Hominids. If there were but six left in all the Red Mountains, they’d soon shave it down to three by fighting, and two would make the third their slave.

“Come with me,” AuRon said. “Come to my island. You could live out your life in peace.”

“The peace of an exile? I can’t. It’s hard to explain, but if my people believe me still alive, still fighting, it’s as though some part of them hasn’t been beaten. More so, I have to keep near, be a threat, or I fear it will be the end of Hieba, or my daughter.”

AuRon felt a pang at Hieba’s name. The little girl he’d hunted for and watched grow up, snared in all this, thanks to no crime but her love of this man. “How can you be so sure they still live? Have you had word?”

Naf picked a sizable hunk of meat from the gap in his teeth, worked it thoughtfully with his toadlike tongue. AuRon could never make up his mind which hominid line had the ugliest arrangement of features. “No. It’s just—a feeling. And the Queen—she’s too keen a calculator of chances. If matters were to go ill with her, she’d like to have them as goods to be negotiated in a final bargain.”

AuRon tailvented enough air-volume to make the stars shimmer in their courses, interrupting his friend. “Horsemeat always does that in me,” he said, by way of apology for the interruption.

“Can I suggest that you stay with me? I could use a pair of eyes in the clouds. Better still, bring your family here, and aid me in my cause. I could promise you and yours food and safe landings as long as the Dairussians call themselves men of honor. With the help of some dragons, I might be able to get my lands back. Then Ghioz would have a true enemy hard on her border. I might bring down the Queen herself.”

“I’m not sure she can be killed,” AuRon said. “She brags of immortality.”

“It’s the same hickory-dickory her priests spout. I think she uses doubles. If one is killed, another takes her place, and the Queen shows herself only to her most trusted courtiers in the safest of circumstances. She must keep four or five copies of herself, women of her height and shape who imitate her voice. You met her, saw the masks?”

“Yes.”

“Once I thought only that she was hideous. Men are too easily swayed by appearances of women—one way or the other. I don’t know how it is with dragons.”

“We appreciate beauty in our mates, but the wise dragon chooses for other reasons.”

“Well, now I think it aids her use of doubles.”

“How do you know?” AuRon asked.

Naf looked thoughtful. “Because I killed her. In her own bedroom. I stole in, said I’d been summoned. The Queen has odd appetites. I fashioned a weapon from a bone hairbrush. I felt her heart flutter its last under my palm, but when I took off the mask. . . . Oh, if men only knew.”

AuRon waited for more, but thought it best not to press him for further details.

“Just as well I didn’t collect my ransom from her, I think.”

Naf returned from his memories. “How’s that?”

“I’d hoped to return to my island bearing coin.”

“Then you won’t stay?”

“I will always call you my friend. But I can’t hurl myself into the flames of war. I have a mate and hatchlings to think of.”

“I think of mine even as I draw my sword,” Naf said.

AuRon could not find a reply.

“Well, I’d be a poor friend if I sent you back empty—errr, handed. I have a few coins. A very few. You’re welcome to them.”

He made a birdlike whistle.

An adolescent girl approached, tall and a little awkward in her movements. She had rich red hair braided out of the way of her duties.

“This is my camp helper and tentmate. She’s the daughter of a man who rode with me, a son of Dairuss now dead. Get the dragon-box.”

The girl scuttled off. She had slight swelling at her hips. AuRon’s limited understanding of hominids allowed that the configuration meant she was ready to mate. “Hieba might wonder, keeping someone like that in your camp.”

“Oh, it’s not that kind of arrangement. I’m getting a little old for such antics, my friend.”

Naf sighed, as if regretting either his age or hers. “We spoke of beauty earlier. Beauty for a Dairuss is a reason for lament. The Ghioz take what they like.”

The girl returned with a wooden box. She carried it easily enough, as it wasn’t much bigger than a loaf of risen bread. Dragon forms, rather more snakelike than the real thing, at least to AuRon’s taste, decorated the lid, inlaid in dark wood.

