The dwarf carefully set his frying pan down and stood.
Wistala froze, waiting for him to reach for a weapon.
But he wasn’t looking in her direction.
She tried to follow his gaze, but all she could see was the string of tasty-looking ponies, chewing their meals in bags attached to their noses.
One of the middle ponies had no interest in his meal; instead he stood miserably with one hoof tipped forward.
The dwarf went to his little two-wheeled cart and returned with a bag. She watched the dwarf lift the pony’s hoof and shake his head. He scratched it between the ears, grumbling something in his tongue, and went to work.
Wistala had gnawed at enough horse hooves to know that men sometimes put iron soles on the bottoms of their saa to save their beasts sore-footedness. Perhaps one had come loose. In any case, the dwarf carefully cleaned the pony’s hoof, extracting a sizable rock with a long device shaped like a dragon’s snout, and applied some kind of tart-smelling salve from a covered clay pot. Then he pounded in a fresh shoe, driving nails right into the animal’s foot. The pony didn’t like the hammering, but placed its foot on the ground, happy to rest its weight on all fours again.
Still grumbling, the dwarf refilled the nose bags from a sack and returned to his now-cold meal. The dwarf mopped up a little congealed grease with a lump of bread and left the rest.
The desire to leap and kill left Wistala. Any sort of creature that would leave his own dinner to see to the comfort of a four-legged brute didn’t seem the type to slaughter hatchlings in their cave. Besides, he held no helm or shield with flames; as far as she could tell, he had no sort of insignia on him, unless you counted the strange angular design like the gems Father gave them to play with on the rear doors of his cart.
He removed the nose bags on his ponies and posted them so they could nibble at the grass and growth on the banks or lie down. The nose bags intrigued Wistala, Bartleghaff’s story of men carrying around water in the bodies of animals had stayed with her. They seemed just the right size for fish.
The dwarf cleaned his tools and then sprayed a sweet-smelling liquid on his short, thin beard using a bag that hissed like a hatchling as he squeezed it.
The dwarf turned in. Once she heard snores, she crept up and licked the contents of his pan. Then she picked up two of the nose bags in her mouth. The startled ponies shifted and whinnied in alarm.
She shot into the brush as the dwarf came awake, still with the grease on her tongue. Once out of hearing from the dwarf’s camp, she dropped the nose bags and licked her teeth, searching for lost tidbits. Delicious.
Father didn’t like her playing with the nose bags: “The Four Spirits gave dragons everything they need to survive, and your mother’s wit will fill any gaps.” Once dragons started relying on hominid artifice, they’d be painting their scales and wing tissue again like the decadent dragons of Silverhigh.
But Mother’s wit told her to improvise. The nose bags were big enough to hold rabbit and pheasant or several fish. When she dumped a meal of squab—oh, the thrill of leaping on them as they took wing—out for Father, he bent so far as to say that circumstances permitted a temporary utilization of the nose bags.
They were so clever! Leather straps designed to hold them on the ponies’ heads had little brass latches like dragonclaws poking through holes punched in the straps, and a rope drawstring closed them like the leg coverings she’d examined on the man Auron ate. Wistala, after a good deal of trial and error that was more error than trial, fixed the straps so they hung across her shoulders just where the neck-dip began. They swung about a little, which was a bother, and snagged on her scales. She wished she could find that dwarf again and convince him to fix the bags together somehow.
“Tell me again about burning the bridges at Sollorsoar,” Wistala urged her father.
“You’ve heard that one before,” Father said.
“I like the part where the elves either must jump into the river or burn,” Wistala said. It was easy to place the faces of wide-eyed elves who rode after Auron upon the group of warriors trapped at the center of the bridge.
“You’re an odd sort of dragonelle, Wistala. Those saddlebags, and now war stories. Even your Mother only asked for my battle anecdotes when she wanted to be lulled to sleep. You gobble them like gold.”
“She’s a young Ahregnia, or imagines herself one,” Bartleghaff said.
Curse that condor! Every time he mentioned Ahregnia, Father went into one of his lectures. She felt her sii extend as Father cleared his long throat.
