Auron touched her nose, managed a choking prrum as he pushed her into a crevice.
He listened to the hoofbeats of the approaching elves. “Go to Father. Follow the Bowing Dragon. Follow Susiron. Father is there!”
“Auron, I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. Don’t waste time.”
Auron hurried into the meadow, in the open for everyone to see. High above, wheeling hawks altered course and moved to fly over him. They cried out, and were answered by horns from the valley.
He can’t be leaving! He can’t he can’t he can’t . . .
She called to him with her mind, called him brave and good and sent all the love she couldn’t find words for, reaching to touch his mind if not his soft gray skin.
“Good-bye, sister.”
He’d never called her sister before.
He never would again.
Wistala cried, alone, and not one living thing in the Upper World cared.
Chapter 6
Darkness settled on the mountainside before Wistala moved again. All the time she waited, she had to choke back little peeping hatchling cries. A day ago, she would have put her neck on an oath that she couldn’t keen like a still-wet hatchling anymore, but the sight of her brother leading the elves away from her and to his doom brought the sound—whether she liked it or not.
She waited until long after dark, hoping that Auron would return, galumphing out of the mountainside mists with eyes ablaze and a tail-thumping story of outwitting the elves.
She looked into the valley in the direction Auron had disappeared. Campfires dotted the area around the meadow where they’d come across the unsaddled horses. She heard no baying of hounds, saw no torches in the trees indicating a hunt still on. But Auron was quick, perhaps—
No. You’re alone now. They’re all assassinated.
Except Father. Gone north, to some dwarven fortress by a lake. The clouds thickened; another storm might be working up.
She couldn’t just leave. She and Auron deserved some mark to show they’d lived and breathed and seen. She went to the ledge where they’d watched Father fight the elves and dwarves. She extended a thick saa-claw and scored a pair of marks into the lee side of the stone.
Though she took her time, the result certainly didn’t match the fabled artistry of Silverhigh—it looked like something a bored blighter might carve into his cave wall: two dragons, mirror images, circling each other as though guarding the other’s back.
“We’ll always be together here, Auron. This stone won’t forget.”
She crept up the hill, moving away from the rocky prominence.
Going up a mountain can sometimes save you travel around its base, but that wasn’t the case for Wistala. Without a second pair of eyes to keep watch as she moved, she had to pause every hundred lengths or so, to watch and listen and pick a route for her next creep.
The cave also drew her from the heights. This time, instead of screaming, the mouth of the cave seemed to call to her. Home . . . home . . . home, the egg shelf, the trickles, the patches of moss and easily caught slugs.
And she had to know.
Perhaps at the last moment Mother had shoved Jizara into the chimney, the way she tossed Auron. Or both sides, having torn each other to pieces, had retreated to lick the blood from their wounds.
She hazarded an entry by the roof. The elves and dwarves would be less likely to watch the top. While difficult and tiring, it would be infinitely safer to go that way.
Once closer to the mouth of the cave, traveling through knots of creeper where a hominid could barely crawl and cling, she examined the ancient battleworks. Dwarves or blighters had broken up pieces of mountain and rebuilt them into walls and chambers, sealing them with something that felt—and tasted, she explored a crack with her tongue—like long-dried mud, only harder.
The view from the top of the cave mouth made her dizzy and disoriented. Not so much from the distance she could see even in the dark, for dragon eyes opened wide, or from the height to the rock spill below, but from the sense that she’d seen this view before. Sensory impressions from Mother, no doubt.
Below and at the bottom of the rock spill, a tiny campfire guttered with hominid forms sleeping around it. Woven bags containing some kind of prize gleaned from the fight—perhaps dragonscale? The nets were too widely woven to hold Father’s gems from the small hoard Auron had told her about and which she and Jizara had played with before greedily devouring. If a sentry watched the cavern, he was well concealed.
She reversed herself and entered the cave at slug speed. There were no end of grips for her probing sii and saa, and if her tail wasn’t so long as Auron’s, her rather stumpy limbs were a good deal stronger than his. The great hump of muscle on her back that would one day power her wings—assuming she survived the passage of the season-circles—took over when she clung to just rest.
