The Copper smelled more gold down the hole. He hurried toward it, following the smell, which seemed to have seized hold of his brain.
The boulder came down, and he ran nose-first into it.
“A dragon must win his own hoard, outcast,” Father said, moving off toward the egg shelf.
Chapter 3
The Gray Rat and he made a sort of peace. The Gray kept to his hunting perches, keeping an eye out for slugs, and as long as the Copper avoided the usual spots they’d go long stretches without seeing each other. Wistala, the chatterer, seemed always to be talking to her mother or brother or sister, and was the most successful hunter.
Of course, they were usually hunting the best spots, so the Copper had to make do with trying to catch the white, long-whiskered cave rats in the offal pile while the others slept. They were smart, quick, and vicious, and to get on he had to be smarter, quicker, and even more vicious. He tried piling bones and loose rocks in such a way that they loomed over a juicy bit of dragon-waste, then toppling them when he heard noises in the pile, but he found that the rats would worm through the bones and hooves easier than if he tried to catch them on the hop.
He found that if he smeared himself first with slime from the receding pools and then with dragon-waste, they couldn’t smell him, thanks to the wet, and would often get within a jump’s distance. But he learned an enervating lesson when he overhunted the garbage pile, for the rats quit coming. He took to visiting it only after the other hatchlings ate something Father brought back, for sometimes they missed a tail or an ear or a bit of marrow. Then he hunted the pile with an appetite that would have taken many, many rats to fill, but took away only one or two for all the filth and bother.
Of course, this necessitated a good deal of washing afterward.
While scrubbing off after one meal he heard a high, pleasant trilling coming from the egg shelf above. The words and tune warmed him like the sunlight he dreamed of. The running, splashing water devoured the words, so he climbed up the egg shelf and peeked over.
Farther down the egg shelf, almost out of the mosslight, his mother slumbered, and he saw the tail of the Gray Rat wrapped around her tail-tip. Wistala’s nose peeped from under Mother’s tail.
The longer and thinner of his two sisters lay across the trickle, arching her back in the water cascading down the side of the cave, warbling to herself:
Paint my wings, as a stranger in paradise,
Take me not from the city’s light,
through white towers I long to soar…
“Oh,” she squeaked, seeing him. She shrank against the cave wall.
“Why did you stop?” he asked.
“Do you want to use the trickle?”
“Use it?”
“The cascade. It’s marvelous for cleaning under the scales, especially that bit that falls all the way from the ceiling.”
“Your name is Jizara,” he said, marveling at how easily the word formed in his mouth.
“That’s just for songs and such. Zara rolls off the tongue so much easier. You don’t speak very well. I suppose you don’t get much chance for talking.”
“Will you sing more?” He felt the clumsiness of his words.
She uncoiled a little. “You like my singing?”
“It’s beautiful.” He edged up on the other side of the trickle.
She turned a little deeper green as her scales rose and fell. “You won’t…you won’t jump on me?”
“Why should I?”
“Auron does it all the time.”
It felt so good to talk, he was wondering if he wanted a song to interrupt. “I’ll stay on this side of the trickle.”
“What do you want to hear?” she finally asked.
“What was that you were singing before?”
“A song of Silverhigh, the ancient. They made such beautiful songs. I can only sing them when I’m alone.”
“Why?”
“You sound just like Auron! Mother said it was a wicked place full of foolish dragons.”
“But they made beautiful songs. Sing.”
She went on, and he found himself relaxing, joint by joint, claw by claw, lulled by the music. Then he was asleep.
He woke in glorious warmth. Jizara lay wrapped right around him, nose-tip to tail-point. But then she had an extraordinarily long neck.
A golden eye opened. She yawned. “You’re rather small. Almost like a new hatchling of my own,” she said. “You fell asleep, so I came over to your side.” She looked away. “Oh, Mother is stirring. I’d better get back. She gets angry when we wander while she sleeps.”
“When will you sing to me again?” he asked.
