In any case, the girl stopped asking questions after that, and the old man turned his attention back to Dumery.

"Now, boy," he said, "who are you, and just what were you doing turning up on my doorstep? You looked half-starved, and half-frozen, and you weren't wearing anything but some rags that look like they used to be fancy city street clothes-how in the World did you get way up here in the mountains?"

This mention of his clothes brought to Dumery's attention that he was wearing an unfamiliar, but very comfortable, flannel nightshirt. He wondered what had become of his own attire, but he didn't ask; instead he answered, "I'm Dumery of Shiphaven. From Ethshar."

"Which Ethshar?" the old man asked, before Dumery could say anything else.

"Ethshar of the Spices," Dumery replied, startled. It wasn't a question he had ever been asked before.

But then, he had never left the city until this trip.

The old man nodded. "Go on," he said. "How did you get way up here?"

Dumery hesitated, unsure what to say.

If he told the truth, that he had followed Kensher Kinner's son into the mountains, what would happen?

Where was he, anyway? Was this the house at the dragon farm? If so, where was Kensher? Wasn't it his farm?

"I was lost," he said.

The old man frowned.

"Where am I, anyway?" Dumery asked, a trifle belatedly. "And who are all you people?"

"My name's Kinner," the old man said, and Dumery's heart jumped at the name.

"That's Talger, Kalthen, Kirsha, Shatha, and Tarissa, some of my grandchildren," the old man went on, pointing first to the boy who had been in the room when Dumery awoke, then to another boy, then to three girls. Kirsha had been the one asking questions.

Just then the black-haired woman reappeared in the doorway, holding a tray, and the old man added, "And that's Pancha, my son's wife."

"I brought soup," the woman said in heavily-accented Ethsharitic, raising the tray.

Dumery groped for words as he sat up, and couldn't find them; he settled for looking as grateful as he could as the tray was set down atop the washstand.

Then he didn't worry about words or appearances as he began slurping up the soup. It was a thick beef broth with carrots and peas and other vegetables in it, and Dumery considered it the most wonderful thing he had ever eaten in his entire life. It was warm and filling and savory and settled very nicely in his empty gut.

When he had to stop eating to catch his breath he managed to say, "Thank you."

Then he picked up the spoon again and continued.

When the last trace was gone, the bowl almost dry, he looked up and realized that the old man, the woman, and the five children were all staring at him.

They had apparently been whispering among themselves, but that stopped when they saw his eyes upon them.

"Thank you, lady," he said. "That was delicious."

She shrugged, but a pleased smile lit her face.

"Now," old Kinner said, "you were explaining how you got here."

That wasn't quite how Dumery remembered the conversation, but he had learned long ago that arguing with adults was usually a mistake. "I walked," he said.

Kinner looked exasperated. "But whyhere?" he demanded.

Dumery hesitated. These people seemed friendly enough, and he was grateful that they had taken him in and fed them-but on the other hand, it seemed very likely that the existence of this farm was supposed to be a secret, and he had stumbled upon it. Admitting that he was interested in a career involving dragons would draw attention to that fact.

But then, they must know he'd seen what was going on, and it really didn't matter how or why he had come here-he still knew the secret.

Besides, he couldn't think of a good lie.

"I was following someone," he said. "A man named Kensher Kinner's son."

Talger glanced up, startled, at the sound of the familiar name. Kinner eyed Dumery with interest. "Were you, indeed," he said.

Dumery nodded.

"And why were you following my son?" Kinner asked.

That confirmed Dumery's suspicion. "I thought he was a dragon-hunter," he admitted.

"Oh? And why were you interested in following a dragon-hunter?"

"I was seeking an apprenticeship."

Kinner stared at him silently for a moment, and Dumery stared back defiantly.

The children, puzzled, looked from one to the other and back again.

"You want to be a dragon-hunter?" Kinner asked.

Dumery nodded.

Kinner said, "What made you think that Kensher was a dragon-hunter?"

"I saw him selling dragon's blood to the wizards back in Ethshar," Dumery explained.

"Ah," Kinner said, a satisfied smile of comprehension spreading across his face. He rocked back on his heels. "And you assumed he'd gotten it by hunting dragons."

Dumery nodded again.

"I suppose you saw this place clearly before you passed out," Kinner remarked.

Once more, Dumery nodded.

"Then you now know that Kensher isn't primarily a dragon-hunter," Kinner said.

"He's a dragon-farmer," Dumery agreed. "That's all right. I still want an apprenticeship."

Kinner sighed. "Boy," he said, "you may have the most wonderful reasons in the World for wanting to be Kensher's apprentice, but I'm afraid it doesn't matter. It will never happen."

"Whynot?" Dumery demanded.

The old man stared at him, considering, for a moment. Then, holding up an admonitory finger, Kinner said, "Wait." He stepped out the door of the room and called something in Sardironese.

Dumery had little choice; he waited.

A moment later footsteps sounded, and faces appeared in the doorway-young faces, varying from a little younger than Dumery to several years older.

"That's Seldis," Kinner said, "and Wuller, and Kinthera, and Shanra, and Kashen, and Korun, and Kinner the Younger. You already met Talger, Kalthen, Tarissa, Kirsha, and Shatha. They're all my grandchildren except Wuller, who's married to Seldis-and more importantly, they're all Kensher's children. And Pancha's, of course," he said, with a slight bow to the woman.

Dumery stared. Eleven children, ranging in age from a young woman down to a boy of two or three-not to mention the young man Wuller, who had married into the family.

"And every one of them has a prior claim to an apprenticeship here on this farm," Kinner pointed out.

"But..." Dumery began.

"Boy," Kinner said, cutting him off, "it doesn't take eleven people to run this farm. It doesn't take more than, oh, two or three, really, though more hands mean less work for each. And this is the only dragon farm left in all the World, so far as we know, so there's no point in training you with the idea you'll find work elsewhere once you make journeyman."

Dumery hesitated. "The only one in the World?" he asked.

Kinner nodded. "So we're told."

"But how ... if it's the only one..." Dumery puzzled over this for a moment, and then asked, "How did itget here?"

Kinner sighed. As he did, the girl-young woman, really-he had called Seldis whispered something in his ear. Kinner nodded, and muttered something in reply.

Seldis and Wuller vanished from the doorway, and as Kinner told his tale most of the others gradually drifted away as well.

"You know about the Great War," Kinner said.

Dumery nodded. "When Ethshar destroyed the Northerners," he said.

"Yes, exactly," Kinner agreed. "It was a long, long war-nobody knows anything about what the World was like before it began, not really. So we don't know where dragons came from originally, because they were around from the earliest days of the war. Personally, I suspect some wizard invented them, maybe by accident-why else would they have so much magic in their blood? And they aren't like any other animals I ever heard of, the way they grow, and behave..." He blinked, stared silently and thoughtfully at nothing for a moment, and then recovered himself.

"Well, anyway," he continued, "wherever dragons came from, originally they were all raised by people, there weren't any wild ones at all, anywhere. They were used as weapons in the war-if they weren't just an accident, that must be what they were invented for. They were fighting animals. One big dragon can tear up a whole town pretty quickly, after all, and that's without even mentioning that some can breathe fire, and some can fly, and most of them have hide like armor, and if you let them grow big enough they get smart enough to talk-I mean, how does that fit in with the rest of the World, animals that can learn to talkas adults, when it's too late to civilize them? It just doesn't make any sense unless somebody invented them for the war."

Dumery stared. This was beyond him; the idea that somebody might haveinvented dragons was all new to him. After all, did squid fit in with the rest of the World? Had someone invented those, too? What about camels, or nightwalkers?

Did they make any sense?

Kinner noticed the dazed expression on the boy's face and realized he was losing his audience. He hurried to get on with his tale.

"So," he said, "during the war the army kept dragons around as fighting animals, and bred them as part of the war effort. Some were trained to fight; others were just turned loose behind enemy lines, where they grew up in the woods and ate up all the game, and when that was gone and they got hungry they turned on the livestock and the civilians, and they just generally made life more difficult for the Northerners.

"And of course, Ethshar's military wizards needed a steady supply of dragon's blood for their spells-the war was fought as much with magic as with swords, southern wizards and theurgists against northern sorcerers and demonologists.

So the army ran its own dragon-breeding operations-I don't know how many, but several of them. And toward the end of the war one of them, right up near the front but hidden in the mountains, was run by a man named Thar, who was a sergeant in General Anaran's elite Forward Command." Kinner smiled. "Sergeant Thar was my ... let's see ... my

great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Six greats-that sounds right."

Dumery blinked. "Oh," he said. "But the war ... I mean, that was hundreds of years ago..."

"That's right," Kinner agreed. "It was. And when the war ended, about two hundred and thirty years ago, Sergeant Thar simply kept on raising dragons.

The government didn't care. Or maybe they didn't even know. The way I heard it from my grandfather, orders came down saying the dragons were surplus, that the army didn't need them any more and they should all either be killed, or set free up north, to help polish off any survivors after the Northern Empire fell. Well, Sergeant Thar thought that was stupid and wasteful, so he kept the dragons and the breeding camp for himself, and passed them down to his son, and so on, and so on, until I inherited them from my father. And when I die, my son Kensher will inherit the dragons and the farm from me."

"And you sell their blood?" Dumery asked, mildly revolted by the idea of raising the animals just for that. It seemed awfully wasteful.

"That's right," Kinner said, nodding. "We kill them and sell the blood. It's a fine business, too. There are plenty of wizards out there who need the stuff, and there isn't a lot of dragon's blood around. It seems, from all we've heard, that the other old dragon-breeding operations, the other ones that the army ran during the war, alldid shut down. At least, we've never heard of any others, and we don't seem to have much competition out there selling blood. I guess the other breeders didn't see that wizards would still need dragons even in peacetime-or maybe they just didn't want to disobey orders. So they must have all killed their stock, or set it free. So we're the only dragon farm left."

He smiled, and added, "At least, as far as we know."

"So you..." Dumery began, then stopped and tried again. "So this one farm is where all the wizards in the World get the dragon's blood for their spells?"

"Well," Kinner said judiciously, "maybe not all the wizards in the World. We have a good-sized operation here, though. We can satisfy most of the demand from wizards in the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, and throughout the Baronies of Sardiron, and that's where we sell. The wizards in the Small Kingdoms-what few there are, magic isn't very popular there-well, anyway, in the Small Kingdoms, or in the Tintallions, or in any of the other northern lands, the wizards have to get their dragon's blood elsewhere. They can buy it from middlemen in Ethshar, where there's always some trader who'll get it from us and double the price, or they can try to obtain it magically, which isextremely difficult-I mean, it involves things like demons-or else they can buy it fromreal dragon-hunters."

He laughed, and Dumery didn't like the sound of it. "If you think we dragon-farmerscharge a lot, boy," Kinner said, "you should try buying from a dragon-hunter!"He sobered. "There's a good reason for it, too-a beginning dragon-hunter is lucky to live more than a few months. Or maybe days." He shrugged. "We know dragons here, since we grew up with them and work with them every day; they're dangerous creatures, no doubt about it. And the wild ones can grow bigger than we ever let them get here. There are ways to deal with them, but it's risky. Dragons aremean, sometimes. It was a dragon that did this." He gestured with the stump of his left arm. "Not a wild one, either-one here on the farm. After that happened I decided I was getting old, and I let my son Kensher make the sales trips down to Ethshar and run things around here, instead of doing them myself. And my granddaughter Seldis does the run to Sardiron of the Waters." He smiled reminiscently. "Seldis killed a wild dragon once-that was how she met her husband, Wuller. This dragon was preying on his village, and they sent him for help, and he saw Seldis in Sardiron of the Waters selling dragon's blood and talked her into getting rid of it for them. But we know dragons, as I said-she did that with a trick, she didn't hunt the thing down out in the open, with a sword or a crossbow or something.

And my other sons, besides Kensher-two of them took up dragon-hunting, and last I heard, one of them was still alive. We've lived with dragons all our lives, and we don't do anything stupid. Most dragon-hunters don't live long enough to learn what's stupid."

Dumery struggled to take this all in.

It was too much. He fell back on the bed, trying to think.

Kinner realized he'd been rambling, taxing his guest's strength. He called quietly, "You rest, boy." Then he herded the remaining children out of the room and stepped out himself, closing the door quietly.

Dumery looked at the closed door for a moment, then lay back, decided it wasn't worth the effort to think about it all just now, and fell asleep.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The witch and warlock had left hastily, without even a word to the innkeepers at the Blasted Pine-Adar's only hope of escaping the Calling was to get far enough from the Source to resist it before Teneria passed out from exhaustion, so there was no time to spare. Teneria quietly rebuked herself for wasting time in explanations and histories, while Adar cursed his own stupidity, and his insensitivity in not seeing how tired Teneria was. He levitated both of them effortlessly and began flying north.

He found that he could not move quickly, though; the Calling was fighting him every inch of the way, slowing him, trying to pull him back south. If he sped up he found himself turning, his path curving back toward the southeast; if he kept himself firmly on course it was like fighting a strong headwind, forcing himself northward yard by yard.

And Teneria was fading; she had put in a long day walking, had carried Adar a quarter-mile on her back, and now she was maintaining a tricky and unfamiliar spell constantly. The meal and brief rest at the inn had helped, but weariness was closing up around her.

If Adar had been a witch, Teneria thought, he could have passed her some of his own energy-but of course, if he had been a witch, she wouldn't have needed to stay awake. And warlocks did not seem to be able to transfer energy as witches could; Adar was completely unfamiliar with the concept.

After all, why should warlocks need to share energy? They all shared the same inexhaustible Source.

All the same, despite the differences, Teneria thought that she might have been able to tap Adar's energy if she weren't so tired, and if she weren't doing anything else.

She couldn't possibly do it in her current state, though. And she certainly couldn't do it without dropping her defenses against the Calling.

If they had met elsewhere, under other circumstances, Teneria was sure that they could have done much more, could have shielded Adar against the Calling with his own energies-but that wasn't what the gods had wanted.

So they flew unsteadily northward, Teneria in Adar's arms like a bride being carried across the threshold, and she might have enjoyed the sensations and the novelty had she not been so desperately trying to stay awake.

Perhaps half an hour after their departure from the inn she dozed off for an instant, only to be awakened by a shriek from Adar.

Quickly, she restored her dropped spell, but both were shaken by the incident.

They survived that one.

They had survived that one, but it wasn't the last.

Teneria never did know exactly what had happened; the events blurred in her memory, lost in a fog of fatigue. She knew that she had finally lost consciousness somewhere over the forested hills, in the black depths of the night-that much she remembered.

But that was all she knew until she awoke atop a bed of pine needles, lying on her back with dawn's golden light in her face.

She lay on a hillside, surrounded by trees, their shadows black on the ground around her, the sun bright in the east. Her cloak was draped over her.

