But what? Whatever would they try, with so many of the leading dragons of their Empire in attendance?

I may not show it, but I’m so glad you’re here. I feel safer with you about.

AuRon warmed at that. He felt the pulse of emotion returned across their mind-link. Very well. I’ll keep to the fringe of the crowd.

“You’ll need to blend in,” she mused aloud, half to him and half to herself.

Now it was his turn to cock his head in astonishment. “That’s my specialty.”

“No, with the Empire throng. Paint and such.”

“You are the expert,” he said, wondering if she had thralls just to run tools back to the worktables while her cosmeticians worked on scale.

She gestured with her tail at a bowl set high up, out of reach for a hominid but accessible to a dragon-neck. “You’ll need some coin. I keep some silver around for guests who want a polite mouthful. Take some of that.”

“Where does it come from?” AuRon asked.

“What does that matter?”

“You know how I feel about this whole Dragon Empire. Organized robbery.”

Natasatch stiffened. “There were some bandits in the mountain pass—you know, the high road above the capital. I found their camp, burned out the bandits, and recovered a good deal of livestock and bundles of fabrics. The Merchants’ League gave me half the worth of the recovered goods in exchange. This was two years ago, and a good deal of it is left. As Protectors go, I don’t live high. Our cave is still much as you remember it.”

AuRon felt ashamed, both by the explanation and by her use of “our cave.” To him, their cave was back on the Isle of Ice, the shelf where their eggs had been hatched. Her use of the phrase suggested that her most happy days had been spent with him in the Protectorate.

Humans, elves, and even dwarfs, he supposed, had elaborate notions of love. They all had elaborate rituals for courting and aligning with prospective mates, oftentimes with extensive involvement of both families. Blighters looked on wife-gathering much as a herdsman tries to increase his herd—it meant more wealth and power. He’d heard stories from the ancient black dragon NooMoahk, his mentor after the loss of his family, of dragons in the distant past tending more toward the blighter view than the human. With several females surviving hatching to each male, powerful males sometimes accumulated what NooMoahk called a “harem.”

Dragons used the word “love,” and it meant something that was oddly more practical, yet deeper than the human notion. A male dragon did not obsess over the object of his affection or write odes to her various perfections, but he usually admired the one he wanted for his mate for specific, practical reasons. Once mated, it was his duty to provide and, if necessary, to lose limb or life defending her refuge.

With Natasatch he admired her courage in adversity. He would have given in to despair had he spent most of his youthful years chained in the dark, as she had. He liked her wit and her open-mindedness to his ideas that dragons could—must!—do better, lest their kind fall into twilight and then vanish from the world.

Her expression of concern, desire for him to be there, troubled him. She was a dragon who was hypersensitive to trouble, the way you could feel a thunderstorm before the dark clouds appeared. Perhaps it was all those years in the dark hatching cavern on the Isle of Ice.

He scooped up a mouthful of coin.

“I’m grateful,” he said, meaning so much more than the money.

Even in the predawn, dragons were already preparing themselves for the feast. AuRon saw a mass of torches in a mountain pasture, and assumed food preparation was under way. He glided down to investigate, wondering if they would accept a trade of manual labor in hauling whatever sides they were smoking in exchange for a hearty meal.

It turned out that the flames weren’t from pits for charring and smoking flesh, but banks of light for thralls already at work decorating.

He scanned the waiting crowd of dragons for familiar faces—their own hatchlings all served the Empire in one capacity or another, and they would quickly recognize him from his twice-stumped tail. Not recognizing anyone, he landed and settled his wings so that they tented and changed his outline as much as possible. All eyes were on the workers, mostly men and blighters, shaping and prepping scale.

Some of the cosmeticians were creating outlandish, colorful designs on their dragons, working paint and shaping scale into swirls or spikes or what looked like vines or jagged bolts. He recognized some iconography from the Lavadome. He knew enough to recognize a toothy Skotl sigil from the pen-quill-like flourish of the Ankelenes.

At the other end of the spectrum were dragons just giving scale, teeth, ears, and wings a good cleaning and oiling.

