Tooth and Claw (10 page)

When he had dealt with this weight of correspondence, he had four piles and three notes left over. The first two piles consisted of notes of sympathy divided by sincerity. The second two were cards of invitation, divided into those to which he would return polite but negative thanks, owing to his bereavement, and the much smaller pile which he would certainly attend. He kept the remaining three notes in his hand for a moment. The first was from his attorney, Hathor, offering any help that might be needed with storing or investing Avan’s inheritance. “I’d bet a farm that he knows the amount to the last crown,” Avan said to himself, setting the note on top of the pile of invitations which he would accept. The second was from Liralen, his immediate superior in the Planning Office, offering condolences and wondering when Avan would be back at his desk.

The third was from the Exalted Rimalin, and said nothing whatsoever of Bon Agornin but merely hinted, rather cryptically, that if Avan had any money to invest, he knew of an opportunity. Avan looked at this note for a long time, then sought the note of sympathy from Exalt Rimalin. There was no doubt that they were written in the same hand. When a dragon uses his wife as his clerk, it means one of two things. Either he is economizing, which, as Avan had explained to Penn, would not have been how he would have read his friend’s situation at all, or he is dealing in very confidential information. Avan would have listened to Rimalin’s
proposition in any case, but now he would listen to it very much more carefully.

He left the piles where they were. His lodging was a comfortable double-domed building, made of stone that at least gave the appearance of solidity. Underneath, there was only one sleeping cave, which, however, had an exit of its own to the street. Avan did not consider the place secure, but it did manage to combine respectability and inexpensiveness, so he kept his valuables with his attorney and continued to lodge there.

He whistled as he went down towards the sleeping cave, not from any lightness of heart but to wake his clerk, Sebeth, and give her a little warning, if such might be necessary, that he was returning and would expect to find her alone. Avan called Sebeth his clerk, but it would have been hard to say what her status really was. Certainly she performed the functions of a clerk, she wrote Avan’s notes and carried his messages, she was educated enough to act as a respected maiden clerk. But she was of no Respected status and was for that matter no maiden, she was head to toe an even eggshell pink. She shared Avan’s quarters, and often enough his bed, though she was not his wife. She cared for his clothes and his food, but she was not his servant—her wings showed some sign of having been bound at some time, but they flexed now as freely as those of any Exalt in Tiamath. The truth of her history and condition only she and Avan knew.

She was alone in the sleeping cave when Avan reached it, stretching and yawning. “I didn’t expect you until tomorrow,” she said, smiling at him. Avan knew better than to inquire if there had been some friend visiting who had left at his arrival. The whistle was sufficient. He did not know whether her other lovers were real or part of her imaginative life, and as long as he was not forced to meet them he was happy that way.

Sebeth welcomed him into the sleeping cave. She had arranged the gold already, he noticed. “This won’t be staying here,” he warned. He had not enough gold to spare for comfort or display, and they generally slept on rocks.

“I know, it’ll all be invested and taken away,” Sebeth pouted, then laughed. “But we can enjoy it while we can. See how delicious it is to stretch out on?” She suited the action to the words, smiling enticingly.

Sebeth was, or claimed to be, the daughter of an Eminent Lord—not even Avan knew which one. Counting up the nobility and their ages, he sometimes suspected it may have been an Exalted or an Illustrious rather than an Eminent, but he did not challenge her illusions. She had little enough to comfort her. At an early age, scarcely thirty years, with her wings barely grown, she had been kidnapped when on her way from her tutor’s to her father’s demesne. The kidnapper held her for ransom. He tormented her with his presence, causing her to blush, but he did not dare actually assault her until the ransom demand was scornfully refused. Thereafter he made her something which it pleased him to call his consort. Later, he forced her to walk the streets of Irieth with bound wings, a streetwalker who could refuse no stranger who offered her gold. This gold she was forced to hand over to her captor. The worst of it was, she had told Avan, that he had made her believe that she owed it to him, because the ransom had not been paid. The betrayal of her father was almost worse to her than the subsequent servitude to which her family had left her to be subjected. “He said he had dragonets enough and that they were welcome to keep me,” she said when she first told Avan the story. For once there was no artifice in her voice, no teasing, her sapphire eyes were almost still. “I stayed with my captor until I had paid him back, by my calculations, the ransom he had expected. Then I killed him while he slept.”