There was no sign of Adar.

She guessed that when she had passed out he had been unable to wake her, and had had enough control to put her down gently before being carried off to the southeast.

She hoped that they had gotten far enough north to be safe, and that he had put her down and gone on home by himself-but she didn't believe it, no matter how hard she tried.

And when she used her magic to locate herself, and realized that she wasn't north of the inn at all, but east, she knew that she would never see Adar again.

Maybe he had headed back, and had been able to stop partway and put her down.

Maybe, in the darkness and fighting against the compulsion, they had drifted off course or unwittingly circled back even before she passed out.

Whatever had happened, here she was, alone and lost in the forests of Aldagmor, and Adar was gone. She had only herself to depend on.

Despite her night's rest she was still worn and weak from witchcraft overuse.

She needed food and drink. She pushed herself up on one elbow.

A squirrel chittered overhead; startled, she looked up. The animal was sitting on a branch above her. Desperate, she managed to summon the strength to catch its attention, to work a quick little spell.

The strain was more than she had expected for so small a piece of witchcraft; she lay back and shut her eyes, recuperating, unsure whether the magic had worked.

It had; a moment later she was showered with carefully-hoarded nuts. Relieved, she rolled over and gathered a handful, then cracked a walnut on an exposed root and ate the meat.

Even that tiny morsel helped; she ate another, and another, as the squirrel above her realized it had been tricked and protested loudly.

Within an hour she had found a small brook, and was no longer worried about whether she would survive, but only about how long it would take to return to inhabited lands.

With her witchcraft to guide her she reached the Blasted Pine by noon the next day. The innkeepers-the two women and an old man whom she hadn't met before-were startled to see her again, and greeted her enthusiastically.

They didn't inquire after Adar, and she didn't volunteer any explanation.

She ate a proper meal, and as she ate she spotted the spriggan peeking out from behind a nearby table, watching her anxiously.

She smiled at it.

The little creature grinned back, then ran out and leaped up on her lap. She petted it, soothing its nerves, as she ate. Although it babbled incoherently, she could see that it had been terrified, had had no idea what was going on.

It was very relieved to have her back; it had more or less adopted her as its protector.

She grimaced slightly at that. She hadn't been much of a protector for poor Adar.

When she felt sufficiently fed and rested she gathered up her pack, put the spriggan up on her shoulder, then picked up Dumery's trail and headed off along the south highway.

She wasn't really very interested in Dumery any more, but what else could she do? Adar was gone; there was nothing she could do about that. She was still supposed to be fetching Dumery safely home for his parents-it would complete her apprenticeship and make her a full-fledged journeyman witch. She would follow the little nuisance and find out what he was up to, and then she would go home and figure out what to do about what she had learned about warlocks.

It did not escape her attention that Dumery appeared to be heading directly for the Warlock Stone.

Nor that she was heading toward it herself.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Someone cleared his throat, and Dumery turned away from the window to see Kensher standing in the doorway. He was wearing green wool instead of brown leather, but it was unmistakably him.

"It really is you," Kensher said. "The kid from Ethshar."

Dumery blinked, but didn't answer.

"You have got to be the stubbornest little idiot I ever saw in my life, following me all the way up here from Ethshar!" Kensher said, marvelling.

"Itold you I didn't need an apprentice, didn't I?"

"Yes," Dumery admitted, "but I thought that if I showed you how determined I was you'd change your mind."

Kensher snorted. "Not likely! With eleven kids of my own? You'd need magic to change my mind."

"Well, I didn't know you had eleven kids-you never mentioned that when you turned me down! And if I had magic, I wouldn'twant to change your mind!"

Dumery replied hotly.

"Exactly my point," Kensher said. "Following me here wasstupid. Do your parents know you're all right? Do they have any idea where you are?"

"Yes, they know I'm all right," Dumery said. "They bought a spell and checked.

A sixnight ago, I think it was-the second night after we left."

"Well, that's good, then," Kensher said. "That's one less thing we have to worry about. Now all we have to do is get you safely back home."

Dumery shook his head. "I'm not going home," he said. "Not until I've served an apprenticeship."

Kensher glared. "I just told you, boy, I'm not taking you on! No apprenticeship! No way! You're going home!"

"And if I go home, do you know what I'll do?" Dumery shouted. "I'll tell everyone on Wizard Street that Kensher the dragon-hunter isn't a hunter at all, that you raise dragons, and you have all the blood they'll ever need right here for the taking, and then what's going to happen to your precious family farm?"

Dumery caught himself, horrified. He hadn't meant to make the threat so bluntly. He'd been thinking exactly that, that he could force Kensher to keep him on here by threatening to expose the secret, but he'd meant to do it subtly, gradually, not in a single angry outburst.

Kensher stared at him coldly. "Not much," he said. "For all I know, half the wizards in Ethshar already know we run a farm and not a hunt-maybe theyall know. Haven't you ever heard of divination spells? You can't keep secrets from wizards, boy, not unless you're a magician yourself."

"But why would they have looked?" Dumery asked. "It probably never occurred to them to check!"

"Oh," Kensher said, "I suppose nobody would ever have noticed that three-fourths of the dragon's blood in the Hegemony all seems to come from one hunter. Nobody would ever have gotten curious about that. Nobody would ever have noticed how steady our supply is. No, in two hundred years, no wizard would ever think of that!"

"Oh," Dumery said.

Kensher glowered at him. "If I were you, Dumery of Shiphaven," he said, "I'd be a little more careful about what I said, and I wouldn't argue this. We don't need any blackmailers around here, nor anyone who makes threats to the people who took him in and sheltered and fed him, instead of leaving him to die. For all anyone back in Ethshar knows, if your parents haven't checked in a sixnight, you might already have died lost in the mountains somewhere-and if you want to exchange threats, well, you might yet die lost in the mountains somewhere if you aren't careful!"

"I'm sorry," Dumery said contritely, and he was partly sincere. He hadn't wanted to anger anyone.

He just wanted an apprenticeship.

"You should be," Kensher answered, calming somewhat. "Besides," he added, "I thought you wanted to apprentice to a hunter, not a farmer."

"Oh, I don't care which," Dumery said, "just so long as it's dragons."

"You like dragons, then?"

Dumery hesitated. That hadn't really been what he meant; he was far more concerned with the value of dragon blood than anything about the beasts themselves.

On the other hand, they were pretty interesting.

"Yes," he said. "Very much."

"You were watching them out the window just now, weren't you?"

Dumery nodded.

"Do you think you're fit enough to go outside? We could go take a closer look at them, if you like."

"I'd like that," Dumery said.

After all, if he was going to work with dragons-and he would find a way, somehow-it was never too soon to start learning more about them. Besides, he wanted to ingratiate himself with Kensher. He'd gotten off to a bad start, offending the man with his silly threats, and this might be a chance to get back on better terms.

Five minutes later, wrapped in a fur cape Korun Kensher's son had loaned him, Dumery followed Kensher out the back door of the farmhouse onto the stony ground of the little plateau.

The icy wind hit him like a hard slap across the face, leaving his right cheek red and stinging. He blinked hard, trying to keep his vision clear; it felt as if teardrops were freezing in the corners of his eyes.

"Cold," he remarked, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

Kensher looked at him, startled. "A little," he said. "For this time of year, especially, I guess. But it's not that bad, really; you've just been curled up indoors for too long."

Dumery gritted his teeth and didn't answer.

"Of course," Kensher went on, as they strolled across the yard to the first of the pens, "you're from Ethshar, aren't you? It doesn't get very cold there, does it? Not like up here in Aldagmor."

"No," Dumery said, "I guess not." He had always thought that Ethshar of the Spices got quite cold enough in the winter, when the snows came, but by the middle of spring-which it now was-the snows were long gone, and the spring rains getting progressively warmer. Warm, damp breezes would be blowing in from the Gulf of the East, nothing like the cold, cutting blast that swept across these northern mountains.

He shuddered, literally, at the thought of what this place must be like in the winter.

It occurred to him that maybe he didn't want to stay here after all.

He thrust that thought aside and looked around.

He and Kensher were standing at the first pen, where wrought-iron tracery connected black iron beams as big around as a man's thigh. The pen was perhaps thirty feet long and fifteen feet front to back, and the iron barrier was at least ten feet high. The ironwork continued across the top in a graceful arch.

The ground behind the metal was bare stone.

Inside the pen, a dozen tiny dragons were staring up at them.

Dumery stared back.

"Hatchlings," Kensher said. "Broke the shells a sixnight ago, while I was on the way back from Ethshar-I'd wanted to be here to help, but I didn't make it.

Just two clutches this year; we usually do better."

The largest baby dragon, which was also the closest, was black, with golden eyes and gleaming white talons. From nose to the tip of its tail it was four or five feet long, Dumery estimated, but most of that length was in the long, curling tail. It had four legs, thin and bony, each one ending in five long, curling claws; its head was long and narrow, with long, upright, pointed, set-back ears. The gleaming yellow eyes had black slit pupils, like a cat's.

When the dragon realized Dumery was staring at it it opened its mouth and hissed, and Dumery glimpsed a pointed, yellowish-red tongue surrounded by hundreds of tiny white teeth.

They looked very sharp.

It had wings on its back, great black wings, shaped like the wings of a bat, rather than any sort of bird, with thin, leathery skin stretched over a bony frame-except that the wings hung down limply.

"The wings..." Dumery said, pointing.

Kensher snatched the boy's finger back away from the bars. "They bite," he said.

Dumery gulped, and looked at his finger, making sure it was still there.

"Broken," Kensher said.

Dumery looked up at him. "What?"

"The wings are broken," Kensher explained. "We have to do that to make sure they don't fly away. We don't want a bunch of wild dragons running around loose in the woods down there."

"Oh," Dumery said, looking back at the little black dragon. "But you have a roof on the cage."

"Yes, of course we do, but..." Kensher stopped, groping for the best way to explain. After a moment's thought he continued, "Look, when they fly, they're a lot harder to handle. If you go in the cage they can knock you down and slip out the door and get away, and there's no way to catch them if they can fly.

That black one there must weigh thirty or forty pounds, and it's still a hatchling. In a month it could be fifty or sixty pounds; in three months it could top a hundred. You do not want to argue with a hundred-pound flying dragon. It's bad enough when theycan't fly, believe me."

"Oh," Dumery said, looking through the bars.

Behind the big black hatchling were about half a dozen green ones, smaller, but still big enough to be frightening. A reddish-gold one was pacing about in a far corner of the cage; two blue-green ones and a red one were curled up together asleep.

All of them, Dumery noticed, had broken wings.

"So dragons really can fly," he said.

"Oh, yes," Kensher said. "Most of them, anyway. Some don't have the wingspan, or the muscles don't develop right, but most of them can fly. At least when they're young."

"Do any of them really breathe fire?"

Kensher grimaced. "Not around here," he said. "There are fire-breathing dragons, all right, and back during the war they raised them here, but it doesn't make any difference in the blood, and that's the only market we have left, so my great-great-great grandfather culled them all. They're just too damned dangerous to have around. My ancestors used to have to wear armor just to go near them, and even so, a couple of several-times-great uncles got fried. Sometimes we get a throwback-the trait's not completely weeded out of our bloodlines yet-but when that happens, we kill it as soon as we find out about it."

"Oh," Dumery said, looking at the hatchlings. "So none of these can breathe fire?"

"Not that we know of, anyway, and usually they start to at least spit sparks by now."

"Oh," Dumery said, stepping back.

"Come on, let's look at the yearlings," Kensher said, beckoning.

Dumery followed him around to the right, past the hatchlings' cage.

The next cage was several times the size of the hatchlings'; Dumery didn't care to guess its exact dimensions. The wrought-iron tracery was much simpler, but much heavier, with larger openings. Four dragons, each ten or twelve feet long, occupied it; two were green, two golden yellow. There was a strong and unpleasant odor to the place-Dumery wrinkled his nose at it. He noticed the pile in a corner that was presumably the source for most of the stench.

All four dragons were clustered around the remains of a steer, eating noisily.

One gave the two humans a red-eyed glance, then turned back to its meal.

All four had wings, and again, all the wings were broken and hanging limp.

"Those are just a year old?" Dumery said, looking at the curving talons, claws bigger than his fingers.

"That's right," Kensher said.

Dumery noticed a golden wing flopping. "Don't the wings heal up?" he asked.

"Of course they do," Kensher replied. "That's why we have to break them again every year."

"You do?"

"Of course. Look at those things-four hundred pounds each. And we can't remove the claws or fangs, because then they can't feed themselves. We can't let them fly."

Dumery looked, just as a green dragon lifted its head with a bloody mouthful of beef. He shuddered. "No," he said, "I guess you can't."

The tour continued, past two more cages of yearlings, and then a dozen huge pens for older, more mature beasts. These ranged from about twelve feet long up to twenty or more, and glared fiercely at the two humans. Every so often one would roar, and Dumery would cover his ears against the sound.

A heavy outer fence ran around the entire group of pens, enclosing much of the plateau. Kensher noticed Dumery looking at it as the pair walked on.

"Sometimes they get out of their cages," he said. "We don't know how they do it, sometimes, but they do-dragons are tricky. When that happens, the fence there stops them from going any farther."

"Do any ever get away completely?" Dumery asked.

Kensher admitted reluctantly, "Sometimes, yes."

Dumery looked down across the edge of the plateau toward the forests below.

"So there are wild dragons out there?"

"Maybe. I don't know if they survive-after all, they've never learned to hunt for their food, and there isn't much game around here, and they can't fly.

Most of them probably don't last long."

Dumery didn't find that very comforting. He remembered that he had come up the path through those woods alone and unprotected, without ever giving the possibility of being eaten by a wild dragon any serious thought.

Then, finally, they came to the slaughterhouse, where Dumery gawped at the tangle of huge iron chains and heavy beams, used to restrain and support dragons while their throats were cut and their blood drained.

"We cull most of them when they're six or seven months old," Kensher explained. "That's where we get most of the blood. By then we know which ones we want for breeding stock, so we dispose of the rest here. If there's any sign of illness or anemia, or if they're unusually vicious, or if we just don't like their looks, we weed them out then. The others we keep until they're about four or five years old, and then they have to go, too." He gestured at the restraints. "A healthy dragon's about eighteen or twenty feet long by then, weighs maybe a ton, but the growth is slowing down, so it's not worth keeping them any longer. Besides, any bigger and they get really dangerous, and we can't handle them any more. They aren't just bigger and stronger, either, they're smarter. A hatchling's no smarter than a kitten, and a yearling maybe as bright as a wolf, but by the time a dragon's five or six years old it's smarter than any other animal except people. A really smart one might start learning to talk when it's seven or eight, and we can't have that."

"Why not?" Dumery asked, puzzled.

Kensher blinked. "Ah ... because if ... if it can talk, then it's not just an animal any more, boy, and it wouldn't be right to kill it." He frowned. "It's bad enough killing the breeding stock as it is."

