Dragon's Keep (23 page)

blew
his fire on it. The cave filled
with its rich smell. The sweet
ness of it
taunted my nose.

"Not fair!" I cried. "I'd
never ask the simpkin Mouser to spout Latin, nor would I ask a dog to give a
speech in French! It is beyond my mouth!"

"Then so's the auruggullittht,"
said Faul.

On my knees already I barked out the sounds
till my throat
was sore and my tongue was
raw with rubbing on my teeth. After
more struggle I vomited the word
"Auruggullittht!" and was given a roasted fish.

In the days ahead I
dreaded Lord Faul's language lessons.
Re
stricting my speech with the pips to
the twisting and growling of DragonTongue turned me to a fool.
But Faul would have his pips trained up right,
learning DragonTongue before other languages. In truth many of the words began
somewhere in the gut as a belch does, and most were low of pitch. These sounds
were well suited to dragon's bellies, and the pips took to them as a ladle to
the soup. But my belly had neither the roundness nor the breadth of my
blue-scaled fellows and my soundings showed it.

At home Mother and Father took pride in my
agile tongue. I'd learned a goodly bit of Latin and mastered French with ease.
Yet here, as Lord Faul spoke to us all in a row
before the fire, I
looked for
all the
world as
dumb as a mushroom.

^Hissstory

AUTUMN
brought pounding rain
to
Dragon's Keep. I was expected to harvest even in the heavy weather, though Faul
would not fly me there in the rain. So, wet and stinking as a cur, I hiked the
hills to cut milkweed and thistle. When rain ceased and the air was damp and
chill, I took Mother's small round mirror from my cloak pocket, caught what
ray of sun I could, and by reflection, lit myself a fire. When she'd first
given it to me I'd held it up to her face, saying, "See the angel in the
glass?"

I did not look for an angel now, but there was fire to warm a ragged body.
In the flames I'd cook the bit of raw meat Faul had given me. Some
days
fish, others fowl. After this spare meal I was back to
harvesting.

When Faul first found me near a little fire he huffed out smoke. "How
did you make this?" I did not answer straight but said, "By fuel and
heat."

"And a tinderbox," he scoffed.

I would protect Mother's gift if I could. It was all I had of her here.
"No tinderbox. I have none." This was true enough.

A strange look came to
his eyes, and lowering his great head,
he
sniffed the fire as if to assure himself it was real.

"So, Briar," he said. "You
have a fire in your belly."

I started. It was the
selfsame thing his lady dragon said to me
when
first we met. Faul misread my surprise and took it to mean that like his pips,
I too was gifted with fire. I should have disclaimed it, but liked his
admiration.

Near day's end, if the piles were of good
height, I stayed on to carve the boat. Even in the storm I'd stay, gutting the
charred wood while lightning lit the devil's banners in the sky. The slowness
of the work angered me. How I longed for hammer and chisel! Even now, the boat
was only a quarter done.

The pips had long since grown out of the need
to use the
cave as their privy, so the
hated chore of cleaning up the piss and
scat was at an end. But they
hungered all the time now and when I was not harvesting, Faul made me hunt and
forage with his brood.

Dark clouds hung over the greenwood, and
thunder rumbled in the distance. Chawl snuffed around the tree roots. "Dig
here for the truffles," he said in DragonTongue.

"If you help me," I answered in
English. "You have the sharper claws."

He batted my backside for not using proper
speech, though not hard enough to harm me. I said it again in DragonTongue. It
made no difference. Chawl roared and tumbled down the hill with Kadmi. They
slapped each other's tails, chanting the rhyme from Merlin's prophecy I'd translated
into DragonTongue and taught them.
"Bright fire.
Dragons
fire.
Broken sword.
One

black
talon ends the war!" They
bashed each other in earnest, fin
ishing
the game with words that twisted Merlin's peace prediction. "Turn them
into mincemeat! Bake them in the flame! Cut them up! Spit them out! Start the
war again!"

