful. Out on the coast there were shallows thick with crabs the size of a battle shield and great waddling tubes of flesh and fat that sunned themselves on sandbars and coastal rocks, the fattest often at the top where they could bark at the lesser, but the commanding height just meant they were easily plucked up by a hungry dragonelle.
The exhaustion of flying became too great.
She found a reef-sheltered isle, in seas she guessed were too rough for the boats of men, and spent a dozen or more days happily in the hardy bush and wind-racked pines atop sheer cliffs, taking various multilegged, pincer-armed crawlers from the sea during the day and plucking the occasional barker at night from the sleeping beaches.
While resting there, she saw not one, but three dragons. The sight shocked her, after spending much of her lifetime without so much as a glimpse of her kind. To see not just one, but three, all at once and together, froze her for a moment. They flew almost wing-tip to wing-tip, a slightly smaller silver leading two big reds.
Wistala threw herself into the air, fringe high and stiff with excitement, flapping madly to gain altitude.
Wing-tips rose in unison as they glided. They must have marked her. All turned gently for a better look.
That was when she noticed the riders.
It was so like horses, she glided for a moment, losing altitude, stunned. The dragons had reins, reins! running forward from the riders to the head and out to the leading wing bones.
Dragons fixed and ridden like horses had no appeal, and she didn’t like the way they were coming around, spreading out a little.
She rolled on her back, dived, headed for the shoreline, where she wove around her plateau island and changed course a little southward so if they were moving to intercept, they might overshoot. She chanced a glance back and saw one of the riders was in difficulty; his dragon was circling oddly. The silver and its rider dived toward her, then came around in a great swoop, leading the other red, which could not match its turns. The pair headed to the aid of the other.
The last Wistala saw of them, as she plunged into the coastal forest, was the silver and undercommand red flanking the other as they turned back out to sea.
Summer days at the top of the world lasted forever.
Wistala saw patches of ground ice that must linger throughout the year, and inlets where glaciers flowed into the Inland Ocean. Heated by sun and perhaps current, the glaciers would groan and crack and send ice plunging into the water with a rumbling sound like a thousand thunderstorms.
Perhaps it was the rich sea diet, or all the exercise, but she found herself in the midst of another growth spurt and losing scales, despite her careful rationing of coin. But for all her loss of shining scale, her wings grew prodigiously, and she suspected that had she left them alone they would have uncased by themselves at this point.
She came to a marsh country, where the land looked like ocean, patterned into regular waves of higher ground mixed with wet patches below. Rabbits with oversize feet, herds of moss-antlered herbivores, packs of wolves, and little brush-tailed foxes thrived here, along with a few hardy humans who kept to the waterways in flat-bottomed boats.
The wind blew hard here, and Wistala used it. Every day she matched herself against the wind, once after the morning’s hunt and again in the evening, every day fighting a little harder for speed, or height, or the length of time she could hang over one spot, gaining strength with each battle against the wind.
And met her second dragon here.
She spotted him while eating on one of the ridges—the wetter hollows were thick with mosquitoes, but the bugs couldn’t cope with the wind on the hill humps—splashing through the wet, approaching her from land.
He looked wider than he was long, reminding her of a toad, and had rust-colored scales edged with white cracks and chips that struck her as unhealthy. He approached, nostrils sniffing her as if she were a dinner of venison, perhaps attracted by her smell or the blood.
“You are stranger, welcome,” he said. It had been so long since she’d heard Drakine, it seemed more foreign a tongue than Elvish.
“UthBeeyan am I, dragon of the coldwinds. Which wind brought you?” He bobbed his head but kept his sii still. She guessed he meant no harm, but she left off eating so as not to be taken with a mouthful of bone.
His mind held nothing but hunger and an eager lust for her green flanks.
“Wistala am I, dragonelle of whatever winds may bear me. Are there many dragons in the coldwinds?”
“I drive away!” UthBeeyan said, which Wistala found easy to believe, as she was downwind of him. He let out sort of a croaking roar. “You hear my song, we mate now.”
“We shall do no such thing,” Wistala said.
He jumped at her and she backed up, putting her tail point in between his nose and her, ready to crack him across the soft spot between his eyes, but he settled onto her kill and took a mouthful. “You huntress worthy of spring wind. I take dragonshare. Find another.”
Gladly, Wistala thought.
The weather turned cold, bitterly so, almost overnight, freezing the swampy areas and turning the soil on the hill hummocks hard. Snow blew some nights, but could only cling where the wind couldn’t reach it, and Wistala returned to the rocky coastline. During the day everything turned a hard, uniform gray: water, shoreline, clouds, the sun at best a whitish circle behind mists.
She happened across a big boat, of all things, hugging the coast as it crept along south, a dwarf at the tiller and four men pulling the oars. All wore hides so thick, they looked like bears, save for the dwarf, who might be mistaken for one of the sausagelike barkers on the rocks, for his booted feet barely protruded from beneath his coat, looking like flippers.
More hides, entire bundles of them, were lined up in the center and bottom of the boat, along with strings of fox tails and what looked like wolf skins.
Swooping low, she saw the dwarf turn the boat for shore and lift a device that looked like an immense crossbow, wider of bow than she was high. She dropped into the water some distance away, upwind so her words might carry and any bolts fired would have to fight a stiff breeze. The cold, after its first shock, wasn’t so bad.
“May I ask you a question?” she called across the water in Parl.
The dwarf startled, and the rowers bent over their oars and bowed and chanted and rattled strings of shells.
The dwarf lifted a speaking trumpet. “Question away, though I warn you, I’ve no coin.”
“Do you know these lands, good dwarf?” she called.
“Know them? I love them, and will tell you why: Fools don’t survive up here.”
