Sioned frowned with concentration, weighing the flat stone in her palm. Her audience waited nearby— Sionell holding her breath, Pol sorting through his own collection of rocks, and Walvis grinning as he stroked his neat black beard. The Lord of Remagev gestured invitingly to the calm surface of the lake. Sioned angled her arm carefully and sent the stone skimming out over the water.
“Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen!” Sionell cried excitedly. “Can you make it skip that many times, Papa?”
“Easy as sliding down a sand dune,” he assured her. He sent a rock flying out across the lake, and his daughter counted off fifteen tiny splashes before it sank. “Best three out of four?” he challenged Sioned.
As they gathered up suitable stones, Pol and Sionell tried their hand at skipping rocks. The older pair exchanged smiles as Sionell made six on her first try and Pol only two.
“Like this,” Sionell said, giving instruction that Pol accepted with poor grace. “Watch me do it.” A moment later she called out, “Eight! I got eight!”
Sioned turned in time to see Pol’s second try. The stone he sailed struck the water three times, then vanished.
“Try again,” Sionell urged.
“No, thanks.”
The little girl gave him a disgusted look. “How’re you going to learn if you won’t even try? You can’t be good at everything the first time you do it, you know.”
Sioned caught Walvis’ eye and they waited while Pol engaged in an internal struggle that was plain on his face. Pride won—not unusual at that age. He shook his head and piled all his selected stones into his mother’s palms.
“I’ll practice some other time.”
Sioned and Walvis lined up for their competition. Her first stone skipped twelve times, as did his; her second made sixteen splashes. Walvis groaned as his own second try brought only ten.
“Best five out of seven?” he ventured hopefully.
“A deal’s a deal,” she retorted, and flicked her wrist. The stone skipped fourteen times and Sionell applauded.
Walvis glared down at his daughter in mock affront. “Whose side are you on?” he demanded, and she giggled. He let fly his third stone. “Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—“
All at once a shadow swooped down, wings stirring a ripple of breeze across the water. A blue-black dragon dipped his hind claws into the water, beat the air with powerful strokes, and craned his neck around as he rose into the sky. His snarl of frustration echoed around the crater.
“He thought it was a fish!” Pol exclaimed, laughing. “Look at them all!”
A flight of about forty three-year-old dragons settled in on the far shore for a drink. Wings folded gracefully, long necks bent to the water, they paused as the one who had mistaken a skipped stone for a fish arrived late. He was jostled from side to side and they sang out in derision as he snarled again.
“Walvis,” Sioned murmured, “I could swear they’re making fun of him.”
“I was thinking the same thing. Do dragons have a sense of humor?” He closed one hand on his daughter’s shoulder as she moved at his side. “No, you may not go closer to look,” he ordered.
“But they wouldn’t hurt me! They’re so beautiful!”
“And they’ve got teeth half as long as your arm. We’ll watch from here and hope they’re feeling friendly.” He cast a worried glance at Sioned, sharing her thought; they must stay still and not attract the dragons’ attention, for stories abounded of people who had been plucked from the ground by dragons when they attempted to run away.
Sionell squirmed. “They’ve already eaten, Papa. Look at their stomachs.”
She was correct; bellies usually lean before a meal were rounded, and a few of the dragons even paused in their drinking to belch. Sioned wondered how many sheep and goats had gone to feed this hoard, and reminded herself to ask Rohan again about cultivating herds for the dragons’ sole use.
Thirst quenched, some of the dragons bounded into the air. They flew to a tremendous height, then folded their wings and plunged straight down into the water. Diving, rolling, flinging water at each other with sweeping wings, calling out to the ones onshore, they resembled nothing so much as playful children.
“You see?” Sionell said. “They wouldn’t hurt anybody. Besides,” she added slyly, “I’m not a princess, and everybody knows dragons prefer princesses!”
“Hush,” Walvis said, tightening his grip on her shoulder.
