Page 84 of Dragon Fate (Age of Fire 6)

AuRon said, “One of the blighter sweepers at the Sadda-Vale told me his legend. He’d just lost a brother to that troll that raided our flocks and came right down to the fishing pools two years ago—remember? He was mourning his brother through a cask of beer Scabia allowed him—odd that the blighters brew beer for their own use, but they must get permission from Scabia to drink it—and he said something along the lines of wishing Anklemere had never called them down from the sky.”

“DharSii believes trolls are connected to Anklemere, too.” Wistala stared off into the northern sky, where Susiron, and presumably DharSii, stayed in place while the world turned.

AuRon, were he to confess his secrets, was a little jealous of his sister’s devotion to DharSii. He was an impressive dragon, but he’d treated his sister poorly. Allowing the phony mating with Aethleethia, keeping her twisting like a bauble on a string while he attended to other matters . . . Cruel was the only word for it. A dragon should have the courage to name his mate and fight for her.

“I can’t see that Natasatch has treated you any better,” Wistala said.

Cursed female! Dragonelles and dragon-dames had such highly tuned abilities with mindspeech they could read private thoughts if you weren’t guarded in them!

So they followed the coast, zigzagging to visit the interior cities.

It was a patchwork land. Always there was a palace or two, occasionally a fortress, and a city built around the mysterious conical minarets of the priests. Wistala, better read than he, explained that theirs was a fetish that believed in a single vast god encompassing all, but this god’s will was so inscrutable he either sent emissaries down or elevated men to demigod status to speak for him. Each of these temples was watched over and named for one of these gods or demigods. The priest caste wasn’t as involved in day-to-day life as the Hypatian “low clergy” that Wistala was familiar with—quite the opposite, in fact. They renounced the world and lived lives of simplicity. They sat in the temples, heard the prayers of the locals, and meditated long on them, in the hope that this universal God would nudge the universe in the proper direction.

AuRon preferred the straightforward cults of Old Uldam. You took a deer from the forest and you thanked both your personal god and the deer-god, and you always left a vital at the kill as an apology to the leopard whose game you poached. It just seemed to him that the blighters got all their business done right away, dealing directly with the gods. Priests and such made him wonder just how much of the offerings to the gods ever made it beyond the priest’s purse.

The princedoms of the Sunstruck Sea were a frustrating lot to deal with. They had negotiating intermediaries who came out and spoke to AuRon and Wistala.

AuRon felt like the poor supplicants seeking intervention from the all-powerful. They never managed to speak to any of the princes, just the intermediaries. They did what they could to warn them that the Dragon Empire was readying for war.

They tried to find out about Nissa, inquiring about a princess from the north, or an old arranged marriage from the Ghioz, and mostly received shrugs in return, or blank looks, or some old legend that either illustrated the maxim that it was best to get a good look at the bride before the ceremony of an arranged marriage or a sad story about a heartbroken bride who drowned herself on her wedding eve for she’d been pledged to a rich man rather than her true love.

The princedoms were full of such stories—not really histories, not really legends, but something in between.

“The librarians should really catalog them. There must be hundreds of these little tales.”

“I fear we’ll hear all of them before we find Nissa, or anyone with real authority to do something.”

Outside a city that was fragrant with peppers and more exotic spices and flowers, so much so it was almost dragonlike, they finally received news of her.

“Ah, yes, the Hidden Widow,” said a spice-trader with a good knowledge of Parl who’d been sent out to talk to them. “She was once of the Ghioz court. She resides in the country at the Peacock Palace.”

He supplied them with directions, though they’d spotted the building from the air.

The Peacock Palace had a ragged beauty to it. The jungle had encroached across the old walls that ringed the great house, filling fields with vines and grasses. The white—what else?—house stood besieged by green, three floors of balconies, verandas, and shaded walkways so that the air might run free while the sun and rain were kept out. It smelled to AuRon of chrysanthemum, which was growing in profusion in old pools.

He heard a plate fall and break from somewhere within the house as they approached, landing outside the gates and climbing carefully into the grounds.

A dark woman with two neat pleats of gray appeared on a balcony just above the main door. She wore a simple sleeveless dress with a black fabric belt wrapped and knotted about her waist. She reminded AuRon of both Naf—with her height and grave bearing—and Hieba—with her large eyes, elegant chin, and thick hair—so that it pained him to look at her. Just a little.

Wistala called greetings in Parl, but the woman just smiled and spread her hands as though helpless.

“Were you once known as Nissa?” AuRon asked, in the language of the Dairuss. He’d learned a little of it from Naf and more when he’d served in Dairuss.

She looked shocked and answered similarly: “That is the name my father and mother gave me, yes. I have not heard it spoken in a long time, dragon.”

“Your flowers are beautiful,” Wistala said in the same tongue, though with difficulty.

“They keep the bugs away.”

You know the tongue of the Dairuss? he thought to her.

It is similar enough to Hypatian that I can get by, she returned.

“Are you also the person they call the Hidden Widow in the city?” he asked.

“I am a widow. I keep within my home,” she replied. “There are rumors I am much wealthier than our own Prince Samikan and the rumors attract thieves like flies coming to spoiled meat.”

“I’m sorry to hear you are widowed. I will carry the message back to your mother, if you like. Your father has died. He was a good friend of mine.”

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