Kalo twitched as if struck by an arrow. Sintara felt the big dragon stiffen, sensed how his poison sacs suddenly swelled. A few moments ago, she had thought that resting between the two large males had been a place of safety. Now she perceived that she was in the thick of the danger, trapped between Sestican and Mercor. Kalo lifted his head high and glared down on Mercor. If he spat acid now, Mercor would be helpless to avoid it. And she would also be caught in the spray. She hunched her shoulders uselessly.
But Kalo spoke rather than exhaled poison. “Do not speak to me, Mercor. You know nothing of what I think or feel.”
“Don’t I? I know more of you than you recall yourself, Kalo.” Mercor suddenly threw his head back and bellowed. “I know you all! All of you! And I mourn what you are because I remember what you were and I know what you were meant to be!”
“Quiet! We’re trying to sleep!” This was no bellow of an outraged dragon, but the shrill cry of a frustrated human. Kalo turned his head toward the source of the sound and gave a roar of fury. Sestican, Ranculos, and Mercor suddenly echoed him. When that blast of sound died away, a few of the dimmer dragons on the edge of the herd imitated it.
“You be silent!” Kalo trumpeted up at the human dwellings. “Dragons speak when they wish to speak! You have no control over us!”
“Ah, but they do,” Mercor said quietly. The very softness of his words seemed to bring all attention to him.
Kalo turned his head sharply. “You, perhaps, are controlled by humans. I am not.”
“You do not, then, eat when they feed you? You do not remain here, where they have corralled us? You do not accept the future they plan for us, that we will remain here, dependent upon them, until we slowly die off and stop being a nuisance to them?”
Sintara found that, against her will, she was listening raptly to his words. They were frightening and challenging at the same time. When his voice stopped, the quieter sounds of the evening flowed in. She listened to the river lapping at the muddy shore, to the distant noises of humans and birds settling in the trees for the night, and to the sounds of dragons breathing. “What should we do then?” she heard herself ask.
All heads turned toward her. She did not look at anyone except Mercor. The night had stolen the colors from his scales, but she could make out his gleaming black eyes. “We should leave,” he said quietly. “We should leave here and try to find our way to Kelsingra. Or to anywhere that is better than this.”
“How?” Sestican abruptly demanded. “Shall we knock down the trees that hem us in? Humans can slip between their trunks and find pathways through the swamp. But if you have not noticed, we are slightly larger than humans. Gresok went blundering off, going not where he willed but only where the trees would permit him passage. There is no escape that way, only swamp and dimness and starvation. And poorly fed as we are, at least the humans bring us something to eat each day. If we left here, we’d starve.”
“There’s no need for us to starve at all. We should eat the humans,” someone on the edge of the herd suggested.
“Be quiet if you cannot make sense,” Sestican retorted. “If we eat the humans, once they are gone, we are still trapped here, with no food.”
“They want us to leave.” Kalo spoke suddenly, startling everyone.
“Who does?” Mercor demanded.
“The humans. Their Rain Wild Council sent a man to speak. One of the feeders asked me to talk with him. He told the Council man that I am the biggest of the dragons and therefore the leader. So he spoke to me. He wanted to know if I knew when or even if Tintaglia would return. I told him I did not. Then he said that they were very upset that someone had eaten a corpse out of the river, and that someone else had chased a worker down into the tunnels that go to the buried city. And he said they were running out of ways to feed us. He said that his hunters have hunted out all the large meat for miles around, and that the fish runs are nearly over for the year. He said the Council wishes us to call Tintaglia, to let her know that the Council demands that she return to help them solve this difficulty.”
In the darkness, several of the dragons snorted with contempt for such foolishness.
Mercor spoke with disdain. “Call Tintaglia. As if she would respond to us. Kalo, why did you not speak of this before?”
“They told me nothing that we do not all know already. Why bother repeating it? They are the ones who refuse to accept what they already know. Tintaglia’s not coming back,” Kalo confirmed bitterly. “She has no reason to. She has found a mate. Together they are free to fly and hunt wherever they will. In a decade or two, when her time is ripe, she will lay her eggs and when they hatch, there will be a new generation of serpents growing. She has no need of us any longer. She only helped us stay alive because we were her last resort. And now we are not. If Tintaglia had had a mate at the time we emerged from our cases, she would have despised us. She knows as well as we all do that we are not fit to live.”