Detritus of a battle could be smelled below. Dragonblood—dwarf loathsome reek!—and fainter scents like bruised mint-herbs that may have been elf.
The cave twisted and turned, and at one corner, she descended to the cave floor to pant and rest her muscles. She might have become lost on the way down, as the cave branched out twice, but thanks to the spatterings of dragonblood, the trail was easily followed. When she started to come across cave moss again, she returned to the ceiling.
She let out a hatchling mew—the noise took her by surprise—as she entered the cave, a tiny skulking shadow of one of Father’s glad returns with sii full of feast for his hungry hatchlings.
Alarmed at the noise, she spent a long time looking, listening, and smelling. Except for the odor of dragonblood and the faint foreign smell of dwarf, the cave smelled no different; indeed, it was achingly familiar, so much so that it was all she could do to keep from running to the egg shelf.
The familiar patterns of the faintly glowing cave moss pulled at her. How could the splashes of light remain unchanged when everything else had? It should re-form itself into spear points and daggers and arrows and—
Something lay on the egg shelf.
She lost her grip, didn’t even right herself as she plummeted, and only a patch of cave moss saved her serious injury.
The egg shelf shielded what lay up there. Most of it, anyway. She crept, mindlessly as a slug, toward the shelf. A broken ax-blade slid as she trod on it, and she froze, listening. Nothing but her own heartbeat answered.
She climbed up to the egg shelf.
It wasn’t Mother. It was mother’s size, certainly, but mother had skin, glowing green dragonscale that changed color as it rose and turned according to mood and body temperature.
Mother also had a head. And sii. And saa. And tail. And great leathery wings that could cover the whole egg shelf when extended. Not tendrils of cave moss exploring and thriving on what it found as it crept up her back.
She stood in the cave moss consuming Mother, engulfing her like a growing, grasping soft claw.
Wistala’s body no longer obeyed her. It jerked and shook as she walked, walked away, turned her back, and shut her nose to the sickly-sweet smell, tripping clumsily like a hatchling fresh out of the egg. She hurried to the trickle at the end of the egg shelf, sat under it, let water fall and wash her scales clean.
Then she saw her sister.
They’d done the same to Jizara, then tossed her on the dragon-waste pile. The thing that had been her sister was mostly obscured by devouring cave moss, but even moss couldn’t hide that the tail she’d once been so proud of, her lovely elegant tail. . . .
A shrieking, whistling cry came up her throat, and she didn’t care if the dwarves came again. Once her head was off, she’d have no more images of this, this butchery. How could her mind carry this for the remainder of her life?
She ran all the way to the egg shelf, where it turned into hardly a ledge, drove herself against the cave wall, vaguely aware of a racking sound coming from somewhere deep in her chest. She rubbed her fringe against a sharp rock. Some old scales were coming loose up there, and it would be just as well to be rid of them sooner, and the pain wasn’t bad at all; in fact, it was a bit of a relief as—
“Sister?”
Auron?
She looked off the shelf, heart leaping and body ready to join it—
And saw the copper. Thinner and more haggard than ever. The copper stood, leaning a little as he balanced on his crippled limb’s joint.
“They killed her, Jiz—” His voice was only superficially like Auron’s after all; he still had some hatchling inflections.
“I’m Wistala. You’re no brother to me. You had a tooth in this.” She felt her fanlike griff expand. Though she had no crest to rattle them against, they could still flutter angrily, she found.
“They lied,” the copper said, but she launched herself off the ledge, jaws agape and sii reaching for him. “A bloody cave, no hoard—”
He dodged as she landed, took advantage of her being off balance to throw himself across her neck. “We need to overcome this, put it behind. Unite. The past can’t be changed!” he said.
Wistala squirmed, couldn’t break free. She gathered her limbs under her body. “No. But it can be avenged.” She lifted herself with all four limbs and her tail, pushing forward.