The copper tipped.

And she struck him, sii, teeth, even dealt shoulder blows, trying to tip him so his vulnerable underbelly would be exposed, gutted and thrown on the waste heap to feed the lichen!

She tried to claw at his eyes, but her sii just rattled off his crest and griff. She found something soft, drove her digits in with claws extended.

The copper squealed, so loudly that it shocked her into releasing him, vague memories of wrestling with Auron during one of his attacks triggering instincts—

Face smeared with blood, the copper scrambled away, striking her between the eyes with his tail as he turned so that she saw dragonflame explode for a moment. She shook her head to clear her vision, and he was gone.

Liquid gurgled and pulsed behind her breastbone, and she spat after him. Her fire bladder bile had a sharp, unpleasant smell, like vomit and sulfur.

She sniffed out the blood trail and followed it. The dribbles led her to the biggest of the cave pools, the one with the waterfall next to it. A fissure in the wall had been widened, and she saw a forgotten spike or two still resting in a piece of wall that had come down and fallen into the pool.

Had he gone to get the dwarves?

I’ll meet that cripple and his dwarves again when I have real dragonfire, instead of bladderbile.

But until then, she had to survive. She took a deep drink of the water from the pool; her brother’s blood could just be tasted on it. Or perhaps it was simply a loosened tooth from the fight. Wistala turned and left her home cave forever.

Chapter 7

Wistala used the walls and ceiling again on her way out, now sure of the route and good places to rest. She wasn’t afraid of being taken unaware by pursuit; the bloody-handed dwarves might as well bang their shields against the walls for all the noise they made.

She feared and hated them. It would be hard to say which emotion was the stronger—perhaps her fear, that she would end up another headless, sii-less, saa-less corpse robbed of life and skin itself.

Her body wasn’t equal to the anger she felt. It hung above her, vast and thick, like a storm cloud. One day she might be able to inhale that cloud, take it into her body and use it to fuel her vengeance for a butchered family.

One day. When I am strong. I’m too weak now.

Weak wasn’t the word for it, more like exhausted, drained . . . Every muscle in Wistala’s body ached as she climbed out of the cave. She inched forward as she emerged, not knowing what sort of help her brother might have summoned. Furtive creeping was her only defense. She wouldn’t be able to put up any more of a fight than a slug, thanks to her weariness and the cold despair in her hearts.

The smell of fresh air steeled her limbs and gave her a last burst. As she climbed up through the creepers at the mouth of the cave and squeezed into an old crack in the battlements, she felt as though her body was sloughing off her limbs to puddle beneath her. She joined it, slid down a rushing slide of fatigue, and slept.

Wistala awoke to alarm that she couldn’t smell Auron. The events of the previous day came back in a rush, along with the tumult of emotions. Not true emotions, rather echoes of them. The fear, the anger, the disgust, the despair all felt cold and dead and dark, leaving her spiritless.

Was it just yesterday she had lost one brother, and fought another?

I’m done for. The world’s too much for me. It’ll have me, too, in the end.

She would have laughed at the dreams of were-blood taken from the dwarves were it not too much effort. Never to smell Mother’s rich, comforting scent, spin gemstones on the egg shelf with Jizara, listen to Father’s approach with awe and a little fear at the bloody odors . . .

A beetle probed the dirt of a crack in the battlement above her eye. She could pick it with a flick of her tongue and crunch it down, but it still sought sustenance with the determination of one who knew only instinct. It knew nothing of doom or enemies or the vast indifference of this uncaring, friendless world.

“I shall be you for a time, beetle.”

The beetle hunted so that it might eat, unaware of its own near destruction. And so should she.

She crept out of the cold crack. Everything on her hurt, especially the gripping maniples of her sii. She got behind an old wall, or perhaps it was a paved path; it was wide and low, and thick brush almost turned it into a tunnel.

It was morning on the other side of the mountains, she guessed. Here the land lay shadowed and cold under a purple sky. The clouds above slowly warmed, and she took advantage of the twilight to explore a broken tower. From an arrow-slit next to a stony ledge, she examined the approaches to the cave.