Dumery considered that for a moment.

How did learning to talk make a dragon a person? It was still a dragon, after all.

But he could sort of see Kensher's point. If you could hold a conversation with something, it wasn't just an animal any more.

But if a talking dragon shouldn't be killed, then was it really all right to kill the immature ones? Did that mean that it would be all right to kill a human baby that hadn't yet learned to talk? Maybe it did mean that; he had heard that sometimes girls did exactly that when they had babies they didn't want.

Dumery decided he didn't want to think about that just now.

But if the dragons were killed when they were still babies, too young to talk...

"How old do they have to be to lay eggs?" he asked.

"Oh, they'll start breeding as yearlings, if we let them," Kensher said. "We don't, though; that's why there are three separate cages for yearlings instead of one big one."

"Three?"

"Well, we don't usually get nice even numbers of male and female," Kensher explained. "We usually have more males than females. And we don't want them to breed until they're about three; the young are healthier that way. So we have two cages for males and one for females."

Dumery nodded, staring at the ironmongery.

The killing knife hung by the door, a huge saw-toothed blade the size of a broadsword, its metal polished and gleaming. The bottles used for the blood stood ranged on shelves against one wall, all of them empty and sparkling clean.

He hadn't thought about the actual killing when he asked for an apprenticeship. He hadn't thought about feeding almost a hundred hungry dragons every day, about raising the cattle to feed them. He hadn't thought about breaking wings every year, or watching for fire-breathers and killing them young, or losing fingers or hands or arms in a moment's carelessness around the livestock. There was far more to raising dragons than he had considered.

It looked like a dull, dirty, difficult, and dangerous business. It meant cruelty and killing.

Dumery didn't like any of that.

All the same, Dumery thought, what else could he do? He had come this far; he was reluctant to throw that away. Besides, for as long as he could remember, all he had wanted out of life was magic, and he had been denied that. There was nothing else he wanted to do. Dragon-farming might not be magic, but it wassomething, anyway, and if it meant he could rub Thetheran's nose in the dirt, then itwas what he wanted to do.

Now all he had to do was convince Kensher to let him do it.

Chapter Twenty-Six

"You know," Dumery remarked between bites of Pancha's baked pudding, "my father's a wealthy man."

"Oh?" Kensher said, not particularly interested. Kinner looked up from his plate, but said nothing.

Dumery nodded. "He'd pay well to buy me an apprenticeship, enough to cover all the costs with some left over."

Kensher shook his head. "No apprenticeship," he said. "I told you that. We have plenty of money as it is, and if we need more we just raise our prices; we don't need your father's gold." He scooped up another heaping spoonful.

Dumery looked down to hide his annoyance. He had thought he had a chance, that he would at least be able to put up an argument, but how could he counter that flat refusal?

He looked up again and glanced down the dinner table, taking in all the faces.

Most of them, he knew, didn't understand Ethsharitic, so they had no idea what he and Kensher had just said. For all Dumery could tell, most of them might not even know that hewanted an apprenticeship.

And did all of them want to stay here and learn the family business? Maybe he could replace one, somehow.

He caught a glimpse of Wuller of Srigmor, the shepherd who had married Seldis of Aldagmor, the eldest granddaughter.That was a possibility-Wuller had married into the family, and there were still five other granddaughters, presumably all unmarried and probably not spoken for yet. There were not a lot of eligible suitors up here in the mountains.

There was Shatha, and Tarissa, and Kirsha, and Shanra, and Kinthera. Shanra and Kinthera were a few years older than Dumery was-not that that really mattered.

None of them particularly appealed to him, though. Seldis was pretty-but she was already married, andmuch too old.

And besides, he didn't really want to commit himself to marryinganyone yet.

Of course, he could lie andsay that he wanted to marry Shanra; nobody would expect him to make good on that until he was sixteen, at the earliest, by which time he ought to know all there was to know about raising dragons for their blood.

But the knowledge wouldn't do him much good if he angered the owners of the only dragon farm in the World.

And besides, he didn't like the idea of lying about it. It wouldn't be proper to get an apprenticeship that way. And in all likelihood his lies wouldn't be believed in any case; these people weren't stupid, and they knew what he wanted, since he had foolishly admitted it already. They wouldn't accept him into the family just to give him an apprenticeship, and they would know that was thereal reason he wanted to marry in.

Besides, there was no guarantee that Shanra or any of the others would be interested in marryinghim, now, was there?

No, marrying into the family was not going to be his answer. At least, not in and of itself.

If he could find some way to stay, then in fact he really might eventually marry one of the girls. After all, if he stayed here for a few years he wouldn't see anyother girls, and sooner or later, he supposed, he would want to get married.

But that argument wasn't going to convince Kensher to let him stay, he was sure.

"And you really don't care if I tell all the wizards back in Ethshar that you people are running a farm here, and not hunting dragons in the wild?" he asked.

Kinner blinked, Pancha flinched, and Kensher sighed.

"Not much," Kensher said. "The hunting story is a convenient fiction, and we're happy with it, but it's not really essential. We'd stay in business without it; we might need to negotiate a little with the Wizard's Guild, that's all." He put down his spoon. "Look, Dumery," he said, "give it up. We don't need an apprentice here, and if we did, it wouldn't be a rich, spoiled city boy who was stupid enough to follow me home the way you did. And particularly not one who makes threats about revealing secrets."

Pancha flinched again. "Kenshi," she said, "don't be so harsh. It took courage and resourcefulness for him to come all the way up here by himself."

"Doesn't mean it was smart," Kensher said. "And resourceful or not, we donot need an apprentice!"

Kinner made a noise of agreement, and even Pancha couldn't argue with that.

Dumery often didn't know when to quit, but this time it finally sank in that he wasn't getting anywhere, and he finished his pudding in silence.

When he was done he sat staring at the empty plate, and inspiration struck. He looked up.

Pancha was clearing away the empty dishes, and Kinner had gone off somewhere with some of his younger grandchildren, but Kensher was still at the table, leaning back comfortably.

"What if I bought a dragon?" Dumery asked.

Kensher let out his breath in a whoosh, then leaned forward, startled.

"What?"he demanded.

"What if I bought a dragon?" Dumery repeated. "Or two, actually. They wouldn't have to be good ones; a couple of hatchlings you'd cull anyway would do just fine."

"We don't sell dragons," Kensher said, eyeing him suspiciously.

"You sell their blood," Dumery said. "What's the difference?"

"Plenty," Kensher said. "A bottle of blood never bit anyone's arm off."

"All right, so it's not the same," Dumery admitted. "Will you sell me a pair anyway?"

"A pair, is it? You mean you don't just want any two dragons, you want a male and a female?"

"Well, yes," Dumery admitted, "that is what I had in mind."

Kensher stared at him for a moment, then leaned back in his chair and said,

"Boy, you're amazing. You must think I'm as dumb as you are! You want me to sell you a breeding pair so you can set yourself up your own little dragon farm and go into business in competition with us?"

That was, in fact, exactly what Dumery wanted, but it seemed impolitic to say so just now. Instead he sat silently frustrated, staring at Kensher.

"I have got to admit, Dumery, you are the stubbornest, most persistent lad I have ever met in my life," Kensher said, his tone almost admiring. "Even the dragons aren't as determined as you. But it doesn't matter. We arenot going to set you up in the dragon-farming business, either here or in competition with us. We're going to send you home to your family, and hope you have the sense not to go and cause pointless trouble by telling everybody where we live and what we do. Is that clear enough?"

Dumery reluctantly nodded. "It's clear," he said.

And in fact itwas clear that the descendants of Sergeant Thar wouldn't help him intentionally.

Perhaps, though, they might be made to provide assistance without knowing it.

As he carried his empty plate to the scullery Dumery was planning just how that might work.

It would involve lying and stealing and a good bit of danger, but he thought he could manage it.

Just a little while ago he had been reluctant to lie to Kensher and his family about wanting to marry Shanra, and here he was considering not just lying, but robbing them as well.

Well, he was desperate. And this new scheme was much more likely to succeed, anyway, and it would be over much sooner, one way or the other.

There was a chance it would get him killed, but he refused to worry about that. It might work.

And if it worked, it would be well worth the risk.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Teneria stared in disbelief at the pens.

Dragons!

Dozens of dragons!

Big dragons, small dragons, red, blue, and green dragons!

She had never seen any dragon before, in her entire life, and here there were dozens of dragons.

What in the World was this place?

And what was Dumery doing here?

She lowered her pack to the ground, then scooped the spriggan off her shoulder and dropped it onto a nearby rock. She sat down, still staring at the farm, and tried to think.

As she did, she was aware once again of a sort of soft muttering in the back of her mind, as if someone were trying to sneak up on her, or was thinking loudly about her somewhere nearby. The same uncomfortable sensation had come over her a few times on the way up into the mountains, and she didn't like it at all.

She had disliked it right from the start, but oddly, it had taken until the fourth time she felt it before she recognized it.

It was the Calling.

Witches weren't supposed to be susceptible to the Calling-but on the other hand, Adar had told her that people who got too close to the Warlock Stone could spontaneously become warlocks, and witchcraft and warlockry were apparently not all that different, after all. She knew that she had been born with a strong talent for witchcraft-Sella had told her as much. That was why Sella had been willing to take Teneria on as an apprentice even though Teneria's parents couldn't pay the customary fee.

And if Teneria had the innate talent for witchcraft, why wouldn't she have the talent for warlockry, as well?

Even so, she might not have picked anything up, might not have sensed the Calling, if she hadn't spent those long, horrible hours focused on Adar's mind, trying to hold the Calling out. That had taught her what the Calling was, had attuned her to it.

She wasn't a warlock, even now, by any means; she could levitate things, of course, but it still tired her, it was still witchcraft, not warlockry.

Witch or warlock, though, she could feel that unpleasant mental touch, ever so lightly.

And it seemed to be growing more noticeable as she continued southward and eastward. She did not like the idea of venturing even farther in that direction.

But now she wouldn't have to. Dumery was here; despite the delays, she had finally caught up to him. And this, surely, was where he had been headed all along.

She could see why he hadn't wanted to tell the truth when his parents' hired wizard contacted him. That would have sounded so reassuring to his poor mother-"Oh, I'm hiking up into wild, dragon-infested, warlock-haunted mountains in Aldagmor, along what used to be the frontier of the old Northern Empire. I'll be up there in the freezing cold weather without any supplies or money, with nothing but the clothes on my back. I'm going to a secret menagerie of dragons up there."

And what in the World did Dumery want in this miserable, gods-forsaken place, anyway? What business did a twelve-year-old boy have at an all-dragon zoo like this? Had he been tricked into coming here as dragon-fodder?

No, that didn't make any sense; he was still alive, she could tell. And even if there were some reason to feed dragons boys instead of sheep or cattle, surely there were gullible boys to be found closer than Ethshar of the Spices.

Maybe the boy was on some errand for a wizard? Everybody knew he had been hounding half the magicians in the Wizards' Quarter for an apprenticeship; maybe he had settled for a job as a wizard's errand boy. Wizards seemed to take an unhealthy interest in dragons; she had certainly seen enough of them with dragons embroidered on robes, or with carved dragons adorning their shops.

Well, there were ways to find out what was going on. The simplest and best was to walk right up and ask.

If it turned out that her interest wasn't welcome, well, she was a witch; she could defend herself.

She marched down the path. Behind her the spriggan let out a small yip of dismay, which she ignored, and then scurried after her.

She reached the door, stopped, raised a fist, and knocked loudly. The spriggan grabbed her ankle and held on.

Even through the heavy oak, and even though she had never had any contact with the people on the other side, she could sense the astonishment within. She waited.

Eventually, the door creaked open an inch or so.

"Yes?" a handsome young woman asked, in Sardironese. "Can I help you?"

Teneria could see that the woman was thinking in Sardironese-hardly surprising, as they were still in Aldagmor. The witch was still not very comfortable with the local language, but she tried. "I am looking for Dumery of Shiphaven," she said, unhappily aware that she had spoken with a very thick Ethsharitic accent, and that the spriggan was clinging to her leg, hampering any fast movement.

"Dumery?" the woman in the house replied, startled. Teneria saw that she knew exactly who Dumery of Shiphaven was; the mental image she conjured up matched Teneria's own perfectly.

"Yes," Teneria said, nodding. "Dumery."

"He hadn't told us he was expecting anyone," the woman said, uncertainly.

Teneria realized that she wasn't much older than herself.

"He wasn't expecting me," she said. "His ... his..." She groped for the word.

Seeing Teneria's discomfort, the woman said, "I understand Ethsharitic, mostly."

Teneria noticed that she hadn't said soin Ethsharitic, so she kept her words as simple as she could. "His parents sent me," she said.

"Oh!" The confusion cleared from the woman's mind with miraculous speed. "Come in! I'm Seldis of Aldagmor; my parents and grandfather own this place. Come on in." She swung the door wide.

"Thank you," Teneria said, accepting the invitation. The spriggan, riding on her boot, came with her.

She found herself in a large, cluttered room, facing a horde of children and a handful of adults. One of the children she immediately recognized-Dumery of Shiphaven.

"Hello, Dumery," she said. "I'm Teneria. Your parents sent me."

"My parents?" the boy asked warily. "Not Thetheran?"

"Well-my mistress, actually. I'm still an apprentice. But your parents hired her." Teneria was uncomfortably aware of more than a dozen pairs of eyes watching the conversation closely, even though she could tell that only four of the listeners understood Ethsharitic-an old man with an arm missing, a big, powerful middle-aged man, a small, dark middle-aged woman, and Seldis.

Some of the children had spotted the spriggan, and were pointing at it and whispering to one another. The little creature hopped off and ran off to hide under the furniture somewhere.

"They did?" Dumery asked. "Who is she, your mistress?"

"Sella the Witch," Teneria replied.

"My father hired a witch?" The boy believed her, she knew; he was just startled.

"I think your mother had more to do with it," she answered.

The middle-aged man had stepped forward; while Dumery groped for another question the man spoke, holding out a hand in greeting. "Welcome to our home, young lady," he said. "I am Kensher Kinner's son."

"Teneria of Fishertown." She bowed politely.

Dumery watched as this unexpected new arrival was introduced to all the inhabitants of the farmhouse, and as he watched he was trying to figure out what to do now.

He had never expected his parents to send someone after him; despite the dream Thetheran had sent he hadn't thought that they cared enough, or that his father would be willing to pay for it, and besides, why would they send someone when they had used the dream spell?

And quite aside from all that, how had this person found him?

She was an apprentice witch, of course, but he hadn't known that witches could do that.

Somehow, though, she had found him. Maybe that spriggan he had seen run under the sofa had had something to do with it, if that was the same one he had seen back at the Inn at the Bridge-after all, he knew even less about spriggans than he did about witches.

