Auron wondered if he could turn her sympathy to his advantage. He had watched hominids enough to know that for some reason they shook their heads side-to-side to indicate negation, up-and-down for agreement. Dragons sensibly closed or opened their nostrils. He shook his head up-and-down.
Her eye widened, and then she laughed. It was a pleasant sound; he liked it despite himself. “I wonder if you’d speak,” she mused. “I don’t think I’d better give you the chance. I’m childish-foolish, but I’m no fool.
“I know something of dragons, little one. I used to be as fresh and little as you, when I had flowers in my spring hair. Our . . . what would the word be in Parl . . . elders, our frost-haired elders thought me bright, so I was apprenticed to a great . . . student-nature, no, student of nature. Her name was Ilsebreadth. She knew everything there was to know about wild creatures. She could tell what kind of winter we’d have by where the squirrels would hide their acorns, or tell if a pine tree was healthy by smelling the sap. She spoke to bears and owls about their hunts.”
At the mention of hunting, Auron perked up a little. Then he remembered his hunts with Wistala, and his hearts ached at the loss.
“The frost filled her hair as I grew up, but there was still one great mystery: dragons. She became obsessed with finding an ancient dragon before she had to put down roots for the last age. She sought one of the first sons lingering from the days of your kind’s dominance. Yes, I know, dragons were here before the paran, the blighters, or their descendants, the naran—the speaking-people.”
Auron wished he’d been born into a time before the naran. Why did the Great Sprits have to curse the earth with them? Squabbling fools.
“Dragons make art, dragons tell stories, all without the written word. Your kind’s history goes far before and beyond that, into the mists of time. What secrets you must know!”
Auron followed her story with no small amount of difficulty; she had to pause to form words, as if she was used to thinking of her tale but not speaking it. Especially not in Parl. There were no mind-pictures, either, but that could not be expected from an elf. Even—and Auron admitted this only with his hatchling teeth rubbing against each other in displeasure—a kindly elf.
The elf tucked her long lower limbs under herself to sit beside him. Again Auron found the gesture almost dragonlike.
“She decided to hunt NooMoahk, the black. Not hunt to kill, but hunt to meet. It was a long hunt, and we picked up enough dragon lore for a shelf of books. After much travel, we came upon a caravan trader who had sold a warrior black dragon scales for a shield and armor. After a good deal of bargaining, he agreed to take us to the dragon’s hold. We had to cross a desert, the hardest journey of my life. Ilsebreadth sickened and died on the trip, but I pressed on after; I didn’t want her dream to die with her.
“I found him, but was betrayed by the trader. He wanted to use me, then hand me over to the dragon—for more scales, I suppose. I got away only after an ugly fight with his men, which left me with this memento,” she said, turning the corner of her mouth up on the scarred side of her face and revealing hair the fiery colors of a fall forest. The leaves growing in her locks had a dry smell, like bark peeling from a birch.
“I found NooMoahk, easy as berry picking. Would you believe I came face-to-face with the greatest of all blacks? A slender twig of a youth before a dark hurricane? He would have eaten me, I’m sure, but I’d picked up a strange tidbit while writing Ilsebreadth’s words for her records. I knew you dragons love music. I had a poor voice for an elf, but I sang him a sea song:
Agone, away, abreast the endless sea
To circle in my journeys,
And then come home to thee.
“That was one of the verses. A silly song that rose and fell like the waves. But he liked it. He cocked his head, like a dog hearing a whistle—”
How Father would snort if he heard that, Auron thought.
“—and said a word to me. In my own tongue, the sea tongue, even: more. And I gave him more. He was old, isolated, lonely. I think he liked having someone to talk to, even if it wasn’t another dragon. In his turn, he told me some fine stories. Kings forgotten even by their worn-down coin, empires turned to dust, terrible battles that would live forever, if only someone could remember who fought or why.”
Auron flexed his claws inside the leather mittens. Did elves always talk this much? Hazeleye was worse than his sisters.
