Blood of Dragons

Malta clutched at Reyn’s arm. She could feel the ridged muscles in his forearms and knew how difficult it was for him to restrain himself. After days of waiting for the dragons to converge and have speech with them, it seemed that all they could tell them was that Ephron must die. Had they come so far and waited so long just to hear what she had most feared from the moment of his birth? She looked down into the little face she held so close to her breast. Her son was swaddled in an Elderling tunic to keep the cold and damp from him, but even so, he never seemed warm to her touch. His dragon scaling was bright where it outlined his brow and the line of his nose, but his human flesh below it seemed greyish, and he was so thin. The little hand that had ventured outside his coverings clutched at her with fingers more like a bird’s bony talons than a child’s fat fingers. An ache sharper than any physical pain she had ever endured stabbed her every time she looked at him. So tiny and so brief a life, and he had never known a moment of ease or contentment.

Alise was speaking. ‘For generations, the folk of the Rain Wilds have suffered the deaths of their children, children born too Changed to survive. Those who have lived have taken on some aspects of Elderlings that we have seen depicted on ancient tapestries, but they too go to early graves. All these things the Rain Wild Traders have accepted as the cost of living where they do. Yet in all those days, there were no dragons to wreak changes on them. Why, then, wise Mercor, did they have to endure such hardships?’

The dragon’s head was held high and he appeared to be looking off into the distance. Was he thinking, or merely wishing the puny humans would leave him alone so that he could safely launch himself back into the air and return to hunting?

He spoke reluctantly. ‘Humans are vulnerable to dragons. Of old, we changed some of you deliberately, to better fit you to be companions and servants to our kind. You lived such a short time that it was nearly impossible for us to achieve full communication with a human before it died. And so we allowed and shaped change for those who seemed most fit to live alongside us. But soon humans learned that any exposure to dragons and the things of dragons could change any human, and that those changes were not always beneficial. So those who took pleasure and found purpose in serving the dragons built their cities and their works, lived alongside us and took joy in serving us. They cherished the ways we could change them.

‘Those who wished to remain unchanged ventured into those cities but seldom and knowing the risk involved. Here, in Kelsingra, Elderlings lived. Humans lived and worked in a different settlement, across the river. Others lived outside the city, where they tended herds or grew crops far from the Silver-streaked stone walls of the city. Risks were known, and those who took the risks did so of their own will. We did no wilful harm to humans; if harm was done, they brought it on themselves.’

Was it the dragon’s words alone or did he summon memories from the stone? Malta felt entranced, as if she saw and heard the things he related. She could see this square thronged with folk, talking together in the spring sunshine. A silver-gloved Elderling with three elaborate marionettes dangling from his hands shouted to three tall, slender women carrying gleaming pipes. One lifted hers to her lips and tweetled a reply to him, and several passers-by laughed at the exchange. Through the Elderlings came a lumbering violet dragon, his wings chased with silver, wearing an elaborate golden harness covered with a thousand tiny round bells. The crowd parted for him and many an Elderling shouted a greeting or made an obeisance to him as he passed. The bells made a sweet, shrill jingling. Mercor’s ancestor? The glorious scene of prosperity and plenty faded and she once more stood in the windy plaza hearing his words.

‘While dragons were gone from the world and Elderlings, too, humans came into the lands where once we had prospered. You discovered the magic creations of the Elderlings and the places they had shared with dragons. You handled their works and lived where dragons had walked and lived. Enough influence remained that those who lived there changed. But the changes were random, not shaped by a dragon, and often displeasing or dangerous.