“He’d rather be rooted with the family across the gorge there,” Ragwrist said. “But Hammar is a bitter man, I’d hate to have him take vengeance on a rooting elf.”

Wistala watched the procedure. Under Ragwrist’s direction they sat the body cross-legged, facing the river and bound up in canvas, then coated him with fresh clay, until he resembled a lumpy, three-sided pyramid. The crown of his head they left naked to the elements. His hair still sprouted there, if anything a little brighter green than before. “He’ll like it better on the south bank anyway, the sun catches the river mist, and he’ll have rainbows. And a better view of his bridge and lands.”

She asked Ragwrist about the custom as Dsossa smoothed the clay sides with her hands.

“The being you knew is dead, certainly. The dormant comes to fore after death,” Ragwrist said. “Some elf families bury their dead upright in a hole, others hollow out dead trees and place them in there. With us it is clay.”

“Us?” Wistala asked.

“Yes, Rainfall is my brother.”

She was shocked into speechlessness. “But you’ve only shown—”

“To elves family is an accident, Wistala. We are dutiful to our parents and try to pass on all we’ve gained from the world, in wisdom and wealth, to our children, but as to siblings or cousins or all that stuff humans and dwarves set such store by—” He shrugged. “Just as well, for I’ve seen feuds start between brothers over family obligation that make the Steppe Wars mild by comparison. It is sad to see another full-elf go. So few are born anymore these days.”

“It is the same with dragons,” Wistala said, as Dsossa kissed a new bud on Rainfall’s head. She planted a handful of Mossbell’s green lichen to keep him company. “Why is this? Are elves hunted, as well?”

“If I knew the cause, I’d be in a shell-house, looking out over the water gardens of Krakenoor. We have our enemies, true enough, but that is not the cause. They say the magic is being leeched out of the world. But what do poets know?”

Dsossa touched her at folded wing edge. “Wistala, I know Rainfall would want you to have this,” she said, drawing the blue battle sash from beneath her weather coat. “It is a relic of Hypatian Generalhood and should go to his daughter.”

The silk was so shiny and smooth, it was as though water had been woven into fabric. “I could not wear it. My scales would tear it to pieces.”

“Carry it, then. What has become of your harness and satchels?”

“We lost much baggage in Quarryness,” Ragwrist said.

“I will ask Brok to make you something more fitting,” Dsossa said.

“Will you come with us south?” Ragwrist said. “If the circus is to continue, we must back to the winter camp and replace our losses. Would that they’d just taken money instead of lives! Money is so easily replaced.”

Wistala almost snorted, never having heard money and easy so closely associated from Ragwrist. It took her a moment to answer the question, so conflicted were her thoughts.

Oh, the allure of familiar routine! Drained in body and brain, she could eat the wheel-size fish of the delta—

“I must think on this. I told you I would travel with you until I had my wings. But I must decide what purpose to put them to.”

Wistala’s wounds ceased bleeding whenever she moved the next day, though she suspected she still had an arrowhead in her, for if she struck her left sii out far forward it pained her.

Despite her fatigue she went across the bridge, and saw Jessup and some of his family rebuilding their brewery. She didn’t pause to talk—though she did touch the sign for luck, which caused one aged man sitting on the doorstep to touch a phantom mug to his lips—but instead went to Mossbell. There she took Stog in mouth, holding him as tenderly as a gamesman’s bird dog would carry a duck, and crossed Mossbell to the grove of Rainfall’s ancestry.

She had to keep her eyes averted from the ruin. Remarkably enough the two trees flanking the front door still lived, though their smaller limbs had been burned they were still green far above.

At the glade of Rainfall’s ancestors, she found the remains of days-old campfires and a garbage pile, and noted that the barbarians had carved rude symbols in the tree bark with their blades and left their filth all about the roots. Whether it was chance or purpose, she could not say.

She laid Stog beside Avalanche and gathered rocks, and over the course of the day built such a cairn that not even the strongest badger would be able to dig his way through. When it was done, she sat atop it and looked across the gorge. She could just see a brown dot, Rainfall’s cocoon, from which a tree would hopefully emerge.