Sioned looked at her son. Enchanted love was in his eyes—exactly the expression that shone on his father’s face when dragons were around. The gold mattered nothing to either of them; they loved the dragons as part of the Desert, part of their blood.
Eventually the creatures climbed out of the water to sun themselves. Sioned admired the varied hues of their water-glistening hides, each dragon a different color. She picked out a reddish one, smaller than the rest, who shook diamond-drops from her wings. Sioned watched for a moment, wondering if she dared. Dragons definitely had a sense of fun, and she knew they had thought-colors. She threaded a few strands of sunlight together, cautiously extending the silken gold weave toward the little dragon.
The female arched her neck, fanning out her wings with their dainty golden undersides, and shook her head to clear her eyes of the water still trickling down her face. Her head turned questioningly and she shifted her shoulders, tucking her wings back along her body. Sioned displayed her own colors—emerald, sapphire, onyx, amber—and their pattern, long engraved in her memory. The dragon tossed her head, droplets spraying out as she shook herself all over. Sioned sought a closer contact and the dragon whined through her long nose, shivering a little.
Suddenly the sunlight exploded into a rainbow of color. Sioned cried out at the same time the little dragon threw back her head with a howl of terror. All the other dragons sprang up into the sky, keening a chorus of fear and warning as they fled.
“Mother!”
Pol tried to hold her up as she crumpled, Walvis and Sionell right beside him to cushion her fall. Sioned gulped in several breaths, trembling all over with the shock, and managed a faint smile for her ashen-cheeked son.
“I’m fine,” she whispered.
“The dragons aren’t,” Walvis said grimly. “Listen to them.”
The wild music echoed down from the cluster of dark shapes in the sky. Sioned pushed herself upright and winced.
“I was too clumsy. I frightened her.”
“What are you talking about?” Walvis demanded. “My lady, what did you do?”
Pol, kneeling at her side, answered. “She used the sunlight to touch a dragon.”
* * *
“You did what?”
Rohan’s eyes blazed down at the woman who sat sipping iced taze as casually as if she’d just returned from an afternoon stroll around the lake.
“Please stop scolding. You can’t say anything I haven’t accused myself of.”
“When I asked if you could touch a dragon, I didn’t mean for you to risk your life at it!”
“I’ll be more careful next time.”
“There isn’t going to be a next time.” He crossed to the windows of their chamber and looked out at the quiet water. “We heard your scream all the way from Thread-silver. “
“Mine, or the dragon’s?”
“Weren’t they one and the same?” he countered.
That gave her pause. “You may be right,” she admitted.
Rohan swung around. “You faradh ‘im talk about being shadow-lost. What if you got lost inside a dragon’s colors and couldn’t remember your own? It would amount to the same thing, wouldn’t it?”
“But that didn’t happen.”
“This time!”
She set her goblet down and folded her hands in her lap. “You’re thinking about forbidding me to try again, aren’t you?”
“I’m thinking about having you swear a promise,” he corrected.
Sioned bit her lip. “I’ve never lied to you—“
“But you omit things when it serves your purposes. Oh, you’re far too honest to lie—and far too clever to put yourself in a position where you’d have to. After twenty-one years of living with you, my lady, I know you very well indeed.”
She said nothing.
“Sioned, there are too many ways I could lose you just in the normal course of things. I won’t add another to the list just because of my stupid notion about dragons. It won’t do me any good to forbid you outright, and we both know it. I won’t make you promise, either. But that means I’ll have to trust to your good sense—and to the fact that you want to see your son grow up.”
She flinched. “That wasn’t fair, Rohan!”
“No,” he agreed. “But neither are your little omissions.”
She glared at him. “Very well, I’ll make you a promise. I won’t try it again unless Maarken is with me to back me up and set my colors again if I start to lose them.”
“The way you did for Tobin, the night she was caught in the Moonrunning?”