“My sire knew her as sister, Wistala. A bitter female, consumed by revenge for her lost mate. Scarred she was, poisonous of mind, with tongue as sharp as her claws. Leave battles to dragons, and save your hearts for husband, hatchlings, and home cave.”
“Jizara, Auron, and Mo—”
“Are mine to avenge, daughter. If I can ever get aloft again.”
Father spread his wings, wincing at the pain in his ax-hacked neck and shoulders. He beat his wings, stirring hardly enough wind to blow Wistala’s fringe to the other side of her neck. One long black fringe-point dropped to the corner of her eye, and she reached up with her left sii and snipped it short with her claws.
“That’s a terrible habit, Wistala,” Father barked. “A long fringe means a healthy dragonelle.”
A failed attempt at flight always leaves Father irascible. But his tone still stung, no matter how many times she told herself that.
“You’re just wearing yourself out,” she said. “I smelled deer spoor in the woods. I’ll try to find you a yearling.”
“What I really need is some metal. Look at these scales coming in! A snake would be ashamed.”
“Deer wouldn’t carry gold and silver,” Bartleghaff said.
“I saw a . . . a . . . ,” Wistala said, searching for the word, “. . . road. Might riders carry gold?”
“They’d carry weapons, as well,” Father said. “I thought I saw some ruins in the forest to the southwest, probably Old Hypatian. There might be iron to be plucked. I’d settle for nails. You could carry them in your neck contraption.”
“How far?” Wistala asked.
“Too far for you to find it on foot. You’d spend weeks searching,” Bartleghaff said.
“Exactly,” Father said. “Listen, old vulture, you’re getting fat on all those fish heads. Fly and guide her so your wings stay in training.”
“Why?” Bartleghaff asked. “I need nails like I need a captive hawk’s hood and tether.”
“Call it a favor to an old friend keeping an eye on his daughter. Two, if you can spare a glance down now and then.”
“High flier! Not an errand-wing,” Bartlegaff cawed.
“Smoldering pile of feathers for taking advantage of her hospitality,” Father said. He spat a globule of fire off the steep rock-side facing the river, watched it fall and hit the froth in a hiss. It rode the waves for a moment, still burning, before succumbing to the white water. “She’s been catching and hauling fish for you for weeks. And you fair bubbled with gratitude last night over that rabbit. Or did the gratitude get coughed up along with the bones?”
Bartleghaff worked his trailing wing feathers with his beak. “Oh, very well.”
“Have a few mouthfuls of metal yourself, daughter. You’re growing, and you need your ferrites. If you come across any quartz or fine sand, a mouthful or two wouldn’t hurt. Scours the teeth and aids the digestion.”
“So you and Mother have told me. Over and over,” Wistala said. But she couldn’t hide her excitement at the errand.
Bartleghaff’s guidance consisted of a few visits throughout the day, mostly to tell her she was heading in the wrong direction. He always picked out landmarks that she couldn’t see, even by climbing a tall tree! She’d follow a ridge he put her on for an afternoon, only to have him swoop down and tell her she’d been making too easterly for hours, and she had to veer back south. She felt her fire bladder twitch at some of the abuse he employed—birdspeech had no end of colorful calumnies.
“You could come down and correct me more often,” she said, her fire bladder pulsing in time to her angry hearts.
“You could rest in a clearing now and then so I might see you through these confounded trees.”
She guessed it was a young forest. Now and then she passed a stone wall that led nowhere and divided nothing but its mossy side from the bare. She found a tall brick building on a bank. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to divert the stream years ago so that it flowed close to the building; now all was overgrown and inhabited by raccoons who retreated to tight holes in the bricks and bared their teeth when she sniffed at them. According to Father, where one man came, soon there would be ten and then hundreds, but whatever men had lived here, they’d long ago abandoned the land to the thriving trees, leaving the waterfall and pool they’d crafted to tasty frogs and fish.
She chased some smaller crows away from a dead groundhog and decided the meat was too noisome to interest her, but Bartleghaff thought it palatable.