By the third beating the pain wasn’t so bad, just dull warmth with the occasional jolt, like a fading cramp.
He heard a heavy step and shifted his body, felt scales give way. His skin had stuck to the floor with his own dried blood.
He did his best to tuck his tail. It moved clumsily, stiff and heavy, unable to curl. He rolled an eye upward, saw a vague sort of shadow, a hominid huge and dark looming above. The hominid smelled of dogs.
The tall one grunted and turned away, almost as an afterthought giving him a swiping kick to the nose with the side of his heel. Pain shot across both eyes.
A warbling broke out, and another hominid fell to its—no, her—knees in front of him. Her flat face was scarred on one side, and she wore an eye patch. A light brown eye, with just a touch of Mother’s gold and a hint of green, looked into his.
“Oh, how they’ve hurt you, young one,” she said in intelligible Drakine. “Poor thing.”
His hearts woke to the words, the sympathy of her tone, even if the Drakine was nasal and harsh. She reached out and rubbed him between the eyes. If his snout hadn’t been tied shut, he would have brushed her with the tip of his tongue, so grateful was he for the sympathy.
“Worthless little scut,” the tall, broad, dog-scented man said in far worse Drakine. He lifted his boot again, and the Copper shut his eyes.
The one-eyed one interposed her body, and he noticed that she had leaves in her hair. That should mean something, he felt, but the aches in his body kept whatever vestigial memories he’d received in the egg deep and dark.
“The dwarves blame you for the crimes of your parents,” she whispered. “They’ve been hunting a very wicked pair, a bronze and his mate, who’ve betrayed and stolen from the dwarves. Dwarves will move mountains to reclaim their own, if you don’t know.”
She looked at her companion, off on the other side of the tunnel talking to the dwarves. One leaned on one of the iron rods they’d used to beat him. Another, more potbellied than the rest, pulled at his dim-glowing beard as the man spoke, making noncommittal hmpf sounds at the pauses. The tall man unrolled some kind of map, and the potbellied dwarf sneezed.
“I don’t hold with blaming offspring for the crimes of their parents, do you?”
He hesitated a moment before answering. Was it wise to talk to a…a…leaf-hair? Elf! So satisfied was he that he had finally summoned the name that he croaked, “No.”
The elf showed her teeth when he answered, even though the word was muffled by the binding about his snout.
The tall man came over and talked to the other in their unknown barking tongue. Casually, while he spoke, he brought his heel down on the Copper’s tail. The agony made him whimper and writhe, and the elf finally pushed him away.
She yelled at the others until they shrank away from her fury. If only Mother had been this protective of her own hatchling.
Then she knelt beside him again. “Little one, I’m here hunting hatchlings. The dwarves have a buyer willing to pay a princely sum for healthy males or females. That was your sire’s bargain with the dwarves, a set of eggs in exchange for much gold and silver. But they reneged and fled.
“I know dragons. I suspect you were driven out of the nest by the stronger male. Let me capture your brother and sisters, if any, and I’ll see to it you get enough copper—silver even—to stuff yourself for a year.”
She reached into a bag on her belt and extracted some coins and let him sniff. Even in his shattered and weakened state, the smell turned his mouth slick.
She put the coins back, looked at the others. The man approached, drawing a long sword, an evil carved blade extending from the wide-open jaws of a dragon.
“Some king and queen of dragons, this hatchling’s sires,” the man said. “If my babe disappeared from his home, I’d drag the sky down into the deepest corners of the earth to find him.”
The elf snarled something to him in their tongue.
He ignored her. “Just what you’d expect from dragons, leaving their hatchling in the hands of some vengeful dwarves. I’ll take his griff as a trophy and the dwarves can finish him.”
Another dwarf picked up an iron rod.
“No!” the elf protested in Drakine. The Copper would wonder, much later, how and where she learned the tongue. Even hate himself for not being suspicious at their use of Drakine in their arguments. “I can make a bargain with him. Even the dwarves will accept a bargain.”
She turned to him, caressed him under the chin. “Little one, you must let me help you. Show me to the egg shelf. We’ll take your brother and siblings. They’ll be well treated and prized by their eventual owner, and the feud between your parents and the dwarves will be over. You’ll have the egg shelf.”
