CAN YOU BELIEVE OUR luck?” Kel Rostenlaughed, and the caravan chief fingered the strange tunic the wild girl had worn. Dripping between his hard brown hands, it glittered in the sunlight like a thousand jewels; he couldn’t imagine what it could be made of. Skin of some kind, of course, some sort of reptile skin, but it was like nothing he’d ever seen before. The reptiles themselves must have been very small, for the tunic was made of many patches sewn carefully together. But the colors were quite amazing; gold-washed vermilion, purple-washed blue, silver-washed green—
In all of his life as a trader for K’trenn Lord Berenel Hydatha, he had never seen anything like it. And if he could find out the source of these wondrous skins—
“The lords’ll eat that stuff up,” his second-in-command said, touching the tunic with a wondering finger. “Demonspawn! That’s just fair amazin’ skin. C’n you picture Berenel’s Lady in that? Or th’ young Lord? Strut around like peacocks, they would. An’ hev’ ev’ other elven lord beggin’ fer some fer himself.”
“It’ll make a fortune for Lord Berenel,” Kel agreed, “and if it makes a fortune for him, that means easy living for us!”
Berenel believed that a contented human was a profitable human— unlike some, Kel reflected. When his bondlings did well, they were rewarded with luxury. Lord Berenel’s people gave short shrift to troublemakers, and actively looked to increase their Lord’s profits.
Ardan’s eyes glazed over with anticipation. “Wine,” he murmured. “Quarters in the Big House. Fine food, fine drink, pick o’ the’ concubines—”
“All that and more, my friend,” Kel agreed affably, slapping his second on the back. He mentally congratulated himself for finding a man with both the ability to command and no ambition whatsoever. Ardan’s dreams and tastes were simple: a life of relative luxury, and the leisure to pursue his hobby of becoming an expert on vintages. And since he towered a good head over any other man in the caravan, and could use both fists and the knife he carried with speed and skill, no one ever gainsaid him. A man whose muscles matched his height, his canny brown eyes promised peace to those who kept it, and trouble for those who didn’t. He favored unobtrusive robes of pale gray over his crimson tunic, unlike the chief trader’s flamboyant dragon-scarlet, and his choice of clothing reflected his preferred life-style.
“Lord Berenel’s a generous lord, and he believes in sharing good fortune,” Kel continued. “If we can find out where this came from, he’ll do more than give us pick of the concubines—he’ll retire us. No more caravans, and easy living for the rest of our lives! Think of that! The worst we’ll have to sweat is when we stand at stud!”
“No more caravans—no more sandstorms!” Ardan grinned, his teeth showing white in his black beard. “That last one was enough for me! Demon’s eyes! I thought we was gonna lose the whole pack-train! If I never see ‘nother storm like that, it’ll be too damn soon.”
“Got that right.” Kel folded the tunic carefully, admiring how easily it compacted into a tiny package. He listened a moment at the door of the tent, then lifted the entrance flap and discovered that the drugged water had finally put the wild girl to sleep. He motioned Ardan to follow him inside.
He moved several bundles to one side, and stowed the tunic away in the secret bottom of one of his pack-baskets. “Remember where that is, in case something happens to me,” he told Ardan, who nodded. “That has to go to the Lord, no matter what.”
“No fear of that,” Ardan replied with another grin. “But I’ll be watchin’ yer back, in case some ‘un gets ideas.”
Making him my second was the smartest thing I ever did. “Good man,” Kel said, slapped Ardan companion-ably on the shoulder, and went back to the entrance, calling out to one of the boys for food and water. He had no fear he’d wake the girl now; he’d put enough black poppy in that water to knock out a pack-grel.
“Take a seat, old man,” he said, gesturing to one of the piles of cushions. “The girl’s good till sundown at the least. I’ve no mind to have to tend a wild thing if it wants to run, nor damage good, sound merchandise; I figure on keeping her well muddled until we reach Anjes.”
