Sd’hirrin and Lhhaess looked at each other, then back at Hasai again. “That was Hasai ehs’Pheress,” Lhhaess sang, surprised. “Doubtless you are of collateral line, but—”
“There was no collateral line,” Hasai said, and dropped his jaw. “You know that. My dam and sire hatched no other egg after me, and I never mated. At least, not before casting the last skin.”
The two Marchwarders looked at Hasai most dubiously. He had used one of the more casual idioms for physical death.
“Hasai ehs’Pheress went mdahaih,” Sd’hirrin sang, with overtones that said he thought perhaps some game was being played with him, and he didn’t care for it. “I have mdeihei in common with his line, and word spread from his mdeihei to mine—”
“So it should have. And I did go mdahaih. Indeed, I almost went rdahaih instead; it was a close thing. But I found a sdaha at last. Or she found me.”
The Marchwarders looked at Segnbora, now. Sd’hirrin’s look was suspicious, as well it might have been, as he looked at a Dragon he had never seen before—and almost all Dragons knew almost all other Dragons on sight, there being few enough of them in the world, with most of their mdeihei related as well. But then his look, and Lhhaess’s, went back to Hasai in bewilderment.
“You are too much here to be mdahaih!” Lhhaess said, sounding slightly indignant as well as confused. “You are physical!” The word she used was dav’w’hnesshih, there-enough-to-bite, one of the words used only of Dragons or other living beings still in their original bodies. And indeed, standing there in the downpouring noon-light from the cracks in the hilltop, Hasai was quite physical enough to cast a shadow, which no mdaha should have been able to do, no matter how vigorously he was manifesting.
“Auhé,” Hasai said, shrugging one wing, “it’s my sdaha’s fault, I suppose. She has never been one for following tradition; some days I despair of her.”
Segnbora caught the sidelong look in Hasai’s eye. She stretched her wings up and bent her head down somewhat lower than Hasai had, the properly respectful gesture of a younger Dragon among elder ones—but with a slightly insouciant sidewise tilt to her head which indicated, youth aside, that her and the others’ relative ranks would have to be worked out later. “Segnbora d’Welcaen,” she said to them. And then when she saw Sd’hirrin opening his mouth to say that that hardly sounded like a Dracon name, Segnbora shrugged out of the Dracon form as if out of a cloak, letting go the Firework that had been holding it in place, and stood in her own shape again. Skádhwë was in her hand, flaming blue: she sheathed it, watching with satisfaction as the Dragons gazed at her in astonishment.
“The Goddess’s greeting to you, Lhhaess, Sd’hirrin,” she said; “and my own with it.”
They stared at her, and then their heads swung as one to Hasai.
“You have gone mdahaih to a human?” Sd’hirrin said.
“It cannot be done,” Lhhaess said. But she was looking at Segnbora with less shock, now, and more curiosity.
“I took what life the Immanence sent me,” Hasai said mildly. “It does not seem to have served me so badly.”
“I thought it couldn’t be done, either,” Segnbora said, “at least not and leave me sane. But it’s been done, all right. I found Hasai going rdahaih, but he passed to me instead, and all his mdeihei with him. Which is going to eventually raise some questions for the Lhhw’hei.”
Sd’hirrin folded his wings right down, the gesture of a Dragon trying to show no outer reaction while it consolidated its thoughts. But Lhhaess said to Segnbora, “We’d always thought that only a Dragon of one’s own line could accept another as mdaha that way... if not an egg-child, at least a collateral relative....”
“We may be more alike than any of us thought,” Segnbora said.
“That can’t be so—!” Sd’hirrin began to say, standing suddenly and spreading his wings right up to full extension in discomfort. But Lhhaess turned to him and said, “Whether it can or not, what’s come of our hospitality? For shame.” To Segnbora she said, “Have you eaten and drunk? We have none of the kinds of things humans use, but we could find something in a short time, I think—”
“I took sun with Hasai on the way here, thank you,” Segnbora said, and smiled a bit at Sd’hirrin’s nonplused expression. Dragons lived off light, which they drank through the webs of their wings: it fueled their Dragonfire and helped them fly... and no mere sorcerer, no matter how talented, could change his or her body to such an extent as to eat sunshine. It would be one more thing for Sd’hirrin to think about. “Perhaps we might go out and bask later. But business first.”
