“Griffaran. After a manner, your ladyship.”

“Good idea. DharSii, get that lot down into the kitchens. See what else we need if we are trapped in here. You might think about putting a few blighters on watch. Larb, go through all the main passages. Use your ears, listen for more of those things.”

“Me stomach’s—”

“Going to be filled as soon as you finish, so the sooner you begin, the sooner you eat,” DharSii supplied.

“NaStirath, stay behind, would you?” she asked.

The others moved off in the direction of the kitchens, Aethleethia and the hatchlings helping to move nets full of fish.

“I should have brought more salt from the sheep-lick, I know,” NaStirath said. “I’ll see to it right away.”

“Not, it’s not that, NaStirath. I’ve been lying here thinking about something.”

“That the great hall needs better drainage?” he said, looking at the puddles on the floor beneath the circular opening at the top.

“I won’t live forever. I might not live another day; my hearts give a flutter now and then with these injuries, and I don’t like—”

“Matemother, you’ll outlive us all,” NaStirath said. He was skilled at coming up with the right thing to say. That might be useful to a dragon in charge of a hall and its residents. She drew back from making up her mind one more time, considering.

“I certainly hope not,” she said. “It’s the natural order of things for me to precede you by a good many years. I wouldn’t want to outlive my daughter. You—it depends on what day I’m asked. Today I would not wish to outlive you. However—”

“Let’s change the subject, Matemother.” NaStirath probably decided she was winding herself up into a roaring mood that would reopen her wounds.

“No. I want you to listen. If I should die, I want you to take over Vesshall and the Sadda-Vale.”

“Me? Why not Aethleethia? She’s your own flesh and blood. Or DharSii—he’s a relation.”

“It’s too much for her. She needs to get those hatchlings flying. As for DharSii, he’s only half here in spirit even when his body rests on his perch. I expect he’ll be leaving to join Wistala anytime. You’ll have to be responsible for once in your life. We are, it seems, at war with the Empire.”

NaStirath looked shocked. “I don’t know one end of a spear from another, and I’ve only ever used my fire to relight the kitchen hearth. I’m no warlord.”

“The best generals rarely are.”

“I’d much rather be a fool.”

She found the energy to take a deep breath and slap her tail down. “You no longer have that luxury, dragon. You no longer have that luxury. It’s time to remove those last bits of shell from your scale. You have no reason to be confident in yourself because you’ve never been challenged. Well, dragon, the challenge is coming, whether you want to play the fool or no. You can either rise to it or die as the joke you’ve lived.”

She let that sink in a moment before continuing.

“You may not credit this, NaStirath, but I am glad you’re my daughter’s mate. You have brains, anyone who knows you will agree, but you just play with them rather than put them to use. You have strength and health—they’ve just never been tested by enemies and privation. You can be pleasing when you choose, which makes all the times you choose not to be doubly frustrating.

“For once, NaStirath—for once—prove yourself a dragon. No jokes, no tricks, no idle chatter. Your sires couldn’t all have been ninnies. Reach down deep inside and find whatever drops of their blood are left in you. Let those hatchlings tell proud tales of their father to their own eggs someday.”

NaStirath opened his mouth, let it hang for a moment, and shut it again.

Shut it? No quip? No jibe. Perhaps there was hope.

Chapter 11

NaStirath went to work with energy that surprised everyone, save perhaps Scabia. He put the blighters through some simple trials, divided them into thirds, and took the best group and put them in modified versions of leather work-aprons that he had them set to studding with metal buttons as armor. This group became the “Black Sentinels,” taken from the color of their aprons. He asked DharSii to use his experience in the outer world to select an appropriate weapon for them and see about practicing.

They could never hope to stand against dragons, of course, but they could help in another fight if more of those dreadful black griffaran came.

Later, he claimed that at every spare moment he reclined and thought to himself, What would a careful and competent dragon-general do? and then set out to do whatever came to him as best he could.

