“The Tyr and I ask you for the benefit of your experience. The Lavadome shall send a group of Firemaids to offer assistance to the Hypatians and build an alliance. Do you believe they will accept?”

“Hypatia is . . .” Wistala searched for the right words. “Hypatia is not like the Lavadome. It is not a matter of someone making a decision. There’s no all-powerful Tyr to win over and settle matters.”

Nilrasha gave a humorous prrum and resettled her wings. “When you understand the Lavadome better, you will not say such a thing.”

Wistala, having figured out the flow of the water, watched the lava run down the other side of the crystal. Beautiful colors.

“Dragonkind is depending on you, Wistala,” Nilrasha continued. “We can no longer stay underground, at least as dragons rather than some kind of slaves. I fear we’d turn into little more than a lava-lit stockyard for raising young dragons to be brought to the surface. To survive, we have to return to the surface. We’ve been so long underground, in hiding, we know very little of the Upper World. We need friends up there who can guide us to safety. Friends we can trust.”

“I must ask you the same question. Can the Upper World trust dragonkind? If I am to go to Hypatia, do I know that you’re offering an alliance of equals? Hypatia demands that even kings obey laws. I want to be able to promise aid, not obedience.”

Nilrasha extended and settled her griff. Perhaps the Queen was not used to being questioned so closely.

“What kind of forces may I promise?” Wistala asked.

“So you will do it?”

“I am a Firemaid and will obey. Not that it matters, but I think it’s a wise path the Tyr chooses. Dragons will thrive only if they learn flexibility in their relations with the hominids. It can’t all be wars, thrall-taking, and ‘Upholds.’ ”

“The Firemaids will be with you. Perhaps a score of dragonelles and threescore drakka.”

“But the drakka cannot fly, and it is a long way to Hypatia.”

“You haven’t been long a Firemaid. Thanks to our experience with the new Aerial Host, we’ve learned the best way to fix some light straps punched through your fringe. The drakka grip the straps. It’s not altogether different from hatchlings riding atop their mother’s back. As long as they stay flat, flight is still possible. It’s actually easier to carry two rather than one, for better balance.”

Wistala thought of her desperate trip carrying dwarven wounded and messages from the doomed column, lost in the barbarian north so long ago.

“I’m no warrior.”

“We will send Ayafeeia with you. She’s our best. Do not worry. She is sensible. I spoke to her over my first meal. She will act as your maidmother when she sees fit, but will leave the Hypatians to you.”

“Suppose I fail?”

“We will come to the surface in any case. Otherwise we will sicken and die.”

Wistala had heard about the kern. But something else crossed her mind. She found herself liking the Queen.

“You love my brother.”

“Yes. He’s different.”

Wistala watched her breathe. “True.” She wondered if she should talk about the murder of her parents, expand upon a few details left out of the conversation at the assembly. No, no reason. Her brother had changed, it seemed.

She had too. She no longer wanted to claw his eyes out.

“May I ask one more question, my Queen?”

“Oh, you may ask. But there are questions I choose not to answer, sometimes.”

“Why did you bring this to me? Does my brother fear my reaction?”

“Fear? No. But I frequently sound dragons as to his ideas. That way you can later be asked and assigned in court with proper pomp and ceremony.”

“Perhaps matters of state in the Lavadome are more complex than they appear,” Wistala said.

“You’ll do well to support the Tyr, Wistala, and do your best for us. Like it or not, ever since that scene in the assembly, you’re thought of as being in the Imperial Line, and a relative of RuGaard’s. If the Tyr falls, you will too. Speaking of which, rank has its privileges. Take a roasting hog back to your sisters when you leave.”

Wistala uttered a few more pleasantries and found Takea, who was wearing a fluffy rabbit’s foot hooked in her griff. Together they managed to drag a whole hog back to their hill.

Wistala asked Takea what she’d occupied herself with during the audience, and the drakka described a visit to the Aerial Host to hear stories.

“And the rabbit’s foot?”