“What business?” Lhhaess said. She had thought for a long time about how to best phrase this, and Hasai had been little help to her: Dracon protocol was mostly about temporizing. “The business of Arlen. Being here as long as you’ve been, you can’t help but have noticed the difference between things as they are the last seven years, and things as they were when there was a King in the land.”
“I have seen some thirty kings and queens here,” Sd’hirrin said. “I saw Freolger fall off his horse, that great fall that caused so much trouble with his ministers; I saw Faran the Seafarer go sailing away with her fleets that never returned, and Laeran the Young at the gates of Torth, hammering them down. I have seen kings hanged, and queens laid low by the plague, and enough bad times before that these look not so much different to me.”
“Then you should look harder,” Segnbora said. “Sd’hirrin, all your years are impressive enough, but don’t think to weigh down a mere human with awe of them; my mdeihei are as old as yours. You and they may both have seen the Worldwinning, but whether it’s made all of you any wiser, who’s to say? What I’ve seen is how time passes, or seems not to, for a Dragon who listens too closely to the voices of the past. Their advice will be no help to you against the trouble that’s coming.” She took care to speak in the Dracon precognitive tense, the future certain, in which one could not lie, but could only speak truly about what she foresaw. She had seen the forthcoming trouble often enough now, in her own dreams, made sharper by her newfound Fire and Hasai’s way of seeing the future whole, in terrible broad blurred glimpses marred only by being filtered through her too-human perceptions.
“What trouble?” Lhhaess sang, sounding disturbed.
“You’ve seen. The land doesn’t bear much more than grass; the weather is misbehaving; the armies move; pestilence is rife, people are starving. And where are all the people who should be living here?” Segnbora said to Sd’hirrin. He had folded his wings down tight again. “This was pastureland, once, and farm country. The hedgerows are still here, but not much else. Trees grow up through the barns; the herds are gone; the roads are all gone to grass. Where has your Wardship gone?” She used the oldest word, from the Homeworld, lhhw’auviuh’thaeh, life-guardian. “Dragons settled here as MarchWarders to guard the rhhw’hei from the Dark, so it’s always been said. Doing nothing about the forces that drive them away is a poor way to guard them!”
“Precipitate action is dangerous—” Sd’hirrin began. But Lhhaess moved uneasily, and Segnbora knew that the argument that she and Hasai had had so often had been staged here as well. She was glad of it.
“Oh come,” Segnbora said. “In a language where the words ‘to do’ and ‘to be’ are the same, that’s a poor excuse. The Shadow is moving, Sd’hirrin! The same Shadow that fathered your old enemy the Dark, three thousand years ago, and killed half your people coming here: the same that snuffed your star out and sent you on this journey to begin with! Did you really think you would lose It in the dark? It’s followed you here. It lives here as It does everywhere else in the Universe, right out to the place where even the stars’ light can’t flee from It any further. It tried the obvious moves, and lucky for you, they failed. It attacked you when you first came; the Messenger came and saved you. For a while. A scrap of the Dark lived to attack you again, and M’athwinn ehs’Dhariss of the WorldWinner’s line killed it again; but she warned you that Its
day was not done. Are you deaf even to your own people’s prophecies? She said, ‘Its subtleties are many, and Its end is not yet’. And that’s all true. The Shadow has given up obvious attacks on this world. Now it attacks through humans. It’s the Shadow that moves Cillmod’s armies and policies. And you look aside, afraid, not wanting to be involved. For Its own defense the Shadow has inflamed your old fear of doing some harm to humankind—and so made certain that by inaction, you will!”
Sd’hirrin looked troubled, and subsided, but said nothing. Lhaess spread a wing out, a thoughtful look. “Tell us then, raihiw’sheh,” she said, “what you would see done.”
