City of Dragons

“Bring me your dragon man, and you will have my daughter.”

Ellik took a deep breath and abruptly bowed low, touching his forehead to the floor.

The Duke nodded to himself. The man was as good as a son to him. And like a son, if his loyalty proved false, he could kill him. His smile deepened.

Epilogue

HOMEWARD BOUND

Icefyre liked hunting the rough hills that bordered the desert. He was adept at following the contours of the land in flight. He glided close to the ground, sometimes barely skimming the pungent gray-green brush that cloaked the rocky foothills. When his black wings moved, it was in deceptively lazy, powerful downstrokes. He was as silent as the shadow that floated over the uneven terrain below him.

His was an excellent hunting technique. The two dragons had been here since spring, and the large game animals that had once had no fear of the sky had learned to keep a wary watch overhead now. Icefyre’s tactic carried him soundlessly over low rises. He fell on creatures basking in noon sunlight in the sheltered canyons before they knew he was there.

It did not work as well for Tintaglia. She was smaller and still practicing the sort of flight skills that Icefyre had mastered hundreds of years ago. Even before he had been trapped in ice for an extended hibernation, he had been an old dragon. Now he was ancient beyond belief, the sole surviving creature who could recall the time of the Elderlings and the civilization the two races had built together. He recalled, too, the cataclysmic eruptions and the wild disorder that had ended those days. Humans and Elderlings had died or fled. He’d seen the scattered fragments of the dragon population dwindle and die off.

To Tintaglia’s frustration, the black dragon spoke little of those days. She herself had only shadowy memories of her serpent-self creating a case before her metamorphosis into dragon. But she recalled too well how she had stirred to awareness inside her cocoon, trapped in a buried city, denied the sunlight she needed to hatch. Elderlings had put her there, she suspected. They had dragged her case and others of her generation into a solarium to shelter them from falling ash. That rescue attempt had become her doom when falling ash buried the city. She had no idea how long she had been imprisoned in her case in lonely darkness. When the humans had first discovered the room where she and her fellows were trapped, their only thought had been to salvage the dragon cases as “wizardwood” for the building of ships that would be impervious to the Rain Wild River’s acid floods. It was not until first Reyn and then Selden had come to her that she had been freed to light and life.

Selden. She missed her little singer. How he could flatter and praise, his clear voice as pleasing as his tickling words that glorified her. But she had sent him away, impressing on him that he should travel in search of tidings of other dragon populations. At the time, she had been hopeful that the late hatch of elderly serpents could yield viable dragons. She had not been willing to believe that all dragons everywhere had died out. So she had sent Selden off, and he had gone with a willing heart, to do not just her bidding but to also seek allies for Bingtown in their never-ending war with Chalced.

In the years since then her time with Icefyre had cured her of any optimism. They were the only true dragons left in the world, and thus he was her mate, no matter how unsuitable she found him. She wondered again what had become of Selden. Was he dead, or just beyond the reach of her thoughts? Not that it really mattered. Humans, even humans transformed by dragons into Elderlings, did not live all that long. It was scarcely worth the effort to befriend them.

She caught a whiff of the antelope as Icefyre dived on them. They were a small herd, only five or six beasts, dozing in the trapped warmth of the winter sun. As Icefyre fell on them, they scattered. He crushed two beneath his outstretched talons, leaving Tintaglia to pursue the others.

It was harder than it should have been. The festering arrow just under her left wing made every flap of her wings a torment. The narrow arroyos of the rocky hillside offered the game beasts shelter in spaces too narrow for a dragon to navigate. But one foolish creature broke free of the others and fled uphill and onto the ridgeline. She pursued him and in a frantic dive knocked him to the earth before he could reach the next gully. Her front talons tore him as she seized him and clutched him to the keel of her chest. He struggled briefly, spattering her with his warm blood before going limp in her clutches. She did not delay but tore into the warm meat. It was her first kill of the day and she was famished.

The antelope was not a large creature, and it was winter lean. Soon there was nothing left of it, not a skull or the hooves; only sticky blood on the rocky earth. It did not fill her, but nonetheless she felt herself sinking into somnolence as soon as she had finished eating.

Tintaglia stretched out and closed her eyes. Then she shifted and tried a different position. It was worse. It was not the stony ground that discomforted her, but the broken shaft and the arrow head and the infection that surrounded it. She lifted her wing and craned her neck to sniff at it, then snorted. Bad. Rotting meat smell. The claws on her forepaws were too large to be of any use; clawing at it only made it hurt more. And the end of the broken arrow shaft was no longer even visible. She feared that instead of being pushed out of her body by the infection, the missile was actually digging in deeper.

Icefyre landed nearby in a rush of dust from the braking beat of his wings. We should hunt more.

I want to sleep.

He lifted his head and snuffed the air. That arrow festers. You should pull it out.

I’ve tried. I can’t.

He leaned closer, snuffing at her injury, and she allowed it, but not graciously. Of old, sometimes humans used poisoned weapons against us. They would dip the heads of their lances in filth before they tried to stab us. They knew that they could seldom kill us outright but that a lingering infection might kill a dragon.

She flinched away from his scrutiny and immediately craned her neck to inspect the wound. Do you think this arrow was poisoned?

Impossible to tell. He seemed very calm about it. Do you wish to hunt again?

What did they do, the dragons with poisoned injuries?

They died. Some of them. Sometimes they went to the Elderling healers for aid. Little human hands can sometimes be useful in cleaning a wound. The silver water could cure many ills. I am going hunting. Are you coming?

Do you think I should go back to the Rain Wilds and try to find my Elderlings? Malta and Reyn?

The black dragon looked at her for a time. Whatever thoughts he had, he was not sharing with her. When he spoke, it was only to say, I do not think I could trust a human again. Even an Elderling.

I might trust them. If I had to. Malta and Reyn have both served me before; they would serve me again, I think.

Again, he was quiet. Then he said, The silver well of Kelsingra. It was a rare and wondrous thing and to drink from it brought dragons great strength. Sometimes it was used for healing. You could go there, to Kelsingra.

I’ve been to Kelsingra. The well is no more. The city was empty and dead, with dust blowing through the streets. And when I went to the well, the windlass had fallen to ruin. Even if there had been Elderlings there at that moment, they could not have drawn the silver for me. She did not speak of how angry it had made her; of how she had trampled and broken what remained of the windlass and shoved it down the fruitless well.

Kelsingra. Icefyre spoke the word regretfully. It was a place of wonder, once. If, as you say, it is abandoned and empty, then that is a loss. I recall it as a place of poets chanting