“Yes. I knew her colors and I could bring her back. I promise I won’t touch a dragon again without being in the same kind of contact with Maarken. Will that content you, my lord?”
“It’ll have to, I suppose.” He folded his arms. “You’re a dangerous woman, High Princess.”
“No more so than you’re a dangerous man, High Prince.” She smiled a little. “That makes us very well mated, doesn’t it?”
Rohan snorted.
* * *
Dragon shrieks woke everyone in the middle of the night. Rohan and Sioned threw on their clothes and hurried to the courtyard, where the entire population of Sky-bowl had assembled by torchlight, confused and more than a little frightened. Ostvel, sleep-rumpled and worried, shouldered through the crowd to Rohan.
“I’ve never heard them scream like that at this time of night! What do you think is going on?” He winced as another high-pitched howl split the air. “Goddess! Listen to that! What’s the matter with them?”
“I don’t know,” Rohan replied, glancing around. “Where’s Pol? Sioned, do you see him?”
“No—and if he’s run outside to watch dragons, so help me I’ll blister his backside for him! Walvis!” she called out, catching sight of Remagev’s lord. “Have you seen Pol?”
He mounted a few steps and scanned the crowd, then shook his head. “Nor Maarken, either.”
Chay and Tobin arrived in time to hear this, and the latter asked Sioned, “You don’t think they tried to touch a dragon, do you?”
Sioned paled. “They couldn’t be so foolish! Pol!” she called out. “Pol!”
“Up here, Mother!”
He and Maarken stood on the gatehouse balcony with several of the Skybowl guard. All eyes turned to them as Rohan shouted, “What are you doing up there? Come down at once!”
“But we’re watching the dragons, Father! They’re fighting on the shore!”
“I want to see, too!” Sionell squirmed out of Feylin’s arms and raced for the gatehouse steps.
Rohan turned to Ostvel. “Get everybody indoors. They can watch if they like, but nobody is to set foot outside the walls until those sires have had it out with each other. They’re likely to attack anything that moves.”
“At once, my lord. But I’ve never known them to do battle at this time of night before”
The moons rode high in the sky, illuminating the lake in pale silver. From the thin windows of the gatehouse two dragons could be seen halfway around the lake, highlighted by gleaming teeth and talons. Wings were folded close to lithe shapes as the sires roared defiance, heads lashing out to rip at already bleeding hides. Adolescent dragons lined the crater’s lip, watching; in three years they, too, would fight to the death for possession of females.
Pol had helped Sionell up into a window embrasure, steadying her with an arm around her waist. Neither of them noticed the entrance of their elders until Feylin plucked her daughter from her precarious position and held her firmly away from the open casement.
“I wasn’t going to fall,” Sionell complained. “Pol was holding onto me.”
“For which he has my thanks,” Feylin replied, “but you’ll stay away from the window, my girl.”
Pol joined his parents, standing on a stone shelf where, in times of war, archers knelt to loose arrows through the narrow openings. “Which one do you think will win?”
Both dragons were injured now, one holding his left foreleg at an awkward angle, painful to see. They took their battle to the air then, startling the audience of three-year-olds who fluttered their wings in reaction. The fighting dragons circled each other, snapping with blood-darkened jaws and slashing with claws and tails. Grunts of effort and impact resounded across the crater as they pummeled each other. The darker dragon rose high above his rival and for a moment everyone thought he had given up the field. But then he plummeted directly down, all talons and teeth digging into his enemy’s back.
The wounded sire bellowed his pain and fury, losing command of the air and his own wings as his attacker’s tail slammed across the main bones of his left wing with a crack audible even in the gatehouse. Someone moaned in sympathy. The pair fell toward shore, where the defeated dragon would surely be crushed to death on the stony ground. Yet he retained wit and strength enough to angle his fall, and the two dragons landed with a mighty splash in the water.
The victor stroked upward, calling out his triumph as his vanquished foe rolled in the water, vainly trying to work his shattered wing. The adolescents flew off after the winner, leaving the mortally wounded sire to die.
