“Go safe,” she said, “and go always with Her.”
“She’s always here anyway,” Lorn said. “As for my half of it—” He shrugged. “I’ll do what I can. Meantime, you be careful too. And if you hear from Herewiss—”
Eftgan said nothing, just nodded, then turned and rode away to her waiting people.
Lorn turned his back on her, and nudged Blackmane with his heels. “On the road again, my lad,” he said, and let the gelding take his own way through the bracken and the jutting stones, eastward, toward the low hills and the distant Arlid. In a soft clangour of pots, Pebble came pacing after them on his lead rein. Lorn only turned once, after a while, and saw the flash of something diamond-hafted held up under the noon sun. Lorn waved in that general direction, unable to make out figures distinctly. Another flash, blue this time, and then the only light left was the everyday light of the sun on the heather and the stones.
He turned again, and rode east.
Iha’hh irik-kej ahaa taues’ih ohn taue-stihé hu.
(The only thing more to be feared than a great desire is that same desire come true.)
(Dracon proverb)
“I plan to fly,” she had said, so offhandedly. Being more than half-Dragon, these days, she thought she might as well. Now Segnbora flew, and shook her head at her own naivété, for she had never thought it would be so complicated.
How many times in the old days, when she had merely been a sorceress, did she look up at birds and think,
What a marvel to do that. And how easy it looks.
And so it did; a flick of the wings, the wind to bear you up, freedom to soar. Well, freedom there was, now, but not in the shape that she had ever expected. There was a strange body to manage, with its own habits and prerogatives. —Well, not exactly strange; no Dracon body would ever be strange to her, inside or out, now that she was “outdweller”,
sdaha
, to Hasai.
She glanced over at Hasai as she soared. They were flying slowly, for pleasure’s sake. Rushing would not profit them in the slightest at this point, and there had been little enough time to fly for pleasure since she had broken through into her Power and things started to happen in a hurry. Hasai was in slow-flight extension, his wings at full spread, not moving. A Dragon, Segnbora had found, rarely needed to move its wings except when landing, to brake—an old habit, even that not entirely necessary. Using the wings to push against air was the least part of flying, for a Dragon. Once upon a time, back in the dim times on the Homeworld, when Dragonkind was young and inexperienced, it had been the most important part. But now, for most of their flying, Dragons propelled themselves using forces that the world itself bred in its turning—invisible lines that stretched north to south, as well as other lines more local, and more tenuous but more powerful forces that started where the air gave out and had to do with the Sun, and the Moon and the other worlds that went around it.
Other worlds
, she thought, shaking her head slightly. There was soft laughter from some of her
mdeihei
in the background. They found it mildly funny that the humans of the Middle Kingdoms didn’t even know about the other planets in their solar system. Segnbora had not even known what a solar system was, until Hasai suddenly became her
mdaha
and changed almost everything in her world.
Nor had she known about what flying took; but she was learning, in short order. She had a chorus of hundreds of breathy, rumbling, echoing voices singing in the back of her mind, now; all Hasai’s linear ancestors, all of them
mdahaih
, “indwelling”—physically dead, but nonetheless alive inside her, and vocal—and all commenting in intricately interwoven melody on her skill, or lack of it. That by itself didn’t bother her... but the complexity of the comments left her astounded.
The Dracon language was full of words about flight. It was just as well that because of the presence of her
mdeihei
, she knew what all the words meant. Words for wind, how it blew, whether steady or gusting, and words for the different ways its direction changed; words for the temperature of the high airs, up to the point where the sky went black; hundreds of words for different kinds of cloud and cloud cover, the way the wind worked on it, whether the cloud was likely to rain or snow, conditions inside the cloud and above it; words for degrees and violence of turbulence; words for lighting effects, degrees of light and shadow, for the halo that appeared around your shadow when the Sun looked down past you onto cloud. There were words for the height from which you had seen moonrise and sunrise, and for having seen one or both more than once in a day; words describing the great rivers of wind that ran high above the ground, how they flowed, how they changed; for the usual flow of the fields of force that Dragons manipulated, and for disturbances in those fields; for icing and thunderstorm weather; for the changing thickness of atmosphere, and the conditions beyond it —
She sighed a soft chord to herself and looked over at Hasai again. He had an eye on the countryside below them, seemingly watching the patchwork fields and clumps of forest go by. “Where are we?” she said to him.