The Copper didn’t care what they did with his brother. Or the chatterer—they could drag them both off, for all he cared. But Jizara…
“I have two sisters,” he said. “One goes. One stays. Her name is Jizara; she’s got the longer neck and tail. She stays.”
The elf’s eye widened and he saw her teeth again. She barked at the others. The potbellied dwarf lowered his face and stamped, then grunted something in return.
“Bargain!” she said, and untied his jaws.
The Copper felt better than he had since the first iron-rod blow to his tail. In all likelihood Mother and Father would kill these wretched, torturing dwarves. Even if they didn’t, the Gray Rat would be dragged off and have his snout tied. As for the chatterer, she could do with a bit of enforced quiet. He almost smiled at the thought.
Mother told me to overcome. She left out any details of how to do it.
After he told her how to find the home cave, she gave him a purse full of silver pieces to seal the bargain.
Chapter 5
Their plan had the virtue of simplicity. The dwarves would storm the egg shelf, restrain Mother with holding poles, and bind up his siblings.
They showed him the straps and poles and snout cage that would be used on Mother, yet worms of regret were wiggling at the back of his mind. But they gave him no chance to escape, keeping chains on him from the point where he swam through the underwater tunnel with a guideline for the dwarves to the moment tunnelers arrived to widen the cracks.
The dwarves lit their way with hissing firework torches that burned bright blue even underwater and created a minichamber from a polished shell as big as a dragon’s head. They cleverly fed the air bubble within the shell with a pair of leather hoses worked by bellows back at the scullery, constantly substituting good air for bad.
The trick, as the Copper saw it, was to have the dwarves make off with Auron and Wistala the chatterbox. If a few of the rod-carrying poghti got burned in the process, so much the better.
He thought he knew how.
All three of the other hatchlings explored and hunted within the egg cavern. Auron always scurried around over a wide range, Wistala had a few predictable perches where slugs were likely to pass, and Jizara kept closer to Mother and the garbage pile.
He could take care of Auron. Thanks to the dwarves’ meals and generous amounts of metal, his new scales were coming in thick and fast. He could tell the dwarves where to find Wistala, then immobilize Auron somewhere far from the egg shelf—but not too far to be heard—and scare him into trumpeting a warning. The dwarves would not be so foolish as to attack an alerted dragon, and at the first sign of alarm Wistala would certainly hide by Mother.
So pleased was he with the plan, he found himself giving off a slight prrum.
The day finally came. They timed it with Father leaving on a hunt.
He met the dwarves and the missing-eyed elf in the now dry chamber behind the waterfall. The dwarves had cleverly diverted the water into a metal tube that carried it off down the cavern of the scullery, save for a little leaking that dropped into a bubbling pool.
Tunnel dwarves were marking the wall behind the waterfall with chalk, muttering quietly to others who carried spikes and hammers.
Behind them warrior dwarves gathered with their holding poles and lines and straps, the potbellied dwarf at the front. Eye Patch, looking tired and smelling of wood smoke from the Upper World, stood off to one side, armed only with a small knife at her belt.
The Copper was rather relieved that the big, cruel man who liked to step on his broken tail was absent. There’d been some talk, he was told, about having a guard outside the cavern in the event Father returned unexpectedly. Perhaps he was in the Upper World. The farther off, the better. Once the bargain was struck, the dwarves had become elaborately polite to him, always bowing and tossing him greasy half-eaten joints of lamb or broken old bits of metal. But that man…Every time he stared down into the Copper’s eyes with those cold, unfeeling round eyes, his griff fluttered nervously.
The man meant to kill him. What was holding him back? He doubted even Eye Patch or the dwarves could stop him—even if they wanted to.
And he smelled like dogs. Dog smell awoke an ancient fear in the Copper. In any case, it was time for a few last words. He’d have the egg shelf and his sister at last, or be dead.
“I keep my bargain. Two hatchlings,” he said, using a rehearsed speech in the Dwarvish that Eye Patch—for he never learned her name—had taught him.