He knew the ridgeline with the mine Istach spoke of once she described the topography in detail. He’d often hunted in those hills and woods when feeding NooMoahk and after he “inherited” NooMoahk’s old cave.

So with a half-full belly—it didn’t do to explore on too full a stomach, since digestion slowed the blood—he thanked his daughter and set out. He kept to the ground when he left the cave, taking dusty paths through the old ruins where once he’d played hide-and-seek with Hieba, just in case the new Protector was out and up early. According to Istach he ate hearty meals during the night and slept through the mornings, but AuRon had a lifetime of cautious habits spent guarding his thin skin.

The summer sun was hot. AuRon had forgotten how fierce it was in these mountains after the solstice. He gained altitude and found some cool air.

Ah, there was the lake, and the ridge. The mine must be between—

Movement behind caught his eye. A copper dragon was coming fast on his tailline. For a moment, AuRon thought it was his brother—they were of similar size and color.

AuRon executed a rising half loop to gain altitude on the Protector and face him.

“I’m neither assassin nor thief,” AuRon called. “I intend no harm to you or what’s yours.”

“Think you’ll take my title away, do you?” the copper dragon, who could only be FuPozat, bellowed. “I paid good coin, my whole inheritance, and no interloper, however beloved of the blighters, is going to take it away.” This speech left him panting and he banked to come at AuRon from the side.

The fool had missed his chance. If he’d been careful, he could have followed AuRon on a line between him and the sun and dove out of the light. Evidently he was a dragon not much used to hunting or fighting.

“What makes you think I’m claiming your title?”

“Word came in the predawn. Their old totem-dragon had returned to claim his own. Stooped and gray old blighters tell stories from their childhood of your days here, how you ate of their cattle only at festivals, and say that peace and plenty are returning with you! They’re feasting in their huts in your name!”

Foolish blighters. Well, it was Fusspot’s own fault. If he was mismanaging the mountains so much that the blighters were slaughtering fat calves in hope of AuRon’s return, perhaps Fusspot should levy a few less head in the name of the Empire.

In any case, rage had driven the Protector out of his senses. He was coming at AuRon like a crazed woodpecker, swinging in from whichever angle with no thought to altitude, wind, or AuRon’s suppleness of wing and body.

If he hadn’t been called to more important duties, he might have enjoyed toying with the enraged dragon. It was like playing dodge with a tortoise.

Each time Fusspot came at him, AuRon flapped hard and ascended. No scaled dragon could match him in a climb; thanks to the lightness of his frame, he was faster and could rise at a steeper angle.

“I’m no more of a threat to you than you are to me.”

“Is that a challenge? I eat challenge and pass victory,” Fusspot bellowed. AuRon decided that he wasn’t necessarily stupid, just young and inexperienced. The Protector had finally figured out that in a fight you could use the prevailing wind to help you pick up altitude.

AuRon supposed that if he let himself laugh at such speeches, he might lose his wind. Good thing he was in training; had he had to do these steep climbs back in the Sadda-Vale, he might have grown winded.

He wondered at such a character winning a Protectorate. Perhaps the Dragon Empire was already cracking with decay. Such was the way of things. What dragons of ability and skill built, their legacies took for granted and mismanaged. It happened with hominids as well, even disciplined and tradition-bound dwarfs.

Just to vary the contest, AuRon closed his wings and fell. Fusspot turned hard and moved to intercept. AuRon worked his wingtips and adjusted his glide path to stay out of reach.

Fusspot saw his chance, sped up to match AuRon’s fall, and spat the contents of his firebladder.

The fool! What dragon didn’t know that you vented fire only when flying slow and level or in backing into a climb?

The droplets of burning liquid spread in the air and the dragon plunged headlong into his own flame.

He emerged from the cloud of black and orange with fire coating his face. His bellow of anger turned into a shriek of pain.

Fusspot rolled over, griff extended and wings beating at the flame on his face, and plunged toward the earth. For one bad moment AuRon thought he would meet his death impaled on the trees, but he must have sensed the ground approaching somehow, for he turned legs-down at the last second.

Still, he hit hard.