Utterly sapped by the effort, she slept. She dreamed the trees were whispering to her, soft words made of wind and leaves.

Chapter 22

Even before the circus left, Wistala occupied the old troll cave overlooking the Whitewater River west of the bridge.

It wasn’t a bad cave. The outer length stank of gulls; the cave mouth looked like a running sore, so thick were their droppings down the rocks below.

Farther inside bats clung to the cave roof. They were oddly comforting, reminding her of the home cave. The more responsible part of her mind, which often spoke with Mother’s voice and silenced those bits interested in old Elvish poems, Hypatian architecture, or the taste of sweetwater fish mixed with gar-locque or other herbs—and occasionally considered what composition of length, curvature, thickness, and number might make the most pleasing array of horns on a dragon, told her that the bat droppings would hide dragon odor. Not that the dog had yet been bred who could negotiate the cliff and stick his wet nose in her temporary lair.

At night she would visit burned Mossbell, which now belonged, as all ruins must, she supposed, to the cats. Jessup told her that Old Yari-Tab was sharing an upstairs room with Widow Lessup at the Green Dragon Inn until a house could have its roof and doors repaired.

Jessup also mentioned that the thane’s men had already set up a bridge toll and expected their mead and meals free as part of “guarding” the ruined village.

The younger cats ran wild in the ruins and gardens, hunting the birds and mice and rabbits that came for the beans and vegetables, but scuttled away whenever she approached one—as if a rangy cat would make more than a snack!

She climbed the burnt bark of the doorway trees and wrapped herself around the trunk at their height and tried to ignore the yowls of mating cats below. She looked off toward the ridge that shielded Galahall’s rooftops from her vision, or the two hills, or the long lines of mountains disappearing north and south—she could just make out one of the peaks that bordered the Wheel of Fire dwarves to the north—and the Dragonblade, if he still lived among them.

“What dragon lives that doesn’t count his enemies on more than one limb?” she said to the wind, wishing she had the strength to at least burn Galahall. But Lessup told her that some years ago Hammar had Galahall’s roof re-covered with slate and his cornices and towers shingled with dragonscale, bought at great expense from the Wheel of Fire dwarves.

Wistala knew, too well, how they acquired dragonscale. How much was Mother’s green, or Father’s bronze?

“I’m but one dragon, what can I do? Assemble an army of dragons? From where? I’ve not seen another of my kind since—”

She could keep neither the promise to her Father nor her private oath of vengeance—the scroll of the family slaughtered now included Rainfall and probably Rayg, for the barbarians could make cruel sport of captives—without knowing another dragon. A dozen would be better, but as far as she knew numbers like that had not gathered since the days of Silverhigh. Even Auron, scaleless and thin, would have been a comfort as an ally with his sparks of inspirational courage.

She would have to improvise.

She almost chuckled, she’d been so long among hominids. At least Auron wasn’t keeping the rain off some grasping thane with delusions of kinghood. Did dragons naturally indulge in the humor of the funeral pyre, or had they developed it through dark years of murder and assassination? Poor Auron. She tried to imagine him curled around the tree opposite, probably complaining about his empty stomach or talking of the stars.

Where is his star again? Follow the Bowing Dragon. There. Susiron, always in your spot.

How sad that Auron never learned the joy of flight. She threw herself from the tree and opened her wings—she still wasn’t strong enough to take off without a drop from some kind of height, and flapped up into the clouds.

She was still weak. To regain her strength, she’d go far away, and work herself until she was as strong and single minded as the toughest barbarian. She would go north.

“It’s as good a place as any for a dragon,” Ragwrist said with a shrug.

She had heard the circus was going to leave the next morning and had sent a message through Jessup, and they met at Rainfall’s grave on the eve of departure. The clay pyramid now sprouted at the peak like a four-head cluster of broccoli. “But . . . brrr. Not for me. And the tribes up there, they’ll slit your throat out of pure meanness and take your skin for coat-shell.”