Just how it was done didn't really matter, though, since it had been done.

So now what?

What did this do to his plans?

It pretty much knocked them to pieces, he realized, unless he could either get rid of this Teneria, or get her over on his side, somehow. He had intended to take his leave of the farm, then sneak back at night and steal two hatchlings, as breeding stock for his own farm. If he were in a witch's care he couldn't very well carry out his scheme without her knowing about it.

Getting her over to his side-well, that would be ideal, certainly. A witch would be extremely useful.

However, he couldn't imagine any way it could be done. Getting rid of her should be far easier.

Just now, though, he wasn't sure how to do that, either.

It would require further thought.

Teneria, even as she committed the names of all the children to memory, was listening as best she could to Dumery's thoughts.

She couldn't get them exactly, but she knew he wasn't happy with her presence.

He had been planning something, and he didn't think she would approve.

This was something she would want to discuss with him. In private.

She smiled at Pancha and complimented her, in awkward Sardironese, on her fine collection of offspring. The mistress of the house smiled back.

She invited Teneria to stay for dinner, and for the night, and with an eye on Dumery, Teneria accepted.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Upon consideration, Teneria realized that effective privacy would not actually be all that hard to obtain, since the children spoke no Ethsharitic-only the adults had to be avoided. When Kensher and the older children were out checking on the livestock after dinner, and the younger children were playing with the spriggan, and Pancha was in the kitchen putting away dishes, a little judicious witchcraft allowed Teneria to get Dumery away from Kinner and Seldis.

Dumery hadn't really noticed yet that the two of them were alone in the front room until Teneria demanded, "All right, Dumery, what are you up to?"

Startled, Dumery said, "I don't know what you mean." He eyed the young woman he was beginning to think of as his captor and wondered how much she knew. The stories he had heard were vague on whether witches could read one's thoughts, or merely sense moods.

"I know you're up tosomething," she said. "I'm a witch, remember? Now, suppose you tell me all about it."

"All aboutwhat?" Dumery persisted, still unsure of his best course of action.

Teneria put her hands on her hips and glared at him. "You know what."

"No, I don't," Dumery said, trying to look puzzled.

Teneria let out an exasperated sigh. "All right, then," she said, "let's take it a step at a time. What are you doing up here in the mountains of Aldagmor, instead of safe at home on with your parents?"

That was no secret any more, so there was no harm in telling the truth. "I followed Kensher," Dumery said. "I wanted to arrange an apprenticeship with him. I saw him selling dragon's blood to Thetheran the Mage back in Ethshar, and I decided I wanted to get into the dragon's blood business, too. So I followed him here, and asked him."

"And he turned you down," Teneria said. She could see that from Dumery's attitude, and she could even see the reason-Kensher had eleven children of his own.

"That's right," Dumery agreed. "He turned me down."

"So now you're just going to go quietly home with me, I suppose," Teneria said sarcastically.

Dumery ignored the sarcasm and nodded, trying to look innocent.

Teneria was disgusted. "Right," she said. "You know perfectly well that that wasn't what you were planning at all."

"Well..."

"So what were you planning?"

Dumery stood obstinately silent.

Teneria sighed again. "Suppose," she said, "that your parents had instructed me to do whatever I can to see that you get what you came after, be it an apprenticeship or whatever. Would you still be standing there like that?"

"They didn't, did they?" He sounded very doubtful indeed.

"Not exactly," Teneria admitted. "But they do want you to be happy, Dumery, and to find a career you'll enjoy. I don't think they'd object to dragon-farming. Now, did you have some scheme for getting an apprenticeship dragon-farming, after all?"

"No," Dumery said. "There isn't any way. Kensher won't listen to me, and there aren't any other dragon-farmers."

Teneria was glad to see that Dumery was telling the truth. "So it's not that,"

she said. She eyed him carefully.

He was tall for his age, but very thin, with a very stubborn set to his jaw.

His mind was not easily pried at-she could see at a glance that he was very closed and self-contained, and could never have become a witch.

A thought struck her. The boy had been desperate to become a magician, and here he was in Aldagmor, where, she now knew, the source of one kind of magic was to be found. "Is it something to do with the Warlock Stone?" she asked.

"The what?" Dumery answered, baffled.

No, it wasn't that; Teneria could see that the boy had never heard the term before.

Back to other matters, then. "Something to do with dragons?" she asked.

He didn't answer, but he didn't have to.

"Dragons," she said. "Something to do with dragons." She considered him carefully.

"Not hunting them, I hope?" She had a rough idea how dangerous dragon-hunting might be; she could hardly say she'd fulfilled her task of seeing that Dumery was safe if she let him go off hunting the great beasts.

"No," he said, and she knew that he was telling the truth.

"It's something you feel guilty about, though," she said. That much was obvious. "Something dangerous?"

He shook his head.

Teneria frowned. That was a half-truth. Dumery thought it might be risky, somehow, but he didn't think it should bereally dangerous. That didn't tell her much.

This was all very tiresome. He obviously wasn't going to tell her if he could possibly avoid doing so, and she couldn't read it from him, and it might take hours, or days, to guess it. She glowered at him for a moment, then changed her approach.

"Is there anything you wanted to ask me?" she asked.

Startled, Dumery studied her carefully and considered his response.

She was a witch, but he had only a vague idea of what sort of magic witches used-he had mostly heard of healings and divinations, and didn't know much about how those worked. He had always been more interested in wizardry and the other, more prestigious varieties of magic, not the rather plebian witchcraft.

And she was a girl, almost a woman-he wasn't sure whether to consider her a grown-up or not.

She was working for his parents, so he had been thinking of her as being on their side, on the side of rules and regulations and authority, but might that be a mistake?

He couldn't very well ask her straight out, "Are you going to stop me from committing a robbery?"

Maybe he could sort of feel her out, though. And there was something that he wondered about.

"What's the Warlock Stone?" he asked.

Teneria was caught off-guard, and hesitated for a moment.

Well, why not? What harm could it do?

"It's the source for all the warlocks' magic. It's somewhere in Aldagmor, to the southeast of here."

"Really?"

Teneria could clearly see the boy's sudden interest in this news, which was not at all what she had wanted. She sighed again.

"Listen, Dumery, forget it," she told him. "You can't get near it. No one can.

It kills anyone who gets too close.I don't dare get much closer than I am right here and now-magicians are more susceptible."

"Oh," Dumery said. He thought that over.

He wasn't sure he believed her, but on the other hand, if it reallywere approachable, and if people knew where it was, and if it was really any use, then someone else would have gone there by now, and it would all be in the hands of others. After all, warlocks had been around since before he was born.

So that was out, and he was back to his former scheme.

"You're a witch, right?" he asked.

Teneria nodded. "An apprentice, anyway."

"Have you ever put a curse on anyone?" Maybe she wasn't a total goody-goody.

Maybe she'd go along with a little adventure.

"No," she said, dashing his hopes. "Witches don't do curses."

"They do in the stories..." Dumery began.

"All right," Teneria said, exasperated, "I don't do curses. And I never met a witch who did, either, but maybe there are some."

"Oh." Dumery shut up. It was clear to him that a person who wouldn't deal in curses was not the sort to go along with a burglary scheme.

Teneria glared at him. The boy was infuriating! And it appeared that she wasn't going to learn anything else useful from him.

"All right, look," she said, "whatever you've got in mind, just forget it, all right? Tomorrow morning we're starting back down the mountain, taking you home to Ethshar. You can find an apprenticeship of some kind there."

Dumery didn't answer.

They glowered at one another for a moment, then marched away in opposite directions.

Later that night, as the household began to settle down, Dumery considered the situation.

He had intended to take his leave, go down the mountain until he was out of sight, then slip back up at night.

He couldn't do that while in Teneria's care, though. He would have to make his move that very night, while everyone was asleep, before he and Teneria were thrown together for good.

He had also planned to flee down the trail to the river, the same way he had come, but now he decided against it. If he did that, Teneria would come after him and find him, almost certainly. She was a witch, after all, and had found him way up here in the mountains of Aldagmor.

He could escape her, though. He saw exactly how he could escape her. If he headed south or southeast, toward the Warlock Stone she had spoken of, she wouldn't dare follow. The thing would kill her.

It wouldn't kill him, though, because he wasn't a magician. Or at least, it wouldn't kill him unless he got really close, which he would try not to do.

And the possibility that he might stumble on the Stone by accident-well, that was a chance he'd take.

And if he did, who knew? Maybe Teneria was wrong and he would wind up a warlock after all.

It didn't seem very likely, though.

He hadn't really planned everything out yet, but there was no time to spare, with Teneria here. He would just have to improvise, deal with problems as they arose.

As soon as he was sure everyone was asleep, he would go.

He lay back and waited.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Dumery crept down the stairs with his pack on his arm, walking to one side to lessen the chance of creaking, and listening intently for any sign that someone else was still awake-someone like Teneria, for example.

He heard nothing but the wind outside. Apparently witches slept just as soundly as anybody else.

Cautiously, he made his way down the hall and through the rear storage room to the back door, the one that led out to the dragon pens.

It was barred, with three heavy bars-Dumery assumed that that was just to keep dragons out, should one escape from its cage. He looked the bars over carefully.

They were padlocked in place, and the keys were nowhere in sight.

He had half-expected that. With a shrug, he turned and made his way, slowly and cautiously, back through the house to the front door.

That had an ordinary bolt and a hook latch; he threw the bolt, lifted the latch, and then, very slowly, eased the door open and slipped out.

Both moons were high overhead, the lesser just passing the greater, and between them they gave enough light that Dumery could see where he was going.

He made his way up the path between the flowerbeds and through the garden, back over the rocky shoulder of the mountain, until he could see the forest spread out below, black in the moonslight.

The weather had finally warmed somewhat in the last day or so, and the winds were relatively calm, for once. Moonslight sparkled eerily from snowcaps on distant peaks, and the moons' two colors edged shadows with pink and orange.

It was a beautiful night. Dumery could easily have made his way down slope and into the woods without fear of stumbling or losing his way.

That was if he were heading down slope, though, and in point of fact he had no intention of doing so.

Rather, he intended to circle around the house so as to get at the dragon pens.

Accordingly, as soon as he was certain he was out of sight, should someone wake and glance out an upstairs windows, he turned left off the path and began cutting cross-country, through the pastures where the cattle that the dragons ate grazed.

At first he had intended to simply circle around to the back of the house by the shortest possible route, but he encountered an obstacle he hadn't known about-a fissure, separating the pasture from the dragon pens. The house appeared to have been built directly atop it.

He studied it for a moment. It was deep, and wide, and the plank bridge that the people and cattle presumably used to cross it was drawn up on the other side. One end ran right up to the foundations of the farmhouse.

He supposed it kept the dragons and cattle from approaching each other too closely, and he wished he had noticed it before.

It was too wide to leap, in the dark, and the lower end was impassable because of the farmhouse. He would have to go around the upper end.

That took him up out of the pasture, over the fence, and into the wilderness beyond.

There was no trail at all this way, and the terrain was rough; stretches of bare, jagged stone were interspersed with moss, lichen, gravel, and a few struggling pines. Dumery had to pick his footing carefully, and every so often a rock or chunk of moss would slide out from underneath him and send him sprawling. He cut his chin, bruised and scraped the palms of both hands, and twisted his left wrist painfully, but he made steady progress.

His biggest worry wasn't falling into the fissure-he kept a healthy distance between him and that-nor falling off the mountain-for the most part the slopes were not so steep as to make that a real danger-but the possibility of encountering an escaped dragon. Despite what Kensher had said, Dumery suspected that there were probably quite a number of them in the vicinity, gone wild.

He couldn't decide whether they would be more likely to leave the area completely and avoid the place where they had suffered in captivity, or whether they would hang around the only home they had ever known.

He tended toward the former theory, not just because it was reassuring, but because he remembered those pitiful broken wings hanging down across the hatchlings' flanks. If he'd had something equally unpleasant done to him, such as a broken arm or two, he certainly would never again want to go anywhere near the place it had happened.

But he wasn't a dragon, of course, and he didn't know how dragons thought about these things. So he struggled onward and tried not to worry about it.

The lesser moon was down and the greater sinking fast when he finally scrambled around a towering boulder and found himself in sight of the back row of dragon pens, with the farmhouse just barely visible beyond them.

He smiled, satisfied, and crept down toward the pens, moving as silently as he knew how. He ignored the curious glances some of the dragons gave him. Several of the sharp-eyed creatures were awake, and some had spotted him as soon as he emerged from behind the boulder into sight of the farm, but they hadn't done anything about it. There was no reason they should.

They weren't watching him constantly, but they certainly knew where he was and cast an occasional glance at him.

The bigger ones did, at any rate; the yearlings didn't seem to have noticed anything, and he couldn't even see the hatchlings from where he was.

The hatchlings, however, were what he was interested in. If he could sneak off with a pair of them, one of each sex, then he could start his own farm, and to hell with Kensher and his brood.

He had planned it out as best he could while he was convalescing, and although he never got another real tour after that first one, and had had to hurry everything up drastically when Teneria showed up, he had had chances to watch out the window when the hatchlings got fed, and had asked a few important questions-such as, "How do you tell them apart? Male and female, I mean."

He hadn't gotten a good explanation, really, but in the ensuing conversation he had been told that the black one, the red one, and the reddish-gold one were all male, while the two blue-green ones were both female. The green ones included four males and two females.

He intended to ignore the green ones, since he couldn't tell them apart, and grab a blue-green one and one of the others. He figured that if he held them by the neck, one in each hand, they wouldn't be able to bite him-and he just hoped they wouldn't claw him. Hauling two four-foot, forty-pound dragons was going to be quite difficult enough without getting clawed up.

He hoped he could manage it. It would be tough, but if he got away with it he would be set for life.

He had watched when the hatchlings were fed and watered, and when Seldis had given them their bath-she had climbed up on top of the cage and poured buckets of water in through the bars, and then had gone into the cage with another bucket and a scrub-brush to do a final inspection and touch-up. Wuller had gone in with her, carrying a sharp prod, and two of the others, Kinner the Younger and Korun, had stood at the door of the cage as back-up, but the dragons hadn't given her any trouble.

And watching that, Dumery had seen that the latch on the cage didn't need a key. He hadn't gotten a good look at just how it worked, but he was sure no one had used a key, or anything but fingers, to work it.

And the calm ease with which Seldis had handled the hatchlings had been very encouraging. They were used to human touch.

Dumery thought he could manage it-get in there, grab the dragons, and get out again, and then hide somewhere in the forest, work his way south and west, back out of the mountains and back toward civilization. Teneria wouldn't dare follow him if he went south, near the Warlock Stone.

He hadn't worked out all the details, of course, but the hard part, he was sure, would be getting the dragons. Once he had his breeding pair he would worry about details, such as where he was going to keep them, and how he was going to get them there.

