Nilrasha waggled her wing stumps. It was a disarming gesture, so dreadfully unsettling it was humorous.

“Act as his mate?” Wistala managed, feeling her scales tingle as they resettled.

“Don’t look so shocked, sister, there is a precedent for it. Back in the days of Silverhigh, of course.” Silverhigh was a half-legendary dragon civilization, in an age long, long ago when dragonkind ruled the Earth and flew proudly in the sunshine. Before the assassins came.

Bother precedents and Silverhigh. Her brother? She didn’t hate him outright. In her opinion, he’d turned into a rather noble dragon even if he looked, walked, and flew a little offbeat. Wistala had given him his bad eye in her fury over his role in the discovery and murder of their parents.

Nilrasha waggled her stumps again, pointing one at Wistala. “I don’t mean you’d be his mate. It’s true, we’ve had no luck with hatchlings, probably because we’ve both been so smashed about in our youth, but I don’t mean a sort of substitute egg layer. Only that you’d act in my place in matters of rank and title.”

“Why me?” Wistala asked. Surely there were more famous dragonelles—Ibidio, for instance. She was the well-respected daughter of Tyr FeHazathant, the greatest and most legendary of the Tyrs. Since Tighlia’s death, Ibidio had always set the standard of how a great female dragon should act. If anyone deserved to display a proud side of green at court functions it was she. “Surely someone like Ibidio is more used to life in the Lavadome on Imperial Rock.”

Nilrasha’s wings froze and her griff flashed open and shut again with a snick that echoed off the cavern walls.

The Queen cleared her throat. “First, you’re his sister. When all is said and done, I trust blood. Second, you’re an outsider. You don’t belong to any particular clan, so I suspect everyone would find you assuming the position agreeable. If we tried to put an Ankelene in, the Skotl and Wyrr would object, if Skotl—I’m sure you have made the mind-picture. These jealousies of clan and class are more dangerous to us than any hominid. But I’m showing my radical scale again; I must get back to cases. Third, you have tremendous experience in the Upper World—rank and friends in the Hypatian Protectorate, and no matter how knowledgeable some of us are in various wars and politics in the Lavadome or the Upholds, it’s just a little hidden corner of the world. My mate could use the advice of someone as traveled as you. Fourth, you’re one of the most impressive physical specimens of a dragonelle I’ve ever seen. It’s clear you didn’t grow up on scrawny bullocks and kern. If it came to outright physical intimidation, you’d make any of those pretentious, overgrown asps in the Imperial Line back off.”

Lavadome politics were still a vague business to her, but she did know the three “lines” of dragons mistrusted one another, a holdover from terrible civil wars generations ago. “I always thought myself rather thick and lumpy. Most of you are so sleek and graceful.”

“You’ll find there comes a time when you simply must draw yourself up and bellow with that collection of iron-brained self-importance of the Imperial Rock, Wistala. Even if you can’t break heads, you can give their ears a good pounding. You’re the dragonelle to do it, I believe.”

“I’ve no ambition,” Wistala said, wishing she’d stayed to see her roof finished. “I’m happy living among my friends in the northern provinces. It’s a fractious part of Hypatia, my Queen. Barbarians to the north with a few mercenary dragonriders left over from the Wizard’s days, grumpy, begrudged dwarfs in the mountains, infiltrations by clans of Ironriders in the woods and dales committing banditry, and the human thanes who are ostensibly our allies don’t care for the Hypatian Directory being high-handed thanks to our Tyr’s backing. You see ‘dragons out now’ scrawled on mile markers in some of the other provinces, especially where their ‘Protectors’ demand much in the way of food and coin. Not that I’m not immensely honored—”

Nilrasha clacked her teeth to cut her off. “Fifth, you analyze rather than emote. Half the dragons I know would be cursing the dwarfs and barbarians and already have a war going. You talk like an Ankelene sage but display like a Skotl and persevere like a Wyrr. I hope you’ll take no insult at the comparisons.”

“I’m flattered you think so much of me.”

“When you held the Red Mountain pass against Ironriders and Roc-riders alike I knew you were a dragon who could set her backbone and stick.”

Blood in the snow. Wistala didn’t care for those memories. Battles terrified her beyond words and she still dreamt of young Takea, dying in that dreadful pass.

