Dragon Prince 02 - The Star Scroll (22 page)

The females shifted, moved from the low hills that bordered the plain and grouped together in bunches of five to ten. Feylin moved over to Pol and began a low-voiced explanation of the hierarchy.

“The youngest are to either side of the senior females. You can’t really tell them apart except for their wings. See the scars on the older ones? Mating gets pretty rough. But there’s another way to tell the younger from the elder. The ones who’ve been through this before are pretending to be bored.” She chuckled softly as Pol blinked at her. “The sires will have to impress them. The youngsters will be the first to choose their mates, but the others will wait a while. They’ve seen it all before, and, like most ladies, they want to be wooed.”

Maarken whispered playfully, “Bear that in mind, Pol.”

“I’ll be marrying a
girl
someday, not a dragon,” he scoffed.

“My husband says there’s no discernible difference!” Feylin laughed softly. “Watch the sires now. They’re just about ready.”

The three dragons made a delicate landing in the sand and were joined by a fourth and a fifth. Two were golden with black underwings. The third was russet-colored, the other two black and brown. Maarken had seen their dances before, but never so many dragons at once. He glanced up and saw the remaining eight sires hovering watchfully on thermals high above, waiting for the first dragons to exhaust themselves; when one tired, a fresher male circling overhead would land and take his place.

The five took up position before their audience, rearing back as one with wings spread wide and heads thrown up to the sky as they howled their opening music. The chord slid up and down the scale, wailing like five separate wind-storms. Maarken fought the urge to put his hands over his ears and knew the others were just as disturbed by the wild music. Feylin huddled in her cloak. Pol froze in place, eyes huge as he listened to the terrible dragonsong. But the females reacted with the dragon equivalent of shrugged shoulders, and the older ones opened their jaws in wide, insulting yawns.

The reddish-brown sire was the first to move. His head dropped down and his wings swept sand before him in great glistening waves. His song became a low, keening moan as he reached up, claws extended as if to tear down slices of sky. Neck writhing, wings sweeping back and forth to spew sand in all directions, his voice rose to a screech once more. And then he began to dance.

Poetry in flight, dragons ought to have been lumbering lumps on the ground. But their grace in the air was nothing compared to the elegance of the sand-dance. Swaying from side to side as smoothly as a slim willow in the breeze, the russet dragon folded his wings, spread them, swept them out once more as he paced with nimble ease across the sand. He was soon joined by the black dragon with rose-brown underwings, then a gold, then the brown and the second gold. The sequence of movements was as orderly and patterned as a Sunrunner’s colors, repeating from dragon to dragon as each followed the other in ritual steps and wingsweeps.

Sand flew high and wide as the dragons repeated the steps over and over, each marking out his territory, each rising to full height with wings spread before dipping down again to pace the dunes, swaying gracefully until the end of the sequence when it was his turn to repeat the song. The younger females were shifting in rhythm with their tentative choices, sometimes changing in mid-beat as their attention was captured by another male moving in a different place in the dance. The older she-dragons had abandoned their pretense of indifference, but still sat back on their haunches, waiting to be impressed.

The black dragon tired first. He missed a step, one wing folding down to keep his balance. An ash-gray sire instantly saw the opening and swooped down, calling out derisively to his faltering rival. The black snarled, but the pattern had been broken and he could not recapture it. He took a few reluctant steps back, then beat his wings to lift away from his landing challenger. The gray sire then began his dance, fresh and energetic. The young females immediately focused on him, and the first rearrangement of their ranks came as they were attracted by his vigor.

But when he accidentally caught the first joint of a wing on one foreclaw, the females hissed their disapproval and abandoned him to watch the other sires. A gold had dropped out, replaced by another brown with gorgeous red-gold underwings. Another dragon, very young and without a battle scar on his hide, was bold enough to join in without taking the place of a faltering sire, spreading his wings in defiance of the older females’ snorts at his insolence. It was as if he knew very well that his green-bronze hide, accented by startling silver underwings, made him easily the most beautiful of all the sires—and he intended to take advantage of it.

They were moving apart now, slowly, subtly, and the females were moving with them. The dance continued. The russet sire who had begun it all drifted farther and farther from the territory he’d marked out; he had lasted the course and would now see how many mates he had won. Seven followed him, young ones who waddled egg-heavy after him. It was his turn to pretend to ignore them, sweet revenge after their seeming indifference earlier. One of them cried out plaintively, and another hurried forward to nip gently at his tail, but he showed no sign of noticing them at all. This impressed one of the older females, who started after him. A few moments later, another followed.

The group was well away from the others when the sire suddenly sprang up with a single powerful stroke of his wings and landed neatly behind the two older females. His attempts to herd them after the other seven brought howls of protest and a few angry snarls. One eluded him and returned to the watching group. The sire bellowed at her on her way past him, but evidently felt she was not worth going after; he gave a yowl obviously meant as an insult, to which she responded by baring her teeth. The russet sire then gathered his eight females and they took off at his side for the caves above Skybowl.

