Hardly the sort of dragon who would attract a mate.

But flying, exploring, patrolling could keep the thoughts away for a time. He had just finished a hunt in the forests of the southern borderlands on foot, snapping up two-legged flightless birds that ran from him with bobbing heads, when he came across the washer-women. While taking a drink from a stream, he smelled humans in the water. Something about the smell made him want to investigate. He followed the flow, creeping along the riverbank as low to the ground as a snake. He traced the tantalizing smell to its source: a village built up off the ground on poles. Pigs and chickens lived under the stilted huts, with humans above. Women washed clothes at the river. It was their rich female smell that had attracted him.

His appetite, which he thought sated just minutes ago by a bellyful of flesh and feathers, got the better of him, and he rose from the riverbank reeds.

The women left their laundry, screaming as they ran to the huts. AuRon dashed after them, flattening reeds and scattering piles of wet cloth, but they had too much of a head start. Men poured from the village, snatching up arms and shields. He had no desire for battle in the middle of a man village with foes on every side. AuRon snapped impotently at the hindmost female. Frustrated, he turned his chase into flight and rose to the sky, strange lust-hunger forgotten.

AuRon flew north, wondering if he had learned a lesson. He had heard tales of young mateless dragons chasing down hominid females, even pursuing them into castle towers or taking them prisoner to toy with before eating. According to Mother, it meant the end of many a dragon. Hominids avenged the loss of their women, whereas a dragon could sometimes make off with half a herd in the belly and get away with it.

Perhaps he’d become that sort of dragon, pursuing the smell of human females instead of his own kind. He saw himself as a night- stalker, twisting natural desires down a desperate path that would lead to his death. Sickened at the thought, he resolved never to chase down that particular smell again.

But that night, he dreamt of screaming womanflesh.

“A prize, a gift for you we bring, O AuRon-vhe,” Unrush Uth-Rinsrick said some months later. “Today the Feast of the Deathrage among my people is marked. We remember! We give! We revel! Join us, we ask. The fireblades gather.”

The blighters had probably dug up a jade bauble in one of the ruins to the south. AuRon had a collection of statues in his library. The statues were better company than blighters: quieter and certainly more aesthetic.

“In what manner am I to join?”

“Accept our offering. We bring you a prisoner.”

AuRon nodded. So that was it. The blighters occasionally brought him some wretched hunter who had wandered too far in the forest. Rather than just kill him, they presented him to AuRon and watched while he made a meal of the trespasser. The half-starved prey never made much of a dinner; he would have preferred a bullock.

The blighters filed in and formed a circle. AuRon cast a wary eye over them; he had set down a law that said no weapon larger than a dagger was to be brought into his cavern. A blighter witch-doctor had stirred up a few malcontents against him once; while they perished in fiery battle, he never did find the witch-doctor. AuRon didn’t trust any but Unrush. A dragon couldn’t afford to trust if he was to live long.

They dragged the captive in. He was small and dirty, pinioned by a pole thrust across the small of his back and bracketed by his elbows. His hands were bound before him. One of the keepers pulled him along, and another lashed him from behind with a leather switch.

AuRon unwrapped himself from the dais—wanting to put the captive out of his misery and be done with it—and the blighters fell back to form a ring around dragon and prey.

“Day of death! Rage of death!” the blighters chanted.

“Take your sacrifice, sacred spirit of the fireblades,” Unrush howled, rolling his eyes in barbaric ecstasy.

AuRon sniffed the captive, and startled. The woman smell. The hunger that was not all hunger rose in him, wetting his mouth and quickening his heartbeat. AuRon trembled like a hatchling out of the egg.

The sacrifice raised her bruised face. “Bite. May you choke on me, if you’ve forgotten your daughter, Auron,” Hieba said in dragon tongue.

Chapter 19

AuRon’s mind flashed back to his good-bye in the woods outside the lumbermen’s stockade. He saw Hieba again as a scared little girl, running from her guardian through the wildflowers.

When the first shock faded and he saw the ring of confused blighters again, he snorted.