“From a thrall boy, Zathan, the son of one of the Free Thralls in the Aerial Host. You know they raise many rare rabbits in the host caves? Not just for meat. They grow long hair that the riders stitch into their jerkins to keep them warm aloft. I promised to let him ride me one day, and he took a loose scale and I took his rabbit’s foot. We’ll keep the tokens until my wings come.”

Wistala left the Lavadome with more than a score of dragonelles and twice that in Firemaids. The Tyr, at a ceremony full of all the pomp and pageantry Nilrasha had promised, insisted that they take a few bats along as he wished them good fortune on the surface.

The Firemaids chuckled. The Tyr and his bats.

Blighters banging giant drums shook Imperial Rock as they offered to endure hardships and death in the Upper World.

He wished them farewell, calling them the first explorers of a new history for dragonkind, representing the rehatching of their species—as dragons emerged from protective egg, so to would they leave the dark.

“Rise, and rise with you the hopes of dragonkind,” the Tyr said.

The flying straps were well designed. They didn’t interfere with wing movement, and allowed the drakka to hang on to either side of the fringe—the nerveless tissue was pierced by wooden handles to help them hang on—and they rode easily enough out of the wind.

Their flight northwest to Hypatia began in confusion. A few members of the Aerial Host guided them for three horizons, then returned with a warning to keep well west of the horsedowns.

Luckily Ayafeeia knew what the horsedowns were.

Wistala did not know these lands, and the Lavadome’s maps were old and inaccurate. She had to trust to hope that they would reach the southern provinces, where she’d traveled with Ragwrist’s circus a score or more years ago.

At least the hunting was good. The savannah, broken by empty seasonal watercourses in what looked to be the dying part of the year, had herds of antelope and half-horse following the rains north. A few primitive bands of blighters and humans followed the herds, skirmishing with each other as they went.

Of course the Firemaids wanted to gossip about old wounds between her and their Tyr. She admitted only that both she and her brother had been greatly altered by their experiences.

Luckily, the herds were moving in the right direction.

Sooner or later, the stars must turn familiar, if she just flew north long enough so that the flying dragon of the southern skies disappeared and the bowing dragon rose.

They passed into rich grasslands and she recognized the distant spine of the southern tips of the Red Mountains. And with that she was back in familiar lands, the southern provinces of Hypatia. She’d once searched this far south looking for dragons, but had decided that the empty plains beyond didn’t look promising. Perhaps, had she just gone south as long as land held, she would have come to the range holding the Lavadome—though only griffaran showed themselves above the dragon mountains.

She took her Firemaids to the coast of the Inland Ocean, and they dined on fresh fish, crabs, and sea turtles. They passed over the ruins of the old elven sea-city—she’d seen Krakenoor in its glory, sadly, before the race war of the dragon-riders that she’d missed while hunting AuRon in the east.

When they reached the coastal marshes she knew they were less than three horizons from Hypat. The marshes had been settled and then abandoned long ago, but roads and paths still crisscrossed the wet mass.

There was food and game to be found, if you didn’t mind crayfish, smelly water-rats, and raccoons.

She’d once been told that the gods smiled on the foundations of Hypat.

She knew the air on this part of the coast well. Ragwrist’s circus rested here, so that old talent could be paid off in changing-house funds and new talent hired and trained from those drawn to the marble city from across half a world.

From above, the city reminded her of a jawbone of some big herbivore. The long, toothy side hugged the river creeping into the Green Tidetwist of the Inland Ocean, with the great thick bulge of the city on somewhat higher ground overlooking some marshes that provided nutritious mud for the city’s gardens—even the most impoverished resident could scratch a living hauling wet mud—

By some trick of river, ocean, wind, and sun the city saw sunshine almost every day of the year—bright, cool sun that burned off the fogs that rolled in off the Inland Ocean and into the famous vineyards. A half-day flight to the north and you cursed the fogs and the cold wet that bypassed your skin entirely and settled in around your bones; a half-day flight to the south and the air was humid and the black-bark forests smelled like rot filled with rain-slicked squirrels and torpid turtles. Only the ants hurried anywhere.