“Kel—I don’t s’ppose there’s any chance that girl could have been planted, is there?” Ardan said, with a sudden frown, as one of the ‘prentices, a thin, nervous boy, brushed aside the canvas flap, bringing a skin of water fresh from the pool, bread, and goat-cheese. “The Lord has a powerful lot of enemies. And it’s kind of odd, finding that girl out here, alone, claimin’ she’s lost.”
Kel bit off a mouthful of bread and considered the idea. No matter what the others thought, Ardan was anything but stupid, and that was just the kind of twisted trap one of the other lords might think up…
He stood up, strolled over to the girl, and looked down at her, thoughtfully. She looked nothing like the instrument of a plot; tangled in the pillows and silk covers, she looked even younger than he supposed she was. His guess was that her age was maybe fourteen; she looked eleven at most, with her face slack with sleep.
He noted her work-worn hands, the tough, sinewy muscles, the scratches and scars and half-healed cuts. Her bare feet were as tough as boot-leather. And there was a fair amount of abrasion on her arms and the back of her neck and legs—signs that she, too, had been caught in the storm.
“Well,” he said, after a moment of study, “she’s scratched up, callused, with a skin like a field hand. From the look of her, she’s been through that storm. And nobody could’ve known we were gonna find this place—I mean, I knew it was on the map, but that don’t mean water’s gonna be where the map says.”
“Lord could’ve drove us with that storm,” Ardan countered. “Girl could be a field hand. Tunic could have a glamorie on it.”
“True enough. But I got a test for that, remember?” Kel returned to the pack-basket that held his prize, and extracted it again. He pulled a silk-wrapped bundle out of his belt-pouch, and carefully unwrapped it, revealing a pendant wrought of an odd, dull metal of a greenish cast, centered with a black stone. He applied the stone to the tunic, taking care not to touch it with his bare fingers.
“There, see?” he said triumphantly, when the stone remained a glossy black, and the tunic remained unchanged. “If there was any glamorie around, this’d take care of it.”
Ardan nodded thoughtfully. “Girl don’t act like anythin’ but wild, I’ll give you that. All things considered, I’d be willin’ to lay down money that she’s a wild ‘un, an’ you know I don’t bet on nothin’ but a sure thing. I gotta think of these things, Kel, it’s m’job.”
“And I’m right glad you do it.” Kel stowed the tunic back in hiding, and the pendant in his belt-pouch. “So, if you’ll bet she’s wild, then I’ll take that as good as trade-gold. Now, tell me something, what do you think of the girl? Will she be worth selling, you think?”
Ardan cocked his head a little to one side. “Huh. I think so. Once we find out where she got the stuff—if she knows, if she ain’t too feebleminded to remember. Some of these wild ‘uns, their memory ain’t too good.” Ardan scratched his side through his tunic, and ate a piece of cheese. “You get bondlings what’s escaped, or some of them rogues, runnin’ around wild—half the time they starve, or eat bugs or somethin’. They have any kids, they get brought up the same, they have problems thinkin’ about anythin’ that ain’t got somethin’t’ do with food.”
“Don’t imagine eating bugs does much for their brains,” Kel agreed. “Brains don’t matter much, though, not in a girl. Don’t need brains to make a bed, nor to lie in it, eh?” He laughed, and Ardan joined him. “You’re a good judge of flesh, Ardan, what else do you think?”
“Well, since you’re askin’ my opinion, I’d say she’s no beauty, but she’ll fetch a fair price.” Ardan craned his neck up a little to get a better look at the sleeping girl. “That red hair’s nice; too bad she cut it so damn short. ‘Nother thing you might bark her for is fighter. Don’t need brains to be in the arena, either, just a healthy sense ‘f wantin’ t’ stay alive an’ some good reactions. And these wild ones, they make good fighters if you catch ‘em young ‘nough.”
“Now that’s a thought,” Kel said, pleased. Too bad he couldn’t just sell her and pocket all the money—but somebody’d snitch, sure as the sun rose. Lord Berenel was all right, but no way was he going to put up with that. He’d have Kel’s hide on his wall if Kel cheated him.
