Now only one remained. His slender, golden-haired keeper stood with her hand on his mountainous shoulder, almost as if her touch could restrain him. Hunger blazed inside him, but fondness for the little creature at his side tempered it. Malta felt how impatience simmered in the dragon but desperation boiled in her own heart. She reached for courtesy, reviewed all she knew of dragons and sank down in a low curtsey. ‘Please, O Glorious One. Please, proud lord of the Three Realms. Please help me understand.’

Golden Mercor drew his head back and looked down on her once more. He was almost patient as he repeated what he had already told her. ‘No one here is sufficiently related to Tintaglia to accomplish what you ask. Her marks are on you and on your mate. She made you the Elderlings that you are. Your child has inherited from you the distinctive traits of the dragon who made you. For him to survive, the one who left her marks upon you must alter them so he can grow.’ He snorted, and his rank carrion-scented breath smelled to Malta like death and despair. Perhaps he tried to be gentle as he said, ‘You should not have bred without the permission of your dragon.’

‘What?’ Reyn demanded, fury scarcely caged in his voice.

Malta made a small and hasty motion with her hand, trying to caution him to calmness but as he stepped forward, his anger was like a cold cloud around him. Malta more felt than saw several of the dragon keepers who had accompanied them step closer to them. Plainly, what she was now hearing was news to them as well. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw flecks of fury in one girl’s eyes. Thymara, yes, that was her name.

‘Permission?’ the winged girl repeated in a low voice full of outrage.

Alise suddenly held up her hands as if by doing so she could quell the mood of the Elderlings or at least bid them suppress their frustrations. ‘Please. Malta, if you will, allow me to ask a few questions.’ She stepped between Reyn and the dragon, as if her small body could shelter him from the dragon’s wrath. Mercor’s eyes were spinning faster, with tiny flecks of red in them. Malta held Ephron closer and reached out to seize Reyn’s hand. He put his arm around both of them, but did not allow her to retreat. Mercor’s keeper stood biting her lip.

Alise glanced back at them nervously and then lifted her voice. ‘Mercor, most gracious and golden of all dragons, font of wisdom and power, have patience with us, we plead. What you tell us confounds us, and we seek only to understand.’

Even in an Elderling robe, standing as tall as she could before the dragon, the Trader woman looked short and round now. Her body had not changed, Malta realized. It was her contrast to the tall and willowy Elderlings that surrounded her that made her seem like a different creature from them. Yet all the dragons seemed to treat her with respect. Certainly she seemed most adept at speaking to them. Malta was as frustrated as she was frightened, but bit back her anger and made not a sound. Alise had kept the golden dragon’s attention when he had seemed on the point of dismissing them all. He looked at her, and pleasure at her praise seemed to shimmer off his golden scales like heat from a stove.

‘Ask your questions, then,’ he invited her.

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?’