And why does everyone keep on insisting that the Plains are Empty! I bit my tongue. Westerners!
“That’s right,” I nodded, although he was wrong. There were at least thirty different tribes that I knew the names of, and I’d heard tell that there were more the further out you went... But at least he didn’t regard us all the same, I considered.
“Does that mean that you…” Montfre flickered a look to the window. “Are you one of the Lady Inyene’s slaves?” A new concern crept over his features. “How did you get in here?”
It was my turn to impress him, as I said, “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
“It’s a dragon,” Montfre said, in almost exactly the same tone that Tamin had used when he had first met Ymmen.
We stood on the circular top of the tower with the cloudy skies above us, and the light from the candle Montfre had insisted on bringing up with him shone over Ymmen’s scales, making them shine in the darkness. I studied the young man’s face as he looked at the black dragon, who had turned his head to regard the small person quizzically as he was studied in turn. Ymmen’s pupils had turned to slits of black instead of their rounded ovals, which I knew meant Ymmen hadn’t decided yet whether he liked Montfre or not.
“He’s… he’s… magnificent!” Montfre said in a rush, and I felt a surge of warmth through my mind.
“Not all Bad Magic,” Ymmen said in my mind, as his pupils became a little rounder.
“I mean, look at his wings!” Montfre burst out, which were folded now tight against Ymmen’s back, but we could clearly see how long his pinion-bones were, at least. “His wingspan must be… twenty meters? Thirty? How much uplift can he get from that!?”
It was like the mage was speaking a different language from the one I knew. I had heard Tamin talk like this, when he had come back to our village to talk of clauses, and propositions, and precedents – and I had no idea just what either had meant, but I thought Montfre at least was trying to explain how awed he was.
“My wings are big, little mage!” Ymmen said, twittering through an almost closed maw as he lifted his shoulders and slowly unfurled his wings over us. I could clearly see the paler lightning-bolt where his tear had healed, and his wings stretched far over the entire stretch of the tower top.
“I underestimated you,” Montfre said, nodding his head gravely. “My name is Montfre Veer, of the citadel and kingdom of Torvald, and I am honored to meet you.” He bowed deeply.
I was struck by just how different – and immediate – that Montfre’s respect had been. Maybe it was that he was a mage, but it seemed that he was following a custom that I did not know. A ritual giving of names?
“He is of the people of the sacred mountain.” Ymmen struggled with the words. “Many years with dragon kind.”
Oh, I thought, and felt a pang of jealousy that Montfre had grown up learning how to be a better dragon friend than I was!
“Bah!” Ymmen snorted flame and fire into my mind, a laugh that threw aside my concerns. “Heart-friends don’t bow… but it is nice,” he opened his maw to loll his tongue out at me, as if he were laughing, but he still seemed pleased with the reaction he had inspired in Montfre.
“Narissea,” Montfre turned to me. “I take it that you are bonded? That hasn’t happened in a generation!”
“So my uncle says,” I agreed, although it seemed to me as natural a thing as breathing. “I’m sure if more people made the effort to talk to dragons, then they’d see that dragons aren’t—”
There was a snarl from above us as Ymmen let out a small puff of smoke and flame at what he knew I was about to say.
“Dragons are incredible,” I settled for, and felt Ymmen’s acceptance of my words in my mind.
Beside me however, Montfre appeared agitated, but in an excitable way. “I’m afraid I have to correct you, Narissea. The problem isn’t that there aren’t people willing to become friends with dragons – in the citadel of Torvald at least – but that there are fewer dragons now than there ever were. It is a mystery.” He looked up at Ymmen expectantly. Ymmen who merely blinked slowly. I got the sense that, whatever he knew about why the dragons were disappearing from the world, he was not going to share it with us just yet.
“Anyway.” Montfre coughed. “This is a great cause of celebration! We must get you to the Dragon Academy at once!” His face fell. “Somehow,” he added uncertainly, looking over his shoulder, back towards the south where Inyene’s keep and the work camp would be. And his own mechanical dragons.
“I don’t care about academies and schools and courts,” I said. To me, they all seemed to belong to the same world that Tamin had run off to, and that Inyene had come from. Laws that weren’t really true but were just tricks. Debts, I thought with derision.
“I need to free my people,” I said, and I knew that Montfre understood my need from the light in his eyes and the chains around his feet.
“Then you must understand who it is you are up against.” Montfre spoke seriously, and up there under the dark sky, he began his dark tale.
Chapter 16
A Dark Tale
“I first met Inyene and Abioye when I was twelve years old.” Montfre’s voice was hushed. He sat on the side of the battlements of his tower, the candle at his feet casting a circle of light that was flickering and hesitant.
“Or rather, I should say that Inyene met me. I don’t think Inyene stumbles into anything. Not since she was a child, anyway.” His eyes went far away, as if looking through a window to some old and forgotten room. He shook himself and changed tack. “The Veers aren’t a poor family. We were one of the Named Nobles at some distant point in Torvald’s history – but that was many, many hundreds of years ago.”
“My parents were Valuers. They worked at Main Gate in the Merchant Houses,” he said. All of these names and jobs were completely foreign to me. “We were comfortable I guess, a small townhouse on Beris Lane. But my mother got ill early in life. A coughing pleurisy of the chest, and my father had to borrow more and more money to make ends meet. We were fast becoming poor by the time Inyene sought me out.”
“I went to school like any other Torvald child, but in my tenth year they realized I had a gift for… devices.” He said the word with a certain amount of pride. “I was sent to the Artificers for extra training, and it was there that they realized I had some magical aptitude.”
The young man with the silver hair smiled at the memory. He had been proud of that, I saw. “And so, I was inducted into the Dragon Academy—”
No wonder he wanted me to go there as well, I thought a little irritably. It sounded like the place that made him feel the happiest.
“—but it couldn’t last for long, with my mother’s ill health. Although training at the Academy is free, paid for by the King in the promise of future service to the crown – I couldn’t leave my parents like that. They were struggling already, and they needed an income that I could provide with my skills,” he said, his face falling. “And so, I took to making toys and oddments like the Crystal Euphonia you heard downstairs. A whole range of them. I borrowed materials and workshop space at the Guild of Artificers, and I sold my creations at Central Market, paying back the Artificers and my father’s debts. It was hard, very hard work – but I think I was good at it.”