She retreated from the intensity of his words, jumping across the trickle. “I don’t know. A day? Another day after that?”
Why couldn’t she be more precise? Day had no real meaning in the Lower World. “I’ll wait for you.”
“And I’ll sing for you, brother. A-la, now.”
Her voice calling him brother settled in his head like a mother dragon on an egg perch.
He lurked about the base of the egg shelf too much, waiting for her to return, growing even hungrier. They met twice more, but one hardly counted, for Auron woke and the Copper had to run as soon as he saw him stretching his neck. After each meeting he hugged the moments to himself, played them in his mind so it seemed they’d never parted. They had played a game as they talked, trying to mirror their tail-tips, and he would go to his pool and play against himself, pretending the vague reflection was his sister.
Sister. Brother. Such lovely words to a lonely little dragon.
But the fourth time he saw her, she looked down into the water between them and wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“I’m not to sing to you anymore,” she said.
He was shocked into speechlessness. Everything appeared as usual at the other end of the egg shelf, Mother apparently asleep—
“You’re nameless. Outcast.”
He found his voice. “Zara, you are all I have.”
“She says that if I truly care for you, I’ll do this and you’ll go up out of the cave on your own and find more food and grow strong. Don’t you see how weak you are? You look positively hag-ridden. You’ve no chance at metals. Your scales are thin as an eyelid!”
A glubbing sound came out when he tried to reply.
“Mother says Auron is growing. He may kill you in an attempt to drive you out of the cave.”
“I hate being alone! I’d rather die.”
“Mother has a message for you.”
“She does?”
“She told me that you can overcome this. You’ve got a gift, in a way, a chance to establish your own line. A whole new family of dragons, all tracing their songs back to you! Not even Auron has that. Go, and maybe one day we’ll meet again in the Upper World.”
Chapter 4
He lingered in the cave, however, keeping to the edges, avoiding the others. Once or twice he ventured up the passage Father used on his hunting trips, but they smelled of old dragonblood, and he found broken pieces of scale.
He was tempted to try eating it for the metals it contained, but the smell disgusted him and he wondered what the sharp edges would do to his insides.
The trickles of the cavern dried up into practically nothing, and the slugs ceased roaming. He became hungrier than ever—his appetite grew and thrived and seemed to tap insistently at the backs of his eyes, and he worried the edges of his claws with sharp little teeth, pulling up dead skin until he bled.
He drank and bathed at a little pool in a far corner of the cavern. Once it had been fed by a fall that made the trickle on the egg shelf seem like a rainy bit of nothing, but now even the cascade had dried to a thick dampness on the cave wall.
While licking at it one day he noticed air moving around a projection. Even better, the air carried with it the smell of slugs.
He squeezed around the rock and found a crack, a jagged projection that narrowed at the bottom like a claw. Some water trickled from the bottom, carrying a more definite slug smell. He wormed through the crack and heard a few loose scales—it seemed all his scales were loose these days—fall into the water.
The air in here was wetter, and the cave moss still grew thickly in a ring around the pool, offering some light and playing on the bubbles that popped up now and then through the pool, which had spongy pads growing on the surface. He saw slugs squeezing themselves between rocks and under the pads and fell on them, and upset one of the pads in his thrashing.
The other side of the pad held little white spheres, clustered together so it was hard to tell where one began and the next ended. He sniffed them and they smelled delicious.
He tried swallowing one and almost immediately felt better. Eggs! They were probably slug eggs; they certainly smelled like the slugs. He devoured six more before he remembered how he had overhunted the rats in the offal pile. Eat up too many eggs and there’ll be no slugs….
He tongued down two more anyway, and let out a soft burp. His blood flowed with new life.
He watched the water flow into the pool from a crack at a slightly higher level, less of a waterfall than a water step, and a little flowed out into “his” pool on the other side of the crack. The volume coming in and the volume going out seemed out of balance; a torrent came in but a trickle flowed out.