Authors: Margaret Weis
Ven helped Bellona push and shove and wrestle the cart through the forest, a
laborious task that cost them two full days. They made the journey in silence
for the most part, except when Bellona would bark an order or swear savagely
beneath her breath. Ven was used to the silence. He had come to prefer it, for
it allowed him to retreat to his “mind-cave.” He was leery about going there
now, however, after the awful experience of yesterday when his cave had been
invaded. He avoided it, and, with nothing to occupy him, he found the journey
through the forest long and dull.
He was glad when they struck the King’s Highway, for it at least provided
diversion. If people stopped and stared at him during those times when he
walked alongside the cart, he could stare back and sometimes have the pleasure
of seeing them flush in embarrassment and quickly avert their eyes. There was
lots to see and think about. Bears with iron collars and chains about their
necks lumbered alongside their handlers. Noble lords in sumptuous clothes rode
past, carrying hooded falcons and hawks upon their wrists, sometimes stopping
along the way to let them fly. Their ladies came behind, riding in sedan chairs
or on dainty palfreys. The ladies laughed and sang and sweetened the air with
their perfume. A tinker’s wagon rattled past, his pots banging and clattering.
A party of monks walked the road, their heads bowed and their eyes fixed on the
ground, so that they would not look upon a woman. A troupe of traveling actors
rolled their gaudy wagons past, drawing attention to themselves by beating a
drum and blowing blasts on an off-key trumpet.
Sometimes fellow travelers would call out greetings to Bel-lona. She never
responded or even looked at them. She trudged the road in stoic silence,
pushing the heavy cart, where Ven rode, brushing the fur pelts and smoothing
them with his hands to make them shine and to keep off the dust of the road.
The only people to whom Bellona deigned to speak were those who stopped to look
at the furs and try to wangle a deal.
Since she was going to the faire, Bellona could afford to refuse to bargain,
and though most shook their heads at her demands and turned away, now and then
some wealthy merchant or noble lord would pay her what she asked or barter with
her for something she needed.
At these times, Ven was forced to clamber out of the wagon and stand beside
it. His wool trousers and tunic hid the scales, but they could not hide the fact
that he did not walk or stand like a normal boy. Depending on their quality and
breeding, the customers either would pretend not to notice him; regard him with
kind, but pitying smiles; or coarsely laugh. Ven knew enough not to answer
back, for, as Bellona said, their coin was good if their manners were not.
Ven didn’t mind the looks that consigned him to nothingness. He didn’t
really mind the rude stares. The looks he hated were those filled with gentle
pity. He would rather have them knock him down.
The deal concluded, Bellona would put the money in a leather bag she carried
inside her tunic and lift the handles of the cart. Ven would climb up onto the
furs and they would start once more on their way.
At night, when he lay on a mattress of pelts, blinking drowsily at the
stars, he would wander into his cavern, there to relive, in the soothing
darkness, the clamor and the voices and the looks. This day had been a long
one, the journey tiring. He decided to risk venturing into his cave. He was
half-asleep when he heard something snuffling about his mind, peering and
poking and prodding at the chinks.
Fear gripped him, jolted him to wakefulness. Colors filled Ven’s eyes. The
dragon called to him, urged him to answer.
“Son,” the dragon said, his colors pretty and wheedling, his claws hidden. “My
son. Tell me where to find you.”
Ven did not want the dragon to find him and so he curled up in a tight ball
in the very center of his cave and, eventually, the dragon grew frustrated and
went away.
The dragon—his father.
“where is he, minister?” demanded the old dragon irritably. “Draconas is
late.”
“He is on his way,” Anora replied, her colors conciliatory. “The summons was
unexpected. He required time to travel here.”
“The reason it was unexpected is that he has cut himself off from us,”
Malfiesto continued, his colors red and angry.
“Can you blame him?” Anora returned, frost blue. “Two of us are dead. His
own life is in peril. He believes it is for the best—and I agree—that we have
as little contact as possible. It was with great reluctance that I called this
meeting of the Parliament.”
