“Fine pup you have there, Gunfer,” the Copper said. Now the youth was whirling, his whipping hair blurring with his face as he spun.

“M-my T-tyr?” Gunfer said, kneeling at the address. He trembled a little at being recognized.

Humans! He’d never once simply reached out and eaten a thrall, and he wasn’t about to start now. Wasn’t he famous for decreeing an end to the summary devouring of the Lavadome’s thralls?

“Your boy. I marked him carrying the Hypatian banner through the gate at the head of the storming column. You should be proud.”

“Yes, my Tyr. First boy born after you took charge, so to speak.”

“Yes, I’ve heard. He’s grown up strong, even without the sun and rain of the Upper World.”

“Aye, little secret of ours, passed down from the Isle, you know. For the long winters. His mother, she worked in the nursing halls during all the fighting with the demen. Lots of blood being sloshed about as broken scales were pulled out and wounds sewn up, especially during the fighting in the star cave.”

The strangest of all the hominid races, the demen were pointy and thick skinned, almost as though they were carrying their armor with them like a lobster. They were vassals of the Dragon Empire now, contributing the Tyr’s own Demen Legion.

In the air above them a young dragon and dragonelle flew circles around the city in celebration. A Hypatian banner flew in the highest battlement of the Pirate Lord fortress. His human allies had reclaimed their own. It was soon joined by the woven scale and knotwork pattern of the Grand Alliance. Some Hypatians and an Ankelene had labored hard over the design and presented it to him in great solemnity. The Copper didn’t have the heart to tell them he thought it looked like goat tracks, but then he wasn’t of an artistic bent.

“She drank dragon blood every day while nursing, and mixed it in with his gruel when he started eating on his own. Turned him into a little hellion, but so healthy he practically burst his skin growing.”

Gunfer chattered on in the manner of humans suddenly admitted into conversation with their superiors, describing his boy’s doings as a youth in exercises and games with the Drakwatch. Apparently he’d never once been caught in a game of Fugitive Hunt.

Gundar dropped and began a wild kicking dance, spinning like a child’s toy. Then he jumped to his feet as though born on his own set of wings, landing lightly, black hair flashing—

The Dragonblade!

The youth might have been a statue cast in the likeness of the man who’d briefly ruled the dragons thanks to a foolish wretch of a Tyr named SiMevolant.

Humans and their infernal constant mating. It made bloodlines almost impossible to develop and decent breeding futile for all but the most diligent owner of human thralls.

“Yes, a very fine boy you have there, Gunfer,” the Copper said, more to silence the annoying chatter without insulting a worthy warrior than because he wanted to converse. “He bears watching.”

He dismissed the unhappy thought, saving it for another day. With that he raised his head high and watched the goat-track banner of the Grand Alliance flutter above the captured city.

Chapter 2

Wistala’s polished scale gleamed green in the fall sunshine of the Upper World. The dragonelle always enjoyed the fall season, and not just because of the plentiful summer-fattened game birds that could be knocked senseless or killed with one quick wingstroke. The pine trees smelled just a little bit more crisp, wood and charcoal smoke a little more welcome, and even as something as prosaic as a pile of horse venting could be called gratifying if you watched the steam’s elegant little curtains waft as it dispersed into the breeze.

Of course the former circus-elf Ragwrist would joke that she was scaring the manure out of the famous white horses when she alighted in the paddocks surrounding her adopted father’s estate house at Mossbell. Ragwrist’s brother, Rainfall, had dragged her unconscious from the great river bordering his estate and succored her, educated her, and ultimately died next to her defending the land and order he loved. Taking his place, Ragwrist had settled down—at least as much as such a lively elf could settle down. He married a trick-rider from his circus and assumed the position of estate-head and landlord to a thriving little town growing up around a highway-rest inn with a green dragon hanging above its door, but he still walked the roads in a bright, colorful coat as though still advertising the spectacles of his circus.

Only one thing lacked to complete her happiness in the fall sunshine. There should be birdsong in the sheltered vales around Galahall, but the hammering and calls of dwarvish workers had chased them away.