No campfires. No dwarves. No hunting dogs. No men. Elves you wouldn’t see until their bowstrings sang your death. Some wide-winged birds circled above the woods and meadows; others sat on bare tree limbs with a good view of open ground, preening or keeping watch. Their behavior was regular: they didn’t suddenly change course or startle or cry out, as they would if hunters were prowling the woods. To the north, more mountains, a long line of them, snowy tops tinged with morning gold. Father was up there somewhere, but he wouldn’t even be a dot at this distance.

If he still lived.

Wistala sniffed the air, smelled mountain goat droppings in the grassy interstice filling the bottom of a rocky runnel. The beetle would no doubt find the clumps tasty. She preferred the source.

Wistala followed the smells at a slow stalk with a thoughtless—but not senseless—appetite.

Wistala didn’t need to follow the Bowing Dragon during the day, since the mountains appeared to run more or less north. She kept to the dead area above most of the trees but below the snow. Brilliant green moss the color of her scales covered every rock, evidence to some play of wind and weather that meant mists at these heights almost every morning and night.

While moving in open sunlight meant she could be observed, she’d rather see trouble from a distance than worry what might be around the next scraggly pine tree.

Water was plentiful—the mountains were shedding their winter weight of snow, and it came down in innumerable streams. The streams carried more than just refreshing water and bits of bark and leaf on a long journey down the mountain; they were full of tasty frogs that wiggled delightfully as they went down Wistala’s long throat.

By evening she’d crossed over two shoulders and had to face a decision. The mountains curved away west before going north again, and she could save herself a good deal of time by cutting across the valley, going the same distance in a quarter of the dragon-lengths. But it would mean plunging into thick forest. Trees could mean men, or worse, elves.

But trees also meant warm-blooded, furry, four-footed feasting, marrow-filled bones to crunch, and juicy eyeballs for sucking.

Appetite and the desire to hurry north, hopefully to find Father somewhere plotting destruction to the dwarves, won out over caution. She descended into the valley.

Patient trees waited for her. Soon she could see only slivers of sky around the tops of pines.

“Grounddragon look look!” a blue jay shrieked. It fluttered to a lower branch to scream at her: “Nestraider! Nestraider!”

Birdspeech made hatchling babble seem sophisticated.

“News! Dragon lives?” a swift answered from a nearby tree. Wistala couldn’t see it.

“Lives, lives, the grounddragon lives,” the jay called back.

“I won’t raid your nests,” Wistala said. “Why would it be news that I live?”

“Such news! News! Sparrow say grackle say thrush say elf-hawk say elves kill grounddragon,” the swift called.

“Nestraider! Nestraider!” the jay insisted.

“I will raid your nests if you don’t shut that thorn you use for a beak. When was this grounddragon killed, swift?”

“Not-today,” the swift answered.

Perhaps birdbrains had room for only two concepts of time: something that happened today and Everything Else. Auron might still live, somewhere. The birds might be gossiping about a killing in the area from weeks and weeks ago.

But she wondered—and her fire bladder went cold. Could birds keep a thought in their singsong heads that long?

Mother said some elves understood birdspeech. Wistala didn’t want her comings and goings sung about through the whole forest. She knew she couldn’t convince them to lie. Then she’d have to come up with an alternative truth they could understand. “Good riddance. We not-dragons don’t like them.”

“Nestraider! Nestraider!”

“You look like a dragon,” the swift said, and Wistala finally spotted him sheltering in the notch between two thick branches. She’d seen him only because he raised his whitish chin to speak.

“No, I’m a not-dragon. Though we look a lot like dragons and are often mistaken for them, that’s why we hate them so.”

“Nestraider! Nestraider!”

“Not-dragons don’t raid nests!” Wistala said. She marched off into the forest, tail held high, exposing her vent to the still-screaming jay.

“I’ve met a not-dragon,” the swift bubbled. “The sparrows must hear of this!”

The next day she cut through another wooded valley and crossed a low rocky ridge in the middle of the forest. It was honeycombed with caves of assorted sizes and, unfortunately, empty nests. There was good snake hunting in the rocks. All she had found to eat in the forest was a white-eyed possum, which had been wandering around in the daylight in a muddled daze. It stank like disease, but she still ate it. Mother had said that the illnesses that plagued mammals wouldn’t affect dragons.