First things first, he told himself.

He reached the outer fence, and discovered that the very first step-getting back into the farm-was going to be harder than he had thought at first. This was not an easy fence to climb. It was nine or ten feet high, with black iron uprights set a few inches apart-that much he had known already.

He had not, however, paid much attention to the fact that there were only two crosspieces holding the uprights together, one nearly at ground level and the other near the top. The uprights were far enough apart that he couldn't brace his foot between two of them, but close enough together that he couldn't squeeze through.

And climbing the uprights themselves, while possible, wasn't going to be easy, because they weren't round, easy-to-grasp rods, they were triangular, with concave faces, so that the edges were sharp.

He sighed, grabbed hold of two uprights, and started climbing.

The metal cut into his palms and his fingers; if he clung tightly enough to pull himself up, the edges cut more deeply.

And then he felt himself starting to slide back down; the smooth metal didn't give him enough friction to hold. The edges were cutting more than ever as his hands slid down them.

He let go and fell back to the ground, frustrated. He looked at his hands.

The palm of his left hand was bleeding sluggishly; the fingers and his right hand were marked with red pressure lines, but the skin hadn't been broken.

He swore, using every foul word he'd ever heard the sailors on his father's ships use, and wiped the blood off on the grass.

That, he told himself, was a truly vicious fence! Why had they made it that way?

He supposed that it was really intended to prevent dragons from getting out, rather than to keep him from getting in, but it seemed to work quite well either way.

On the other hand, he thought, he was smarter than any dragon, and the dearth of crosspieces gave him an idea. If he could find something and wedge it between two of the bars, he should be able to bend them further apart and squeeze through. After all, he was thin enough, particularly after his recent adventures in reaching this point. The bars were iron, not steel-iron was cheaper and lasted better in the open weather, since steel would rust away.

Iron, however, was easier to bend, and the bars weren't that thick, no more than an inch or two through.

He looked around, but he was standing on bare rock. His only real tool was his belt knife, and that wouldn't do.

The greater moon's light was already starting to fade, and he decided that speed was more important than any other consideration; he picked up a handy rock, roughly the size of his head, and jammed it into the fence.

It went right through.

He swore again, and picked up another, larger rock.

This one took an effort to hoist up, but at least it didn't go right through the bars. One end of it did. He braced it up with one hand and hammered at it with the other.

The fence jangled loudly at the impact, and he hurt his hand, but the bars didn't yield.

A dragon roared at him from one of the pens, but in the darkness he couldn't make out exactly which one it was.

He snarled in reply, then with one hand holding his wedge-rock in place, he picked up another, and used it as a hammer, pounding at the wedge-rock with it.

The fence rang and buzzed at the impact, and the dragons bellowed in reply-which pleased Dumery, as he judged that the draconic racket would drown out the noise the fence was making.

Then one bar started to give, and Dumery pounded harder, holding his improvised hammer in both hands.

With a loud snap, the rock suddenly fell through the fence, and Dumery blinked, startled. The bar hadn't bent that far yet!

He looked again, and realized that the bar had snapped off at the bottom. He pushed at it, and it swung freely.

Delighted, he shoved it to one side and squeezed sideways through the resulting opening.

Now all he had to do was to get to the hatchling cage, get inside, grab two dragons-a male and a female-drag them out, close the cage behind him, drag the dragons over here and out through the fence, and run and hide.

Oh, sure, that was all. He grimaced slightly, and wondered if maybe he was being a little over-confident.

It also occurred to him that he did not want to close the cage behind him. If all twelve hatchlings got loose the resulting confusion would keep the farmers much busier, which would be so much the better for him.

He trotted along the fence, around the largest pen, ignoring the dragons that were staring at him. His toe caught on a rock and he stumbled, which elicited a weird hooting from one of the dragons, but he caught himself and hurried on.

The dim orange moonlight was fading, and he didn't want to stumble over a cliff in the dark; he had to hurry!

Chapter Thirty

The latch was a black lump in the dimness, and he poked at it in growing frustration.

How in the World did the damn thing work?

It was like no latch he had ever seen before. There was no simple bar to lift, no lever to pull, no knob to turn; instead two thumb-sized stubs protruded from the top of a tangle of ironmongery that Dumery could make no sense of. He tried pushing first one stub, and then the other; both resisted, but either one could be moved. Neither one seemed to do much of anything.

Annoyed beyond reason, he bashed at the thing with his fist, and that didn't help either. It made the cage door rattle against the frame, but the latch stayed closed.

A dragon snorted somewhere nearby; Dumery didn't look up. Instead he grabbed each stub in one hand and tried working both at once, to see what would happen.

Sliding both to the right didn't work, nor did both to the left, but when he pushed them together in the middle he heard a clank, and the door swung open.

Dumery smiled.

A dozen little dragons stared up at him from inside the cage, their gleaming eyes unreadable. He stared back. The colors were harder to distinguish in the gloom than he had expected-the orange light of the greater moon turned both green and blue-green to a murky, dim, nameless color. He was about to step into the cage for a closer look when he heard the growl of a larger dragon. He turned away from all those staring little eyes to see if anyone in the house had noticed the noise, or had just happened to be looking.

He found himself looking directly into another, much larger, pair of draconic eyes.

He blinked, and caught his breath.

One of the big dragons was loose, and standing not ten feet away, its long neck extended so that its head was mere inches from his own.

It growled again.

One of the hatchlings hissed, and snapped at Dumery's leg; he snatched the threatened limb away and started to kick at the little beast, then reconsidered as he felt the big dragon's hot breath on his shoulder.

Snatching up two of the hatchlings while this monster watched did not seem like a viable plan. In a hopeless attempt to look innocent, Dumery managed a sickly smile and started to close the door of the cage. He stopped abruptly when one of the hatchlings shrieked; he had caught its neck and one wing in the door.

He decided to leave the door open after all and to just forget about the hatchlings.

In fact, he decided to forget about everything except leaving, as quickly as possible. He began backing away, watching the big dragon carefully.

His foot landed on something slick, and a hatchling yowled; stepping quickly aside, Dumery saw that one of them, the black one, was out of the cage already, and he had just stepped on one of its dragging wings.

The big dragon roared angrily at him.

Dumery didn't dare turn away, and he found himself with a clear view of a dark mouth lined with hundreds of extremely sharp teeth; foul breath, redolent of rotting meat, swept over him, and his ears rang.

A window swung open in the farmhouse.

"Who's there?" someone called.

Dumery wasn't stupid enough to answer that, but the big dragon turned away for a moment, distracted, and Dumery seized the opportunity. He spun on his heel and ran, narrowly avoiding tripping over the black hatchling.

As he ran, he heard a man's voice shouting, "Hai, dragon! What is it? Guard, boy, guard!"

Dumery ran for the loose upright in the fence, not worrying about what that meant, not worrying about anything except whether that huge, angry dragon was following him. He didn't see it start after him, nor did he see it stop when it heard the order to guard. He didn't see it return, disgruntled, to the door of the hatchling cage, where it began snatching up errant dragonets by their tails and tossing them back into their pen.

Dumery didn't dare look back as he groped along the fence in the dark, feeling for the broken bar, but at last he found it and squeezed through. He stumbled on until he rounded the boulder and was out of sight of the farm.

There he fell to the ground, panting.

After a moment he felt sufficiently recovered to sit up, look around, and listen.

He heard dragons bellowing, but that was off in the distance somewhere; there was no sign of pursuit. The lesser moon was up again, looking even more pinkish than usual and half-obscured by a wisp of cloud. The greater moon's glow had faded to a mere tinge in the west, and no more stars were visible through the gathering mist and cloud.

All Dumery could see was rock and moss and sky.

He sat and gathered his wits.

It appeared that Kensher and company had a line of defense they hadn't mentioned-trained watch-dragons. Or one watch-dragon, anyway. That hardly seemed fair.

But then, they weren't trying to be fair-they were trying to defend themselves.

Against what, Dumery wondered. What was there out here in the middle of nowhere that called for that sort of defense?

Or was it to keep the dragons in?

Would a dragon, even a trained one, help in imprisoning its own kind?

Well, yes, Dumery thought, it probably would. People served as gaolers willingly enough, didn't they?

Whatever the watch-dragon was there for, it was there, and it had kept him from getting his hatchlings. The exact reason for its presence didn't seem anywhere near as important as thefact of its presence.

His burglary attempt was a failure; he hadn't gotten his breeding pair.

Had Kensher guessed what had happened? Would he be guarding against another attempt? Would Teneria know what was going on?

Well, the ground was so rocky that there would be no footprints to show that an unauthorized human being had been there. The watch-dragon wouldn't be able to say anything-would it?

No, Dumery just couldn't believe that Kensher would keep a talking dragon around. And that one had growled and roared, but shown no signs of any greater vocal ability than that. It also wasn't any bigger than some of the dragons in the cages.

So it couldn't talk and say it had seen Dumery. The only evidence of his presence would be the broken fence-if that was noticed-and the open cage door.

That was quite an extensive fence, and there were a great many uprights in it; one broken one might well go unnoticed. It would almost certainly not be found until daylight, at the very least, not unless someone walked the entire fence with a lantern.

Of course, someone might do just that, Dumery had to admit.

And there was that witch. He had no idea what she might see, with her magic, or what she might do about it.

He decided that he would assume that she wouldn't know anything more than anybody else. After all, what did she know about dragons or burglars? Neither one had anything to do with witchcraft. So he would ignore her for now, and assume that she would go along with whatever the others thought.

If he was lucky, they would see the open cage door and would think that one of the hatchlings had somehow opened it, or that whoever was last in there hadn't closed it properly, and that what the watch-dragon had spotted was hatchlings getting loose.

After all, could they really expect intruders up here?

Almost certainly, they'd just think it was an accidentally-opened cage that caused the fuss.

In that case, once everyone had settled down again, Dumery would be able to sneak back into the house. Or even sneak back to the pens and try again.

He had to think about that. If he were going to make a second attempt it would be best to do it tonight, rather than waiting, because the longer he waited the more time they would have to find the break in the fence.

There was the problem of the watch-dragon, however. Did the creature ever sleep, or was it constantly on guard? Was there any way he could elude it, or fool it into thinking he belonged there?

This was a matter that required some thought. Besides, it would take some time for everything to settle back to normal, and there was the darkness to worry about-the lesser moon was still low, and didn't give all that much light in any case. Dumery decided that he would wait until everyone had had time to calm down, and then would decide whether to make another try, or to slip back into the house and pretend he had slept through all the excitement.

For now, he would wait. He settled down, making himself as comfortable as he could on the hard stone.

He had no intention of sleeping, but all the same, within minutes, he was asleep.

When he awoke the sun was warm on the bare stone, and he realized with a start that he had missed his chance. The sun was well up in the east, peering down at him over the peak of the mountain-half the morning was gone. Kensher and his family would be out and about; they might well have found the break in the fence. They would surely have all the hatchlings back in their cage, and might have put a lock on it. The watch-dragon would surely be awake.

And he had missed his chance to get back into the house. They would surely have noticed his absence by now.

In fact, that Teneria might already be looking for him, brewing up her spells or whatever she did. She might come upon him at any moment; if she had followed him to the farm from all the way back in Ethshar, finding him now should be easy.

He sat up and considered.

She hadn't found him yet, though. Maybe she wasn't looking, or maybe something had gone wrong with her witchcraft.

If she didn't find him, he could slip away, hide somewhere, wait until nightfall, and then try again; he could break the fence again, if it had been repaired.

But how could he get past the watch-dragon?

And looking at the situation in the light of day, how would he get two squirming hatchlings out through the fence, and down the mountain?

And what if one of the hatchlings turned out to be a fire-breather?

It was a good thing that Kensher didn't raise flyers or fire-breathers, even as watch-dragons. If the watch-dragon had been a fire-breather, Dumery realized, he might have been dead by now, a charred corpse lying on the stone, instead of alive and well. If the watch-dragon could fly it might have pursued him past the fence-and he hadn't gone very far, had he? Around that boulder and across maybe fifty feet of open ground lay the fence; surely, the dragon could have tracked him that far.

He was glad that Kensher hadn't thought to let the dragon out, hadn't come after him with it.

That assumed, of course, that dragons could track, like dogs or cats, and really, Dumery didn't know for certain that they could. And Kensher probably had good reasons for not letting the watch-dragon out; could he control the beast outside the fence?

Maybe the fence was there to keep the watch-dragon in, more than anything else.

Whether dragons could track people or not, witches surely could; why hadn't Teneria found him yet?

And while all this speculation was very interesting, it wasn't getting him any closer to setting up his own dragon-breeding operation.

He sat and thought, uncomfortably aware that Teneria might appear at any moment.

He devised scheme after scheme for stealing a pair of hatchlings, but they all fell apart upon close inspection. He could think of no practical way to deal with the watch-dragon, or with Kensher and his family if he tried to sneak in when the dragon wasn't on duty. He had no way of killing a dragon that size.

Besides, killing it seemed a bit extreme. It was Kensher's dragon.

It hadn't been that hard to talk himself into stealing a couple of hatchlings; after all, Kensher had lots of them, and most of them were destined to be slaughtered in a year or so anyway. The watch-dragon, though, was fifteen or twenty feet long, and must be three or four years old, at least. Kensher had clearly put considerable effort into training it, judging by the way it had behaved-and Dumery was grateful for that training, because without it the monster might have gone ahead and eaten him.

He was also grateful to Kensher and the rest of the family for taking him in, when he turned up on their doorstep. Yes, it was just normal hospitality to take him in and give him a meal, but even that much wasn't something everybody would bother with, and they had gone further than that, giving him days to regain his strength, feeding him generously, and giving him clothes and supplies for the journey home.

He began to be ashamed of himself for plotting to rob the people who had saved his life. Was he that low a person? Was he that desperate to get hold of a couple of dragons?

He shook his head. It wasn't right. He had let his obsessions get the better of him. He had done Kensher quite enough harm already. He had repaid kindness and succor with threats, attempted blackmail, burglary, and a broken fence. He would do no more harm in return for good.

It was time to get away from Kensher and his farm.

It was time to go home.

For one thing, he didn't really want to get caught.

Ostensibly, all he had to do was loop back around the way he had come, and head on down the trail to the river.

There was a problem with that, however. A problem named Teneria.

He was sure that she would know what he had done. She would know that he had tried to steal those hatchlings. If she went home with him she would probably tell someone, like his parents. And even if she didn't, she would certainly be keeping a close eye on him every step of the way home.

He didn't think he could face that.

And for that matter, did he really know anything about her? Had his parents sent her? It didn't seem like them. After all, they knew he was all right; they'd talked to him in that silly dream Thetheran had sent.

Maybe someone else had sent her, or she had come on her own. Maybe the magicians, including the witches, were all out to get him.

