He learned much of what he needed to know about the humans there his first summer. Their lives were organized around agriculture, growing kern in their high, sunny plateau. Something about the soil and the dry summers, bright sun punctuated by heavy rain at either end of the season, lent itself to their strange-sheathed crop. There were planting festivals and rain ceremonies and harvest celebrations and winter pod picking for their other staple, a rather reddish, bulbous berry that made decent enough wine but tasted eye-crossingly sweet, at least to a dragon.
The kern kings traded dragonscale for kern. The dragonscale they used at human or dwarvish trading houses to buy finery for themselves, or gold. These humans had a lust for gold that matched that of dragons. They wore it, wove it into their hair, girdled themselves in it, decorated their bedchambers with it, ate off it, and even, the Copper suspected, voided their bowels into it if they could afford the pots.
The mated dragons, when they weren’t talking commerce, talked only of hunting. They were friends with the great condors of the mountains, who kept them abreast of conditions of the herds, and they hunted deer, mountain goats, sheep with vast, twisted horns, elk, even woodland sloths and the taut-bodied big cats that preyed on all the above.
Whenever their presence wasn’t required at some kern-king ceremony, they were off after game.
The kern kings had no enemies that could get at them on their mountain-girded plateau, though sometimes their young warriors descended the slopes to raid the fringes of what the Copper learned were the old southern borderlands of the Hypatian Empire, dragging off females and stealing horses, more for sport than bloodlust.
A single, lonely Firemaid guarded the dragon lair and the entrance to the lower world. Her name was Angalia, and she took Nilrasha to be her own long-awaited replacement. She sniffed Nilrasha’s back every morning for signs of wing growth.
“The air’s too thin up here. I’m not a high-altitude dragon; never was,” Angalia complained whenever the Copper visited. Constantly. “My hearts beat so. I’ll burst my hearts and be dead within a year. Mark my words!”
But Nilrasha had it worse. She had to live at the entrance to the Lower World with Angalia, risking burst ears at the endless complaints.
He had a nice chamber in the Upholder palace temple, filled with square carvings of grimacing faces of the kern kings. The men had built a sort of temple to their dragon gods on a spur of one of the mountains surrounding their plateau, over the mouth of the gate to the Lower World. Like all the other constructs on the mountain-girded land, it was done in what the FeLissaraths styled the “Anaean Royal.” Meaning great, heavy square blocks of limestone, elaborately carved, piled on other great, heavy square blocks. They also liked stone globes, smooth and undecorated as turtle eggs. Sometimes the builders placed them on the great, heavy square blocks. But for some reason, perhaps religious prohibition, they never put great, heavy square blocks atop the globes, unless the globes were holding up a roof. Then it was allowed.
“Hominid frippery,” the Copper said to himself, extracting a crunchy beetle from a crevice with his tongue.
So much for the dwelling place of the Anaean royal families’ god allies. Almost every morning the Copper arose to cool, fresh air and bright yellow light. When there was no water in the raincatchers he had a short walk to a melting glacier and tasted runoff from ice older than any dragon and most legends he knew.
In his opinion, his rooms here were as fine as the Tyr’s in the Lavadome, and a good deal sunnier.
A long, straight flight of many scores of scores of scores of stairs led down the mountainside to the dragon-keepers, special priests of the kern kings who offered up pigs and cattle whenever FeLissarath and his mate didn’t have fresh game—a rarity. It was hard to stand at the top of that stone ramp and not feel part of a higher world. He wondered how FeLissarath and his mate seemed such normal, earthy dragons. It would be easy to get delusions of godhood with such a vista.
The Copper made such improvements as he could to the long road back to the Lavadome. After studying how the kern kings sent messages by relay runners carrying hollow, gold-dipped bones with scrolls carried inside, he copied the practice.
He colonized a few caves with bats, and taught the Drakwatch and Firemaids to use them as messengers in return for either draft-animal blood or a taste of dragon vintage. Some of them found the practice creepy, but others enjoyed the tickle of a bat tongue and the euphoric light-headedness and the strangely pleasant dreams that followed. In any case, they reserved dragonblood for the most intelligent of the messenger bats who could be relied upon to carry either a verbal message or a written one to the right post.