Whether she had in truth waited until she had repaid the ransom or until she had a more acceptable protector, Avan was not sure. Sebeth’s life was full of daring escapes, murders, doomed lovers, and drama. He never knew what to believe, and sometimes the stories changed. He was quite sure she was gently born and kidnapped into servitude, but the details shifted with her moods. He had met her in his first year in Irieth, when she had been employed as a dealer at a gambling club. He had at first been fascinated, and been one of the many lovers she took now for her own choice, not for gold. From this they had progressed to friendship and an alliance, in which Avan gave her employment and his protection, such as it was. He did not call her his consort or wife, and he paid her for the clerkly services she performed. He paid her something more than that from time to time as it suited them both. Avan could not have married her. He was quite aware that she was no longer someone who could be considered respectable, and that however much of that had initially been by no fault of her own, the way she had chosen to continue to live was not one that could have been condoned by the respectable world. All the same, he was very fond of her, and it would have been a great sacrifice for him to put her aside had he brought Haner to Irieth as he had offered.

“Do you miss your father?” she asked, after a little while.

Avan had not had time to think about it. “Yes,” he said, after a little consideration. “But almost worse than his death was the manner of his funeral, and the way my sister’s husband Daverak went against all my father’s wishes. I am going to take him to law and make him wish he had behaved as a gently born dragon should.”

“Is he not a great dragon, and an Illustrious?” Sebeth asked. She laughed. “You’ll get scant justice in the courts against one like him. You’d do better to save your gold and your animosity until you see a good opportunity to do him harm elsewhere.”

Avan considered for a moment. “The courts are just,” he said, hesitantly. He had never had much to do with them, but his father had always told him so. “I want revenge on Daverak this way. Besides, his rank is not so much more than mine, and he is married to my sister.”

“If family feeling didn’t restrain him in his offense, what way will it restrain him now?” Sebeth asked.

“The law will make him pay,” Avan said.

“Well, if you believe that,” Sebeth replied, and put her head down upon her arms and was, in any case to all appearances, immediately asleep.

Haner’s first shock on arrival at Daverak was to discover that little Lamerak had been devoured. “He was ailing all this year,” Berend said, a single tear in her eye.

“The liver did him no good, the poor little chap couldn’t hope to survive,” Daverak said, shaking his head portentously. “Come in to dinner.”

Haner found it hard to understand why, if Lamerak had managed to survive so long, he should have been allowed to be consumed now. True, it was a duty of a lord to cull even his own dragonet for the general improvement of dragonkind, but this case of consumption seemed terribly abrupt. It was during one of Berend’s long rambling complaints later that evening about the strains of increasing that she thought she caught a glimmer of understanding. Berend needed additional sustenance, and Daverak had nursed the feeble hatchling along until it was clear he could be replaced. Haner prayed to Jurale to be forgiven for thinking such wicked thoughts
of her own sister and brother-in-law, but what they said on the subject as the evening went on seemed to confirm rather than deny her suspicions.

After an uneasy night’s sleep in the comfortable chamber her sister had provided, she breakfasted with the family. The dragonets were subdued and kept looking over their shoulders for their missing clutch-mate. Haner’s heart softened towards them, especially as their parents seemed to care so little about their loss and tore at their breakfasts with enthusiasm. She made an attempt to divert and entertain the children, with some success. By the end of the meal they were smiling and had eaten almost half a muttonwool between them.

“How do you feel this morning?” Daverak asked Berend. “I’m going to fly to the Causeway Farm and see how the Maje hatchlings are coming on. Would you care to accompany me?”

“It’s very near,” Berend said, with an apologetic glance to Haner, as if to excuse herself for not flying to Agornin on the previous day.

“Hardly more than a glide,” Daverak confirmed. “Maybe you’d like to come with us, Haner? Get to know some of our farmers a little? See the countryside?”