Rohan was down the gatehouse stairs before anyone but Sioned and Pol noticed he was gone. He was panting for breath when he got to the lakeshore. Pale moonlight shone on water stained dark with blood. The dragon’s feeble swimming motions grew weaker. His efforts had nearly brought him to shore, but even if he reached dry ground, he was going to die. Rohan saw in the huge dark eyes that the dragon knew it. Yet he did not give up the struggle, did not cease trying. Rohan’s chest ached and he felt the sting of tears in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.” He heard the others running to catch up with him, felt Sioned’s touch on his arm. “Can we help him?” she asked.
He shook his head. “His wing is gone, and he’s lost too much blood.”
“Father—please,” Pol said softly. “Look at his eyes.” “Can’t we at least put him out of his pain?” Sioned held his arm tighter.
The dragon moaned. The sound was echoed by dragon voices, scores of them from beyond Skybowl’s rim, mourning him. The night sky was empty of wings, but dragon song swelled and shuddered as if borne on wind created by their beating. Rohan said thickly, “Bring me a sword.” “No,” Chay murmured. “You swore never again, my prince. Never another dragon dead by your hand.”
He winced as the dragon groaned again. Walvis took a step forward. “I’ll do it,” he said softly. “Feylin, tell me where it would be quickest.”
“It’s not necessary,” Sioned told him. “Maarken, you ought to learn this.’Come with me.”
They went to the water’s edge. The dragon cried out, a whimper of pain as his failing body reached the sandy shallows, cool water lapping around him. Sioned crooned to him in a low voice, barely two arm-lengths from the lolling head. With Maarken as her loom, she wove threads of moonlight into a pallid silver weave across the dragon’s eyes. The huge body shivered; she and Maarken trembled, too. The dragon’s eyes closed. After a time the rigidity of pain left muscles and torn flesh. His face relaxed, the great lungs heaved in a long sigh, and he slept.
Sioned turned. “He’s at peace now, I think.”
“Mother—did you touch him?” Pol breathed.
“No. I only helped him to sleep.”
Tobin nodded slowly. “Andrade used to do the same thing, Rohan—do you remember? When we were little.”
Sioned nodded confirmation. “It’s something learned with the eighth ring.”
“But you—“ Chay stopped, frowned, and shrugged. “I’m not going to ask. I’ve seen you do too many things you shouldn’t be able to.”
“And some of them things Andrade doesn’t know about,” Sioned finished. “Did you learn how, Maarken? And did you feel his colors?”
“I understood the weaving sequence,” he answered. “I saw a whole rainbow of color. Fading. It can be done, Sioned. It’s only a question of when, and which dragon.”
Rohan went to the animal’s head, stroked the long neck where life beat slower and slower. He had never touched a live dragon before, never been so close to one. The hide was smooth and cool, dark green shading to brown in the moonlight. His fingertips traced the proud lines of brow and nose and angle of jaw. Very lightly he touched the eyelids, feeling how silky-soft they were. Beautiful, even in death.
He looked over his shoulder at his wife and murmured, “Thank you.”
* * *
Two days later, Pol leaned over a map spread out on the carpet, desultorily tracing the route his father, Chay, Ostvel, and Walvis were now following to Tiglath in the north. He made a glum face, still-disappointed that he had not been allowed to go with them. The reason given had been Tiglath’s proximity to possible Merida haunts— but Pol suspected that they all thought him too young. He would be fifteen before winter’s end, but they still considered him a child. It was galling.
But he had been permitted to attend the planning sessions, as fascinated by the debate on tactics as he had been by the changes in people familiar to him since infancy. Father, aunt, uncle, cousin, and friends vanished. They became the High Prince, a warrior princess, and the athr’im of Radzyn, Whitecliff, Skybowl, and Rema-gev. Even his mother had shed her role of co-sovereign, becoming nothing more than Sunrunner to the High Prince. Enlightening as the military talk had been, Pol had found the assumption of formal roles even more educational. He would have to learn how to do that, he decided—how to submerge his own personality into the responsibilities of his position.