This process was repeated seven more times. Eight sires captured anywhere from five to nine females each. But there were still five males unmated at the end of the dance, and their furious screams of rejection made the sands tremble and the watching humans shrink into their cloaks.

Maarken, enchanted during the dragons’ performance, abruptly felt the delicate brush of familiar, beloved colors. Startled, he turned his head instinctively to the west, where the sun was still above the Vere Hills.

Is that how you’d behave if I refused you?
came a teasing voice in his mind.

Worse!
he replied, gathering Hollis’ brilliant colors to him and steadying the weave of sunshine.
How long have you been watching?

There are a few words I’d like to hear right now,
he suggested, and smiled as her colors laughed around him.
But I’ll say them first because I’m a knight, a gentleman, and a lord. I love you! And Sioned knows it—not that it’s you specifically, but we have her help if we need it.

Just see if I don’t, if it comes to that, which it won’t! I’ll wait for the
Rialla
if that’s what you want, but the Lastday marriages are going to be led by us, my love.

He became aware of Pol beside him, tugging his sleeve, and sighed. The threads unraveled and he was back in the Desert, and Pol was whispering, “You were Sunrunning, weren’t you?”

Maarken nodded. “Yes.”

“Where to? How far? Who did you talk to?”

“Taking your questions in order—a long way, very far, and none of your business.” He softened the words with a smile. Getting to his feet, he stretched the stiffness out of his muscles and saw that everyone else was doing the same. Pol, with all the supple resilience of early youth, jumped up and ran to his parents to share his excitement at witnessing the sand-dance. Maarken joined his own parents, grinning as Chay heaved himself to his feet and rubbed his backside.

“How can I be numb and still ache?” he complained. “I’m too damned old for this nonsense.”

“The walk back to the horses will take the kinks out,” Tobin said. “Pol and Rohan are going to the caves, Maarken. Do you want to go with them?”

“I promised Sionell and Jahnavi a full account before dinner tonight, so I’ll ride back with you to Skybowl.”

“And to enough bottles of Ostvel’s best cactus brew to soothe my old bones,” Chay added. To Rohan he called out, “If you’re back late, don’t expect me to save any for you!”

“Not even for your prince?”

“Not a thimbleful. It’s your fault I’m out here roasting like a prize sheep in the first place.”

“Not just any old sheep, darling,” his wife said sweetly. “Definitely a ram.”

“Tobin!” He took one long braid in each hand and tugged her to him for a kiss. “You’re shocking the children.”

Maarken grinned as he pictured himself and Hollis similarly “shocking” their own children. One day people would say their names in the same breath, the way they said “Chay and Tobin” or “Rohan and Sioned.” One day very soon.

T
he people of Skybowl were close-mouthed, even with their prince and his heir, when it came to gold. Men and women who had given warm welcome the day before had only polite nods as Rohan and Pol tethered their horses in Threadsilver Canyon. They had ridden up into the hills from the dragon plain, then cut north through a narrow gulley to join the trail leading to Skybowl and the gold caves.

Wind and sand had worn down the rocks into odd shapes; huge cacti grew here and there along the canyon, broad green platters bristling with needles the size of spikes. There was water deep underground still, but nothing remained of the river that had long ago gouged out the softer stone.

The lower caves of Threadsilver were used for refining gold mined from the upper ones, something Pol deduced from the faint glow of firepits within. His father confirmed his guess as they dismounted for the climb on foot to the higher caverns, but volunteered no other information.

The boy squinted up at narrow shelves connected by a path just wide enough for a single pack horse. Work had nearly finished for the day and most of the men and women were on their way down. They favored the two princes with those slight nods of recognition and respect; one or two smiled, but there were no verbal greetings at all. Pol wondered about that, and the fact that his father seemed undisturbed by the silence. Curiosity was near to killing him.

As they waited for the last horses to come down, Pol could contain his questions no longer. “We’re supposed to be mining silver here, aren’t we? I mean, that’s what everybody thinks—including me.”

“That’s the story, yes. And there really is a vein of it running through these hills. Hence the name Threadsilver.”

“And we pretend this is an extension of it, to make everybody think our wealth comes from silver.”

“Of course. Occasionally we do hit silver around here. It’s useful.”

Rohan started up the trail and Pol hurried to keep pace. “But why keep everything secret?” he asked.

“It’s a complex arrangement,” his father replied cryptically.

Pol paused, allowing a young woman carrying waterskins to get by him, and caught up to his father. “How do we hide the fact that we take gold and not silver from the caves?”

“We have ways to disguise the yield. Lleyn helps. So does Volog.”

Pol wanted desperately to hear the full details of this ongoing fiscal fraud, but his father had signaled to a bandy-legged man up on the first shelf of rock. The boy held his peace during the climb, and was introduced to one Rasoun, who managed the whole operation for Ostvel. The miner bowed his respects and gave quiet welcome.

“Thank you,” Pol replied politely, “Are you going to show us the caves?”

“I think I’ll let his grace have that honor.” Rasoun smiled. “I was about your age when my own father gave me my first sight of the gold caverns. He was overseer for Lord Farid, who held Skybowl for your father’s father Prince Zehava.”