“Perhaps he was too old, for I read to him some of our inscriptions of dragon lore. He corrected the work of Ilsebreadth, filled in gaps. He had a dream of understanding between dragons and people. He said it had been so, once. But he let slip the great weakness of dragons without even knowing it.”
Hmmpfh, Auron thought. Dragons have many weaknesses, but no great one. Wouldn’t Mother have mentioned it so he could be on his guard?Wait, another part of him said. The patient part, that had been memorizing her story, in case he could glean some advantage from the rows of words. Father had said that the dragons were dwindling in number. Had some flaw been discovered in the masterwork of the Great Spirits? A fatal flaw?
She leaned closer. “Would you like to know the great weakness, little one? The chink in the armor? I put it in the book, but it was burned by those barbarian fools years ago.”
The cargo hatch came open, and the ship’s armorer descended with chain wrapped across his shoulders and tools. Hazeleye stood, as if ashamed to be caught next to him.
“You want the beasts chained?” the armorer said. Auron felt himself demoted from being someone to be talked to, to just a beast.
“Well chained,” Hazeleye said. “They’ll be healthier if they can move a little. I want my investment to pay off.”
Being chained was better than being bound and caged. The bands were taken from his snout, the little brass emblem no longer waved at him from the other side of his nose. The collars around his neck and under his arms weighed on him. But he could move.
At first it was excruciating. When he first moved his foreleg after the armorer unhooked it, his sii and saa in chain-and-leather bags fixed by a bracelet, the agony of it brought a squeal from his still-closed mouth. He rolled on his back and over again at the pain. It blinded, it ran along his skeleton like a bolt of lighting. As it faded, he felt himself at the end of the chain he had thrashed to its limit, just a leg-length from the wall.
“Secure enough,” the armorer said. “Watch his claws—I don’t think he can get through the mail in there, but there’s no telling what a dragon can do in time. You’d be better off killing him and feeding him to the others, though. A gray’s worthless.”
Hazeleye said nothing.
Auron watched him fix the other two hatchlings. The littlest one hardly put up a fight; it just lay limp in its bonds after one wiggle. The green must not have been as long confined. She struggled to her feet before crashing to the deck.
The armorer returned to Auron, and jerked the eyebolts attaching the twin collars to the wall. He nodded in satisfaction and picked up his tools.
Alone again with Hazeleye, Auron stared at her, moving his limbs in their sockets. He stretched and it felt good. He used his other eye to look at the eyebolts, remembering how the armorer had used a tool like a blunt knife to drive the claw-thick screws into the wood. Man and his ingenious tools! He’d driven metal claws into wood with no more effort than a mother dragon would use to roll an egg in the nest.
The fixture was worth a closer look.
Little enough light came into the hold, but Auron could tell it was night. Hazeleye slumbered in the reek of the oil lamps warming the egg chest. Her hair had transformed to a dried mass of seaweeds. A few bulbs hung amid the tresses.
Auron’s nose hurt, but this time it wasn’t from a feeding. After two false starts, he learned how to use his egg horn to turn the screws holding the eyebolts in the wood. He unscrewed one too far, and it clattered to the floor. The elf moved in her sleep, but she did not open her eyes.
He had the rest almost out of the wood. One good pull, and he would be free!
The hatchling female watched him. She strained against her bonds once, rattling the chains. He glared at her, trying his best to think “Keep quiet!” to her incommunicative mind.
“You are clever, little one,” the elf said from her hanging bed.
Auron spun, ready to throw himself against her. He wouldn’t be caged again; he’d impale himself on whatever weapon she drew before they could do that to him. She made no move to rise. She lay there, spinning a golden coin between thumb and forefinger. On it Auron saw the insignia of the faceless man spread-eagled in his circle.
She tossed the coin into a bucket holding some plates and remains of dinner. “Go on. I won’t stop you. One thing, though, when you jump off the ship, be sure to head east. We’re out of sight of shore. Do you know how to find east?”
Auron sniffed the air about her, searching for a fear-smell but finding only elf and bilge, then nodded his head hominid fashion, up-and-down.
“Remember, little gray dragon, that I let you go, and told you where to swim. If there’s any honor in you, someday you’ll repay the favor.”