They rattled the words off well enough in
DragonTongue, could spew the rhyme in English, and, more recently, in French.
Lord Faul allowed some schooling in human tongues
after they'd
come to master their own, which they'd done at great speed
al
ready. I was proud of their progress.
They were great mimics. No
words or sounds troubled them, and no wonder.
DragonTongue had to be the most difficult language ever devised; so all others
came easily once the pips wrapped their slit tongues around that.

I put my reed basket by the
roots,
a roughly woven thing 1'd made myself. "Will no
one help dig?"

Eetha chased Ore around a tree. Truffles were a favorite with
Lord
Faul and I'd be blamed if we came up short. I knelt, unearthed a truffle, and
threw it in my basket. Flow tired my bones were. Never did I treat my mother
the way the pips treated me. Did I enslave her? Ignore her? Bat her behind?
Order her about? Never!

There was some pleasantness here digging up
truffles. This earth was rich and damp and it clung to my fingers.

Eetha brought Ore over to help, and we added
more truffles to the basket. Some were the size of walnuts, but a few were as
large as a man's fist. Ore found the largest one, and her blue eyes went nearly
round as she dug it out.

"For Father," she said.

"He'll like it best of all," I
answered.

Eetha fell into a hush, lifting her head and
listening to the breeze the way I'd seen Faul do sometimes. She breathed out a
breeze sound, a kind of wind talk,
then
listened
again. Of all the pips she had a way of sensing the future. How, I could not
tell, but I'd learned to take notice when she spoke in creature tongues or
answered the wind as she was doing now.

"A hailstorm comes," she said. I
wiped my hands and stood. Dark clouds moved across the sky.

"Are you
sure?"

Lightning flashed.
Thunder.
The hail fell so suddenly, Ore squealed and sidled up to me.

"It's all right, little one. The hail
won't hurt you."

Chawl bounded up the hill with Kadmi. Sliding
to a halt in a spray of mud, they twitched their ears, opened their jaws, and
roared out thunder. There seemed no sound the pips could not make, from the
buzzing of a bee to thunderclaps. The pips imitation was so close that Ore put her head on my shoulder. She was the runt and not much bigger than I was, else I
think she would have crawled under my skirts to hide just then.

We waited out the storm under the pine
boughs. Hailstones pelted the ground like a wealthy king emptying a treasure
chest of pearls. A two-inch pile of hail covered the forest floor when the
storm was over. The clouds retreated and the wind sighed in the trees.

"How did you know the hail was
coming?" I asked Eetha.

She answered with a shrug.

I envied her skill. In truth she had truer
divining powers than Sir Magnus, who could never predict weather or tell the
future

with
all his star charts, scattered bones, and books
(though he claimed to do both).

Chawl snorted then ran down the hail-covered
path, calling,
"
Wild goat!"

I knocked over the truffle basket leaping
onto Kadmi's back and we were off. The pips could not yet fly, but that didn't
keep them from the hunt.

That night we supped on
roast goat, wild onions, and truffles.
Faul
beamed at his family as proud as any father. The pips ate heartily now, but
they still wanted thistle milk. I was often left alone to harvest on the hill.
I hated pulling thistles but the gouge in my boat grew deeper.

Throughout autumn my chores seemed never
ending. I was a servant sure, living in a cave, harvesting, cooking, and cleaning,
and sleeping on a pile of moss and rushes. One rainy afternoon I returned
exhausted with my thistle pile. No sooner was I in the cave than I was pushed
outside again.

"Gather more kindling," ordered
Faul.

In the greenwood I piled up the branches, my
back and arms
aching. God's bones! Would
Faul never let me rest? Besides, the
kindling was only an excuse to send
me out. While I was away harvesting Lord Faul had been teaching the pips his
dragon history. The lessons proclaimed the treachery of humans. I'd seen
contempt in Chawl's eyes when I'd entered the cave earlier in the
midst of Paul's litany. Even little Ore had looked angry so I knew
it to be true.

In the windswept forest I slipped through the
mud in my

threadbare
shoes, cursing Faul and his kind through my chatter
ing teeth. Weighted with wood, I hurried back to
the lair and was
about to duck inside when the shouts from within halted
me.