Draconas, who was the subject of this conversation, could hear it clearly as
he walked the winding and twisting corridors that led to the secret cavern far
below ground. The path he walked was pitch dark, but he needed no light.
Although his eyes had the appearance of human eyes, he could see in the
darkness far better than any human. His human legs could run faster, his human
arms were stronger, for Draconas was not human. He was a dragon who had been
magically given human form and then sent by the dragons, who were the true
rulers of this world, to live among humans, keep an eye on them, and report
back to the Parliament all the doings of their short and chaotic lives.
By Parliamentary decree, Draconas was forbidden to intervene in those lives,
either for good or for ill. He’d recently been ordered by the Parliament to
break that law, because another dragon had broken it first. Unfortunately, in
trying to mend the crack, the dragons had shattered the pot. And they were
leaving it to Draconas to pick up the pieces. They had no idea what havoc they
had wrought in the lives of the humans.
They were about to find out.
One member of Parliament knew—the dragon who was the spy for Maristara, the
female dragon who had first broken the Law of Dragonkind by seizing a human
kingdom and holding it in thrall. Her spy was a male dragon and, so Draconas
believed, a member of the Parliament. He deduced this from the fact that
Maristara knew more about the goings-on of the Parliament of Dragons than did
most of the dragons who actually came to the meetings and who generally dozed
through them.
Draconas had warned Anora of this, when she had summoned him to attend
Parliament and make a report. She had agreed with him, but there wasn’t much
she could do. As the current Prime Minister, she was being pressured by the
other dragons, who no longer slumbered through the meetings, to find a solution
to this problem. The other dragons were understandably nervous—two of their
kind had been murdered, presumably by other dragons. Such heinous acts had not
happened since the Dragon Wars centuries ago.
Anora was being pressured by dragons like Malfiesto, the dragon who had
complained about Draconas being late. For all she knew or Draconas knew,
Malfiesto might be the murderer, might be the spy. Precisely the reason
Draconas had argued vehemently against holding a meeting of the Parliament. The
Parliament had nothing to say to him that he wanted to hear and there was
nothing he could tell them, lest it go straight back to their enemy.
Anora insisted, however.
“If Parliament is not to be consulted in this—our greatest emergency since
the end of the Dragon Wars—then we might as well disband the Parliament and
fall back into the old ways of governing,” she told him, the colors of her mind
dark-tinged with fear. “The old destructive ways.”
Draconas was forced to grudgingly concede that she was right.
He entered the enormous cavern, its ceiling far above him, lost even to his
far-seeing dragon sight, lost in darkness so profound that it might have been
the ending of the universe. The eyes of the assembled dragons fixed on him. He
could hear their fear, hear it in their inability to keep still—claws clicking
against the stone, the nervous thumping of a tail, the snap of teeth, the
rustle of wings. He could see the fear in the colors of their minds: ugly
greens and yellows, shot through with streaks of black.
The dragons blended their thoughts to gray, mastered their emotions.
Draconas looked searchingly at each of them, thinking that perhaps he might
find a clue to the identity of the spy in the slant of the eyes, the twitch of
a nostril, the flick of a head. He concentrated especially on the males, for it
had been a male who had attacked him and Melisande, a male so crafty and
cunning •with his magic that he had fooled Draconas completely.
Of the twelve Houses of Dragonkind, five were ruled by males, the rest by
females. The dragon who had been complaining—Malfiesto—was well over a thousand
years old, the eldest male member of the Parliament. His scales, once a vibrant
blue, had darkened to almost black. His teeth were yellow and his eyes clouded.
His joints creaked when he moved. Draconas could almost discount Malfiesto as
Maristara’s cohort, but for the fact that every creak could be an act.
Malfiesto considered himself clever. He had been furious when Anora had been
chosen to lead the Parliament instead of himself and he was quite capable of
deciding that he was above the law. Draconas disliked Malfiesto, whose acid
still burned on his tongue, if no longer in his belly.
Litard was a middle-aged male, hale and hearty in his late eight hundreds.
He sported flashy green scales, of which he was very vain and took great care.
