But his first words had not been a greeting but a query. ‘Have you found Silver yet? Is the well cleared?’ As the other dragons landed and made their way to shore, he listened gravely as he was told that only a small quantity of the precious stuff had been pulled up from the well, and that efforts to reach the bottom of the well had been suspended by news of the dragons returning with two ships.

‘And the Silver you did find?’ he asked avidly.

The small quantity of the precious stuff had been carefully poured into an Elderling flask made of heavy glass and placed in the centre of the table where the keepers dined. There it sat and shimmered, casting an unearthly glow of its own into the room. Tats had been certain that Malta and Reyn would try to apply it directly to the child, but they had not. Perhaps Kase’s small mishap had persuaded them of its danger. In the transfer from the large bucket to the much smaller flask, a single drop of Silver had fallen onto the back of his forearm. He had exclaimed in fear, and then as the others drew near, he bent his head over his arm and stared at the Silver as it shimmered.

‘Wipe it off!’ Tats had exclaimed, tossing him a rag.

He had dabbed at it, to no effect. ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ he had told them. ‘But it feels very wrong, all the same.’ They had all watched in silent fear as the Silver spread on his skin, outlining the scales on his arm and then almost disappearing.

‘Nothing happened,’ Sylve said hopefully.

Kase had shaken his head. ‘Something’s happening there. It doesn’t hurt, but something is happening.’ He’d swallowed uneasily and then added, ‘I hope Dortean comes back soon. He’ll know what to do about this.’

In the day since then, he had shed all his scaling where the Silver touched him, and the skin beneath it looked raw and angry. And remained a dull, silvery grey.

Mercor had listened attentively to their tale. ‘Yes. Dortean will be able to deal with that much Silver, if Kase goes to his dragon promptly.’ The golden dragon’s eyes had whirled slowly. ‘And that was all the Silver you were able to bring up?’ he had asked again.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sylve had told him, and her dragon had wheeled away from her in silent disappointment.

The other dragons soon knew the full tale, and had unhappily conceded that until all the dragons had returned, the vial of Silver would remain untouched. They had accepted the news that the well was all but dry and that the Elderlings would have to work on a device that would lower one of them down to harvest what little Silver there might be. They had not seemed very excited at the news and he guessed the reason. The well was already incredibly deep. They surmised, as he did, that the Silver was all gone.

‘Tats!’ Thymara called, and he glanced back to see her running toward him. The back of her Elderling tunic stirred as her wings struggled to open. She had confided to him that sometimes that happened when she hurried, as if some part of her thought she should take flight. Now as she came toward him, smiling, the wind lifting her hair, he saw how much the wings were changing her. She carried them, a weight on her back, and even folded, their angles projected up higher than her ears. Lovely as they were, he suddenly wished she did not have them, for they forced him to recognize that all of them were changed as much as she was, just as far from the humans they had once been. All of them had changed, and all were just as much at risk from the lack of Silver as the dragons were. He thought of Greft, dying of his changes on the journey to Kelsingra. Did such an end await all of them?

‘You look so solemn,’ Thymara said as she caught up with him.

‘I’m a bit worried about Rapskal,’ he said, and it was not a lie even if it was not the immediate truth.

They crested the last hill and looked down at the docks. Sintara and Baliper were wheeling overhead and Spit had flown up to join them. Rapskal circled them on his scarlet dragon. His shouted victory song reached them as a thin whisper on the wind.

Oars powered the two ships that were coming in to dock. They were long and lean, low to the water. Their masts were stripped of sail and folded down to the deck. The oars rose and fell in an uncertain rhythm that spoke either of weariness or clumsy oarsmen. ‘Catch a line!’ Big Eider’s cry rang out as he threw a coiled line to them, and the men who scrambled to catch it were certainly not sailors. They caught it, and then stood staring at it until one of the oarsmen leapt up to take it from their hands.

The rest of the docking proceeded with similar awkwardness. Some of the men on the ships were doing nothing to help, only standing and shouting that they were innocent men, honest Traders from Bingtown, and that they had done nothing to hurt a dragon or to deserve to have their ship stolen from them. Tats and Thymara halted where they stood to watch the spectacle. As the second ship ran into the first, tangling oars and breaking several, the shouts and curses rose in a storm. Other lines were thrown, and a man stood on the raised deck of one of the ships screaming orders that either his crew ignored or did not know how to obey. On the other, a reasonably competent crew ran about frantically trying to protect their vessel.