But sell her and keep part, especially if he could get a good price—that was something else. Berenel didn’t mind a little skimming, now and again, especially on a pure windfall…
Ardan rose to his feet and joined Kel in looking down at the sleeping girl. As Ardan had said, she was no beauty, but she wasn’t ugly either. Attractive, Kel decided. That pretty much described her. Dark red hair in tangled curls covering her ears down to her shoulders, sun-bronzed skin, decent figure. Good face; arching brows and high cheekbones, with a pointed little chin that made her look like a vixen-fox.
Attractive, healthy, and tough. She ought to bring a decent price; more than a decent price if he could parlay the fact that she was wild into an asset, as Ardan had suggested.
Sometimes Ardan came up with the best ideas out of nowhere.
“Not bad,” Ardan said, after a moment of long study. “Y’know, you put her in a short little leather tunic t’ show off them long legs, grow her hair more, put her out in the arena, she’d make a good novelty. ‘Specially if it turns out she can fight. I think we oughta have them auctioneers bark her that way.”
Ardan’s judgments on trade, though seldom offered, were never wrong. Kel nodded, and made up his mind to share the profit-skim equally with his second.
“You think there’s any harm in keeping her sleepy’till we get to the city?” he asked.
Ardan shook his head. “Naw. We can’t waste time with a kid tryin’ t’ fight us. We ain’t set up f r the slave trade. I’sped if we keep tellin’ her that we’re friends, we’re takin’ her somewhere safe, an’ keep feedin’ her poppy, we’ll be better off.”
“We’re about—three days from Lord Dyran’s land—a bit more than a week from the city. Think there’ll be a problem with keeping her on the poppy that long?” Kel had some experience with poppy addiction; his current supply came from a drover who’d been tied to the stuff. He’d gotten so out of control when Kel took it away from him that Ardan had to kill him.
A waste, but there it was. Demons only knew where he’d gotten it, or got the addiction in the first place.
“Week, two weeks, that won’t be a problem. Make it easier to try and get sense from her, about where that skin came from, too.” Ardan knew more about drugs and their effects than Kel; he doubled as the caravan’s rough herb-healer and bonesetter. Kel was living proof that he knew his business. Ardan had patched up more than a few little gashes of his.
“Then I think we’ve got ourselves a nice little piece of property, eh?” Kel grinned at the bigger man, and Ardan grinned back.
They both returned to the comfort of their cushions, Kel feeling very much at ease with the world. He sipped at the cool water, admiring the purity of it, and the sweetness. On caravan neither he nor Ardan ever touched a single drop of spirit, nor took any drug they didn’t absolutely have to have—like poppy after a serious wound. He’d always felt that a leader could never be anything less than at his absolute peak of alertness. Ardan not only agreed with Kel, he followed his leader’s example, even when he plainly longed to try a glass of some new vintage or other.
“So,” he asked, reaching for a piece of bread, “still think that sandstorms are all bad?” He laughed at his own joke, passing the big man another chunk of bread for himself.
Ardan chuckled. “Not if they blow a bit of sand like that our way,” he replied. “In fact, if they’d do that more often, I could come to like them!”
Keman hid in the ruined tower, and watched the humans from behind its meager protection. He had never been terribly good at reading thoughts, even the thoughts of one of the Kin, but these humans were all possessed of something that kept him from gleaning even the most rudimentary information from their minds. He remembered his mother saying something about “collars”—and since they all seemed to be wearing metal or leather collars around their necks, it seemed safe to assume these collars were responsible. He cowered in the shadow and tried to make himself shadow-colored, pressing his belly to the sand as he concentrated on overhearing their words, since he could not eavesdrop on their thoughts.
He feared the absolute worst from them; their everyday chatter could easily be covering up darker intentions. He’d already lost sight of Shana; they’d lured her into their tent, and presumably they had put one of their collars on her as well, since he couldn’t even read her thoughts.
His stomach was rolling like a wind-weed, and every muscle in his body ached with tension. He wanted to dive right in and rescue her from their clutches—but he couldn’t; he didn’t know where she was exactly, or whether she was all right. And there was no way to just swoop down out of the sky and carry her off. For one thing, he wasn’t sure he could. He’d never tried to fly carrying her before. For another, he wasn’t sure how he’d extract her from that tent.
