'She is well,' the sorceress said, nodding toward the middle of the floor. A very normal-looking human girl lay curled about herself. 'Just resting.'
'And L'yafv-Afvonn?'
'Destroyed. Or at least, fled to another dimension to avoid dissolution. One from which he cannot return, should he even desire to, for a time longer than the span of your lives, and a dozen generations of your descendants.'
The girl moaned, jackknifed. Zaranda was up at once, running to her side, gathering her into her arms.
'What happened?' the girl moaned. 'What did I do?'
'I don't know, honey,' Zaranda said, 'but it sure worked.'
'You have saved the balance of the world, which was in danger of being thrown hopelessly awry,' Nyadnar said, 'You have done well, my daughter.'
The others gaped at her. 'Yes,' the sorceress said, in a tone of voice like none Zaranda had ever heard from her. 'You are my child, Chenowyn.'
'She's a dragon?' Zaranda demanded. 'How could that be? She didn't so much as shimmer in Armenides's dead-magic room; she couldn't have held a polymorph spell. And she's no half-dragon. She's as human as I.'
'She is. She is also a dragon-as much as I.'
Chenowyn jumped to her feet. 'No! It's not true! I'm not a dragon! And stop talking about me like some… some thing that's not even here!'
Zaranda seized her hand. 'Chen, I love you, no matter who you are-and you will never be a thing to me. But you were a dragon. I saw.'
She straightened and faced the sorceress, one arm around the sobbing girl's shoulders. 'How can somebody be both fully human and fully dragon? And what kind of dragon? She's not like any I've ever heard of.'
'She is a new thing in the world,' Nyadnar said, 'A thousand years ago I noted an alarming fact: while you humans are small, short-lived, and weak, and we dragons are great, long-lived, and powerful, your numbers were increasing rapidly, year by year, whereas ours diminished slowly, but steadily.
'One solution-bandied about by the council of wyrms more frequently than it would reassure you to know-has been to eradicate your mayfly kind. I opposed this course of action. For one thing, by the time it came up for debate, I was morally certain it was too late-that were we to attempt any such thing, we should succeed only in hastening our own extinction. For another, I perceived your kind as having a function in the great system of the world, even as dragonkind has.
'Yet I could see the two coming inevitably into conflict. I wished to preserve both races if possible. So I sought to see if I could somehow reconcile them. Many years have I spent in study, in contemplation, and in experimentation. The end result you see before you: a person who is both human and dragon. A super-being, if you will: a ruby dragon.'
Zaranda frowned. 'I've heard that certain evil wizards of the Dalelands created an artificial woman by magic a few years ago. She didn't turn out as expected, if the story's to be believed.'
'You speak of the woman who calls herself Alias of Westgate. I have interviewed her. She was indeed a less- than-pleasant surprise to her creators.' The sorceress shook her head. 'But the cases are nothing similar. There is nothing artificial about Chenowyn. By means beyond your comprehension I quickened her in my womb, carried her for nine months as a human woman, bore her in pain as a human mother.'
'And then you just… turned her out,' Zaranda said.
'When it was clear she was strong and would survive, I left her at the Sunite orphanage in Zazesspur.' Nyadnar turned to the girl. 'I hope you will understand, my daughter. I had to let you make your own way, to prove that this new order of being was viable. I had to let you show you could survive, though it tore at my heart to do so.'
'You mean I'm just an experiment?' Chenowyn wailed.
'No, not at all. You are, as I said, an entirely new order of being. Possibly superior to anything that has existed on this plane before. And you are my daughter.'
'Don't call me 'daughter'! ' The girl turned and bolted from the chamber.
Zaranda ran after her. She got out the door in time to see Chen transform herself into a scarlet-hued dragon and fly upward.
Zaranda looked sidelong at Nyadnar, who stood staring up into the cavern darkness. Her inhumanly beautiful- literally inhuman, Zaranda realized-features remained expressionless, but her alabaster hands were knotted into fists.
'Nyadnar,' she said gently, 'you may've spent a thousand years studying how to give birth to her, but you have a lot to learn about being a mother.'
Epilogue
A Star
Night had returned to Zazesspur when Zaranda returned to the surface.
A vast crowd thronged the civic plaza. Through the doors of the Palace of Governance, Zaranda emerged supporting a gravely wounded Stillhawk. Tatrina followed, looking right and left, tentative as a wild animal.
From far back in the crowd, a voice yelled, 'All hail Zaranda Star!' The crowd took up the cry in a mighty cheer: 'Hail Zaranda!'
'I hope that wasn't one of our people,' Zaranda said to herself.
Duke Hembreon set a halting foot on the bottommost step of the broad concrete stairs. Tatrina's cornflower-blue eyes went wide.
'Daddy?' she said. Then: 'Daddy!' and she went flying down the steps into her father's plate-armored arms.
'All part of the service, folks,' Zaranda said. Suddenly she had to sit down on the top step. She managed to ease Stillhawk down to lie beside her. 'Can somebody fetch a stretcher? My friend here needs care.'
An astonishingly beautiful woman in a low-cut crimson robe came bustling up the steps. She had long white- blonde hair done up in an elaborate gleaming coiffure, and a huge gaudy gold Sune pendant adangle between her not-particularly well-concealed breasts. A pair of strapping young men in red tunics followed her.
'We shall personally tend this hero's hurts at the Temple of Sune Firehair,' she said, clasping her hands before her bosom. 'Ooh, he's so handsome!'
Stillhawk, now altogether unconscious, was gathered up and borne away by the ingenue acolytes, trailed by the hand-wringing priestess. Well, Zaranda thought, I guess it's no more than he deserves. He's had a rough day. On the long hike up from the Underdark, the ranger had told her of dying and being resurrected by Shield of Innocence.
Having turned his daughter over to a covey of nurses and seen her carried off in a palanquin, Duke Hembreon approached up the steps again. Zaranda reached to her belt.
'Here,' she said, flipping the late King Faneuil I's crown to him. 'You might be needing that.'
Hembreon fielded it without turning a hair. 'It could be so.'
'What happened while we were gone?'
'A sudden confusion overtook the darklings. They ceased attacking and fell into a listless state in which they were easily overwhelmed.' He looked abruptly apprehensive. 'You did dispel whatever evil loosed them upon us, didn't you?'
'Oh, yes. It got dispelled good and hard. So did the late king, unfortunately.'
Hembreon's bushy white brows lowered. 'You mean that? You mean to call his death unfortunate?'
'I do. He was a good man. He just got in over his head.' So to speak, she thought, and shuttered.
'Some short while after the darklings lost direction,' Hembreon went on, 'many reliable witnesses claimed to have seen a small dragon, scarlet in color, take wing from the roof of the palace. Some said it was a red dragon; others, including the Lord Inselm Hhune, who himself once slew a red dragon, said it was no such thing. It has occasioned considerable debate over whether the apparition was a good omen or ill.'
'Oh, that was just my apprentice,' Zaranda said. 'She's definitely a good omen.'