Was she really a witch, though? He hadn't seen her work any magic. She had found him, somehow, which was impressive, and she seemed to be able to tell lies from truth with phenomenal accuracy, but neither one proved she was actually the witch she said she was. He hadn't seen her fly or anything.

But even if she were exactly what she claimed to be, he really didn't want to go home with her, having her there gloating over him the whole time.

He would find his own way home-overland, not by the river. And south, where the witch wouldn't dare follow, if she was really a witch.

And if she hadn't lied about the Warlock Stone.

He didn't really think she had. He set out down the slope, to the southeast.

As he walked, he considered.

True, he didn't want to rob Kensher, and he couldn't think of any way to do it in any case, but did that really mean he had to just give up and go home?

He still wanted to do something about his thwarted ambitions. He couldn't be a wizard, he had established that. And he couldn't seem to find an apprenticeship in any other branch of magic, either.

Controlling a supply of dragon's blood would let him lord it over the wizards.

He couldn't wangle an apprenticeship in the dragon-farming business, that was clear, and he couldn't see any way to get hold of any of Kensher's livestock to set up his own farm-but were those the only possibilities?

All he needed was a pair of dragons, and while Kensher might have the only dragon farm in the World, he didn't have all the dragons in the World, by any means. There were plenty of dragons out there.

Wild dragons.

Dragon-hunting as a career didn't sound very promising, though. He remembered the sight of that gaping, tooth-lined maw when the watch-dragon had roared at him, and Kensher had said that the farm dragons were nowhere near as big as dragons could get. Presumably there were wild dragons that were much bigger and fiercer.

But what if he were to find and capture a pair of baby dragons? Or better yet, find unhatched eggs? It happened; he had seen dragons in the Arena that had been hatched in captivity.

That would be perfect.

But how could he hope to find them? He looked out over the edge of the cliff he was skirting, and saw forest stretching to the hilly southern horizon.

That was a lot of countryside, and dragons might be anywhere-or nowhere-in it.

He could look, though, couldn't he?

If he did, he might search forever without finding anything. Or he might starve to death, or get killed by a wild dragon, or by wolves or bandits or something.

On the other hand, who knew what he might find?

Wolves, pitfalls, bandits-or a dragon's lair.

Wolves, pitfalls, and bandits were probably far more likely, and if he did find a dragon's lair it might well have a mother dragon at home, guarding her young.

That was a good way to get killed, finding an occupied lair.

No, the thing to do was to go home, to his own home, back in Ethshar, and then see if he could somehow buy a pair of dragon eggs.

A thought struck him. If he demanded that as his patrimony, would his father cooperate?

He should, Dumery thought. After all, Doran hadn't come through with the promised apprenticeship to a wizard. Millenium-old tradition said that every child was entitled, between his or her twelfth and thirteenth birthdays, to demand that his or her parents provide some way to establish a future career-arrange a profitable marriage or an apprenticeship, guarantee an inheritance, something. Demanding a pair of dragon eggs was unusual, but it ought to qualify.

That, then, was what he would do. He would go home and demand a pair of eggs.

All he had to do was find the way.

He knew he was somewhere in Aldagmor, in the Baronies of Sardiron. That meant that he was far to the north of Ethshar of the Spices. And he was east of the Great River, since he had gone ashore on the eastern bank, while all the cities of Ethshar were more or less to the west of the river's mouth.

Ethshar of the Spices was actually south or maybe southeast of the river's mouth, because of the way the river and the coastline wiggled about, but it was effectively on the western side all the same.

If he headed west he would eventually come to the Great River, but that would mean cutting directly across all those ridges, and then finding transportation downstream, and Teneria might well catch up to him-there was nothing she feared in the west. On the other hand, if he headed due south he would eventually reach either the Great River-much farther downstream-or the Gulf of the East, or if worst came to worst, the southern edge of the World. And he would be passing too close to the Warlock Stone for Teneria.

He certainly hoped he wouldn't have to go anything like as far as the edge of the World. It seemed unlikely that he would.

If he arrived at the river he could follow it downstream, either on foot or by boat, and once he reached Azrad's Bridge he would have no trouble finding his way home.

If he reached the Gulf he could follow the coast west to the river's mouth, then up to Azrad's Bridge. If the gods were nasty and he reached the edge of the World, he could head west to the sea, and then take ship home, or follow the coast around to the river's mouth.

So he would head south, and when due south wasn't practical he would veer to the west, and sooner or later he would reach civilization, or the Great River, or something else helpful.

Accordingly, he looked up at the sun, which was almost directly overhead now, and then around at the mountains, and estimated which direction must be south.

This was turning out to be far more of an adventure than he had expected when he went up to Westgate Market to seek inspiration. He stepped out boldly, stumbled over an exposed root, fell, picked himself up, and marched on, sighing.

While Dumery made his decision, Teneria had finally gotten everything straightened out. The chaos of the farm family's efforts to round up the escaped hatchlings and get everything back to normal had confused and delayed her, and she had not worried at first about exactly what had occurred, but only about straightening out the current mess. She had offered to help, but had been turned down-apparently these people did not entirely trust her.

That was not really surprising, under the circumstances. Her unexpected appearance the day before did look as if it might be connected with the night's disruptions.

And the nature of those disruptions was pretty clear; the reports of the various family members, combined with what her own senses and witchcraft told her, made it all plain.

Dumery had slipped out in the middle of the night, had circled around to the back of the farm, and had then broken into a cage of hatchling dragons.

Kensher assumed that the boy had intended to steal a breeding pair, so as to start his own dragon-farm, and Teneria had to admit that it was a very convincing theory.

However, the watch-dragon, which Dumery hadn't known about, had caught him and ruined his plans.

When Teneria first heard that she was afraid that the dragon had eaten Dumery, which would not only have been regrettable in itself, but would mean that she had failed in her task of keeping him safe. Fortunately, Kinner the Younger was able to reassure her-the watch-dragon hadn't eaten anybody. There was no blood anywhere.

Besides, when Teneria stopped and concentrated, she could sense that Dumery was still alive.

After the farmers had rounded up all the dragons they could find and had taken inventory they concluded that only one of the hatchlings was missing, not a breeding pair, and it was entirely possible that that one, a rather feisty black one, had slipped away by itself in the confusion, rather than having been carted off. Spotting a black dragon in the dark would not be easy.

She considered offering to track it down for Kensher, but she was unsure she would be able to deliver. Dragons, especially young dragons, didn't seem to leave much in the way of psychic traces.

Besides, the dragons weren't her problem-Dumery was. She was not particularly enamored of the ungrateful little would-be thief, but she was supposed to see him safely home.

Once the eleven hatchlings had been rounded up and secured, and once she had used a little witchcraft to convince Pancha that she was not Dumery's co-conspirator and that it was safe to let her out of her room and out of the house, Teneria set out on the business of tracking Dumery down.

She followed his trail around the mountain, across the pastures and through the dragon pens, and back out to the flat, stony area behind the boulder.

There she stopped.

The damned fool of a boy hadn't gone back to the trail. Instead he had set out due south, into the wilderness. She looked down the slope after him, peering into the gloom of the forest, her supernatural senses extended.

Something muttered blackly in the back of her mind, something harsh and alien and almost seductive, something that had drawn Adar away forever.

The Calling.

That wasit, she told herself. That was the pebble that sank the barge. To Hell with Dumery of Shiphaven. To Hell with Sella, if she dared to criticize Teneria for her failure.

She had followed the boy halfway across the World, up the Great River and across most of Aldagmor, but she was not going to walk out into the uncharted wilderness, where escaped dragons roamed free and something apparently ate warlocks alive, something that seemed to intend to eat her alive, as well.

She had had quite enough. She was going home. She was going home by the same route she had come, though without the aerial detour from the Blasted Pine.

And maybe, when she got back home to Ethshar, she could contact some of the local warlocks and see if something couldn't be done about the Calling.

Chapter Thirty-One

At least, Dumery told himself, it was warmer once he got down off the mountain. And the forest could be very beautiful-the sunlight spilling down through the trees, the branches stirring in the breeze with a whisper like the waves of a distant sea, the squirrels and chipmunks darting about in the treetops and underbrush every so often, like little flickers of fur.

The ground was rougher than he had expected, though. He hadn't realized just how much difference having a trail, any trail, underfoot actually made. He was sure that he wasn't making very good time at all.

He had the horrible suspicion, the first night, that he hadn't gotten more than a league or so from the dragon farm. He wrapped himself tightly in the one thick woolen blanket Pancha had given him, which he had surreptitiously stuffed in his pack, and huddled against a tree, hoping that there were no night-prowling predators in the area. Dragons, he was fairly certain, were basically diurnal, but didn't wolves hunt at night? He wasn't sure. And of course, nightwalkers were all of necessity nocturnal, but he had never heard of any of them in the north; they were found in the Small Kingdoms, according to the tales his mother had told him.

Of course, he didn't know how far they might roam, or even how far he was from the northernmost of the Small Kingdoms.

Something, probably a bird, shrieked weirdly in the distance, and Dumery tried to make himself smaller. He was a city boy; this sort of thing was not his idea of a good time. Going north he had at least been on trails, and usually within a mile or less of some sort of human habitation, but here, for all he knew, there wasn't another human being for a league or more in every direction.

He lay curled up in a ball, one hand on the hilt of his belt-knife, while he eyed the surrounding trees suspiciously, trying to see by the feeble light of the cloud-smudged moons until exhaustion got the better of him and he fell asleep.

The second day of the journey he was stiff and sore from sleeping all tensed as he had, and that made walking even worse. He took frequent rest stops, telling himself there was no real hurry. He didn't need to catch up to anybody now; he was just going home, and he could take his time. He still had months before his thirteenth birthday, months in which to make his demand for a pair of dragon eggs.

On the other hand, his trail rations were already running low, and traveling cross-country meant that he wouldn't pass any inns. When this fact sank in, after lunch, he tried to pick up his pace a little.

When he settled for the night this time he tried to find a sheltered spot where he could stretch out, to prevent the sort of cramping he had suffered that morning. He found what seemed like a good spot, but when he lay down he found that a knob of pine root dug into the small of his back. After shifting about in unsuccessful attempts to dodge it he finally gave up and moved to a nearby corner that looked much more crowded, but which in fact proved to be quite comfortable.

He was sleeping soundly and peacefully when the dream came.

He was home, in the front hall of his parents' house, and Thetheran the Mage was standing there before him.

"Hello," Thetheran said. "This is another magic dream. Your parents haven't heard from you in quite some time, and they're worried. They even sent someone after you, an apprentice witch, but we haven't heard from her, and I take it she hasn't found you. Are you all right, Dumery?"

"I'm fine," he answered, a little defensively. It was somewhat reassuring to know that Teneria hadn't reported in. "I'm on my way home. The apprenticeship didn't work out. I have another plan, though, one that I think they'll be happier with."

"What sort of a plan?" Thetheran asked.

"That's none of your business, wizard!" Dumery noticed that he was bolder in these dreams than he was when he was awake, and wondered if it was some side-effect of the spell.

"All right, then," Thetheran said. "There's no need to be rude. I'm just asking on behalf of your parents-I'm sure they'd want to know. When do you expect to be home?"

That was an awkward question, but reasonable enough. Dumery hesitated, and then said, "I'm not sure. I'm traveling overland from Aldagmor, and I don't know how long a journey it is." He was annoyed at his own inability to give a clear answer, and he turned that irritation on his questioner. "You tell them that I'm safe and on my way," he shouted. "That's enough!" He waved angrily, and to his surprise a wind swept Thetheran off his feet and blew him back down the hallway into the kitchen and out of sight.

Dumery looked foolishly at his upraised hand. "Did I do that?" he asked.

A great grinning mouth suddenly appeared on the wall next to him. "You might say so," it said. "Thetheran's spell is slipping-it's not one he's done very often, and he didn't get it quite right this time. He's losing control of the dream. It's turning into just an ordinary dream, rather than a wizardly one.

He managed to send me here anyway, but I'm afraid that the two of you aren't really talking to each other any more."

Dumery stared at it. "Why would I dream you?" he said.

The mouth vanished without answering, leaving Dumery alone in the house. He started up the stairs, feeling less real every moment; a huge green dragon thrust its head out the door of Dessa's bedroom at him, and he turned and fled, the dragon's head pursuing on a neck that stretched longer and longer, without end, and from there on the dream turned into an ordinary, if distressing, nightmare, full of fangs and claws and dark hallways.

In fact, when he awoke and blinked away grit he wasn't sure whether the magical part of the dream had been genuine, or whether he might have dreamt that by himself.

He assumed it was genuine, though. That meant that they were still thinking about him, back home, and now they'd be expecting him. He really hadn't anticipated that they would go to all this trouble over him-wizards' spells and witches' apprentices and all. He sighed, brushed himself off, and got on with the business of walking interminably south.

Around mid-morning he was feeling fairly cheerful-his parents were concerned about him, which might not seem like much, but it was something. And the weather was beautiful-it had been an unusually dry spring so far, which undoubtedly had all the farmers worried, but which made for easy traveling.

He casually dodged a malodorous object that lay more or less in his path, and then stopped.

He turned and took another look.

Whatever sort of beast had left that was big. And it was fresh, too. His good cheer faded abruptly at the thought of large, hostile animals in the area.

There was something familiar about the stuff, too, both appearance and odor.

He studied it for a moment, then looked around uneasily.

Something had scraped that big oak tree there. He stepped over and investigated.

Two or three tiny flakes of red-gold scale clung to the rough bark. They were unmistakable.

A dragon. A wild dragon had passed by here, quite recently-a good-sized one.

He was torn by two powerful and conflicting urges.

First, here was a dragon, and quite possibly a female, and a female might have eggs or hatchlings nearby, and it was too good an opportunity to ignore. The gods had sent him this chance. He should follow the trail-and yes, there was a visible trail through the underbrush-and track the beast to its lair, and see what the situation was. This might be the only chance he would ever have to realize his dream of capturing dragons he could raise as his own, to start a dragon-farm and get rich selling dragon's blood and rubbing the wizards' noses in it. His father might not be able to buy dragon eggs, or might not get both sexes, but he might be able to just pick up a couple for himself if he followed that trail.

On the other hand, here was a dragon, and dragons were flesh-eaters, by all accounts and by the evidence at the farm perfectly willing to settle for eating people if they couldn't find anything tastier. It was a fairly large dragon, too, no mere hatchling-the scale fragments on the oak were level with the top of Dumery's head, and presumably came from the beast's flank. An animal defending its nest was likely to be particularly vicious, and dragons had remarkable teeth and claws. This was no half-tame farm dragon, either, but a wild dragon, that might breathe fire, might be able to fly-it could be lurking overhead, waiting to pounce, even as he stood and debated with himself.

He looked up quickly, and scanned the treetops, but saw no sign of a large red-gold dragon anywhere.

