Dragonlord of the Savage Empire

At first he didn't think she would respond. Reading abilities often operated sporadically for months before a child gained permanent control. She seemed terribly young and indeed looked like a monkey with her spindly limbs and her huge solemn eyes studying him from a too-thin face. Her hair had been lopped off any which way, apparently to save her mother the trouble of combing it.

He was about to ask her name aloud, when she said, "Julia."

He smiled approval. //That's a pretty name. Now, without saying it, try to tell me how old you are.// //Eight.// //Very good.//

The girl grinned, revealing that a front tooth was missing. Lenardo was surprised she was that old. She was no bigger than a five-year-old, and he had been guessing six only because of her response. //Do you know who I am?// he asked. In the heat of the day, Lenardo was wearing a plain tunic and sandals. Julia put a grubby ringer on the dragon's-head brand on his arm and said, //That is the sign of the Lord of the Land.// She cocked her head, puzzled. //I thought he was old and ugly.//

//I am the new lord,// Lenardo explained. //What we are doing now-talking in our minds-is called Reading. I'm going to teach you to use your abilities, but around other people we must talk out loud. It's not polite to shut them out.//

"All right," she said, and held out her arms to be picked up again.

"You can walk," Lenardo told her. "As your Reading improves, you'll find you don't want to touch people. You feel what they're feeling, like that man's pain."

The dark eyes clouded. "Will that always happen?"

"I'll teach you how to stop it."

"Good," she said, idly scratching her head, where Lenardo Read lice.

"That is even easier to stop," he said. "I don't know which you need worse, a meal or a bath."

"Food! Don't want a bath."

"You'll have one anyway," he told her, taking her out onto the steps and turning her over to Cook. Lenardo then joined Arkus again to make the deal with Julia's mother.

"You don't have a seal, my lord," said Arkus, "but the city seal was in the treasure chest."

"That will do for now," Lenardo said. Something else he had not given a thought to. Some sort of symbol. What would Wulfston choose, he wondered, since the wolf s-head sign he had been named for belonged to Aradia?

Julia's mother watched curiously as Lenardo wrote out the document. When he pressed the seal into the wax, the woman pointed to the brand on his arm. "Is that how ye mark your sworn men, me lord?"

Choking down the horror of the idea, he replied, "No, indeed," and lifted the seal, only to find himself facing the dragon's head again, this time surmounting a tower, and beneath it the letter of the savage alphabet for the sound of "z".

If I don't do something about it soon, he thought, I'll end up with the dragon as my symbol by default.

In the infirmary, he found Sandor just finishing with Bril, who was still painfully sore. "Can't you help him any more than that?" he asked.

"I could, but do you want to have to flog him again tomorrow? I healed the cuts so he can't get infected. Let his own body do the rest, while the pain reminds him of what will happen if he turns on you again."

Lenardo said no more. Harsh physical punishment was the norm in the empire as well as here, but before he was branded and thrust beyond the pale, the worst that had ever happened to him personally was a sound thrashing the day he was caught kissing the innkeeper's daughter, when he was twelve years old.

Rubbing the mark on his arm, he told Bril, "Report to Arkus, and don't forget that it's no longer possible to sneak away and hide. I can find you no matter where you go-"

Bril tried to look defiant, but the beating had taken most of the rebelliousness out of him. "You got a Reader working for you, like Drakonius had?"

"I am a Reader." Lenardo allowed a moment for the shock to register and then added, "You were a wealthy man, Bril. If you're clever and you work hard, you may be wealthy again-but it will be a long time before you earn back the right to be trusted."

Emotionally exhausted, Lenardo walked the streets of his city the rest of that afternoon, with some new instinct prompting him to show himself as the word spread of what he was. To his relief, acceptance followed the first shock. It was not that he was nonAdept, like the legendary Wulfston the Red, but that his abilities were different from the ones they were used to… and equally powerful. He Read the fear that had been growing since his arrival beginning to give way. Their lord had his own powers with which to protect his people. They were not defenseless, as they had begun to think.

But there were new fears as well: fear that he knew their most secret thoughts, fear that his powers were inadequate to protect them against Adept attack, and just the vague anxiety generated by another shock to people whose lives had been shattered too many times.