In some ways, Tobin’s had been the most startling transformation. Pol’s laughing, warm-voiced aunt had spoken with real relish about the possibilities of conquering Cunaxa should that princedom be so foolish as to invade Firon. Lines of advance, probable body-counts, razing the Cunaxan seat of Castle Pine, slaughtering every Merida in existence—Tobin was intimately familiar with all the ways of war. Her cheerful ruthlessness had amused him at first, then scared him when he realized she meant every last word of it. But it finally struck him as being her perfect role in the debate. She was dedicated to the advancement of the Desert’s interests—even though her ideas for that advancement were more than a trifle bloodthirsty. She represented her father’s point of view; Prince Zehava had liked nothing so much as a good, clean battle that won him added lands as well as added glory.
As Pol listened, it had become clear that his own father was surrounded by people of differing viewpoints who never hesitated to speak their minds. Pol hoped that when it came his turn, he would hear the same advice as freely given. Moreover, Rohan was in complete control of the debate, though he rarely spoke and then only to steer the conversation back to its major concerns. The decisions would be his alone, and everyone knew it. They would argue their own points of view, but it never occurred to any of these powerful people to question Rohan’s authority. Pol was awed by this quiet proof of his father’s power.
The calling-up of the Desert levies and selected troops from Princemarch had been deliberately casual, designed to alarm no one. Chay explained it as an exercise that would acquaint soldiers from both princedoms with each other’s techniques. He proposed that the following year a similar exercise might take place in the mountains so that troops accustomed to the Desert could get a feel for what another kind of warfare might be like.
Skybowl was not equipped to support a large influx of troops, and thus an assembly point had been established at the old garrison below the ruins of Feruche Castle. Pol looked on the map at each Desert holding and the places from which the soldiers of Princemarch would be called, and whistled under his breath at the total of three hundred foot, half that number of archers, and two hundred horse. “Enough to be impressive, but not quite enough to provoke,” had been Maarken’s conclusion.
Pol could imagine the camp that would soon be set upon the rocky plain outside Tiglath’s walls. Tents, cook-fires, the spears and swords of the foot soldiers leaning outside the tents in deadly array; horses picketed within easy reach of their riders; bows unstrung and arrows kept carefully in leather quivers. The double-tailed battle flags of all the Desert holdings would be presided over by Wal-vis’ blue-and-white banner with a golden dragon atop the staff that signified his status as the High Prince’s commander in the north. Princemarch’s violet would be in evidence, too, with the Desert blue atop it. There would be marching and swordplay, competitions between archers, riders practicing the charges and maneuvers necessary in war. All of it called out to a boy’s restless imagination, making him yearn to go and watch even if he could not really be a part of it as a working soldier.
Pol sighed. Almost everyone had ridden out with Wal-vis and Skybowl’s levy. Rohan and Chay would return in ten days or so after showing support for Walvis and meeting with some of the people from Princemarch. Ostvel would be gone longer on a visit to Lord Abidias of Tuath, then swing back by Tiglath and bring word of the camp to Rohan at Skybowl. Only a fraction of the troops available from the Desert and Princemarch would take the field for maneuvers, but Pol desperately wanted just a glimpse of what was going on.
A rebellious part of him said that if he wanted to look, he could. He was a Sunrunner—not trained yet, of course, but he knew he could weave the light if he tried, glide along its pathways to Tiglath. And oh, how he wanted to—but he didn’t let himself think about it too much. He had responsibilities. He could not do it. But he wanted to.
His finger drew little circles on the map as he vowed that once he was older, no one would be able to make him stay put when he wanted to be somewhere else. At least if he was denied the fun and excitement of the summer’s encampment, he would be doing something almost as interesting. His finger left Tiglath and touched the little symbol indicating the location of Castle Crag, high in the Veresch on the Faolain River.
