Blood of Dragons

The great golden dragon turned to look down on Malta and Reyn. As always, Malta carried her bundled baby against her chest as if she were a child and he her dearest doll. Even in the cold of night, she would not part from him. Did she think he could not die if she held him close? Mercor spoke words that drove all colour from her face. ‘If Tintaglia ever returns, she will need Silver to change your child to a creature that can survive. All our lives depend on Silver, in one way or another.’

‘No. Noooo!’ Malta drew out the word in a low cry and then turned to her husband, folding herself into his arms and sheltering the child between them.

Anxiety rippled Sylve’s brow and she reached out a sympathetic hand to touch her dragon’s face. ‘Mercor, if there is any Silver to be had in any way, I will get it for you.’

‘I know,’ the dragon responded calmly. ‘That is what Elderlings do. But I will warn you that it is at peril of your life that you touch Silver. Dragons may drink of it, but any touch of it on human skin is a precursor to a slow death. Only some of the Elderlings mastered it. At a cost.’ He fell silent for a time, musing, and no one ventured to speak.

Malta lifted her bowed head. Tears tinged pink with blood showed on her face. ‘But you said I had been touched with Silver. If that is so, how is it that I am not dead?’

The dragon shook his great golden head slowly. ‘Elderlings found a way, but I do not recall the details of it. They could touch it and wear it on their hands to work their magic. It gave intent to stone, and spoke to wood and pottery and metal, bidding it be a certain shape or react in a given way. And those things did as the Elderlings bade them. They made doorways from it, entries of stone that they used to travel to their other cities. They created buildings that stayed warm in the winter. They made roads that always remembered they were roads and did not allow plants to break them. The most powerful of them sometimes used Silver to transform themselves at death, going into the statues they made to preserve a strange sort of life for themselves.

‘Sometimes they used Silver to heal, to recall for the body how it should be and help it to make itself right. Their own skill with the uses of Silver contributed to their long lifespans. If an Elderling still existed with such a great level of skill with the Silver, he might even be able to heal your child. Magical creatures, those ancient beings were. But perhaps their time is past, not to come again. And perhaps so it is with dragons.’

‘Don’t say that!’ Sylve cried and flung herself against his flank. She was not the only keeper to stand with brimming eyes. Had they come so far to fail?

Reyn gathered Malta and his child close to him and spoke a promise to her. ‘If there is Silver to be had, I will get it for Phron.’

Tintaglia was weaker than she had thought. The blows she had dealt to their tiller had splintered it but not shorn it from the ship as she had intended. She snaked her head in and seized the wood in her teeth, clamping her jaws on it and tearing at it, intending to pull it free of the vessel. Instead, the ship gave way to her pulling, throwing her off balance. She reflexively opened her wings to brace herself, and the unthinkable happened.

It was a lucky cast of the spear. Even the man who threw it gave a wild shout of surprise when it struck and went in. Tintaglia screamed. In the darkness, the cast had unerringly found her weakest spot, striking the swollen site where the buried arrowhead still festered. She felt a hot stab of unbearable pain, and then the soft infected tissue gave way and the arrowhead tore free. Blood and fluid poured from her into the cold river water. Pain surrounded a terrible relief of pressure as the wound drained. The world spun around her, starlight glinting on the river’s face. She struggled to get away from the ship.

The first blow from the pole hit the side of her head. Suddenly there were men at the railings of both ships, raining blows down on her with oars and poles. Arrows shot at close range thudded painfully against her even if they did not pierce her scaling. In her confusion, she had trapped herself between the two vessels instead of evading them. Someone flung an empty cask; it struck the back of her head and for an instant, she was stunned, her head sinking beneath the water.

She lifted her head to the wild cheers of both crews. They were killing her and she knew it. Fury washed through her that puny humans should be able to treat a dragon so. Heedless of how she exposed her underbelly, she reared onto her hind legs and battered at the ships with her front legs. At the same time, she threw back her head in a wild trumpeting of anger and despair.