A skilled leader would set up a regular watch system and then have a method of sounding the alarm if the watchers saw something. So he rooted around in old art and artifacts, many relics of Silverhigh covered in the matted dust of generations, until he found a triumph-horn, a caramel-colored curved thing with a poured and much-tarnished brass lining. It had originally come from a hairy, four-legged titan that once wandered the steppeland marshes.

The engineering of mounting it in the highest balcony of the Vesshall defeated him, for the horn wouldn’t fit on the small balcony. Then one of the blighters suggested building a watchtower out of three tree trunks leaned against each other, which would put the platform almost as high as the Vesshall dome’s open peak.

So pleased was NaStirath with this solution that he gave the blighter one of the dead griffaran’s feathers to put in his rain-hat to mark him as an officer of engineers. The exercise of dragging tall, straight trees off the far slopes stimulated him in a way that lounging in the warm pools never had, and he suggested that his new engineer should pick a few energetic youngsters to be his construction team.

That night he ate with not a single complaint about the cooking. He was too hungry from hauling timber. DharSii’s ore tasted as good as fresh blood, for once, and his mouth went thick and pasty as it was set before him. He had half a mind to go on a dwarf-raid to find some real gold, but banished the thought. Too much to do in Vesshall.

The resulting watchtower stood as stark and ugly as a gallows against the elegantly sweeping lines of the Vesshall, and according to DharSii the cording holding the trunks bound together wouldn’t last more than a few years in the wet weather of the Sadda-Vale (DharSii helpfully pointed out all the construction shortcomings of the watchtower as together he and the striped dragon lifted the alarm-horn into position).

“Thank you, old friend. I couldn’t face Scabia if this thing fell down and cracked. Long term, we need something else constructed. Perhaps stairs up the outside of the Vesshall dome. Could you do a study and determine the best way to mount it? Oh, the poor sentinels will get rained on, so perhaps a canopy or shelter of some kind as well.”

When an iron-lunged blighter blew on the horn, it could be heard all the way down to the charcoal-shovelers in the kitchens.

The young dragons and dragonelles clamored for it to be sounded again, but NaStirath cautioned them that the alarm-horn was deadly serious business, not a toy. Their clamor silenced at once—he’d never spoken sharply to them before.

To tell the truth, he felt a little guilty. So to make amends, with youthful enthusiasm checked in one direction, he gave them something important to do. They were to do their best that night to sneak into the Vesshall past the sentinels. No fighting, not even play fighting, allowed, and as soon as they were marked and pointed out, the game was over.

They had an opportunity to test it a few days later, when the horn sounded long and loud. It rattled exercise-loosened scale.

“Dragons come!” came the shout from the Black Sentinels.

NaStirath felt his firebladder pulse. When was the last time that had happened? When Wistala startled him at the pools when she first arrived, all those years ago?

He found himself trembling.

Black Sentinels assembled, bearing their spiked wooden clubs. The blacksmith was at work on short curved chopping blades that would make the most of blighter musculature and Vesshall ironmongering capabilities without breaking.

He hurried up to the watchtower balcony, stood just below, and looked to the south. Blighters were running every which way, reminding him of the time a wild dog made it into the chicken coops.

He saw two dragons flying across the lake, making use of the warm air rising.

Just two? He looked across the Sadda-Vale from end to end to make sure there weren’t more approaching low through the mountains. Satisfied, he turned his neck and examined the arrivals again.

A green with enormous wings and a gliding, more slender dragon approached from the south. NaStirath looked away, then looked back again, refocusing his eyes, to be sure of his identification.

“It’s AuRon and Wistala,” he said. It occurred to him that they might need to set up a signal for canceling the alarm.

He couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed that there wouldn’t be a battle. His blood was well and truly aroused. Was he, against all his inclinations and attitudes, fierce?

Wistala landed, hard enough that a loose tile on the vast, stone-paved expanse before the entrance to Vesshall shifted noisily under her.