AuRon opted for something in the middle. He joined a line for an artisan who was deepening faded greens on older females and pulling misshapen scale from male dragons’ faces, making them look neater, sleeker, and wind-friendly.

“I’m Jussfin, your honor,” the human said when AuRon’s turn came, in decent Drakine. He had the squat body and heavy shoulders of a Ghioz stonelayer. “Some skin-painting, sir?”

“Make me look a little heavier and more imposing, if you can,” AuRon said.

“Of course, sir.” He gestured to some colors and a blighter assistant started to pour paint into a pan.

“So, where will you be seated, your honor?” Jussfin asked.

“Near the roasting hogs, I hope,” AuRon countered.

They fell into chitchat. AuRon decided to try his story, that he was a small-time trader who flew into the Far East selling “medicinals.” He’d been east a lifetime ago with the Chartered Company in its traveling towers and could describe the markets of the East from memory.

“Ah, so you’re an aboveground most of the time,” Jussfin said.

“I’ve always been a traveler,” AuRon said.

AuRon tried to imagine what a dragon of the Empire might possibly talk about with someone painting his body, and finally asked if he knew what color the Queen would be wearing.

“Black, I hear,” Jussfin said.

“No,” the dragon next to AuRon countered. “I’m sure it will be red, to commemorate the battle. Yellow highlights.”

AuRon deployed DharSii’s famously noncommittal throat-clearing, lest he fall into a conversation with this dragon.

“You’re done,” Jussfin said, coming to his rescue. “No scale makes for light work. I appreciate the rest. I feel up to pulling misshapen scale from the most elderly dowager now.”

He surveyed the results. Jussfin had taken his natural dark stripes and enlarged them, adding a bone-colored outline around them to make them more pronounced. He’d dusted his wings with something that made the skin redder and a little reflective.

They settled on a price. AuRon argued only a little; Jussfin had named an amount lesser than any other he’d seen pass up and down the ranks of dragons. He ended up giving over two golden coins and telling the artist to never mind about the change.

“Many thanks, your honor,” Jussfin said. “I think you’ll find the roast pork at its most succulent to the north, by the overhang and the waterfall, your honor. Keep well above and behind the Queen’s dinner-path.”

AuRon made a special effort to rise early the day of the feast. He wanted to find a few hiding spots, should there be guards checking names or who knew what sort of introductory rituals. Still, he was not the first dragon aloft—there were messengers and a few dragons of the Aerial Host up and around, and more than a few males and females returning in the predawn gloom from assignations. Keeping to the shadows, he explored the monument to draconic vanity looking down on the city of Ghioz from the Red Queen’s old palace.

He’d been here before and had nothing but unhappy memories of the place. He’d been told that the side of the mountain had been reshaped several times; it had first been carved into the likeness of some kingly dwarf or other, for the foundations of Ghioz were as a dwarfen trading post at an important river junction. As the city changed hands and empires came and went, the face on the mountain changed races as well. When AuRon first laid eyes upon it, it was the classic, sharp-jawed visage of the Red Queen looking down upon Ghioz.

Now, with a good deal more carving and the addition of a great bronze snout and copper scale gone green with age, it was a dragon’s face, snout tucked toward breast and watchful eyes looking southwest, somewhat in the direction of the Lavadome, he supposed.

Vanity. Monuments to power. If any of the Empires had given thought to the temporary nature of the mountain’s appearance, they showed no sign of it.

AuRon wondered if deep in his hearts, his Copper brother didn’t miss the feeling of being atop the pinnacle of power represented by that carving. He frequently said that NiVom, the most intelligent dragon he’d ever met, would make a better Tyr in any case, but AuRon wondered. It seemed NiVom maintained his hold only by the exercises of Imfamnia, whom no one dared call the “Jade Queen” these days.

They were still at work on the mountainside, it seemed. Scaffolding and signs of digging ran from the eye like a twisting wooden tear. There were no construction noises this morning, however; all the thralls were hard at work preparing for the feast.