Segnbora smiled a small thin smile. “Advocate”, Lhhaess had called her, the name for one proposing an argument in nn’s’raihle: the one who takes the prize, or pays the price, on winning or losing. “To stop the famines and the wars at their source,” she said, “the royal magics must be re-enacted by a properly enthroned Initiate. Arlen needs its King again. Before I became sdahaih, I was bound to the man who should be King; Freelorn, old King Ferrant’s son. I’m bound to him still. He is moving to take back his own. But he’ll need all the help he can get, for the Shadow sees the spoiling of Its plans in him, and wants him dead by any means. The forces of Darthen are moving to war against Arlen for the breaking of the ancient Oath. No war against them would work if the Dragons were with them—humans hold Dragons in such awe and fear. The threat of all Dragonkind roused would be something to give even the Shadow pause.”
Sd’hirrin and Lhhaess looked at him and were silent for a while, conferring in underspeech, Segnbora thought. At last Lhhaess said, “You know we can give you no aid without the DragonChief’s leave.”
“Neither of us would have asked any such thing,” Segnbora said.
“But eyes are of use,” Hasai said, “and ears that hear others’ songs.”
Sd’hirrin sang a brief chord of amusement. “News there is in plenty,” he said. “That we would give any Dragon that asked.” He looked slightly askance at Segnbora.
“Then let us stay a while,” Segnbora said, “and hear the news. Hasai has been by himself a long while, away from the company of Dragons. I would be glad to hear what Dragons who aren’t mdaheih to me sound like; new song is always welcome. And in time... “
“In time,” Sd’hirrin said. “There is a great deal of that.”
Segnbora had thoughts on that subject. But she kept them to herself.
*
They spent some days there, talking to the Marchwarders, hearing the news and telling it. What Hasai had said was true enough; Sd’hirrin and Lhhaess had been watching Prydon and all of northern Arlen closely, with something of the fascination of a small child watching a busy anthill. They gave them endless news about troop movements in and out of Prydon, all of which Segnbora passed on to Herewiss by mindtouch each evening. That at least was of interest. There was an ingathering going on, slow but steady, and some four thousand men were now quartered in Prydon who had not been there earlier in the summer. But when the Warders ran out of troop movements to report, all the talk turned to family histories, whose mdeihei knew whose, and who won what obscure argument however many years ago. For the first few days or so, it occasionally seemed to Segnbora that Dragons had never done anything but argue. She itched to be about something more productive, but Hasai kept quoting her the old proverb, “Rrrh’n heih hw’haé ae-sta mnenhi’thae”; “water melts the stone just as well as Dragonfire does”. “The fire is a good deal faster,” Segnbora would mutter at him. But she knew he was right.
She spent most of her time at Aired in Dracon form. It helped her to patience, since time flowed differently when one lived in a Dracon body—both more slowly and more intensely. It also meant that any hunger she might feel could be assuaged by lying out in the sun or flying above the cloud cover, drinking sunfire rather than raiding the bag of provisions that was all she had brought with her. And it meant that she could work on her ehhath. Her dance was still too stiff, her song-conversation too formal, and she knew it; but over a few days’ chatting with Sd’hirrin and Lhhaess, Segnbora began to loosen up and feel herself more competent. She also started to become better at judging a Dragon’s personality from its style of ehhath—useful knowledge, for Dracon faces are immobile, and personality and mood communicated themselves through ehhath more than any other way.
And then the morning came when she looked up into the hot blue sky and said to Lhhaess, who was basking nearby, “We have incomers,” she said. “Quite high up; they’re just into the blue. Another black. And someone in Dahiric’s livery....”
“With a black?” Lhhaess rose up and put her wings in order, gazing up into the sky herself. “That would be Hiriedh ehs’M’harat, then, in the Worldwinner’s colors. And the black is probably Aivuh ehs’Rrhndaih.”
Segnbora shuddered all over as the mnekh’eiea, the ahead-memory, came over her—the sort of precognition that Dragons took for granted, and which had been plaguing her since she first became sdahaih. As usual, it brushed the hard-edged present aside as effortlessly as wind scattering dry leaves. Suddenly she found herself sitting beside a stream, in long grass, in her human shape. On one side of her was Hasai, and on the other, a dragon scaled in star-emerald and topaz. The other was bending down beside her and singing, low and distressed, “I wouldn’t have anyone else know of this, aihesssch: it’s an embarrassment to me—!” Segnbora heard herself say, lightly, “It’s our secret, then, Hiriedh.” But in the memory she knew she herself was distressed too, frightened of something that seemed about to happen, rushing toward her, inescapable; a huge and threatening change --
—and the memory was gone, and Segnbora would have breathed out in unnerved relief, if Dragons breathed. She looked over at Hasai, and he looked back unconcerned. He had not seen what she had.