There was no definite route planned for the progress. They would wander as fancy took them. The only certainty on their itinerary was that Princess Pandsala expected them at Castle Crag in time for a long visit before going to Waes and the Rialla. Pol had seen the Veresch Mountains from a great distance, faraway purple peaks crowned in white snow—an element he wasn’t entirely sure he believed in. Dorval’s mountainous region never saw snow. He had almost decided that seeing such marvels as pine forests, lakes, meadows, wide rivers, and especially snow was as good as spending the summer soldiering.
“Here you are!”
Pol looked up. Sionell had a positively uncanny knack for finding him. “Good afternoon,” he said politely.
“Jahnavi and I are going riding. Do you want to come?”
“No, but thank you for asking.”
Sionell gave a shrug and sat in a nearby chair. “Why is Riyan a Sunrunner if his father isn’t?”
“For the same reason Maarken is and his father isn’t.”
“Or you and your father,” she said, nodding. “Does it always come from the mother’s side?”
“Nobody knows where it comes from.” He began rolling up the map. “My grandmother’s father was faradhi, even though he was never trained, and his wife didn’t show any signs of it at all. One of their children was Lady
Andrade, who’s more powerful than anybody—and the other was my grandmother, Princess Milar.”
“And Princess Tobin is, but your father isn’t. And her children are, and aren’t. It’s very confusing!” She smiled. “You are, though. Do you think you’ll be as good at it as your mother is?”
“I hope so.”
“I’d like to be a Sunrunner and touch a dragon.”
“That’s not what being a Sunrunner is about.” He got to his feet, the map back in its case. “Being a faradhi
I o,__ * * io
She interrupted, “But you want to touch a dragon on sunlight, don’t you?”
Pol turned away from the shrewd blue eyes. “None of your business,” he muttered.
“You do, too. I can tell. I know all kinds of things about you that you don’t want me to know.”
“Such as?” He swung around.
Sionell gave him a pert grin. “I’m not telling!”
“You’d better!”
She jumped up from the chair and ran laughing out the door. Pol dropped the map and raced after her, catching up on the stairs. He made a grab for her elbow but she eluded him.
“Sionell! Tell me!”
“I won’t—not until you promise to come riding with us!”
“You are the most impossible brat ever born!”
“I’m not a brat!”
“You are, too. And see if I care aboufthings you probably don’t know, anyway.” He turned to go back to his room.
“Pol—I do know something! I know that you want to touch the dragons so you can talk to them and tell them it’s safe to go back to Rivenrock!”
He whirled and stared at her. “How did you know that?”
“Because it’s exactly what I’d do if I was a Sunrunner.”
He looked down at her pudgy little face, the beginnings of respect sneaking up on him. “Would you? Do you understand about the dragons?”
“My mother’s been studying dragons for years and years. She knows more about them than anybody. We talk about dragons all the time.”
Pol heard himself say, “There’s a lot I don’t know about them. Maybe you could teach me.”
Sionell glowed with happiness for a moment, then recalled her pride and looked down at her toes, kicking at the step above her. “Maybe I could—if you’re nicer to me. You’re really a pain sometimes, you know that?”
“Sorry.” He tried to think up something else to say. She saved him the necessity by smiling shyly up at him. Someday, he thought unexpectedly, she might even turn out to be pretty. Even more surprisingly, he was about to tell her so when the walls of Sky bowl shuddered. “What in all hells is that?” he blurted.
“Listen.”
‘ ‘Are the dragons fighting again?”
“Can’t you hear the difference?” she scoffed.
“They don’t sound angry,” he ventured.
“Of course not. They’re mating.” * * *
Sioned and Maarken had spent the last two days with Feylin, who was in the lengthy process of dissecting the dragon. At first the bloody project made both Sunrunners a little ill. Fascination soon replaced squeamishness. And, too, there was something exquisite about the fit of bone to bone, the discovery of how muscles worked, the elegant configurations of flight, that overcame a tendency to queasy stomachs.