AuRon alighted near him, and saw Fusspot rubbing his face in the dirt. He was a sooty black to the shoulders.

“I’m blinded, I’m blinded!” Fusspot screamed.

AuRon threw his weight on the burned dragon’s neck and craned around to check his face. He’d caught it worst around the lips and nose and his eyes were screwed shut against the pain. He would learn a good lesson from the pain, but AuRon didn’t envy him it.

Fusspot forced one eye open with his claw and threw his weight around, trying to lash back with his tail, but AuRon kept him pinned at the neck.

“Your eyes are just a little scorched about the lids. You’ll heal in a day or two, once the water-lids relax and retract.”

AuRon ended up fetching Istach, after a panic attack from Fusspot that AuRon was going to abandon him to starve in the wilderness. By the time they returned, the copper dragon was squinting his way about the woods where he’d crashed.

For some reason, Fusspot made AuRon feel better about his brother than he had in years. Maybe it was meeting a similar-looking dragon, stupid and prickly. Suddenly it seemed that his brother had more good qualities than bad—provided one could forget the family history.

AuRon left Istach unhappily nursing the dragon Protector of Old Uldam and returned to the mine he’d spotted before being attacked.

It was decrepit and hadn’t been disturbed in some time, judging from the brush on the ground and the fallen leaves. AuRon was about to resign himself to further searching the river when he noticed that the brush and leaves about the old mine opening weren’t from the hillside. Nothing like them grew here, only in the lowlands off the ridges.

Someone had been scattering gathered vegetation to hide a trail and hadn’t noticed the change in plant life as they moved up the ridge to the mine. With eager fanning of his wings, AuRon blew aside the scattered detritus and found unmistakable signs of drag-marks. He sniffed about—death, certainly—and there was a green scale. Ants were stripping it of the fresh meat at its root.

AuRon felt a moment of pity for the poor dragonelle it had belonged to. The scale was cut and ground and given a dusting of silver; some female had dressed expensively for the party, perhaps to please her mate or to impress a new one. But she’d ended up as dead as a fallen sparrow, for a dusting of silver didn’t help scale keep out blades, and the reason it grew long and jagged at the edge was to better link with the scale around it and wound jaws trying to rip out flesh.

There had been a time when he envied scale, but no amount of armor protected one from foolishness.

Steeling himself against carelessness and with every sense alive to shadow, smell, and echo, AuRon descended into the mine.

Chapter 7

If NiVom and Imfamnia expected the news of the massacre at the Grand Feast to arouse the dragons of the Lower World, they were greatly mistaken.

Instead, as near as Wistala could determine it, a sense of doom settled over the Lavadome, as though this bloodshed was just the first patter of rain in what would soon be a torrent. Of course, every dragon in the Lavadome was listless and dispirited, with the steady succession of “bleedings” so that the duty could be paid.

There was some halfhearted talk at Imperial Rock, she was told, especially among the Skotl, that it was time to settle accounts with the “pirates” infesting the jungles around the Sunstruck Sea. For pirates, the men of the princedoms of the Sunstruck Sea had a substantial kingdom, with so many inhabitants that even their rulers couldn’t count them. The dealers in thralls flicked their tongues and griff at the thought of the slave trade, should the princedoms be humbled.

Perhaps the subdued reaction had more to do with the change in the dragons of the Lavadome. It had been vastly altered since she’d last been there.

When she’d last seen it, there were still seven contentious hills of dragons, the largest being Imperial Rock, with the Tyr’s relations, a clan that went back to the end of the civil wars when Tyr Fehazathant and Queen Tighlia took over. There were parties of hatchlings engaged in play hunts and combats, feasts, bathing parties at the river ring just outside the Lavadome, young mated couples flying about, plus the herds of livestock, the clay pits filled with kern, and the thrall quarters. Everything felt a bit more spacious, the dragons said, now that so many were in the Upper World engaged in duties in one Protectorate or another.

Now the Lavadome seemed so empty it echoed. There were still vestiges of the three clans occupying their family hills. Most of the Skotl were in the Aerial Host or acting as palace guards in the Protectorate, the Wyrr were, and many Ankelenes had established themselves in the libraries and museums of Hypatia.