The dwarf foreman, hearing some shouts from the roof, trotted over to her, whipped off his cloth sweat hat, and made a sweeping bow.

“Your Protectorship, there’s another difficulty…”

Dwarfs were great ones for finding difficulty. The difficulty could usually be resolved at additional expense. This one had to do with the need for steel-reinforcing cable. There would be a delay of some weeks in completing the project, though they could finish other matters while they waited for cable.

Wistala felt her firebladder pulse with vexation.

Easy there, Wistala, she could almost hear her old guardian elf—and adoptive father—Rainfall say. Civilization is founded on mastering your emotions and guiding your tongue.

There’s nothing less civilized than stomping a workman you hired into hot, soggy mush.

“I’ll give you some funds to purchase it. If it’s light enough, I can fly it here myself. That would be a savings, yes?”

The dwarf bowed again. “Of time and monies. Your Protectorship is judicious.”

The foreman always complimented her when she agreed to his solutions for difficulties. It lessened the sting of suspicion that the dwarfs were padding the bill, but didn’t do much there for the vexation. At this rate, she’d be beggared before she could assume the dignity of her office from a proper resort.

Wistala, even by buying and eating blacksmith scraps and rusted tools to feed her scales, still had little coin left over for her own expenses—particularly since she insisted on purchasing her own cattle and sheep for consumption. Other Protectors demanded feed and metal as their just due, but Wistala asked only for a small yearly contribution from each town and village she “protected” (mostly, she admitted to herself, just by being in the thanedom), leaving it to the local thanes and heads of households and mining interests and craftsmen to work out among themselves. But they tended to pay her in chickens or knitwork, neither of which did much to fill her gold-gizzard.

The dwarfs were putting up a roof over the old ruins of the thane’s manor house, once called Galahall but soon to be renamed Northflight Resort, the local seat of the Thanedom’s draconic Protector. Long ago, as an unfledged drakka, she’d infiltrated the place to retrieve her elvish guardian Rainfall’s granddaughter, who had come under the spell of an ambitious young Thane. The Thane died in the vicious human-dwarf race-wars which had seen the Wheel of Fire, a clan of violent dwarfs who’d murdered her mother and sister, humbled. Since then, it had fallen into disrepair—Ragwrist, while technically the local thane though he considered the office well-managed by attending celebrations to offer toasts at births, marriages, and deaths, didn’t care for tall, gloomy halls. To add insult to negligence, Galahall had been sacked by marauding Ironriders a few years ago in the war that ended with the Grand Alliance.

Wistala had grown sick of sleeping in a barnlike structure, half cave and half thatched roof, near Mossbell. Though warm, it made her feel a bit like a cooped chicken, and her fellow Protectors of Hypatia, when visiting, almost dropped their griff in amazement at the rusticity of her dwellings. They’d all long since at least started on stone palaces surrounded by gardens of water and stone. They’d laughed at her and said their thralls lived better than the sister of their Tyr.

She had plans to make Galahall her official residence, or resort, as Protector of the Northern Thanedoms of Hypatia. All the walls would be linked by a single roof, lined with her own dropped dragonscale and supported by iron melted and recast from captured Ironrider weaponry. She had great plans for its height. Such a roof didn’t exist in the north, not in any temple or old Hypatian hall. Perhaps one of the great Golden Domes of old Ghioz, now reduced to dozens of quarreling baronies under an overgreedy dragon Protector named NiVom, could match it in size. Or the vast hall of the Hypatian Directory, but that was a wonder of the world.

Then of course there was the Lavadome, a crystal bubble an entire horizon wide buried deep in a volcano, but that was more than wonder. The Lavadome couldn’t even be called architecture; it was a mysterious miracle of a forgotten age, claimed long ago by the dragons who went into hiding from their enemies in the Upper World.

Her brother had changed all that. Tyr RuGaard, Lord of Worlds, First Protector of the Grand Alliance, slayer of the Dragonblade—

If she recited her Copper brother’s ceremonial titles she’d be remembering and counting all day. No, the dwarfs needed help steadying their dragonscale-laden machine—crane, it was called a crane—as it lifted its burden to the workdwarfs on the roof.