I (we) remain your grateful family, Wistala (and Lada, who would like to know if Thane Hammar has spoken of regretting me?)

When the two-moon rest ended, the circus took to the roads south and visited Shryesta, with air fragrant of honey and dates, home of the Amber Palace, where the Hypatian Directors held their spring and fall meetings. They saw Vinde, with its waterfalls and famous jeweled bridges, and the sea-elf city of Krakenoor, thick with water gardens and the lively trade of its boardwalks. They played at Fount Brass, home of a thick-limbed race of men who counted dwarves in their ancestry, who rode on even thicker horned-and-hided mounts, and finally the riverside city of Adipose, whose skilled papermakers and glassblowers brought coin for even the lowliest apprentice and slave.

Wistala grew slowly that summer on her meals of stewed offal mixed with a few choice tidbits saved “for the dragon” by Brok and Dsossa. She found she enjoyed the chaos behind the line of wagons during performances more than the shows themselves—performers painting their faces with dyes and powders, adorning hair and body, readying their props. She bounced on the stretched canvas the clown-dwarf used for his drop from the tightrope, and some of the performers took to rapping her scales or touching the Agent Librarian medallion. She now wore the emblem between her eyes on a double-strand of chain the jeweler-women created for it.

She grew to love them all.

The one personality she still wondered about was Intanta. Fortune-telling seemed like a cheat to Wistala, though the “seekers” left her tent happier than when they entered, and sometimes gave her extra money beyond the fee she asked. She’d met the “family” Intanta wished to return to at the two-moon camp; they seemed a curious bunch, heavy with metal amulets, necklaces, and hair wrapped in seashells, pipes both musical and for smoking tucked into overlarge pockets on the two or three layers of coats many wore. One tried to steal a loose scale from Wistala’s tail.

They dined only among themselves, with Lada cooking and cleaning.

If there was any magic to it, it came from the oddly shaped crystal Intanta used. It looked a little like the estuary crabs they sometimes ate boiled.

“A shard from the great crystal of the lost city of Kraglad, enchanted by Dread Anklamere himself!” Intanta said, whenever she removed the rune-woven silk that hid it until her seekers had paid for the telling.

They worked her into the fortune-telling gradually, fixed in a collar and chain harness at the end of pegs hammered into the ground. Wistala could release all by pressing her claw into the keyhole at the collar-join; Brok had built it that way. Intanta became a “medium” between the dragon-seer and her seekers. At first, Wistala kept so still that some of the seekers thought her a statue, so she learned to rock back and forth a little.

Intanta, after consulting with a drunken, disheveled, one-eyed elf who visited the circus to see the dragon—“So it is a drakka. Usually it’s just a painted sandrunner,” the elf said—suggested mosses and herbs that would make her fire bladder more gassy and smoke appear, but Wistala feared a poisoning of her foua or other harmful effects. The one-eyed elf looked rather disreputable.

Close association with Lada brought little improvement in their opinion of each other. Wistala suspected the girl of spitting in her water as she fetched it, and Lada said dragon reek was making her nauseated day and night and harming the baby.

Once a week, Intanta downed a bottle or two of wine and played dice games with her cronies. Afterwards Intanta was well disposed to all and sundry, and sometimes let Lada hold her magic crystal, which relaxed the girl and soothed her nausea. Intanta often looked into the crystal as it sat on Lada’s swelling belly and cackled, or sang or whispered to the growing baby to quiet its movements.

Wistala learned the rhythms of the circus. The shaggy-looking riders who went ahead of the column were scout-outs. If they learned a town had been struck by disease, or recently visited by tax agents, or had suffered some other disaster to commerce like a fish die-off or a mine closing, Ragwrist bypassed it. Otherwise they found a hospitable landlord who would sell them fodder, well-use, and shelter for a few days while the circus encamped. They only ever performed for a day or two and then moved on, usually with all the land’s children watching the gargants from fence rails.

They lightened Lada’s duties as she entered her final moon of expectation and they traveled at the borders of the southlands. Dark-skinned hominids in silk headwraps visited the circus, and Wistala learned other accents of Parl. Birds that reminded her of Bartleghaff soared above the sunny grasslands, home to vast herds of cattle and horses, and Ragwrist bought beef for all.