So the question was, how was he to get near her?
He couldn’t appear as a dragon; that was forbidden. He couldn’t take one-horn form; they’d shoot him on sight with one of the powerful little bows he saw several of them carrying. In fact, any four-footed creature of any size would probably be greeted with a flight of arrows.
If they didn’t think he was a danger, they’d probably think he was dinner.
He couldn’t try to slip in as a human, either, in a group this small, they all knew each other, and a stranger would automatically be thought of as an enemy. Especially with the men of a trade-caravan.
He had to join them, somehow. He had to be something they’d want, but something that was not a threat.
He rubbed his dry eyes with his knuckle and sighed. It was nearly sundown, and he’d been out in the heat most of the day. Being this close to water and unable to go take a drink was sheer torment. He watched with raw envy as one of the pack-beasts ambled up to the pool to drink its fill. If only he could do that…
Huh. A way into the camp suddenly presented itself to him. Why couldn’t I do that ?
It only took a moment of concentration to shift form; when that moment had passed, one of the ugly, warty-skinned pack-grels stood in the place Keman had been.
He ambled down to the oasis, heading straight for the water, as if that was the only thing on his mind, joining the others at the waterside.
He put his head down and slurped with the rest, going weak-kneed for a moment as the ecstasy of the cool water passed over his dry, parched tongue. It was all he could do to keep from gulping the liquid and foundering himself.
It took a moment for his presence—and the fact that there were now ten pack-beasts where there had been nine before—to register with the humans. But when they noticed, they greeted his arrival with greed and pleasure. Four of the drovers surrounded him; he raised his head and blinked mildly at them. They exchanged grins and one of them strolled up to him and put out a hand. He nuzzled it briefly, trying not to wrinkle his nose at the man’s rank scent, before putting his head down in the water again.
They allowed him to finish drinking, at least, before putting a halter on him and leading him to the picket line. There, in the company of nine other specimens of beauty, Keman closed his eyes and tried his best to touch Shana’s mind, straining until he had a headache in one temple that throbbed in time with his pulse.
With no result whatsoever.
He continued to try, off and on, while the humans around him puttered about, starting cook-fires, making dinner. One of them came by with a measure of grain for each of the grels, and Keman licked his up as quickly as any of the real grels. By sunset Shana still hadn’t emerged from the tent, and Keman suspected that something terrible had happened to her. He strained his tether rope to the breaking point, trying to get as close as possible to the tent, trying not to imagine all the horrible things that could have befallen her in there. But he couldn’t help it; he kept seeing her bound, gagged, tortured…
Finally he had his answer as to why she hadn’t appeared, when one of the two men who seemed to be in charge of this group, a big man in a gray desert-coat over his scarlet tunic, passed by his picket, measuring a few pinches of some kind of powder into a fresh skin of water.
A drug… He altered his ears, making them keen enough to hear a gnat breathe, as the man pushed aside the flap of the tent and went in.
He heard Shana’s voice then—it sounded dazed and sleepy. “H’llo,” she said, slurring the word. “I’m—awful tired. Sorry.”
“Do not apologize for weariness, child,” another man replied. “You must sleep as long as you need. But drink, first. The desert air is dry, and you must drink often.”
“Thanks…” said Shana, and then she said nothing more. Both men emerged, looking very satisfied with themselves. The second man was dressed all in crimson, with crimson braid decorating his clothing, but otherwise he was unremarkable. His hair and eyes were brown, he was bearded, and he was a head shorter than the first man. He laughed softly, as if to himself, just as he passed the grel-picket.
Keman couldn’t help himself; he snapped at the man as he walked by, but the man simply reached out and brought his fist down hard on Keman’s nose.
Ayeee! His bellow matched the cry of pain in his mind. The only time Keman had ever experienced pain like that was when Rovy was on his back, digging his claws into Keman’s shoulders. The young dragon went to his knees, still bellowing in surprise and hurt, as the man passed on, taking no notice.