"...
their
deceit," roared Faul in DragonTongue. "All humans are liars!"

Why must he teach the pips to hate people so?
I hid in the shadows at cave's edge and peered inside. Smoke rose from the
central fire. A cache of wood sat at Kadmi's side—more proof kindling wasn't
needed. I would wait here where the drifting wood smoke covered my scent.

"I tell you this," said Faul.
"In our great race, those of us who did not have their own inner fire died
off in the age of ice. The human race would have frozen then. They would have
been" scoured from the face of the earth if the DragonLord hadn't given
them his fire."

Given his fire?
No one had ever told me this. I held my tongue against
my teeth, listening.

"Then why did he
give it?" asked Eetha, always the cleverest
and most attentive to her lessons. Lord Faul raised his head and hissed,
a sound I'd never heard from him before. I shuddered in my hiding place.

"Pity!" spat the dragon. He eyed
the pips one after the other, his slit pupils shining like hammered copper in
the fire. I gripped the kindling tighter, rain pounding on my back.

"No pelts to keep them warm. The cold
was downing humankind. A clawful of deaths would have wiped them out forever.
It was then a lone man staggered through the snow to the

DragonLord.
Entering the cave, he fell on his knees and begged
the DragonLord for mercy." Lord Faul whipped his tail. The cracking sound
made me jump and nearly drop my kindling.

"Mercy," he growled. "And the
DragonLord took pity on the man! And with the gift of fire blazing on a wooden
staff, the man fought his way back through the snow, lit a fire in his cave,
and lived!" spat Faul. "Lived, bred, thrived, and stole our land from
us!"

Here Lord Faul shouted fire to the roof. A
canopy of flame spread out above the pips. And even from my hiding place, my
face stung with the heat of it.

"Then we'll take it back!" roared
Chawl.

"Take it back!" roared Kadmi.
"With wings and teeth and claws and fire!"

"We'll hold a Dragon Council and call
for war!" shouted Eetha, leaping to a stand. I trembled at her fervor most
of all, for Eetha had always been the kindest to me.

I thought to leave and traipse back through
the storm where I'd wait out their war cries. But Faul warned his pips.

"Quit your shouting, pips, or the
man-child will hear. Come summer when you've found your wings we'll fly to meet
the others."

"And begin the war!" called Chawl.

"Not yet," said Faul.

"Why?" asked Kadmi.

I peered inside and saw the dragon narrowing
his golden eyes. "Now this secret must be kept from Briar." The pips gath-

ered
closer, and Faul lowered his voice. I strained to
hear from my hiding place.

"There are too few of us left to fight.
Man has killed our kind. Aside from us there may be only five or six."

"In the world?" cried Eetha.

"In
all the
world," said Faul.

Little Ore let out a strange sound, which I
took to be a sob.

"Stop now!" roared Faul. "I've
told you before. Tears will kill!" His roar was deafening, but he put his
arm about Ore and said more quietly, "Turn it into anger, Ore. Lift your
jaw and roar it out." And so she roared blue fire to the ceiling as I'd
seen her father and siblings do, but this was the first I'd seen her do it.

"We must bow to
Merlin's vision and make peace or we'll die
out,"
said Eetha.

"Peace?" Faul
batted Eetha across the cave. "Merlin's vision
was a lie! A dragon giving king and queen his talon? A
king breaking his sword and laying it at a dragon's feet? No one believed
Merlin six hundred years ago when he told the DragonLord he'd seen this
written in the stars. And any dragon that believes such lies now should be
clawed and thrashed until he finds his sense." With that he bashed Chawl,
who'd begun chanting, "Bright fire. Dragon's fire—"

"Lie down!" Faul roared, and all
the pips curled up on the floor.

"Make as if to
sleep," he said, "before the servant girl returns."

Servant girl.
'Rain rattled the pine trees
across the river and I
shivered in my
place. But fear kept me leaning on the rock, and