Feylin had a sincere respect for dragons and regretted violating this one in death. But her curiosity was stronger. She reported her findings to two scribes, each of whom relied on Sioned’s memory to supply what they sometimes missed. Maarken skillfully produced drawings as Feylin dictated to the scribes. His renditions of the delicate interlinking of muscle and bone in the wings were works of art. Other servants were busy building a rocky pyre for the dragon’s remains, which were placed there when Feylin was done describing them and Maarken had finished his drawings.
“The brain is twice the size of ours, but without so many curves and ridges to it,” she reported, holding the mass of gray material in both hands. “It’s also much larger in the back where it meets the spine, and not as developed in the front regions—“
“Wait,” Sioned protested. “When did you ever see a human brain?”
Feylin cleared her throat and looked guilty. “Well . . . my mother was a physician. She liked to find out how things worked.”
“But how—?”
“One day she found a man lying dead in the hills-there wasn’t any way to identify him, no one to claim him—we gave him a decent burning afterward,” she finished defensively.
Maarken glanced up from his sketchpad, eyes wide. Sioned gulped, shook her head, and murmured, “I’m sorry I asked. Go on, Feylin.”
Brain, eyes, tongue, teeth, nasal structure—all of it was measured and defined for the scribes and then placed before Maarken to be drawn. Over the last two days Feylin had systematically examined the huge corpse—legs, stomach, lungs, wings, chest cavity, and heart. One of the scribes, who had lasted through a detailed description of the dragon’s last meal after an exploration of the stomach’s contents, finally balked at a lengthy discourse on the eyes. He threw down his parchment and pen, staggered over to the lake, and was violently sick. Sioned took his place, scribbling for all she was worth, and told herself firmly that High Princesses did not throw up in public.
“Maarken, you’re as green-faced as a pregnant girl,” Feylin said suddenly.
“There’s blood and then there’s blood,” he said. “It’s different from battle blood.”
“Carving up a dragon for study is worse than carving up your enemies?”
“It’s different,” he maintained stubbornly.
“He has a point, you know,” Sioned observed. “How would you like it if somebody sliced you up into your component parts?”
“I’d mind plenty if I was still alive! Once I’m dead, what does it matter? I have no more use for my body, after all, once I’m gone from it.” Feylin placed the last section of skull on the blanket before Maarken, stretched, and went to crouch beside Sioned. “Anyway, this chance was too good to pass up.”
“But it seems so—“ She ended with a helpless shrug.
“How else do we learn? My mother wasn’t the only physician who investigated human corpses, you know.
Does a dead body mind the flames we light around it?
Would it mind being poked around in?”
“Just the same, I don’t want anybody doing that to me,” Sioned told her.
“What if we learn something from this dragon that helps us understand the whole race better?”
“Oh, I’m not arguing with you, Feylin. And I did volunteer to help. But I’m afraid I can’t look at it quite as calmly as you can.”
“I think I know why,” Maarken said. “This really isn’t any different from carving up any animal we use as food. But Sioned and I have touched dragon colors. The only other creatures we can do that with are humans. And that’s what makes it different.”
By late afternoon they were finished, and flasks of perfumed oil were poured over the dismembered corpse. Sioned and Maarken together summoned Fire to set the remains alight, and the flames brought forth a spicy-sweet odor. The scribes and workers returned gratefully to Sky-bowl, leaving Sioned, Feylin, and Maarken to watch the dragon burn.
When the mating howls split the sky, all three jumped. Feylin, whose respect for dragons included a healthy fear of them, turned white; Sioned took her arm in support. “They’re only mating. You’ve heard that before.” “And it affects me the same way every time. It’s ridiculous,” she said nervously. “I can study them, count them, watch them—even cut one up to find out how he works. But something about their voices twists me up inside.” She gave another start and flinched as a flight of three-year-olds burst over the southern rim of the crater. “ Sweet Goddess!”
