LITMIR.BIZ

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drink deeply of the silvery wells of Kelsingra. If I must die, I’d like to die as a dragon rather than whatever pathetic thing it is that we’ve become.’

      ‘And I’d like to sleep!’ Kalo snapped.

      ‘Sleep, then,’ Mercor replied quietly. ‘It’s good practice for death.’

      His final words seemed to end all conversation. The dragons shifted and settled and shifted again, each looking, Sintara thought, for a comfortable spot that no longer existed. It was not just that the cold, damp earth was uncomfortable; it was that Mercor’s words had destroyed the small amount of acceptance that the dragons had built for their situation. The anger and her stubborn endurance now seemed more like cowardice and resignation.

      Since Sintara had emerged from her case, she had known that everything in her life was wrong. Mercor’s proposal filled her thoughts with possibilities. Cautiously, unwilling to wake the others, she extended her puny wings, and stretched her neck to allow herself to groom them. Had they grown at all? Nightly she waited for dark and performed this senseless ritual. Night after night, she pretended to herself that they had grown and would continue to grow. They were laughable things, scarcely a third of the size they should have been. Flapping them scarcely stirred a breeze, let alone lifted her bulk off the ground. Carefully, quietly, she folded them back to her body.

      Wings made a dragon, she thought. Without wings, she could not hunt successfully, and could never hope to mate. Indignation roiled suddenly through her. Only a few weeks ago, stretched out to sleep in a small band of sunlight, she had been rudely awakened when Dortean had tried to mount her. She had wakened with a roar of outrage. He was an orange, with stumpy legs and a thin tail. That he had even attempted to mate with her was humiliation enough. He was stupid and pathetic. To awaken to his muddy legs straddling her back as he hunched hopefully at her was a disgusting contrast to all her stored memories of dragons mating in flight.

      Usually males fought for a female once she had indicated she was willing. And when the strongest male defeated his rivals and rose to join her in flight, he usually had to face the final challenge of dominating the female. Dragon queens did not mate with weaklings. Nor would a drake accept as a mate a docile female. Why mingle one’s bloodline with that of a bovine female, whose offspring might lack the true fire of a dragon? So to be straddled and humped by a dim-witted and deformed creature was an insult beyond bearing. She had rounded on him, snapping and slapping at him ineffectually with her dwarfed wings. At first, it had more inflamed than deterred him. He had continued to come at her, muddy-necked and with his small eyes blazing with febrile lust. He had tried to clutch her to him, but a desperate swipe of her tail had knocked him off his feet and into the ever-present mud. Misshapen as he was, he could not easily right himself, and she had stormed away from him, down to the river, to wash his muddy paw prints from her back and haunches. She wished the acid waters of the river could have washed the humiliation from her as well.

      She settled herself for sleep, but it did not come to her. Instead, memories flickered in her mind, filling her with sadness. Memories of flight, of mating, of the distant beaches where her ancestors had laid their eggs and then basked on the hot sand. Terrible longings replaced her sadness. ‘Kelsingra,’ she said softly to herself, and to her surprise, memories of the place flooded her. To describe it as a city by the river could not begin to do it justice. It had been a place constructed as much with the mind and heart as with stone and beam. The entire city had been laid out to reflect that both Elderling and dragon lived amicably there. The streets had been wide, the doors to the public buildings ample, and the art on those walls and around the fountains had celebrated the companionship enjoyed by both dragons and Elderlings.

      And there was something else, she recalled slowly. There was a well there, a well deeper than the river that bordered the city. A bucket dropped into its depths sank past ordinary water to a deeper river of a most extraordinary substance. Even a tiny amount of it was dangerously intoxicating for an Elderling and possibly fatal for a human. But dragons could drink from it. She closed her eyes and let the old memories of other dragons rise to the forefront of her mind. An Elderling woman, gowned in green and gold, turned the crank on the windlass of a well, and brought up a bucket full of gleaming silver drink. It was emptied into a polished trough, and another brought up, and another, until the vessel of polished stone brimmed with silver. In her dreams Sintara drank of it, the silver running through her veins, filling her heart with song and her mind with poetry. She allowed herself to float on the exhilarating memories leaving the reality of her present life behind.

      In this other remembered life, she was a queen dragon who preened herself, her silver-dripping muzzle spreading the fine sheen over her feathery scales. The green-and-gold robed woman rejoiced in letting her drink her fill of the silvery stuff. Together they left the well and strolled through the bright sunlit streets of the city. They passed lavish squares where fountains leapt and played, and brightly-robed denizens of the city greeted her with bows and curtsies. The market was in full voice, filled with the songs of minstrels and the dickering of merchants and customers. Scents of cooking meat and sacks of spices, rare perfumes and pungent herbs filled her nostrils. When she and her companion reached the river’s edge, they bid each other the fond farewells that old friends share. And then the queen dragon spread and limbered her gleaming scarlet wings. She crouched low on her powerful hindquarters and then sprang effortlessly into the air. Three, four, five beats of her wings and the wind off the river captured her and flung her aloft. She caught the current of warm summer air and soared on it.

      The crimson queen blinked transparent lids over her whirling gold eyes. The wind slapped her, but the blow changed to a caress as she banked into it and rode it ever higher. Warm summer sunlight kissed her back, and the wide world spread out below her. It was a golden land, a wide river valley that gave, on both sides, to rolling hills dotted with oak groves and then to steeper cliffs and finally craggy mountains. On the flat lands along the river, cultivated fields of grain alternated with pastures where kine and sheep grazed. A fine road of smooth black stone bordered one side of the river, with tributary paths and by-ways wandering out to the more rural districts. Beyond the settlements of humanity, in the foothills and the narrow valleys that threaded back into the mountains, game was plentiful.

      On the updraughts over the hills, other dragons soared, their glistening hides winking like jewels in the summer sunlight. One, a pale-green dragon with gold mottling on his haunches and shoulders, trumpeted to her. A thrill ran through her as she recognized her most recent mate. She answered his greeting, and saw him bank to meet her. As soon as he had committed to his turn, she mocked him with a shrill call and beat her own wings powerfully to gain altitude. He gave a deep cry of challenge to her in response and came after her.

      Rain. Cold sleeting rain suddenly spattered on her back with the force of a shower of pebbles. Sintara’s eyes flew open, the dream and the respite it had brought her shattered. In the next moment, the cold water was coursing down her flanks and sides. All around her in the darkness, dragons shifted and reluctantly huddled closer to one another. Sorrow vied with fury in her. ‘Kelsingra,’ she promised herself aloud. ‘Kelsingra.’

      In the darkness, the voices of the other dragons echoed hers.

       Day the 17th of the Greening Moon

       Year the 5th of the Independent Alliance of Traders

       From Erek, Keeper of the Birds, Bingtown to Detozi, Keeper of the Birds, Trehaug

       In the sealed scroll case, a letter from the Bingtown Traders’ Council to the Rain Wilds Traders’ Councils of Trehaug and Cassarick, suggesting that the Elderling Selden might go on a journey to discover the whereabouts of Tintaglia and persuade her to return and once more engage in the care of the young dragons.

       Detozi,

       I take up pen on behalf of your nephew Reyall to assure you that the Three Ships girl Karlin is indeed of good character, being industrious, dutiful to her parents, and able to both read and write. Although he is young to form such an attachment, I am willing to consent to my apprentice becoming engaged to her, so long as he pledges to me that they will not marry before he reaches his journeyman standing. I am pleased to give this testimonial to Karlin’s

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