“It’s an artistic style. Dragons are mostly wing, and if artists were to draw them as they lived, there’d be less room for teeth and fire.”

“Perhaps I will take up cave-painting and draw a few humans with tiny, flattened heads.”

Naf laughed, that easygoing boom AuRon found to be his most appealing feature. “Let’s forget the box and remember the contents. Behold! The mighty treasury of a onetime governor. Do not stare in wonder too long, AuRon, for I believe dragons can become bewitched by the sight of such riches.”

He opened the lid on the box. It was almost empty. Perhaps threescore coins lay within, a mixture of gold and sliver.

Naf scooped out half of them.

“Here, my friend. I have a bag. Offer these to your hatchlings. A present from an old family friend.”

“Naf, you must need this coin,” AuRon said.

“It has its uses, but my men serve for vengeance, not for gold.”

“Still—”

“There’s more where it came from. I robbed for these, I can rob for more. AuRon, if you delay much longer I’ll ram the whole thing down your throat, and your noisy digestion can make of it whatever fireworks it will.”

“Thank you, my friend.”

“Well?” Naf said, selecting a leather pouch.

“I will take four coins, one for each of my hatchlings, tokens of many wasted horizons, and four more for my mate. No more, or you will have another fight in these woods.”

It turned out he left the camp more weighted down than he could hope for. Word passed through the rebels that their dragon needed coin, and even the youngest wood-carrier and water-scoop searched their boot-pocket for a Queen’s silver. They filled four saddlebags heavy with coin and arranged them front and back of his wings with hitches of running knot.

Naf encircled his neck with his strong arms, and many in the camp passed their hands over his flanks, though their greasy touch made his tail twitch and he kept an eye rolling across them looking for drawn blade.

They sang a song in his honor as he left, the camp dividing it into three parts: the women and immature boys singing high, Naf and some of the deeper voices low, and the rest rather out of tune in the middle.

If he were to be honest, his digestion made far sweeter music.

But he kept circling back to get his bearings and watch the woods as he gained altitude, thinking of Hieba as a little girl, crying out her loneliness against his flank.

He wondered if he hadn’t left something behind. Like a piece of his conscience.

Chapter 18

The day after the assembly, Takea was teaching Wistala a singsong about the different hills in the Lavadome.

Gryathus hill of Wyrr and wall

By river ring and deman hall

The next around, as river winds

The grazing fields of NuGrakat’s lines

A member of the Drakwatch, a young drake, ignored the calls and jokes from the drakka as he delivered a message.

“I am here to escort the new dragonelle to Imperial Rock. The Queen requests her presence.”

Wistala was happy to abandon her lesson in topography. It seemed there wasn’t a dragonlength of space in the Lavadome that wasn’t claimed by one line or another.

She followed the drake to the Imperial Rock. Takea trailed along, using the excuse that she could point out landmarks, but she spent much of it trying to provoke a fight with the Drakwatch messenger. Wistala had learned enough about the Firemaids to know that a victory in a wrestling match with a member of the Drakwatch was a sure way to get praised by the maidmother.

The drake ignored her taunts and tail-tags, chattering the whole way of a new muster of the older members of the Drakwatch to guard tunnel exits. “Firemaid work,” he complained.

He led her to the “Imperial Gardens.” They lost Takea near the exit for the Aerial Host’s dining halls. Wistala marveled at the growth here, high under the diffused light from the dome-tip above. Strange purple and blue-green blossoms and artfully shaped ferns grew in the muted light of the sun circle above.

They found Queen Nilrasha at a series of splashes, half waterfall, half fountain. A statue of a hatchling spat a thin stream of water, artfully arranged so it bounced off a pair of carved mushroom-caps. Statues of lithe human and elvish girls, posed elegantly, filled jugs that Wistala’s sense told her fed back into the fountain.

“Wistala, I would speak to you,” Nilrasha said.

She looked down at the floor of the Lavadome. Wistala followed her gaze. Hills and pens and goats—was it milkdrinker’s hill? Hominid servants—or rather thralls, as they styled slaves in the Lavadome.