Wistala did no better at learning how to read the seekers.

“That one was a prince. Had you but bowed to him when I winked and foretold his rivals in power one day bowing to him, he would have given us his golden bracers, so pleased was he with the telling!” Intanta groused as they went over the afternoon’s events.

“But he wasn’t showing his teeth,” Wistala said.

“People in this land don’t show their teeth to any but family! If they’re pleased, they purse their lips thus—” Intanta lifted her lips so they almost touched her nose, an expression Wistala found revolting.

“I heard him take in breath and hold it as you spoke of his rivals. He seemed excited. His heart was pounding.”

“You could hear his heart?” Intanta said.

“Louder than yours,” Wistala said. “Yours makes a faint slooshing sound when you are aggravated, by the way.”

“You give me apoplexy, young dragon. But this is of interest. Perhaps instead of reading faces and hands, you should listen to their air and hearts. That’ll let you know when you’re on the right track.”

Moon of the Summer Solstice, Res 471

Beloved Father,

I write you from the Lumbriar Heights in the city of Thallia. How right you were about travel, though we see almost nothing of the cities we visit, for we are too busy either opening, closing, or performing.

I am happy to let you know Lada and her child are well. He is a healthy boy of sparse hair but merry eyes, and his name is Raygnar, a name Lada took a liking to when we visited the Barbarian Passes, for it sounds a bit like good Ragwrist’s moniker, and it is the custom in this circus to have babies given names that are some tribute in sound. He came quickly and vigorously into the world, an easy birth according to Intanta (Easy for her to say!—L) but it seems a messy process compared to eggs. Your granddaughter clasped Intanta’s odd crystal tight all through the birth, staring into it. (The images summoned within did bring some relief.) We have put his handprint in the margin, though now he mouths the ink—

I will keep this letter short, for Lada tires easily. (True!)

I visited the Library at Thallia, and the librarians were somewhat surprised at my appearance. I met your Heloise, who they told me is nearly a hundred, though still keeping busy with her duties. She questioned me closely about you and the tablets restored to them—I think they suspected an arson attempt—but they allowed me into the common room, where I found myself answering questions long into the night.

Ragwrist and Dsossa, who says she has written separately (Thank the holy soulkeepers!) send their regards. I shall end this now. Ragwrist says next summer we are to go north again.

Wistala, Lada, and Rayg

“Behold, Wistala, the vale of the Wheel of Fire,” Brok said at the end of a long summer day the next year. His black cat, whom he called Chunnel, slept neatly balanced on the gargant’s hairy dome.

Wistala, though now the weight of a large pony or a small horse, was borne on the back of the gargant as easily as its fleas. She sat perched atop its spine, a little above Brok at the neck-saddle.

By special request, she was riding gargant-back on the lead animal, offering her the best view of a vista many artists traveled far to depict.

Until they reached the plateau, it seemed another mountain pass, easier than some, along a good road bordering a rushing river of white. But then you passed between two long mountain arms, with a low stone wall running the spine and shorn-off towers at the roads with a catwalk between. According to Brok, the old fortifications were supposed to look deceptively ill-kept.

Once beyond them, the ground rose a little and you came to the Ba-drink.

The Ba-drink was a mountain lake, dammed at the west beneath the towers, surrounded by steep mountainsides and cliffs.

Shaped somewhat like a crescent moon, with horns facing north, its southmost rim was usually enclosed in a thick mist where the colder glacier-fed waters ran into hot springs. Between the horns on the other side were three short, sharp inlets reminiscent of a dragon’s footprint, though the digits were somewhat foreshortened. The mountains between the two outer inlets were almost sheer-sided where they met the lake and faced each other.

“They say that rive was formed by the fire god’s ax,” Brok said. “Though of course, the best view is from the lake. You can just see one side of the Titan bridge at Tall Rock. The sides of Thul’s Hardhold and Tall Rock are both much cut with galleries and balconies, though those towers to the south are where the greater dwarves of the Wheel of Fire live, among their terraced gardens of soil brought all the way up from the lowlands. We shall camp here at Whitewater Landing, for the dwarves let few across the lake to their doorsteps.”