At this remote Uphold, they got their news rarely and in large, sometimes confused batches. SiDrakkon’s thin little mate died of a stomach disorder. The incense trade so vital to peace between male dragons continued to leap in price with barbarian attacks on the trade routes in the east, and Nivom had opened his wings and begun instituting contests between the Drakwatch and the Firemaidens, in which they fought mock battles for hills and caves.
So the years passed and the Copper’s horns came in and the bulges on his back rose. He looked forward to his wings emerging, just because there was so little going on in the plateau, with its unvarying seasonal routines and cool, sunny weather. Nilrasha, perhaps a year behind in her own wing growth, would rub fats into the stretched skin to soothe it. They became translucent, and FeLissarath judged them ready to pop.
“You should return to the Lavadome, Rugaard, so that there can be a proper celebration. You’re in the Imperial line, you know,” FeLissarath said one sunset as the plateau turned to gold and orange.
“Yes, take this winter off and return. Take poor Nilrasha with you,” FeLissarath’s mate added, looking at Nilrasha, who sometimes went stalking on the mountain slopes with the older dragon-dame, and therefore was frequently invited to dinner. “She’s a lively young thing. A great huntress, too. It’s a deprivation to be up here, away from society.”
“I do have friends I’d like to see. But will you be all right on your own?”“You’ve learned little these four years to ask a question like that. Nothing ever happens in Anaea.”
“All the same, I’d like to stay here. I’m not much of a drake for parties.”
Oddly enough, something did happen in Anaea that very night.
It began with being woken by Nilrasha. “Rugaard, there’s a wounded dragon come up from the Lower Road. He asks to speak to you in private. He’s just ouside.”
Rather than being frightened, the Copper was almost delighted to hear it, after the first startle of being prodded from a deep sleep, of course. “Send him in.”
A silver-white dragon, his sii and saa wrapped in rags to enable him to move more quietly on the stones of the palace, mud smeared all over his wings, and his face wrapped in bloody bandaging, stepped in.
He glared at Nilrasha.
“A moment, please, Ora,” the Copper said. The visitor’s wild eye looked panicked.
NiVom tore off the false bandage covering his torn lip as soon as she left. “The blood is from a donkey,” NiVom said.
“NiVom! What in the two worlds—” The Copper at least had wits to pronounce his adult name correctly.
“I’m a fugitive, Rugaard. Hunted. Branded a coward.”
The Copper would have sputtered questions until the bats returned, but instead he listened.
“It’s all Tighlia’s doing, you know. She’s room for only one dragon in her heart, her brother. She aims to make him Tyr, and she’s destroying any dragon that stands in her way. First AgGriffopse. Then DharSii. Now me.”
“Have some wine. Some food.” The Copper looked in on Rhea, who had a comfortable anteroom. “Rhea, get the leftovers from last night’s dinner. Hurry, but do it quietly.” He worked a small cask and poured some wine into a bowl, and NiVom took a deep draft.
“Spirits, that’s good,” NiVom said. “Oh, Rugaard, I’ve been such a fool. I was set to be mated to Imfamnia, and now I suspect she’s lost to me. I’ve been blinder than any of your bats in the sun. Imfamnia, gone. As though she’d care; she’ll fly with SiDrakkon if its his destiny to be Tyr.”
“How did this come about?”
“Let me see. Five, no, seven days ago—can it be only a week?—seven days ago Imfamnia threw herself down before the Tyr and Tighlia, covered with bites and scratches, claiming I’d done it to her during an argument. She’s never had so much as a cross word from me! I was brought before the Tyr, and I challenged her word, and Tighlia worked herself up into a fury and named SiDrakkon’s son SiBayereth Imfamnia’s champion.”
“I remember SiBayereth. He seemed a decent sort.”
“He’s obsessed with dueling ever since his wings came in. He lives for the pit. He’s my size and half again my weight, and has a very long neck and tail. I’d never live close.”
“So you fled?”
“No, like a fool I took the challenge. My blood was up, you see? The accusations—I couldn’t think. Then Tighlia—”