unearthing Elderling treasure. We would tell them that Kelsingra was three times the size of Cassarick and that the Elderling treasury was there.”
“Elderling treasury?” Kalo asked.
“We would lie to them,” Mercor explained patiently. “To make them want to take us there. We know they want to be rid of us. If we leave it to them, they will let us slowly starve to death or leave us living in our own filth until disease claims us. This way, we offer them the chance to be rid of us, and to profit at the same time. They will be willing to help us, because they will think we are guiding them to riches.”
“But we don’t know the way,” Kalo bellowed in frustration. “And if they knew of an Elderling city to plunder, they would have done so by now. So they don’t know where Kelsingra is either.” He lowered his voice and added dismally, “Everything is changed, Mercor. Kelsingra may be buried under mud and trees just as Trehaug and Cassarick are now. Even if we could find our way back to it, what good would it do us?”
“Kelsingra was at a much higher elevation than either Trehaug or Cassarick. Do not you recall the view from the mountain cliffs behind the city? Perhaps the mud that flowed and buried these cities did not cover Kelsingra. Or perhaps it was upstream of the mudflow. Anything is possible. It is even conceivable that Elderlings survived there. Not dragons, no, for if any of the dragons had lived, we would have heard them by now. But the city may still be there, and the fertile croplands, and the plain beyond teeming with antelope and other herd beasts. It may all be there, just waiting for us to return.”
“Or nothing might be there,” Kalo replied sourly.
“Well, nothing is what we have here, so what do we have to lose?” Mercor demanded stolidly.
“Why do we need the humans’ help at all?” Sintara asked into the quiet. “If we wish to go to Kelsingra, why don’t we just go?”
“As humiliating as it is to admit it, we will require their help. Some of us are barely able to limp about this mud flat. None of us can hunt enough to sustain ourselves. We are dragons, and we are meant to be free to the land and the sky. Without healthy bodies and the use of our wings, we cannot hunt. Some fish we can catch for ourselves, when the runs are thick. But we need humans to hunt for us, and to help those of us who are feeble of body or mind.”
“Why not just leave the weaklings behind?” Kalo asked.
Mercor snorted his disgust for such an idea. “And let the humans butcher them and sell off their parts? Let them discover that, yes, dragon liver does have amazing healing powers when dried and fed to a human? Let them discover the elixir in our blood? Let them discover what wondrous sharp tools they can make from our claws? Let them find that, yes, those myths have a sound basis in reality? And then, in no time at all, they would come after us. No, Kalo. No dragon, no matter how feeble, is prey for a human. And we are too few to discard so casually any of our race. Nor can we afford to abandon them as meat or as a source of memories for the rest of us. On that we must be united. So when we go, we must take every dragon with us. And we must demand that humans accompany us, to help provide meat for us until we reach a place where we can provide for ourselves.”
“And where might that be?” Sestican demanded sourly.
“Kelsingra. At best. A place more congenial to dragons, with better hunting, at worst.”
“We don’t know the way.”
“We know it isn’t here,” Mercor replied tranquilly. ”We know Kelsingra was along the river and upstream of Cassarick. So, we begin by going up the river.”
“The river has shifted and changed. Where once it flowed narrow and swift between plains rich with game, now it is wide and meanders through a bogland of trees and brush. Humans, light as they are, still cannot move easily through this region. And who knows what has become of the lands between here and the mountains? A score of rivers and streams once fed into this river. Do they still exist? Have they, too, shifted in their courses? It is hopeless. In all the time that these humans have lived here, they haven’t explored the upper reaches of the river. They want to find dry, open land as badly was we do. If humans could travel in that direction, they would have trekked up the river long ago, and if Kelsingra still existed for them to find, they would have discovered it by now. You want us to leave what little safety and food we have, journey through a bogland in the hopes of eventually finding solid land and Kelsingra. It’s a foolish dream, Mercor. We’ll all just die on the way to a mirage.”
“So, Kalo, you would prefer to just die here?”
“Why not?” the big dragon challenged him sarcastically.
“Because I, for one, would prefer to die as a free creature rather than as cattle. I’d like a chance to hunt again, to feel hot sand against my scales again. I’d like to 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