The
mdeihei
sang amusement. Hasai ignored them and made a picture in her head, a map on a large scale, showing her Arlen and the bulge of the North Arlene peninsula, the winding course of the Arlid River through it all, and a tiny, tiny bright point that was them, a specific height above the earth—all in scale. It still astonished her that Dragons could imagine such
large
things. But then they were none too small themselves.
“You’ll learn to do it soon enough yourself,” Hasai said. “There is Aired Marchward, see, there not too far from Prydon.”
“Another hour,” Segnbora said.
“At this speed,” Hasai said after a moment. He was still having trouble with the human idea of hours, the “divided day”, as he called it; but having Segnbora as
sdaha
, he was getting the idea quickly enough.
“There are no human MarchWarders there, are there....”
“None,” Hasai said. “The
rhhw’ehhrveh
have been dwindling away, in recent times. When we first came, the Dwellers at the Howe thought it would be good to know humans from youth, and live with them, to see what kind of world this was and how we might live in it best. And indeed some humans sought us out. But the human MarchWarders’ houses have not prospered, by and large. Some said this was because our minds were not meant to work in the same way, and we damaged the humans by living and associating with them.”
There was a rumble of agreement from some of the
mdeihei
; Segnbora could feel others, back in the deeps of her mind, looking on silent and uncertain, an uneasy shifting of shadow and subdued gemlight. “The only Marchwards that have
rhhw’ehhrveh
as well as
lhhw’ehhrveh
any more are High Cirr and dra’Mincarrath,” Hasai said. “No point in going down there just now. The Warders at Aired have ties with the DragonChief; our energies are better spent there, I think.”
“All the same, I should like to meet one or two of the rhhw’ehhrveh,” Segnbora said. She was curious about what it must be like to have learned the ways and language of Dragons slowly, over a childhood, instead of suddenly, over a matter of days, as she had done it. What could it be like to be a companion to Dragons, but still human? She started to make a wry face at the thought that any days of simple humanity, for better or worse, were behind her now. But her Dragon’s face wouldn’t do it, and simply dropped its jaw in the gesture that meant humor, and invited another Dragon nearby to inquire as to the source.
Hasai, being
mdahaih
, didn’t need to inquire, but dropped his jaw as well. “How are you doing?” he said. “
Sdaha
or not, that form can’t be quite comfortable for you yet.”
She snorted, a shrug, felt the cushioning of an updraft increasing under her, and stretched her wings out a bit more to get the best out of it. “Learning,” she said. “This is a lazy body.”
“Lazy!” Hasai said, and laughed, in an indignant basso profundo rumble like a distant earthquake.
“Very lazy! You saw that, just then. There’s plenty of sun even with the cloud today, no need to use anything but force to fly; but come any updraft stronger than a sneeze, and ‘aha!’, says the body, ‘a chance not to have to work!”
“Why waste energy?” Hasai said, putting his wings out more fully as well, and absently gaining some tens of ells of altitude, so that Segnbora had to grasp force and pull herself up beside him again. “See that?” Hasai said. “You had to work to catch me up. And I did nothing but add some extension. You simply have this idea that flying is work, or ought to be. You’re going to have to get rid of that, if you’re to be a Dragon in truth, and not some kind of hybrid... as the gossip will have it if we’re not careful.”
Segnbora cocked her head at Hasai. “What’s wrong with being some kind of hybrid?” she said.
A long low rumbling chord of protest went up from some of the
mdeihei
. “Oh, be still,” Segnbora said, annoyed. “When I want your advice, you lot, I’ll ask for it.” The
mdeihei
might be wise with the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years, but they also tended to be conservative—too much so for Segnbora’s taste, sometimes. “New things are happening here, and none of you have had a new idea since you were last
sdahaih
! So listen to this end of history for a change, and see if you can’t learn something!”
A shocked silence fell within her, for the
mdeihei
were not used to being told off by one
sdahaih
to them. The
sdaha
, the physically alive Dragon at the “near” end of the ancestry, was supposed to be properly submissive to the
mdeihei
, and appreciative of their advice.