Sioned’s eye was caught instantly by the little reddish female with golden underwings, the dragon she had attempted to touch before. The group had come back to the lake for another drink; neither the mating cries nor the burning corpse seemed to affect them at all. They were not old enough to comprehend or be interested in the former, and as for the latter—it was almost as if with his death, the dragon sire had been erased from their memories. Knowing she was being fanciful by projecting human emotion onto dragons, Sioned still found it incredibly sad.
Her promise to Rohan flickered across her mind and she glanced at Maarken. He returned her gaze specula-lively, then nodded. Sioned made certain Feylin was all right, then went to her nephew.
“Back me up,” was all she said, and at once felt the powerful sun-weaving of a trained, disciplined faradhi mind. His colors of ruby, amber, and diamond created a strong spectrum with her own emerald, sapphire, amber, and onyx, and the separate patterns complemented each other, her own dominant as she’d asked.
But the brilliance of their colors was as nothing to the swirling hues into which Sioned was abruptly plunged with her first tentative brush against the dragon. Rainbows rioted in her mind and she reeled with the impact, each color repeated in hundreds of shades, each carrying a sound, a vision, an impression or memory or instinct-far too much for her to grasp, let alone assimilate into recognizable form. The sheer glut of colors staggered her; the information attached to them nearly shattered her mind. Vaguely, through the rainbow storm, she sensed the dragon’s withdrawal from her. Then she fainted.
“Sioned!” Maarken flung his arms around her to keep her upright, terrified by her ashen cheeks and lolling head. Well-honed skills kept her colors in strict pattern, retrieved and reformed before she fainted; there was no danger of her becoming shadow-lost. But this blank unconsciousness unnerved him.
Shaking and white-faced, Feylin helped him lower her to the ground. “Maarken, what the hell happened?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see anything or touch the dragon myself—I don’t know what she saw or felt.” He cupped her head in one hand, slapped her cheeks gently with the other. “Sioned!”
“It can’t be too bad, can it? She didn’t scream like last time. Neither did the dragon.” She unhooked a waterskin from her belt—that item Desert dwellers never forgot to carry no matter where they were—and made Sioned drink. The princess choked slightly, but other than a reflexive swallow she showed no signs of awakening.
Maarken saw a quick shadow and looked up. The other dragons had flown, but the reddish female remained, her underwings gleaming as she circled over the pyre. She called out, a soft whine of distress, and darted down for a closer look before rising to fly tight circles above them, whimpering.
“She’s worried about Sioned,” Feylin whispered. “Is that possible?”
Sioned stirred at last, shifting groggily. She made a vague warding-off gesture with one hand, then opened her eyes.
“How do you feel?” Maarken asked anxiously.
“I have a headache that goes clear down to my feet. Maarken—“
“You don’t remember, do you?”
“Is there something I ought to?” She frowned.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t close enough with you to see it myself. But you touched that dragon, Sioned. You must have.”
“I did?” She sat up and hugged her knees to her chest. “I remember wanting to, and asking you to back me up, but after that—“
“I think we’d better get you to the keep and into bed,” Feylin told her.
Sioned groaned as they helped her to stand. “Goddess! I feel as if I’ve been out in the Long Sand through a whole autumn’s worth of storms.” She looked up suddenly as the dragon called out. “She’s still here!”
They watched the dragon fly low over the lake, sweeping close enough to approach Sioned and look on her with wide, fine dark eyes. She trumpeted again, a single silvery note that echoed around the crater as she flew off into the Desert.
Feylin exchanged glances with Maarken and said, “I heard it in her voice.”
He nodded. “I think I even saw it in her eyes. She’s glad Sioned’s all right, and now she can go back to the others.” He regarded his aunt with thoughtful eyes.
“Whatever happened between you, I’d say you’ve made a friend.”