The gods might have sent him this opportunity-but he was an Ethsharite. He knew the proverb, "Trusting the gods is no better than throwing dice." The gods were powerful and benevolent, but that didn't necessarily mean that everything they did would work out for the best. If he went after the dragon the gods probably wouldn't help him fight it, or escape from it, or rob it. If itwas some god doing him a favor, just putting the dragon in his path was probably the extent of it, he couldn't hope for any further protection. The gods could be whimsical, and they generally kept their meddling to a minimum.

If there were eggs or hatchlings, he would have to steal them from their mother, and the mother was likely to strenuously object to that. He would do best to kill the mother, if he possibly could-but how could a twelve-year-old boy kill a grown dragon? He didn't even have a sword or a shield, just his belt knife.

For that matter, if there were hatchlings, how could he hope to capture them and get them back to Ethshar? He had no tools, no rope, no sacks or nets, he was tired and footsore and didn't really know where he was. He was in no shape to handle even hatchling dragons.

Eggs, though-if he could slip a couple of eggs out when the mother dragon wasn't home, he could wrap them in the blanket and carry them that way.

Or if there were no eggs, at the very least he could see where the lair was, what it looked like, and maybe he would be able to find his way back to it later, when he was better-equipped.

He would go and take a look, anyway, and hope that he didn't encounter the dragon.

That brought up the question of whether the dragon, when it passed through, had been going to its lair, or from its lair.

It was still morning; Dumery guessed that it was going from its lair, and therefore he wanted to backtrack, rather than following the beast.

Besides, this way he was far less likely to wind up as the dragon's lunch.

He knew he was being reckless following the dragon's path in either direction, but after all, one couldn't be a great hero or become fabulously wealthy without taking some risks.

He studied the scraped bark, the trampled underbrush, and turned eastward, back the way the dragon had come.

Chapter Thirty-Two

As he walked, Dumery wondered just what he was actually looking for. He had never seen a wild dragon's lair. In the stories, dragons lived in caves, or forgotten crypts, or ancient tombs, or abandoned castles, or at the very least on rocky mountain ledges, and he wasn't in the mountains any more, just in rolling wooded hills, where it seemed very unlikely that he would find caves, castles, or crypts.

What if the beast lived in a concealed pit, like a hunter's trap? He might fall into it and wind up as an evening snack.

What if it had no lair, but just roamed about from place to place? He could wander on indefinitely, in that case-and he was going the wrong direction to get home.

He decided to give it until sundown, and if he hadn't found the lair by then he would turn around and head southwest.

At least the dragon hadn't tried to hide its path; it had just marched on, more or less in a straight line, without worrying about obstacles.

He crossed a boggy area where he found a few claw prints, and he almost reconsidered what he was doing; this was no ten-foot yearling. The claws were as long as his arm.

On the other hand, it was going in the other direction. If he turned around now, for all he knew he'd meet it coming back.

He wondered why it was walking, rather than flying. He mulled that over for a time, and a suspicion arose that he might be dealing with one of the escapees from Kensher's farm. Its wings could well have failed to heal properly after deliberately being broken each year for two or three years, leaving it too weak to fly. Or maybe it had just gotten accustomed to walking. Was flying something a dragon had to learn young, or not at all, perhaps?

It didn't really matter; he pressed on.

One pleasant thing he noticed about following the dragon's trail was that he didn't need to worry much about tripping over branches or catching his tunic on thorns-the dragon had stomped all such obstacles flat. He marveled at just how mashed some of the brush was.

He looked up from a pile of shattered twigs that had once been a rhododendron and spotted something in the distance.

At first he took it for a fallen tree, and then for several fallen trees, and he wondered whether the dragon had knocked them down, or whether some storm had left them there.

As he approached, though, he realized that these were not just downed trees.

No storm knocked trees into stacks.

Something had stacked up whole trees like kindling for a fire. Something had yanked them up by the roots and then laid them in a rough approximation of a circle, piling them up so that the roots and branches interwove and held them in place, forming a great wooden ring at least ten feet high-probably more, Dumery thought, looking up at the massive barrier.

It looked a little like a gigantic bird's nest, using fifty-foot trees instead of five-inch twigs.

Dumery hadn't really been thinking in terms of a nest, despite the winged, egg-laying nature of the beast, but this was obviously the dragon's lair.

This, he thought as he looked at the huge trees used as building material, could be dangerous. Suddenly wary, he crouched down and crept closer, moving as silently as he could, mentally cursing the twigs and leaves that crunched and rustled underfoot.

What if the dragon had returned by another route? What if its mate was in there? What if it had young-not hatchlings, but yearlings, big enough to dismember and devour a full-grown cow-or a half-grown boy?

Dumery inched closer.

The trees were not stacked very tightly; Dumery could see daylight through some of the gaps between them. He decided that he could sneak up and look through one of those chinks and see whether there were any eggs or hatchlings in there.

As he drew nearer he moved ever more slowly, taking his time with every step, struggling to minimize the sound he made, but finally he reached the wooden walls of the nest.

By stooping slightly he could peer between two of the massive logs; he stooped, and peered.

The inside of the nest was a sunny, treeless, bowl-shaped enclosure-a bowl full of dragons.

Most of them he took to be yearlings-he counted four, three of them various shades of green and the fourth a brilliant red, that were eight or ten or twelve feet long. It was hard to judge lengths when the only background was uprooted trees, which could be almost any size, but he was fairly sure that those four were yearlings.

One larger one, with gleaming sea-blue scales that faded to a fish belly white along its underside, was curled up in the sun; Dumery estimated that, uncurled, it would be at least a fifteen-footer, probably more.

And he could hear, but not see, something stirring about just below the crack he was looking through. He was pressing his forehead up against a log, trying to get a better angle, when the rustling of leaves abruptly stopped. A head popped up into view.

There, staring at him through the crack, was a hatchling dragon, a black one, with golden, slit-pupilled eyes.

It looked exactly like the black one back at Kensher's farm.

It blinked at him, and hissed loudly, thrusting out its long dark red forked tongue.

Dumery sat down abruptly, dropping out of the little creature's line of sight.

The hissing stopped; the dragon was silent. Dumery wondered what it was doing.

Was it waiting for him to reappear? Was it going on about its business?

Getting spotted hadn't been in his plans. If that little nuisance had some way of communicating to the other, bigger dragons that there was a human being snooping around uninvited Dumery might well wind up as dragon food.

He cowered, crawling down beside the bottommost log and making himself as inconspicuous as possible.

He listened, and heard no more hissing, no roaring or bellowing or growling.

That probably meant that he was safe enough.

Still, he waited.

While he waited he thought about that black hatchling.

If that was the same one he'd seen at the farm, it was a healthy, spirited little beast. If he could capture it somehow, take it home with him, he'd have half the pair he needed.

How in the World had it ever gotten here, though? True, when he fled the farm it had been out of the cage and running about loose, and it might be small enough to have squeezed out through the fence the same place he did, but how could it possibly have come all this way and wound up in this other dragon's nest?

And who were all these other dragons, anyway, and how did they relate to the one whose trail he had followed? Was the big blue one the mate of the one that made the trail, and these others their offspring?

That would make sense, but it didn't explain the hatchling. Dragons never hatched just one egg.

Of course, maybe there were other hatchlings he hadn't seen. He hadn't gotten a very good look at the entire nest.

Suppose, though, that the yearlings were the young of the blue one and the wandering red one, and that the black hatchling had escaped from the farm and somehow found its way here, seeking out its own kind?

In that case, would the other dragons really object if he captured the little one?

How could he capture it, though? He had no chains or rope, no sacks or restraints of any kind. All he had was his belt knife, and the borrowed-no, stolen-blanket, and a dwindling supply of trail food.

That, and his bare hands.

That wasn't really enough, and he knew it.

Still, that hatchling-was it the one he had seen at the farm? Were there any other hatchlings in there?

He still heard nothing alarming from inside the barrier; apparently he was safe, for the moment. He crawled out of concealment and inched along the outside of the nest, looking for another vantage point.

About a fourth of the way around he found an opening level with his chest that seemed wider than most; it looked as if he could lean through it and look around.

Cautiously, he did just that, slipping his head between the logs, his hands to either side.

The wall was thicker here than he had realized, and he pulled himself forward, into the gap. His feet left the ground and he tugged himself along with his hands.

The problem was that this section of the barrier was two trees thick, and the inner layer was made of very large trees indeed. He slipped through the outer wall, and then had to work his way along the trunk of a gigantic oak until he found an opening in the inner wall, an opening into the bowl-shaped enclosure itself.

He lay along the oak and slipped his head through the gap, into the nest.

The big blue dragon was still sound asleep, over on the far side. The four yearlings were entirely concerned with each other-they were arguing, or playing, or doingsomething that involved twisting their long necks about one another and tugging back and forth.

Dumery spotted the hatchling off to the side, and just as he did, it spotted him.

It came slithering over the thick layer of broken branches that lined the sides of the bowl, its tail winding back and forth like a snake, its broken wings hanging down and brushing across the shattered wood.

The broken wings convinced Dumery-this had to be the same hatchling he had seen at the farm!

He hesitated, debating whether he should pull back, get back out of sight before the creature reached him. That would certainly be the safe and sensible thing to do.

It didn't look hostile, though, merely interested. He watched it approach until it was just a few feet away, looking up at him.

He looked down at it, and at the tree branches beneath it, and he suddenly noticed that many of the tree branches were white, rather than grey or brown.

Wood isn't white, Dumery told himself. He leaned forward to get a better look.

Those white things, he realized, weren't branches.

They were bones.

This graphic reminder that dragons were carnivores convinced him that it was time to leave; he started to shift his hands, which were positioned for sliding forward.

Just then a titanic booming sounded, and the sky overhead darkened. Startled, Dumery looked up.

At first he saw only an immense darkness, but then his eyes adjusted and the thing dropped lower and he realized what it was.

A dragon, the biggest dragon he had ever seen, bigger than any dragon he had ever even imagined, was flying overhead. Its great translucent green wings hid the sky, its head blotted out the sun, its body was like a flying mountain, dark with shadow. Something dangled from its jaws, and its talons held squirming objects that Dumery didn't have time to recognize.

Those tremendous wings flapped, and the booming sounded again; a great wind swept down into Dumery's face, blinding him for a moment. He blinked, and wiped at his eyes, and came within an inch or two of losing his balance and sliding down into the nest.

By the time he had recovered himself the dragon had dropped the load it had been carrying, and three large brown steers had fallen thunderously to the ground.

The four yearlings immediately leapt upon them, the blue dragon-Dumery could scarcely continue to think of it as the big dragon, under the circumstances-close behind.

The hatchling paid no attention to this bounty from the heavens; it was staring at Dumery.

Dumery stared back, then looked quickly up as the shadows deepened.

The big dragon, having delivered its cargo, was coming to rest, settling down into the nest. Dumery could see now that its scales were a rich emerald green on its back, legs, head, neck, and tail, while its chest and belly were golden yellow.

It was immense, easily larger than all the other dragons put together. The head alone was as large as a yearling's body, the neck as long from jaw to collarbone as the blue dragon was from nose to tail. The talons on the fore claws were at least as big around as Dumery's thighs, the claws themselves as big as his entire body.

Those talons looked as sharp as spear points, nonetheless.

There was also a look of age and maturity about this creature, a more hard-edged and finished look, rougher and more worn than any other dragon Dumery had ever seen; by comparison, even the biggest back at the farm appeared as soft and harmless as infants.

It struck Dumery that the fact that it was green rather than red-gold meant it wasn't the one whose trail he had followed, and any scales it lost against trees would have been much higher up than the traces he had found. That hardly mattered, under the circumstances.

The yearlings looked up and began scampering-Dumery had never imagined ten-foot dragons could scamper, but there was no other word for it-out of the way of the descending behemoth, dragging the freshly-killed cattle with them.

The huge dragon landed lightly in the center of the bowl, touching down first with its foreclaws and then its hind ones, facing toward the blue dragon. The tail snaked down into a graceful coil. The gigantic wings stretched, shuddered, and then with a sudden snapping motion and a deafening slap, folded against the broad green-scaled back.

The wind from that action dislodged Dumery from his perch, and with a great crunching and rattling of dead branches and dry bones he tumbled down into the nest.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The hatchling hissed and thrashed its tail like an angry cat; the yearlings and the blue dragon, busy as they were with their feasting, paid no attention.

The gargantuan green dragon swung its head around to see what the commotion was about, and two huge golden, slit-pupilled eyes focused on Dumery.

Dumery scrambled back, snatching at his belt knife, but as the great head drew closer and closer he realized that even with a strong man's arm behind it, let alone his own far weaker muscles, his pitiful little tool-even calling it a weapon was an exaggeration-wouldn't so much as scratch this creature's armored hide.

He'd wanted dragons, he thought bitterly-well, now he had plenty of dragons, in all sizes and colors, and they were about to be the death of him. He would be swallowed by the big one in a single gulp, or ripped into shreds and devoured by the yearlings, or gnawed on by the hatchling. He would never raise dragons, never have a farm of his own, never rub Thetheran's nose in the dirt, never see his family again, never see Ethshar again, never grow up to be a man.

He would be eaten by dragons. He would be nothing but dragon fodder.

He should have just gone with Teneria.

The ponderous jaws began to open, and sudden inspiration struck Dumery.

This creature was surely the one that had built this nest, and that had put at least some of the other dragons in it, giving them a place of safety, a home, a nest. It had brought them food. It cared for them. It might be the mother or father of some of them.

He rolled over and dove for the black hatchling, catching it off-guard. He came up with his left arm clamped around its throat, his right hand holding his knife under its jaw.

"I'll cut the little bugger's throat if you come any closer!" he shouted.

The black dragon squirmed, one fore claw gouging Dumery's leg, but it stopped when it felt the prick of the blade.

The great green dragon's gleaming golden eyes blinked, thick horny lids sliding down across them and then flicking back up.

"Very well," the beast said, in a voice like an avalanche, "then I shan't come any closer."

Dumery's mouth fell open.

He had known that dragons could talk, at least in theory-but theory wasn't reality. All the dragons he had seen so far had been treated as mere beasts, and had behaved as mere beasts, either caged and subdued or wild and dangerous. Even given the far greater size and obvious relative maturity of this monster, he hadn't expected speech; where could it have learned Ethsharitic, out here in the forests of Aldagmor?

Still, it had clearly spoken, and spoken clearly.

For a moment Dumery stood, the black dragon's head clutched to his chest, the knife at its throat, while those huge golden eyes watched him, the gigantic dragon's expression completely unreadable.

His own throat was dry; he swallowed.

"If you would be so kind as to release the hatchling?" the tremendous rumbling voice said.

The hatchling reacted to this by scrabbling viciously, shredding the right leg of Dumery's breeches and drawing three deep scratches down his thigh. He squeezed its neck more tightly, and it stopped.