Well, about time they learned that I don’t intend to handle things that way,
Segnbora thought. “Sithesssch,” she said to Hasai, who was laughing softly, “hybrid may be the word that fits, whether we like it or not. Are the Dragons, the live dragons, really likely to find it so much of a problem?”
Hasai laughed softly, being amused himself by the sudden silence, but did not answer directly. He tilted his wings off leftward, banking suddenly, and Segnbora did the same and followed him around and downward. “One of our line was at the last
nn’s’raihle
,” he said. “You remember.”
Segnbora looked back into the dark place at the back of her mind, the “cave” where the
mdeihei
lived, and saw burning red-amber eyes looking back at her, the Dragon in question. “Ashadh, of course,” she said, and reached back in mind and folded Ashadh’s dark wings and star-ruby hide around her, and lived in the memory again. Against a night sky all torn with flying moonlit cloud and fitful stars, the mountain-shape of the Eorlhowe reared up, and its stones were washed with Dragonfire as two bright shapes at its base circled one another in stately dance—or dance that looked stately until the claws flashed out to tear. The old Dweller-at-the-Howe leapt, talons out, flaming, and was met halfway by the slender, big-winged form that seized him about the throat and let him thrash and struggle. Then a vicious flurry of motion— Nothing but Dracon talons can rip a Dragon’s stony hide; but rip it will. Llunih, the old Dweller, came crashing to the ground, and then came the fire. A moment later his body was ash and charred bone, he himself was gone
mdahaih
, and Dithra d’Kyrin was
llhw’Hreiha
in his place.
Part of Segnbora wanted to shudder at the matter-of-fact way the Dragons assembled there took it all. But Ashadh, who had been there, and the parts of her mind that were beginning to think in the Dracon fashion, saw nothing at all unusual in this. Llunih had begun an argument, and had been unable to prove his case beyond reasonable doubt. His dance had been insufficiently complex, his song too simplistic; and one with a more subtle argument had found the heart of his error, and ended it. That was the way Dracon logic perceived the change in leadership. The fittest, the wisest, came inevitably to lead. All Llunih’s knowledge passed to Dithra, and all his power as DragonChief.
“And the argument,” Segnbora said to Hasai, “was about whether it might not be wiser to cast the human Marchwarders out of the Wards altogether....”
“So it was.”
“So weird mixtures of Dragon and human are unlikely to be welcome when even plain humans aren’t. ... I thank you for the memory, Ashadh,” Segnbora said, and Ashadh slipped free of her, and bowed and veiled himself in shadow again.
“Dithra was always a hard reasoner,” Hasai said, as he straightened out his line of flight again, passing by a great bank of thundercloud on one side, and Segnbora matched him. “Now that she is
lhhw’Hreiha
, nothing has changed in that regard. And she has the power of the office to make her feel that much more certain of her opinions. Dangerous enough, that situation. But the DragonChief’s certainty is not entirely a matter of her own strength of character. Much of it comes from the
mdeihei
—not only her own, but those of all the rest of Dragonkind. She knows the Draconid Name, the Name by which the Immanence called our people when we were first made, passed down through all these years from Chief to Chief. Every
mdaha
is
mdahaih
to her, as well as to its own
sdaha
.”
“Even you,” Segnbora said.
“Even I,” Hasai said. “At least, so it ought to be. I—” the human personal pronoun was coming easier to him of late, and Segnbora was not sure whether to be pleased at this, or alarmed— “I am no longer quite what I was even a few ‘tendays’ ago. But for the moment, my connection to the
Hreiha
feels as it did. I remain, as before, one of her memories—if a living one—as I am one of yours. She can call me up at will, live in my life as you lived in Ashadh’s just now, and dismiss me when she pleases. Any DragonChief might do as much, of course. Not that a Hreiha tends ever to do much of anything... except when in
nn’s’raihle
, as you just saw. She will argue for or against what concerns her—and one in possession of the Draconid Name can ‘kill’ the
mdahaih
as easily as the
sdahaih
.” Rda-é was the word he used, the active verb form of the rarely used Dracon word for permanent death. It was the only time Segnbora had ever heard him use it in connection with himself or any other Dragon. Even mdahhej, the death of the physical body, only meant shifting one’s mode of living in the world. To go
rdahaih
was to become nothing, to be utterly destroyed: or to die as humans were considered to die.