‘Don’t take all day!’ Carson called up good-naturedly.

‘She is always the slowest,’ Spit complained.

‘I’m coming!’ Sedric shouted reluctantly. He turned sideways to the slope, resolving to walk at a slant across the steep face.

‘No dirt!’ Relpda replied stubbornly.

‘My copper beauty, I don’t like it any better than you do. But we must get down.’ He didn’t even want to think of the upcoming challenge he’d face when he tried to persuade her to leap from the bridge in flight. He thought she could do it. All of the dragons had practised so earnestly of late, and most had shown some skill at gliding at least. He was almost certain that she could take flight and safely reach Kelsingra. Almost. He pushed his worry aside. Carson had been warning him about that. He could not doubt Relpda without making her doubt herself.

Moving to one side of the mud chute the larger dragons had created, he began a cautious descent, cutting across the steep face of the hill at a slant. He had gone perhaps five steps when his braced lower foot abruptly slid out from under him. He slammed hip-first to the ground, rolled onto his belly and made a frantic grab for some nearby coarse grasses, only for them to tear free from the earth in his grasp. He was sliding. The suppressed guffaw from Carson and the wild trumpeting of amusement from Spit did not ameliorate his predicament. Twice, his body almost stopped, but as soon as he tried to come to his feet, he slid again. By the time he reached the bottom of the slope and managed to sit up, Carson was at his side, offering him a hand up.

‘That wasn’t funny,’ Sedric began indignantly, but the merriment dancing in Carson’s eyes above his tightly pinched mouth could not be denied. Sedric came to his feet grinning, and spent a few moments brushing gravel, burrs and mud from his Elderling tunic and trousers. When he had finished, his hands were dirty, but the garments gleamed deep blue and silver just as much as they had before. He looked up at Carson. The hunter’s stained leathers were still streaked with mud.

‘I told you that you should try these garments. Rapskal brought back plenty of them.’

Carson shrugged sheepishly. ‘Old habits die hard.’ Then, at the disappointment in Sedric’s eyes, he added, ‘Perhaps after we all transfer to the city. I feel a bit awkward, calling attention to myself in bright colours.’

‘You don’t like them on me?’

Carson smiled wickedly. ‘I like them better off you. But yes, I like them on you. But it’s different. You’re beautiful. You should wear beautiful things.’

Sedric shook his head to the compliment even as it warmed him. Carson was Carson, and in the greater scheme of things, Sedric had no desire to change him. If pressed, he would have to admit now that there was a special rough attraction to Carson in his coarse clothing. There was something comfortingly competent in the way he wore the product of his hunts.

‘I like them, too,’ Spit observed abruptly. ‘They make him smell like killing and meat. A good way to smell.’

Sedric turned away from the knowledge that the silver dragon sometimes seemed a bit too aware of his innermost thoughts. He looked up the steep hill at Relpda, who had ventured to the edge and was looking down at them, shifting her front feet nervously as she did so. Save for Carson and Spit, the others had gone on without them. ‘Make haste, my copper queen, or we shall be left behind!’

‘And you will be the last to leap, as you’ve been last at everything else!’ Spit mocked her unfairly. ‘Come, copper cow, find one straw of courage and tumble down the hill to join us.’

‘Make him stop mocking her,’ Sedric complained angrily to Carson. ‘He’ll make her angry and then I can’t persuade her to do anything.’ Even at this distance, Sedric could see red anger sparking in Relpda’s whirling eyes. She lifted her head, her neck arching and the frills along it standing erect with fury. Her colours grew brighter; her whole body gleamed with her anger like a copper kettle on an overheated stove.

‘The last?’ she cried out. ‘You shall be last, and mateless forever, you shiny toad!’ She transferred her angry gaze to Sedric. ‘No mud!’ she proclaimed, and abruptly whirled away from the edge and vanished from his sight.

‘Now see what you’ve done!’ he rebuked the unrepentant silver. ‘She’ll go all the way back to the village and it will take me another whole day to bring her …’

He never completed his sentence. He heard her thunderous tread and looked up to see her race up to the edge and leap into the air.