Oh—he thought, tears of pain coming to his eyes, as he moaned involuntarily. Fire and Rain, that hurt! He thought his nose was broken—
But as the pain died, he discovered that the man had done no such thing. His nose was perfectly all right; it wasn’t even bleeding. He had just discovered the grel’s one point of weakness. It was a lesson he wasn’t likely to forget in a hurry.
The picket line had been left alone in the dark, and Keman was once again trapped with his own thoughts and fears.
So the men had drugged Shana, and were keeping her drugged and collared. Why wasn’t she afraid, he asked himself, yearning towards the tent. Why hadn’t she wondered why she couldn’t see thoughts anymore?
Then it occurred to him—she had no reason to suspect that these people were dangerous—or even human . She had every reason to suppose that they were just more of the Kin, probably playing a drama-game.
Mother had never told her that the elven lords and the humans still existed. In fact, Mother had given her every reason to think that they had either died out in the Wizard War or lived so far away that the Kin would never see them. None of the other adults ever talked to her, and the only dragonets that told her about humans had been ones she’d never believe—Rovy and Myre. She had learned to write from books the Kin wrote in elven tongue, and those were never histories of anyone but the Kin.
They had kept her blind. Even if she suspected these people weren’t Kin, she was so drugged now she had probably lost the thought entirely. She wouldn’t want Kin to know what she could do—like see thoughts. She might not even have bothered to try reading thoughts, not if she was drugged.
And even if she had—she’d told Keman how her powers faded for a bit after she killed that ground squirrel. She might just think that they had faded again.
What am I going to do? How can I get us away from here when I can’t even warn her that Iam here ?
It was a very long night, spent mostly without sleep.
The sun rose, silvering everything the first rays touched, sending long, blue shadows across the flat sands. A single bird cried; Keman didn’t know what kind it was. That was the only break in the silence.
Keman was exhausted. He’d never spent a sleepless night before. He yawned, and shifted his weight restlessly, wondering what was going to happen next.
One of the humans came out of his tent; a much smaller tent than the one Shana was in. He dropped another ration of grain before each of the grels, then bent again to fling a pack-saddle on him.
He started; then, without thinking, bucked it off.
The human tried again; he bucked just as hard. This time when he launched it into the air, it landed quite a distance from the picket line.
The human muttered something under his breath, and went after it. He manhandled it back to the picket line and heaved the saddle onto Keman’s back, with a repetition of the entire sequence.
This went on for some time. Finally, when Keman was really beginning to enjoy himself, another human, an older one, came up beside the boy. This one stared at him for a moment, and he noticed the human balling his hand into a fist.
Abruptly he became a model of docility, letting the boy fasten the cinches without complaint, then kneeling and permitting the humans to load a variety of packs and baskets of goods onto his back. He had learned his lesson and he saw no particular need to repeat it.
By that time all the other beasts were loaded, and Keman rose to his feet again. Just as he got himself and his load balanced, and looked around, a human scout returned, riding a horse with a bird on a special perch on the saddlebow. Shortly after that, the tent-flaps opened, and the two men who had been in there before came out with Shana between them.
Keman’s stomach churned with anxiety. She was clean, dressed in a new scarlet tunic, and wore a collar like the others. But she stumbled, rather than walked; her eyes were glazed, and she was dazed and plainly only half-aware of her surroundings.
The two men helped her into the saddle of the beast whose load Keman had been gifted with, and tied her there. The grels were lined up, and tied one behind the other in a long string. Shana was on the end; only three beasts behind Keman. So very near—and yet, he could do nothing about her or their situation. He was just as trapped as she was, because he refused to leave without her. And he couldn’t help her.
As the drovers goaded all the beasts—including him—into getting on the move, he bellowed with the rest of them. But the reasons for his crying were as different as his mind was from theirs.
Keman knew from the drover’s talk that the caravan was less than a day from their goal, the gates of the trade city where Shana would be further interrogated, then sold.
And he still hadn’t been able to free her, or even talk to her.