"You'll eat me if I let it go," he said.

"Nay, I shall not," the great dragon replied. "I feasted well ere I fetched the kine for these younglings, and I've no appetite left in me. I'll swear not to harm you, if you'll in turn swear not to harm these infants here gathered."

Dumery glanced down from those eyes, and saw the other five dragons watching with interest.

"You've got to promise to keep the others away from me, too," he said.

"Surely," the dragon agreed. It turned its immense head and hissed, a sound like storm-driven waves breaking across the docks of Ethshar; the yearlings and the blue dragon backed away to the far side of the nest, thoroughly cowed.

Then the head swung back to face Dumery.

"Release the youngling, then," the dragon said.

Still reluctant, Dumery looked down at the black hatchling. It glared up at him with its yellow-gold eyes, and squirmed again, but this time its foreclaws missed his leg.

He dropped his knife and took the little beast's neck in both hands, then flung it aside, stepping back away from it as he did so.

The dragon tumbled, then scrambled to its feet and started back toward Dumery, hissing, its neck weaving like a snake preparing to strike.

The adult dragon hissed in reply, loud as an ocean; startled, the hatchling stopped in its tracks, turned its head, and stared up at its guardian.

The big dragon bent down and picked the infant up, grasping it gently in its gigantic maw and depositing it, unhurt, with the others.

Then it turned back to Dumery.

"You swore," Dumery said, nervously.

"Aye, I swore I'd not harm you, and I shan't. Speak, then, manling, and tell me what has brought you hither. Why have you come to my nesting and keeping?"

The beast spoke Ethsharitic very clearly, but also very oddly. Its words were accented strangely, consonants enunciated far more clearly than Dumery was accustomed to, and some of the words it used struck him as curiously old-fashioned. Dumery tried to make sense of the dragon's question. Did it mean why was here in the area, or what was he doing in the nest?

He decided it must mean the latter.

"It was an accident," he said, defensively. "I was just curious about what was in here, so I was looking through the logs, and the wind from your wings knocked me down inside."

"Ah, and what was a lad from Ethshar, for I note your use of the Old Tongue as spoken in that land, what was a lad from Ethshar doing in the wildernesses here, where few men dare venture, save the warlocks bound to their fate?"

This sentence was too much for the boy, with its warlocks and tongues and ventures.

"What?" he asked.

The dragon made a noise in its throat that reminded Dumery of a heavy bucket dropped into a very deep well. "Are my words hard on your ears, then? I confess, I must strain to apprehend some of your own pronunciations."

Hopelessly, Dumery repeated, "What?"

The dragon eyed him warily, then asked, "Do you have trouble understanding my words, lad?"

Dumery nodded. "Yes," he said, nervously.

"And I yours," the beast said. "I fear our common language has changed since last I had occasion to speak it."

"And you use big words," Dumery said.

The beast snorted in amusement, and the gust of hot, fetid air nearly knocked Dumery off his feet. "Aye," it said. "Surely I do, by the standards of a lad as young as yourself. I forget myself. Well, then, I shall attempt to limit myself to simpler words, and my apologies to you, boy, for my inconsideration."

Dumery just stared.

"Now then, boy, why is an Ethsharite in this vicinity?"

"I ... I was on my way home."

"Ah? Whence, that your route led through these wilds?"

"What?"

"Where had you been, lad?"

"Oh. In Aldagmor."

The dragon made the bucket-in-a-well noise again-could it be a chuckle? Dumery hoped it was that, and not something more ominous. The dragon said, "Verily, lad, still are you in Aldagmor, as they call this land, and indeed at its very heart and namesake. Mean you that you were at the keep of he who falsely claims to rule here, him styled Baron of Aldagmor?"

"No," Dumery said. He hesitated, then asked plaintively, "Um ... smaller words, please?"

"Forgive me, child," the dragon said, with what Dumery took for a sort of smile. "'Tis such a pleasure to speak to a human again, after all these years with none but foolish young dragons to hear me, that I find myself wrapping my tongue around the richest and finest words that strike me, the better to savor the experience. I've had none with whom to hold converse for twenty years or more save younglings of my own kind, taught to speak by myself, so that I've but heard my own words prattled back to me, and poorly, at that. This drought has been hard and long on my ears, so that I would now drink deeply indeed from the font before me. Is't truly hardship for you, then, to follow my thoughts?" It looked at Dumery's bewildered expression. "Ah, I see it is, and again I would beg pardon." The beast paused, clearly thinking, its head cocked slightly to one side. Then it spoke again.

"I shall try to use smaller words. Were you visiting the Baron of Aldagmor?"

"No," said Dumery. He debated whether to volunteer more information, and if so, whether to tell the truth.

"You are surely a reluctant font, that needs must be pumped," the dragon remarked. "Where, then, were you, if not at the castle?"

"I applied for an apprenticeship," Dumery said. "I was turned down, and I lost my way, and I knew that if I headed south, I'd eventually come to the river or the sea."

"And in truth you might, but had none warned you of the perils of such a journey? This land is counted accursed by many of your kind, boy, and indeed I myself am a portion of that curse, though of late only the lesser portion." It saw Dumery's helpless expression and said, "'Tis dangerous, lad! Did no one tell you?"

"No," Dumery said. He was beginning to accustom himself to the beast's manner.

"Well, 'tis. Truly, it is. Aside from the presence of myself and my kind, this is the land where warlocks vanish, where ordinary folk may become warlocks, to vanish in their turn. All this, and the more usual hazards of any wilderness, as well."

"I didn't know," Dumery said. It seemed the simplest reply, under the circumstances, and after all, he hadn't known there were wild dragons, or that the Warlock Stone was real and dangerous, if it really was.

"And did you make this journey unaccompanied, with none to aid you?" the dragon asked. "No father, nor mother, nor sib, nor comrade, to see you safe to your destination?"

"No," Dumery said. "Just me. My father didn't approve."

"Ah," the dragon said, in a curiously sympathetic tone, "an outcast from the bosom of family, are you? So was I, once, these few centuries past, to a way of thinking. What name do you go by, lad?"

"Dumery," Dumery said. "Dumery of Shiphaven."

"A fine name, it seems me, a fine name. No patronymic, then, but merely a residence?"

"I'm the third son," Dumery said in explanation. He didn't mention that patronymics were out of fashion in Ethshar.

"Ah. Well, then, Dumery of Shiphaven, I have been known, and know myself as, Aldagon, which is in the speech of the lost ancients 'She Who Is Great Among Dragons,' or so I was once told. Some have called me Aldagon of Aldagmor, but that strikes me ill, since the land's named for me."

"It is?" the boy asked, startled.

"Aye," the creature said, "Aldagmor means clearly, the Mountains of Aldagon, and the Aldagon so named is myself. I was here ere this land had any name in our common tongue." Aldagon turned its-or rather, her head slightly and squinted at Dumery. "Me seems we've wandered a field in our converse, lad. I was asking whence you came, and why, and we've rambled off to names and whatnot whilst I have no sound reply from you."

Dumery said nothing-not because he was stubborn or reluctant, but only because he didn't know what to say.

Aldagon let out a long, earth-shaking draconic sigh. "Speak, lad, tell me the tale entire, in whatever words and manner that you choose, but you tell it all. How came you here?"

Dumery hesitated, but then explained, in awkward and stumbling sentences, that he had wanted to see dragons, and that he had seen Kensher Kinner's son in Ethshar, and had followed him home to the dragon farm. There he had asked for an apprenticeship, had been refused, and had left in despair, only to lose the trail and head south, cross-country, toward Ethshar.

That was the tale as he told it, and Aldagon accepted it. No mention was made of burglaries or witches.

"You sought dragons, you say, and indeed you've found a surfeit of them, I'd venture-first came you to that accursed and damnable farm, and now to my nesting, where you find us all." She flexed a wing slightly to indicate the half-dozen young dragons huddled on the far side of the lair.

Dumery nodded.

"Me seems you have an unusual favoring of fortune, to chance upon so many. In truth, I am not often to be found here; my common dwelling is to the east, beyond the mountains, where I'm little troubled by your kind. I take pleasure in converse with humans, but alas, few care to join me so; the more likely occurrence, should I appear amongst them, is a flurry of spears or spells, flung hither and yon for fear of me."

Dumery gulped, and ventured, "Well, you do eat people, don't you?"

"Nay," she replied, with a shake of her head, "I've not tasted man-nor woman, nor child-for these two centuries and more, not since the Great War ended."

"Oh." The idea that this creature had been around during the Great War seemed absurd at first, but then Dumery looked at it again. Aldagon was immense, her head alone a good bit bigger than a farmer's wagon. She had certainly needed a very long time to grow to such a size.

And she was clearly old. Her scales were thick and overlapped each other heavily, while the edges were all worn smooth. Her teeth were huge, but they, too, looked worn.

And if she had really been around back then it made her claim that Aldagmor had been named for her more reasonable, too-Dumery was rather vague on the details, but he thought that Aldagmor, like most of the rest of Sardiron, might have been part of the Northern Empire, so it wouldn't have had any name that ordinary people could use until after the war was won.

"Were you really around during the War?" he asked.

"Oh, aye, of course," Aldagon said. "I was born and bred for the war, these four hundred years past. I was hatched on just such a farm as you saw, though not that very one-the Ethsharite forces had not penetrated so far in my time.

I was trained from the egg to fight and fly in the service of the Holy Kingdom of Ethshar, against the minions of the Empire, and for a century I burned the towns and camps of the Northerners, slew their sorcerers and the sorcerous beasts sent against me, and devoured whatever Northern soldiery I could find.

I took many a blow in that service, and with damnably little in recompense."

"Really?" Dumery asked.

"Aye, really," Aldagon said. "Oh, at first I was but a beast, rampaging where my masters sent me, at the behest of a half-trained fool whose hand-signs I had been made to recognize, but when I had at last learned to speak I began to operate more freely, to take orders too complex for a beast, to fetch back what news I could, and my masters sent me ever farther afield in pursuit of sundry military goals. And what did I ever receive for my pains, but shouted commands, scant provision-for they wanted me always hungry, the better to feed on the foe-and the occasional whack on the snout?"

Dumery made a wordless noise of sympathy. Aldagon nodded.

"At last I thought better of it," she continued. "I betook me across these mountains, and made my home upon their eastern slopes, where I could dine in peace upon the abundant wildlife and the stray Northern patrol that ventured by."

"And you've been there ever since?" Dumery asked.

"That I have, save when the whimsy takes me, and I stray back this way, seeking a taste of beef, or to rescue a handful of my fellows from that foul farm where you were turned away." Again, Aldagon gestured toward the young dragons.

"Oh," Dumery said. "They didn't just escape?"

"Nay, I brought them forth-save that one hatchling, he of the black scales, who I found wandering the mountaintop behind the farm, lost and alone. I know not how he came there." She made a motion with her neck and shoulders that bore an uncanny resemblance to a shrug.

"Oh," Dumery admitted, "I think that was my fault."

Chapter Thirty-Four

Aldagon eyed Dumery with interest.

"Speak, child," she said. "Tell me how you came to send this youngling roaming free."

Dumery cleared his throat uneasily, stalling for time to think about what he wanted to tell this gigantic beast. Despite its oath, he still feared that if he said the wrong thing he might be roasted, eaten, or both-after all, a fit of temper would only need to last an instant for a dragon as large as this one to kill him.

"First," he said, "tell me about rescuing the others."

"There's little to tell," Aldagon said, lashing her tail slightly and sending dry bones and broken branches flying. "I came upon that farm in the waning days of the war, when I chanced to be flying over the area and saw dragons beneath. Mine is a lonely life, lad, so I descended, only to see that my fellows were penned up like beasts, as had I been in my youth. I realized that it was but another breeding farm, and paid it no more heed-I had no wish to interfere in the Ethsharitic war effort.

"But then came rumors of peace, and I wondered what was to become of dragons, when they were needed no more in the great conflict, so I took to flying over that establishment every few days.

"To my confusion, I saw few changes. Still were there dragons penned there, and still did humans tend them, and assist in breeding them, and watch carefully over the hatchlings.

"But in time I did notice that all was not as it had been. Many of the hatchlings were slain, and yearlings as well. Those that reached an age to be trained were not trained, but were slaughtered instead. Wings were broken, and broken again, and I know not why. It seemed to me that this camp had become a mere prison, with no sound reason to continue.

"I mused upon this, and considered what action I should take. The thought that I might destroy the establishment and free my fellows occurred to me, but I pursued it not-surely some sound and logical reason existed for its continuance, and had I obliterated it I might be doing great harm, in some way I failed to comprehend. I might well, I thought, by such an action, have given your fellow men reason to hunt me down and slay me-something that none ever troubled to seriously attempt, though my presence was widely known. I bothered few, and the task of exterminating me, while certainly within the abilities of your kind, was apparently deemed to be not worth the effort required. Had I destroyed the camp, though, perchance that had provided the impetus needed to send wizards against me with spells sufficient to the task."

"Are there spells that could kill you?" Dumery asked.

"Oh, assuredly," Aldagon replied. She continued, "Thus it was, though, that I knew of that iniquitous place, yet feared to demolish it. Instead, I ventured near, and snatched free one of the largest dragons, whilst no humans watched.

I sought to question him, but alas, the poor thing was still only a beast, with no powers of speech and little thought beyond his belly. So no greater purpose was served by my effort."

Dumery nodded his understanding.

"I noted that no retaliation was made against me for his freedom, though,"

Aldagon went on. "No embassy was sent, no traps set, no spells cast. It seemed to me that though I dared not blast the farm to rubble, I might even so save some of its inhabitants from the abattoir, and the humans would not trouble to stop me, should I keep my depredations minor. And in fact, such has proved true-though I have returned every few years and carried off as many as a half-score of dragons at a time, as yet have they done naught to deter me."

She made an odd noise in her throat, then continued, "I confess, 'twas for the most part loneliness that drove me to these rescues, more than altruism, for I had hoped to enjoy the company of my own kind again, as I had not since I fled my duties long before. In that I was sorely disappointed, for the infants I have saved from slaughter are none of them capable of speech, and most perish ere they learn." She glanced around the nest. "I see, certes, that the one I called Kuprik has fled the lair, no doubt seeking the food that I would have brought him, had he but waited."

"Was that a big red and gold one?" Dumery asked. "I mean, not big, not like you, but bigger than most of those."

"Indeed he was," Aldagon answered, startled. "Saw you such a one?"

Dumery shook his head. "No," he said, "but I followed his trail back here. He left some scales on a tree he scraped against, so I knew what color he was."

"Ah, well," Aldagon said, "and you had seen him he would most likely have devoured you. A shame that he's gone, for he was the eldest and largest I had here, and knew a few words, as none of these others yet do." She sighed.