“And what the Council wants done is the dragons driven away from Cassarick.”

“Well, that’s putting it a bit harshly, Sedric. But look for yourself. They’re obviously not in a good place. They’re not healthy, there’s no game they can hunt for themselves, and they’re killing the trees all around the beach.”

“And they’re impeding a profitable excavation of the old city.”

“Yes, that’s true also,” Leftrin replied implacably.

Alise gave Sedric a sideways look. His last little remark had been barbed. He was still upset, and she supposed he had every right to be. Her session at the Traders’ Hall in Cassarick had gone on much longer than she had expected. Thrashing out the details of Leftrin’s contract with the committee had taken most of those hours. Malta the Elderling had remained for the long discussion, but with every passing hour, she looked more like a weary pregnant woman and less like an elegant and powerful Elderling. Alise had observed her unobtrusively but avariciously.

When Alise had first encountered the idea that humans became Elderlings, it had cracked her sense of reality. Elderlings had been the stuff of legend for her when she was a girl. Shadowy, powerful creatures at the edge of tales and myths; those were the Elderlings. Legends spoke of their elegance and beauty, of power sometimes wielded with wisdom and sometimes with casual cruelty. When the original Rain Wild settlers had discovered traces of ancient settlements and then connected those ruins to the near-mythical Elderlings, many had been skeptical. Over the years it had become accepted that they had been real and that perhaps the magical and arcane treasures unearthed in the Rain Wilds were the last remaining traces of their passage on this world. They had been a glorious magical race and now they were vanished forever.

No one had connected the unfortunate and sometimes grotesque disfigurements of the Rain Wild settlers with the ethereal beauty of the Elderlings depicted in scrolls, tapestries, and legends. Scaled skin and glowing eyes were not always lovely to look upon, and in the cases of the Rain Wild offspring afflicted with them, their life spans were greatly shortened, not the near immortals that legend decreed the Elderlings were. Vultures and peacocks might both have feathers and beaks, but one did not confuse the two creatures. Yet Malta and Selden Vestrit of Bingtown and Reyn Khuprus of the Rain Wilds had changed, just as those touched by the Rain Wilds changed, not toward the monstrous but toward the fantastic. Dragon touched, some now called them to distinguish them from the others. Somehow, she suspected, their being present during the emergence of Tintaglia from her case and spending so much time with her afterward had caused their metamorphoses to proceed in a different pattern.

Watching Malta Khuprus had given her much to think about during the long and tedious hours of Leftrin’s haggling. He had not seemed to find the delay boring, but had settled into his deal making with the enthusiasm of a pit dog trying to pull down a bull. While he discussed who would pay for food and how much the Tarman could carry and if the small boats for the keepers would be his responsibility and who would pay if a dragon did any damage to his vessel and a hundred other variables, Alise covertly studied the Elderling woman and wondered. It was too obvious to ignore that the physical changes a human underwent were that his or her body acquired some of the characteristics of a dragon. Or a reptile, she judiciously added. The scales, the unusual growths, Malta’s crest on her brow all spoke of some connection to the dragons. But other parts of the puzzle did not fit. The strange elongation of her bones, for instance.

If the Elderlings had known exactly what precipitated the changes that took them from human to Elderling, they had not written it down, at least not in any scrolls that Alise had ever seen. Then she wondered if Elderlings had ever been a completely separate race from humans. Had humans always changed to become Elderlings, or had Elderlings existed separately but perhaps interbred with humanity? Alise had become so enmeshed in her pondering that when Leftrin abruptly announced, “Well, it’s all settled then. I’ll depart as soon as you’ve managed to ferry the supplies down to the dock,” she felt jolted out of a dream. She looked around her to see the Council members rising from their chairs and coming to shake Leftrin’s hand. A document, evidently written as they settled each term, and signed by all, was being sanded to set and dry the ink. Malta, looking frailer than ever, had signed in her turn and was now gazing at Alise. The Bingtown woman gathered all her courage and went to present herself.

Yet before she reached Malta, the woman had gracefully but with weariness come to meet her. She took both of Alise’s hands in hers and said, “I truly don’t know how to thank you. I wish that I myself could be going. Not that I have any great fondness for dragons; they are difficult to deal with, being nearly as stubborn and self-justified as humans.”