“The Majes are a very old family,” Berend said, glancing at her husband for confirmation. “They’ve lived in the Causeway Farm almost as long as the Daveraks have held Daverak.”

Daverak inclined his head in confirmation of his wife’s statements.

“I’d be delighted to accompany you,” Haner said, politely.

Nannies came in and took the dragonets away. Daverak also went out. Haner sponged her face and chest in the dining room with Berend. This was the first time she had been entirely alone with her sister since her arrival. “Have you laid the first egg?” Haner asked,
quietly, as she could not have asked in front of Daverak and the children.

“Yesterday morning,” Berend said, with a smug little smile. “No difficulty at all, though I have been ravenous ever since. That’s normal, as you’ll see when you have a clutch for yourself.”

“That might not be for some time,” Haner said, wondering if she would ever be able to marry.

“It’s lovely to have you here, of course, and I want you to feel perfectly at home and have a long stay with us. But all the same, before very long we must find you a nice husband and see you settled comfortably. It’s much better to have the security. How much did Father leave you for a dowry in the end?”

“Sixteen thousand crowns,” Haner said, as she had agreed, feeling tears coming to her eyes as the remembrance of her vow made her think of Selendra, so far away. Berend, kind as she was being, was a very poor substitute for her beloved clutch-mate.

“That’s more than I feared, but not as much as I hoped,” Berend said, briskly, drawing herself to her feet. “I’m well aware that it was my good fortune to be well dowered, and do not mean to see you marry beneath yourself because of that. Now hush, Daverak is coming back. We’ll talk about this later.”

Daverak led them to the ledge, and from there out into the cool fresh air of a sunny morning in Leafturn. The russets were ripe and the scent of them drifted up as they flew over the orchards. They flew towards the lake that was the center of the Daverak demesnes. It seemed almost the shape of a dragon’s eye, though of a deeper blue and more still than any eye she had seen. As they drew near the shore Haner spotted a little island in the water, connected to the land by a causeway of heaped stone. There was a little farm on it, also of piled stone. As they circled lower to land she caught sight of a herd of beeves, with a bronze dragon among them.

“There’s Maje,” Daverak said. “I expect the family are inside.”

They came boiling out as their lord and lady landed, even the youngest flattening their claws and tails to the ground in an old-fashioned gesture of respect. Haner counted three half-grown dragonets, well on their way to having wings, and two small hatchlings. “Well, well,” Daverak said, smiling benignly.

A dark red dragon, clearly the mother of the family, was the first to straighten. “Welcome to the Causeway, Illust, Illustrious,” she said.

“This is my sister, Respected Haner Agornin,” Berend said. “She’s come to stay with us for a little while.”

“Very nice, I’m sure,” said the farmer. One of the older dragonets, whose gold scales showed that she was a maiden, looked up at Haner. She smiled reassuringly, but the maiden did not smile back as any farmer at Agornin would have. Strangers everywhere, Haner thought.

Just then, the father, the bronze dragon who had been among the beeves, came running up, keeping himself low to the ground as if he were in a cave.

“How is everything here?” Daverak asked him.

“Very well, very well indeed, thank you for asking,” he said. “The russets are half harvested already, and the beeves are doing nicely.”

“And your hatchlings?”

He looked at his wife uncomfortably. “Safely hatched,” he said, but the set of his wings betrayed his discomfort.

“And the other two?” Daverak asked sternly. “The two I don’t see out here?”

The mother rushed forward and threw herself down at the ground at Daverak’s feet. “Spare my hatchlings!” she cried, rubbing her head on the ground. “Have mercy, Illustrious.”

“It is not I who will have mercy but Jurale,” Daverak said,
stepping away from her. “I will see all four hatchlings, or I will see the unhatched eggs. Maje, take care of your wife.”

Maje, the farmer, looked at Daverak for a moment. His gray eyes whirled with emotion. He put his tail back straight, and for a moment looked almost as if he would attack Daverak, though that would be suicidal. He was twelve feet long and Daverak forty. His stance subsided to subservience.