He plodded along the dusty road, breathing in the dust of the grel in front of him, kicking up dust of his own for the men walking behind him to inhale. Around him were Lord Berenels fallow fields; fields that at one time had been cultivated, full of his scarlet-clad slaves tending his crops. But, according to the drovers, that was before the Lord hosted a small war; now those fields lay fallow for the next decade. When the bodies—human bodies—had turned to rich, black earth, and the bones could be plowed up and crushed for fertilizer, Lord Berenel would plant again. Knowing that his fields would yield tenfold what they had before the war had been fought on them.
He was going to have to get away. And he was going to have to do it without Shana. Once he was in that city…
I don’t know, maybe it will be easier there to get her loose, maybe if I turn into elf-form I can order her release…
But that was a foolish hope, and he knew it. A low-ranking elven lord was only marginally better than a high-ranking human, and no one in Lord Berenel’s service was going to release this particular captive on some unknown elven lad’s say-so.
Because they still hadn’t managed to get an answer they understood from Shana about where her tunic had come from.
She just didn’t have the words, the language, for one. But more importantly, she obviously believed that her “friends” were of the Kin, and she couldn’t understand why they kept asking the same question about her tunic, over and over. She thought she was being asked who the skin was from. She told them. She told them any number of times.
They thought she was mumbling gibberish, and began treating her as simpleminded.
He still didn’t know what he was going to do. He had to do something, but what?
Then, in the moment between one breath and the next, the question was taken out of his hands.
The cloudless blue sky above was split with a high-pitched roar that was like nothing he’d ever heard before. He, along with every other living creature in the caravan, looked up.
Diving out of the sky in a stoop, shrieking as she dove, was his mother. He knew her immediately; how could he not? It was easy enough to recognize her.
She was in pure, unadorned dragon-form.
She pulled up with a snap of wing-membranes at the last possible moment, cutting across just above the heads of the grel-riders. She gained altitude rapidly, readying herself for another stoop. Keman was tailmost today; he froze in pure astonishment, legs locking—but that wasn’t what anyone or anything else in the caravan did.
The grels, one and all, decided en masse to bolt, as Alara circled around for the second dive. Keman, standing stock-still, was unprepared; he was braced and the grel in front of him was leaping away—the tether snapped with a whip-crack sound, leaving him standing alone in the middle of the road. Alone, because the men had taken to their heels as well; some scattering over the fields, looking for somewhere to hide, and some belting after the vanishing grel.
.•Mother!: Keman called, as she began her second stoop. .-Mother, stop! Mother, you have to —:
Either she couldn’t hear him, or had no intention of heeding him. The result was the same, either way. As she plunged towards him, he saw her foreclaws out, saw that they were padded.
Too late, he tried to make a run for it.
She hit him with enough force to knock the wind out of him, and snatched him up with her hindclaws, all in a single, smooth motion. And with him firmly caught in her claws she proceeded to gain altitude and distance, taking him farther and farther away from Shana, ignoring his protests entirely.
Shana was black-and-blue from head to toe. Grels, it seemed, were not smooth runners. Shana had been bounced around on the back of hers until she thought she was never going to sit comfortably again.
When the caravan stopped to allow the men on foot to catch up with them, she looked about herself, puzzled. Alara hadn’t actually hurt anyone—she’d only launched a teasing raid on the train. The worst she’d done was to carry off one of the pack-beasts. That was nothing more than a basic prank among the Kin.
Befuddled as she was, she couldn’t imagine why they were so genuinely terrified of a simple dragon in stoop, and a trick-raid.
She struggled with her straps, while the men straggled in, winded and weary. The more she fought the soft leather straps, the more alert she felt. Finally she freed herself from her straps, and slid down off the back of the grel. She looked for Kel or Ardan, but all she saw were the drovers, sitting or lying on the ground in postures of profound exhaustion.
They weren’t going to help.
She started to wander off, hoping to find someone to explain it all to her.
Thatwas when her “friends” Kel and Ardan appeared, suddenly changed; they grabbed her before she could get too far, as if they were afraid that she was going to run away. When she tried to wriggle free of them, Kel hit her.