During previous meetings of Parliament, Litard had spent much of the time
preening and grooming himself, to the ire of the other dragons. He was looking
a bit seedy these days, Draconas noticed, as if he had other matters on his
mind. Litard refused to meet Draconas’s eye.
Mantas was the age of Draconas, a relatively young dragon, and a mystery to
everyone. He kept his colors dark, as the saying went among dragons, rarely
sharing his thoughts, never speaking unless forced to do so by some direct question.
He was an observer, not a participant. He seemed to have a great many secrets
hidden beneath his blue-purple scales and, because he was such a very obvious
suspect, Draconas had almost written Mantas off. Mantas had no trouble meeting
Draconas’s eye. He held his gaze so long that it was Draconas who looked away.
Jinat was another elderly male, though not as old as Malfiesto. Red in his
youth, his scales had darkened to burgundy. He was mild and unassuming and
always seemed laden with some heavy sorrow, as though bearing the weight of
everyone’s sins upon his shoulders. He did not make a very good suspect unless,
Draconas thought, the weight Jinat bore was that of a guilty conscience.
The last of the males was Arat, a sharp and intelligent dragon of early
middle age, cunning and selfish. His scales were red-orange and his thoughts
almost always tended to that color, his brain afire with schemes and plots. He
made no secret of the fact that he despised humans. He went out of his way to
avoid having anything to do -with them and he sat through the meetings with a
curl on his lip, to show that he considered all this namby-pamby care of these
insignificant creatures a waste of time. He ranked high on Draconas’s list.
Once the dragons had settled themselves—though the darkness was still
restless with their movement—Anora opened the session by relating the terrible
events that had precipitated this crisis.
Anora told how the dragon Maristara had, several hundred years earlier,
broken the Law of Dragonkind by seizing Seth, a kingdom of humans located in an
isolated valley surrounded by mountains. She had taken human form—not by magic,
as was done in the case of Draconas—but by murder. Down through the years,
Maristara had murdered countless human females, torn the hearts from their
still-living bodies, then used the images of those bodies to rule over the
kingdom of Seth. She had again broken the Law of Dragonkind by giving human
females dragon magic, teaching them to use this magic to defend against dragon
attacks. Thus she and the humans who served her were able to stave off the
members of Parliament, who had tried several times to enter the kingdom in
order to remove her.
Maristara had a companion in her evil—a male dragon who acted as Maristara’s
spy and informant, and who received payment in the form of all the male
children born to the women of Seth who possessed the dragon magic. The male
dragon had also taken human form, undoubtedly by murdering his victim. His name
was Grald and he ruled over another kingdom—one that was hidden away from the
sight of humans and of dragons. Here he raised the male children who had been
born with the dragon magic, teaching them to use their magic to fight dragons
and other humans.
“Hoping to stop Maristara,” Anora continued, “Draconas formed a plan. He
recruited a human male and transported him to the kingdom of Seth. There this
human male was supposed to find the human female known as the Mistress of
Dragons and spirit her away from the kingdom. Draconas hoped that by questioning
this female, we might be able to discover Maristara’s plans and find a way to
thwart her.
“The plan was a good one, but it went awry. Maristara nearly caught and
killed the two humans. Draconas rescued them, took them from the kingdom. He
then devised another ingenious plan—”
Breaking all the rules, Draconas interrupted the speaker. “Do not credit me,
Anora,” he said, using his human voice, his words grating. “The plan may have
been mine, but I later advised against it. You and Braun decided it should be
implemented.”
“Without consulting Parliament,” Malfiesto stated testily.
“The danger was too great,” Anora returned. “As evidenced by the fact that
poor Braun was killed not long after.”
“All this is spilt milk, as the humans say,” said Draconas, “and the cat is
licking its whiskers. The plan was that the human male would impregnate the
human female. Since she possessed the dragon magic, we assumed that her child
would also be gifted in the dragon magic. She and her child were to be brought
here, to be cared for by Anora, until the child grew to an an adult. Then he
would be sent to deal with Maristara.