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gathering.
She gathered her things, including the loose tile from the hearth. She studied the picture again, and then handed it to Leftrin. He took a well-worn kerchief from his pocket and wrapped the precious thing. ‘I’ll take good care of it,’ he promised before she could ask. Arm in arm, they left the cottage.
Outside, the overcast day had darkened as the clouds thickened and the sun sank behind the gentle hills and the steeper cliffs that backed them. The shadows of the houses loomed over the winding streets. Alise and Leftrin hurried, the chill wind pushing them along. As they left behind the modest houses Alise had been investigating and entered the main part of the city, the whispers grew stronger. She didn’t hear them with her ears and she could not pick out any individual voice or stream of words: rather, it was a press of thoughts against her mind. She shook her head, refusing them, and hurried on.
She’d never been in a city like this one. Bingtown was a large and grand city, a city built for show, but Kelsingra had been built to a scale that dwarfed humans. The passageways in this part of Kelsingra were wide, wide enough for dragons to pass one another in the streets. The gleaming black buildings, too, were sized to admit dragons. The roofs were higher, and the doorways both wide and tall. Whenever they came to steps, the central sections were always wide and shallow, not sized for a human’s stride at all. Two steps to cross each step and then the hop down. At the edges, flights scaled for humans paralleled the course.
She passed a dry fountain. In the middle, a life-sized dragon reared on his hind legs, clasping a struggling stag in his jaws and forepaws. Around the next corner, she encountered a memorial to an Elderling statesman carrying a scroll in one long slender hand while he pointed aloft with his other. It had been crafted from the same black stone threaded with fine silver lines. It was plain that Elderlings and dragons had both dwelt here, side by side and possibly sharing abodes. She thought of the keepers, and how their dragons were changing them, and wondered if some day this city would shelter such a population again.
They turned onto a wide boulevard and the wind roared with renewed strength. Alise clutched her poor cloak closer about her and bent her head to the wind’s buffeting. This street led straight down to the river port and the remains of the docks that had once awaited ships there. A few remnant stone pilings jutted from the water. She lifted her gaze and through streaming eyes beheld the gleaming black surface of the river. On the horizon; the sun was foundering behind the wooded hills. ‘Where is Rapskal?’ She half-shouted the words to push them through the wind. ‘He said he’d bring Heeby to the water’s edge at sunset.’
‘He’ll be there. The lad may be a bit strange, but in some ways he’s the most responsible keeper when it comes to keeping his word. Over there. There they are.’
She followed Leftrin’s pointing hand and saw them. The dragon lingered at the edge of an elevated stone dais that overlooked the water. The dais adjoined a crumbled ramp. Alise knew from the bas reliefs that decorated it that once it would have led to a launching platform for dragons. She surmised that perhaps older and heavier dragons needed a height advantage to get their bulk off the ground. Before the blocks of the ramp had given way to decades of winter river floods, it had probably been very high. Now it terminated just beyond the statue’s dais.
Heeby’s keeper had clambered up onto the dais and stood at the base of a many-times-larger-than-life statue of an Elderling couple. The man gestured wide with an out flung arm, while the woman’s pointing finger and gracefully tilted head indicated that her gaze followed something, possibly a dragon in flight. Rapskal’s head was tipped back and he had stretched up one hand to touch the hip of one Elderling. He stood, staring up at the tall, handsome creature as if entranced.
Heeby, his dragon, shifted restlessly as she waited for him. She was probably hungry again already. All she did of late was hunt and feed and hunt again. The red dragon was twice the size she had been when Alise had first met her. She was no longer the stumpy, blocky creature she had been: her body and tail had lengthened, and her hide and half-folded wings gleamed crimson, catching the red rays of the setting sun and throwing them back. Muscle rippled in her sinuous neck as she turned to watch their approach. She lowered her head suddenly and hissed low, a warning. Alise halted in her tracks. ‘Is something wrong?’ she called.
The wind swept away her words and Rapskal made no reply. The dragon shifted again and half-reared on her hind legs. She sniffed at Rapskal and then nudged him. The boy’s body gave to her push but he made no indication that he was aware of her.
‘Oh, no,’ Leftrin groaned. ‘Please, Sa, no. Give the boy another chance.’ The captain released her arm and lurched into a run.
The dragon threw back her head and whistled loudly. For a tense moment, Alise expected the creature to charge or spit acid at Leftrin. Instead, she nuzzled Rapskal again, with as little response. Then she dropped onto all fours again and stood staring at them. Her eyes whirled. She was plainly distressed about something, which did nothing to reassure Alise. A distressed dragon was a dangerous dragon.
‘Rapskal! Stop day-dreaming and tend to Heeby! Rapskal!’ Her shout fought the wind.
The young keeper stood as still as the statue he touched, and the dwindling daylight glittered on the scarlet scaling on his bared hands and face. Heeby moved to block Leftrin but the sailor dodged adroitly around her. ‘I’m going to help him, dragon. Stay out of my way.’
‘Heeby, Heeby, it will be all right. Let him pass, let him pass!’ Heedless of her own danger, Alise did her best to distract the anxious dragon as Leftrin set his palms to the chest-high pedestal and then vaulted up onto it. He seized Rapskal around the chest and then spun away from the statue, tearing the boy’s grip from the stone. As he did so, the keeper cried out wordlessly and suddenly went limp in the man’s arms. Leftrin staggered with his sudden weight and both of them sank down to sit at the statue’s feet.
Heeby shifted restlessly, swinging her head back and forth in agitation. She was the only dragon that had never spoken to Alise. Despite being the only dragon that could both fly and hunt capably now, she had never seemed especially bright, although she had always seemed to share her keeper’s sunny temperament. Now as Leftrin held the youngster in his arms and spoke worriedly to him, the dragon seemed more like an anxious dog than a powerful predator.
Even so, Alise gave her a wide berth as she made her way to the dais. It took her considerably more effort to gain the top of it than it had Leftrin, but she managed. The captain knelt on the cold stone cradling Rapskal. ‘What’s wrong with him? What’s happened?’
‘He was drowning,’ Leftrin said in a low voice full of dread.
But as Rapskal’s face lolled toward her, she saw only his idiotically bemused grin and barely open eyes. She frowned. ‘Drowning? He looks more drunk than drowned! But where did he get spirits?’
‘He didn’t.’ Leftrin gave him another shake. ‘He’s not drunk.’ But his next actions seemed to belie his statement as he gave Rapskal another shake. ‘Come out of it, lad. Come back to your own life. There’s a dragon here that needs you, and night is coming on. Storm’s coming in, too. If we’re to get to the other side before it’s dark, we need you to wake up.’
He glanced at Alise and became Captain Leftrin dealing with an emergency.
‘Jump down and take his legs when I pass him down,’ he commanded, and she obeyed. When had the lad got so tall? she wondered, as Leftrin eased the limp Rapskal down into her arms. When she’d first met him, he’d seemed just past boyhood, made younger than his peers by his simplicity. Then he and his dragon had vanished and all had believed them both dead. Since their return, the dragon had proved her competence as a predator and Rapskal had seemed both older and more ethereal, sometimes a mystical Elderling and sometimes a wondering boy. Like all the keepers, his close contact with his dragon was changing him. His ragged trousers exposed the heavy red scaling on his feet and calves. It reminded Alise of the tough orange skin on a chicken’s legs. And like a bird, he weighed less than she had expected as Leftrin let go of Rapskal and she took his full weight to keep him upright. His eyes were wide open.
‘Rapskal?’ she said,