She hit back; and kicked and bit, for good measure. That was enough to trigger a full-scale fight. She screamed and clawed and kicked with everything she had, but they were much bigger than she was. They kept trying to pin her to the ground, and never uttered a sound except when she kicked them especially hard.
She was convinced that both Kel and Ardan had gone mad.
Finally they subdued her by the simple means of tripping her and sitting on her.
While she continued to fight, they kept her pinioned. Now they began to talk, and it made no sense. Kel produced rope and they tied her hands together, then threw her on the back of her grel and tied her hands to the saddle and her feet to the stirrups, all the time babbling about the “monster” that had attacked them.
Now that they had run themselves into exhaustion, the grels had quieted. As Shana clung miserably to her saddle, the caravan plodded—or rather, staggered—towards the gates of the city in the distance. And at the sight of that city, its high walls, its thousands of inhabitants, a terrible and frightening realization came to her. Because there weren’t that many dragons in the entire world, which could only mean one thing.
They weren’t Kin.
Which meant they were two-leggers. Real two-leggers, of both kinds.
They were two-leggers. Like her. That was why Foster Mother didn’t stay; she must have seen Shana with them, and she thought Shana was all right—
But she wasn’t all right. Her “friends” goaded the poor grel into a bone-shattering trot as soon as the city gates were in sight, and it was entirely obvious that she was a prisoner. Though for what reason—
The tunic! she realized abruptly. That was why they kept asking about it. They wanted to know where I got the bits from .
If they didn’t know, they’d never seen a dragon. If they’d never seen a dragon, there must be a good reason. The dragons must not want them to know that they existed.
If she told them where she really got the skin, they’d try to find more.
She shivered, seeing exactly where that would lead. They’d hunt the Kin down and kill them for their skins. And it would be her fault for telling. She wouldn’t mind seeing Rovy’s hide on someone’s back—but Keman’s or Foster Mother’s—
Fire and Rain, what am I going to do? What are they going to do with me?
The city gates grew closer and closer, and the nearer they were, the bigger they looked. Shana had never seen that much worked stone in her life. And that frightened her even more.
How many people did it take to build all that? And— they must have so much magic to do it—
The caravan passed beneath the walls; thick walls, wider than the grels were long, built of cold, dank stone, strange and hostile. She shivered in the shadow of the walls, and not from chill, but from fear, as the caravan waited, some of the men with the caravan talking at length with some men who were not, and who wore green-and-gray tunics and leg-coverings, all alike.
Finally the caravan moved on, out into the sunlight.
About then was when the city rose up to hit her in the face.
As soon as they passed through the gates, Shana was assaulted by the babble of thousands of voices, by the bawls of thousands of animals, by the heat concentrated because the place was paved over, with never a spot of green anywhere. The intense heat made the odors worse; the smells of excrement and raw meat, of hot oil, of sweat of man and beast, of perfume, of flowers, and of things Shana couldn’t even put a name to, warred with each other. And everywhere was color and motion; hundreds, thousands of people of both kinds of two-legger; jostling, brawling, gossiping, looking at things—dressed in everything from a simple rag to an amazingly elaborate gown worn by one of the pale, tall ones, that changed color whenever the wearer moved.
Shana reeled in her saddle, and was glad enough of the straps holding her down. Right now they were more support than confinement. She had never imagined that there could be this many two-leggers in the world!
After a moment, some things began to resolve themselves. Next to the wall they had just passed through was an enormous square space ringed with buildings, with tunnels or narrow canyons between some of the buildings. The caravan inched its way across this open space, which was thronged with people; it seemed as if their goal was one of those tunnels between two buildings. Sun beat down on them, heat rose up to choke them, and people jostled against the grels without ever looking to see who or what they were shoving against. It took them forever to cross that expanse.
They moved by single steps at a time, with many pauses for someone to clear the way ahead. Shana tried not to be sick, and wished she was out of there, across to that mysterious tunnel, where there weren’t so many people.
But when, at long last, they reached it—Shana regretted her earlier wish.