“What about my duties as a Protector?” Wistala asked. Mossbell was in good hands, but who knows what kind of greedy fool might replace her.

“I’ll find a substitute. Or I’ll take it on myself, and just send and receive a few messages a year so your more ambitious fellow protectors don’t get ideas. Now let’s not look so disheartened; it won’t be forever. Besides, I have another need.” She lowered her voice, but Wistala couldn’t imagine who might overhear, save blighter servants she presumably trusted. “What I’m about to tell you is a great secret. By your oath as a Firemaid, do you promise to keep it?”

“I shall.”

“Your brother will not be Tyr much longer. Once RuGaard has a successor in place, he’d like to lay down his duties. I know the Ankelenes call him power-mad and other worse names, but nothing is farther from the truth. He’s carrying out the honors and duties given him, honors and duties he didn’t seek, whatever the whisperers might say.”

She looked at her battle trophies. “Too many Tyrs have died atop the Imperial Rock. Right now the one thing we don’t have a tradition for is the peaceful transfer of power and responsibility. Can you believe, these Hypatians are more organized about such things than dragons! Short-lived, scatterbrained little mammals arranging their affairs better than, well, their betters. He’d like to learn that one practice from the humans and change that tradition to a happier one—a solemn ceremony where he turns over the responsibilities of rank to another with sense and energy.”

Nilrasha shifted her weight with a lunge and Wistala heard the snap-crack of her tail strike the floor.

“I told you not to listen,” she roared at her hindquarters, where a blighter hopped on one foot and long arm, cradling the other foot in her hand. Wistala smelled blood. “Oh, I am sorry, Obday, I didn’t mean to strike you, just startle. Go get it braced and bandaged and have some soup.”

The servant hobbled off toward a curtained partition and disappeared.

“I still don’t understand why you’re afraid,” Wistala asked.

“There’s a plot against my mate’s life. I feel it in my bones.”

“A plot? As in… as in murder?”

If the suggestion bothered Nilrasha, she showed no sign of it. “Come, let us watch the sunset.”

Wistala followed her out to the entrance. The sun blazed orange red as it sank, making Wistala think of DharSii, the odd tiger-striped dragon she’d met thrice, each time under unfortunate circumstances.

“I’m not one of these brilliant dragons, Wistala,” Nilrasha said. “Everyone is always a move ahead of me in their little games. I’m not that great a fighter, either—if I were, I’d still have wings rather than stumps.”

She waggled them again, then continued. “What I do have, though, is luck. Luck and an instinct for when to move. I’ve lived quietly here for years, doing the best I can to be an absent Queen through messengers and the good offices of court dragons like NoSohoth and HeBellereth. Word has come to me through a variety of sources that something is reaching sii and saa for my mate’s throat. For all that he’s suspicious of hominids, he’s entirely too trusting of dragons, especially those close to him.

“I’m going to tell you something, Wistala, about one time when I had the instinct to be in the right place at the right time and I didn’t act.”

Nilrasha watched the sun turn red. “Your brother had a mate before me, a very frail dragonelle, one of FeHazathant’s line, daughter of Ibidio and AgGriffopse, one of the best dragons who ever flew in the Lavadome. My mate was an upholder at the time, in an important but remote province called Anaea. I was on hand the night she ate an enormous meal and choked on a bone.

“Some people say I choked her. Well, I might as well have. I don’t know if you’ve had this lesson in the Firemaids, Wistala, but in my day we learned how to help a choking dragon. You pierce the weak spot in the windpipe just above the breastbone with a reed, a pair of arrows, anything you can find. It opens the lungs to the air and you can still breathe, after a fashion.

“I had the presence of mind to grab a horn off the wall, the brass tubing would have served admirably to feed her air once I punched it through her throat, but then I froze, unable to act. I think part of me, the part that wanted to be mated to your courageous brother, wished she would die. I stood there, watching her choke, seeing the pleading fear in her eyes, and I knew what I had to do. But I stood there, rooted. Then she collapsed and quit breathing, and too late I tried to intervene. I dropped the horn and went to her side. I thrust my sii down her throat and tried to take out the bone in a panic, and your brother finally appeared in answer to a human thrall’s signal.