“Berrysweet!” It felt good to say the word again. He stepped around her, putting his body between Hieba and her captors.

“I can’t believe I’m here again,” she said quietly, perhaps more to herself than AuRon. “It feels like this was a dream-life.”

The blighters grumbled to each other. The one who had beaten her shifted to the back of the crowd.

AuRon turned his head toward the blighters. “The Umazheh may go,” he said. “By a trick of fate, I know this human. There’ll be no ceremony with her. Go with my profound thanks—you’ve given me five herds’ worth of satisfaction in bringing this human here.”

Unrush scratched the gray bristles at his temples and talked to his fellow chieftains.

“Bring her to the dragon-throne tomorrow night, my lord. We will have oxen and swine, and wine in the year of our bargain first casked. What is your answer?”

“I will be there. Tomorrow night.”

Hieba touched her dirty, scratched hand to the crystal statue.

“I remember this from when I was little,” Hieba said, speaking the tongue of the sons of Tindairuss. AuRon had to ask her to repeat words at times, but it was a version of a language NooMoahk knew well and had passed on to him. “I believed this was my mother and you were my father, Auron. The stone was light and warm and constant, and you were strong and brave and wise. I wonder what it is? I suspect it’s worth a principality of Hypat.” She sagged against the pillar and sank to her knees.

“You need sleep and food,” AuRon said. “A bath perhaps? There’s still the trickle at the back of the cave. It’s bigger than you remember. I added rocks to give the water more notes to play on its journey.”

But she was asleep.

AuRon sniffed around the cavern. There were a few joints lodged high up in the pillars carved from the rock, but he suspected the meat was past edibility—at least to a human—even in the cool of the cave. He did not want to leave Hieba alone in the room, though it would be a suicidal blighter who would return to do her harm after he had dismissed them. He went into the outer city and burned out a rockchuck nest. The hare-size rodents would at least make a mouthful or two for Hieba when she awakened. He hurried back to the cave with his scorched prizes to find her comfortably asleep in the warm light of the statue.

It was a testament to her exhaustion that she did not awaken at the smell of cooked food, or for hours afterwards. AuRon curled his long body below the dais and looked at her. There was still something of the little girl he knew in the concentrated expression on her face: Hieba had always slept as if she were putting her mind into it. Her bronzed skin and jet-black hair, slender limbs and supple bosom marked her as a human of some beauty, as he was able to judge it.

She arose and let out a squeak of excitement at the food, tearing into it with nail and tooth with a ferocity that would do a hatchling credit.

“I’m so happy to find you, still here, still yourself, Auron-who-was-a-father,” Hieba said.

AuRon sniffed at her; beneath the dirt and sweat he could smell a grown woman. “It’s pronounced AuRon now that I’m a full-fledged dragon,” he said. “Though you may call me pony as you first did and I’d be glad just for the sound of your voice.”

Hieba put her arms about his neck and he felt her squeeze, a prrum came from deep within him.

“AuRon,” she said, trying it out. “AuRon. The name pounces like those golden cats in the mountains. Suits you.” She broke off the embrace, walked along his side, and squatted to look at the folds of his wings.

AuRon had a thousand questions. “Have you traveled far?”

“Yes. Though I was on horse until my blighter guide played me false.”

“I’m sorry,” AuRon said. But hominid treachery was hardly a new story. He had scrolls—and a lifetime of experience with it.

“Not from the tribe that brought me here; this was a different group. They trade with the Dairussan. Perhaps they took me for a long-lost Bant on her way home.”

“The sons of Tindairuss?” AuRon translated. “You grew up with them?”

“Yes. My childhood was over as soon as I went into that camp. They put me to work doing laundry and sewing, always sewing. I think I could sew in my sleep. I was there for years, and I even ran away once to find you again. But I came back hungry and cold.”

“So you’ve run away again?” AuRon asked.

“No. When I was perhaps fifteen, a group of soldiers rode into camp, under a captain. He was a man of great renown. A man named Naf Touraq.”

AuRon snorted. “Did he once travel with dwarves, working for a man named Hross?”