SINTARA HAD MOVED far up the hillside. From her vantage, she could look out over the wide, sloping meadow before her. Kelsingra. They had returned. The tall spire of the map tower and the gleaming stone roofs of the city beckoned to her from the other side of the deep, swift river.
Earlier today, she had watched Heeby hunting. She’d seen the red dragon open her wings and spring almost effortlessly into the air. Her wings had beat hard for a moment, and then she’d caught the motion of the air over the river and lifted. In a few moments she had dwindled to the size of a crow, and then to a hunting hawk. Heeby had circled high over the city, and Sintara had watched her and remembered in agony exactly how it felt, how you cupped your wings just so to capture a rising wall of warmer air, and how you spilled wind from your wings to go sliding down the sky.
She remembered. She knew. She was a dragon, a ruler of the Three Realms, a queen of earth and sky and water. Kelsingra with its wells of sweet silver was just across the river. A real dragon would simply open her wings and fly there.
She had opened her wings and felt the sun on them, felt them warming in the kiss of light. She moved them slightly and felt the wind they made. She recalled how Thymara had mocked and defied her, calling her lazy, even stupid. She recalled all of Heeby’s foolish early efforts at flights. How ungainly she had looked, how clumsy as over and over again she had tried to fly and failed. She’d had no pride, no dignity at all.