Her mdeihei rumbled in the background, a sound of vague upset. Segnbora ignored them. She had heard that rumble every time over the past few days that some curious Dragon came to look over the strange half-human-half-Dracon creature, or creatures, staying at Aired. Quite a few Dragons had come and gone, in every size and livery that could be imagined. Some had been polite and inquisitive, some had been astonished, some outraged; some had peered and stared, and talked over their heads, as if Segnbora and Hasai had been beasts in a zoo. If the past couple of days had done anything for Segnbora’s concept of Dragons as a species, they had changed it from a vague sense of great numbers, great age, and obscure nobility, to a concept of many individuals, some better or worse than others, and all simply and unpredictably Dracon. At first her own interest in the individual personalities had outweighed the personalities’ reactions. But now she was bored with it all. And at the same time, curious: for many of the Dragons had showed an odd combination of fascination with them, and what looked like much-repressed fear. Fear of what? Segnbora had wondered, and wondered again now. We’re no threat. Yet there was always that look about them—of a Dragon remembering-ahead, remembering something that will harm them some day. The same sort of ominous memory, actually, as she had just had...
Segnbora put the thought aside for the time being, for there was no use trying to deal with mnekh’eiea while other things were busy happening. She got up and put her wings up in the proper gesture of welcome, and glanced over at Hasai. He was wearing the same manner, but there was something uneasy about the curve of his tail. She sang a soft chord’s worth of sigh and turned to greet the visitors as they landed.
One of them indeed wore the Worldfinder’s livery, like Segnbora’s, but not quite so vivid in color—the paler color of summer grass rather than spring’s. That was the Dragon of her memory, Hiriedh, and she threw Segnbora an odd look while settling her wings. The other, Aivuh, like Hasai, went in black star-sapphires and rough grey-white diamond underneath, his spines and fangs all diamond; but the eyes were the same pallid golden color as Hiriedh’s, and looked at the two of them with cool assessment.
Lhhaess and Sd’hirrin came forward to
meet them and make introductions, and this was done with all necessary courtesy as far as the naming of names went. Hasai gave Hiriedh a bow of surprising depth when he was introduced, making Segnbora wonder where they had met before. But he was keeping his thoughts to himself at the moment, and that made her wonder too.
Aivuh was looking Hasai over with that same considering look in his eyes, glancing from Hasai to his shadow under the sun. There was no return of Hasai’s bow, nor any for Segnbora. “It’s as we heard,” he sang in a voice surprisingly light and soft for his size, which was almost that of Sd’hirrin. “You are dav’w’hnesshih indeed.”
“My solidity,” Hasai sang back, rather dryly, “seems to have become a favorite topic of late. It may come of going mdahaih in a younger world. Or to younger sdeihei.”
“Llunih went mdahaih so,” Hiriedh said, in a light voice much like Aivuh’s, “and could never manifest enough to cast a shadow, let alone bite or be bitten—not though it was the Dweller herself he went mdahaih to.” She looked over at Segnbora again. “I rather think your rhhw’ae here has something to do with it. Some one of their magics, perhaps.”
Segnbora dropped her jaw slightly. Your ‘humaness’ here, Hiriedh had said, using the courtesy form of the species pronoun that Dragons applied to human beings. Unfortunately the pronoun was nearly the same as the one Dragons used for inanimate objects and animals. “We have a few magics of our own, it’s true,” Segnbora said, singing as dry and slow as Hasai, and bowing moderate respect; if others were rude, that didn’t mean she had to be. “As you will have noticed from the doings down by Bluepeak Marchward, and the changes in the mountains there. But no, not in this case; I doubt sorcery or even Fire could have managed what Hasai did by himself. I assumed he simply wanted to live... more than is usual for Dragons.”
The word she used was iuh-kej—the term for life in its active sense, doing rather than just being. There were Dragons who felt using the word too freely, or without qualification, was in bad taste, and the look Hiriedh turned on Segnbora now seemed to indicate she was one of these.