He turned and gave an impatient wriggle that made him a boy again. “Please, Alise, ma’am, not now! Later today, after Heeby hunts and kills and eats and sleeps, when she wakes up, I’ll ask her to take you over there. Then you can see it for yourself and write it down and draw it or whatever. But it’s been so long since I had time with my friends, and I’ve been lonely.”
“What?”
“I’ve been by myself for so long! I really missed having people to talk to and…”
“No. No, not that! Heeby would take me across to Kelsingra? She would fly me there?”
He cocked his head at her. “Well, yes. She doesn’t swim that good, you know, so she’d have to fly you there. She doesn’t like to swim at all anymore. Doesn’t even like to wade out in the water since we got stuck in the river like that.”
“No, no, of course she doesn’t! Who could blame her? But—but she’d let me ride on her back? I could fly on a dragon’s back?”
“Yes, fly you to Kelsingra. And then you could see it all yourself and write it down as much as you want. I’m going to go down there now, with my friends. If you don’t mind, please, ma’am.”
“Oh, of course I don’t mind. Thank you, Rapskal. Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am, I’m sure.”
Then, as if fearing she would delay him again, he spun and ran. She watched him go, watched his long red-scaled legs flash in the sunlight. His clothing looked ridiculous on him now; the ragged trousers were too short for his Elderling legs, and the tattered shirt that had long ago lost its buttons flapped as he ran. His stride ate up the distance, and he shouted to his friends as he went. They turned and called to him in return, motioning to him to hurry and join them.
“Well, he has changed,” Leftrin observed, watching Rapskal run down the grassy hillside toward the river.
“NOT AS MUCH as you might think,” Alise replied as she turned to him. She was smiling, unaware of the ink smear by the side of her nose. He went to her, turned her face up to his and kissed her, and then tried to thumb the smear away but only succeeded in spreading it across her cheek. He laughed and showed her his inky thumb.
“Oh, no!” she cried and pulled a tattered kerchief from her pocket. She dabbed at her face. “Is it gone now?”
“Most of it,” he told her, taking her hand. Still such a fine lady she was, to worry about something as trivial as a bit of ink smeared on her face. He loved it. “I see you’ve added some more pages to your stack. Did you get his entire story, then?”
“I got a summary of what happened to him, and how they found us again.” She smiled and shook her head in wonder. “These youngsters take so much in stride. He sees nothing extraordinary in that he found a place where sheep or goats were running wild, near what had to have been an ancient Elderling dwelling. He doesn’t even consider what it means that he found land, dry land suitable for pasturing livestock, right there on the Rain Wild River. Do you know what that would mean to Trehaug or Cassarick? The possibility of raising meat! Perhaps even sheep for wool. And he shrugs it off as an interesting spot with a ‘get-warm’ place for his dragon.”
“Well. I’ll agree that is a big discovery, one that is likely to remain undiscovered again for almost as long as it has been.”
“Not when the dragons start flying,” she said, and then, to his shock, sprang at him and trapped him in a hug. “Leftrin, you’ll never guess what Rapskal told me! He said he’d ask Heeby to carry me across to the main part of Kelsingra, so I can walk the streets there as long as I want!”
He felt almost hurt at her excitement. “But I told you I’d get you there! There’s just no safe place for Tarman to put in along the bank right now. But maybe tomorrow, the barge could take us most of the way across, and then we could cover the rest of the distance in a small boat. And Tarman could come fetch us back in the afternoon. There’s just no way for him to stay there. Water’s too deep for the poles, and while he can move the barge against a slow current in shallow water, deep swift water is too hard for him.”
“Tomorrow! We could do that tomorrow? Together?”
Had she heard a word he’d said? “Yes, my dear. Of course we could. It’s only the barge that can’t safely put in on that shore. And in the future, when the docks there are restored, that won’t be a problem.”
She looked down at her remaining sheets of paper, and then lifted her last bottle of ink to the light. “Oh, Leftrin, what a fool I was! I documented every little thing all along the way, and now that we are here, on the outskirts of a major intact Elderling city, I’m down to a few sheets of paper and a few drops of ink!”