‘Are they damaged by their own fire?’ Tsen looked incredulous.
‘It washes over them like water.’
‘Then by what?’
Another shrug. Zafir chuckled. ‘Poison.’
‘Poison?’
‘There's no other way to stop a dragon, Baros Tsen T'Varr. Not that's known to me, save to take its will for the fight. The rider. The rider is always a dragon's weakness.’
‘You.’
‘You're right to look for others. You'll need them. I'll do that for you. I'll train them.’ If you have a blood-mage who can make a potion to force me against every grain of my will!
‘And how long will that take?’
As if he hadn't asked the alchemist already! ‘For ever.’ She stretched, letting him see her curves. Still wasted. ‘The longer a rider is with his dragon, the better they're paired. A few months, perhaps, before they can do something useful. You should begin now. Choose the men who will ride your hatchlings once they're grown in years to come.’ A little light emphasis on the years. Time was her friend, not his, and they both knew it. ‘Take all the riders you like from my realm. It will be quicker but they must still bond with the dragon they'll fly.’ There was even a grain of truth to that. She'd leave it to him to imagine how long that bonding would take, that it might be months or years and not merely a few scant hours or sometimes even minutes.
Tsen frowned. ‘Look outside.’
They were up in the clouds. The sky was a dense white, just beginning to break up as the glasship rose through to the clear sky above. She caught glimpses of what looked like line after line of great white waves, frozen still. As they rose higher she stood by the window as the waves became a rolling white sea. To be high in the sky like this, yes, she missed that, but with the howling wind in her face too. More than anything, that was what she missed.
‘How high can a dragon fly?’
There was a mountain, the same mountain that rose behind the city and vanished into the cloud except now it rose from the white sea and she could see its peak, still verdant green. ‘Higher than this.’ She had no idea, really. At Evenspire they'd come from above the cloud so as not to be seen from below, and Hyrkallan had done the same but from higher still. There'd been times she'd flown so high that she couldn't breathe, high enough for the sky to turn a deep deep blue, for the world below to become a formless haze, for the far horizon to be a blur and, if you looked hard, to seem not quite straight any more.
‘But how high?’ asked Tsen politely. ‘Would they cross the mountain of the Elemental Masters?’ He flicked his eyes at the peak outside the window.
‘With ease.’ High enough to feel sick and for her head to ache and spin, for the air to be as cold as ice so it hurt her lungs to breathe it, but the dragon hadn't been troubled at all. ‘As high as the stars perhaps. I don't know how high a dragon might fly alone.’ She stared at the mountain peak. The glasship was flying away from it now. They were leaving the city at last.
‘I've been told what dragons did to my fleet. What would a dragon do to my glasships?’
Zafir smiled over her shoulder and tugged at her damp silks again. ‘Do they burn?’
‘They are glass and gold.’
‘If I were to ride a dragon against one of these, I would seize the egg where people are carried and rip it away. I would snap the tethers that hold it and hurl it through the air. Or, if I was playing, maybe fire would amuse me. Gold will melt in dragon fire, and silver too, but only long after all those inside would be dead, black and charred and brittle. Or perhaps seize the ship itself and smash it into the ground. Are they fragile? If they are I might shatter one with the lash of a tail.’ She tore herself from the window. ‘We're leaving your city and you ask me questions of dragons that are filled with war, Baros Tsen T'Varr.’ She glanced at the map, once more rolled up in front of him. ‘Is there something else you wish to share?’
He shook his head and put the map away, and for a time they talked of other things, of her life in the realms, of the eyries she knew, of dragons and how they were raised, of the wars the realms had seen, old and new, and how dragons fought. They talked for hours and grew slowly tipsy together on wine that Tsen had brought that tasted like apples and honey and fire on Zafir's tongue. She flirted with him constantly. Couldn't help herself. Instinct, but she never reached him and never got anything back from him, not once.
‘Do you prefer men?’ she asked him when the wine made her careless. She thought he might blanch or frown but he only shook his head. ‘Are you a eunuch then?’ He just laughed. ‘Then what are you?’
‘A t'varr,’ was all he said, but she could see she'd touched something. He hid it well but not well enough. A sadness, perhaps, and a flicker of resentment. And then they went back to dragons and ships and how large a sea lord's fleet might be as they slowly finished getting drunk. Whatever she asked, Tsen smiled as he answered her. Did he always smile? He seemed to, and nothing she asked bothered him. Even glow-cheeked on his apple wine he gave nothing away. She'd never met anyone quite like him, one who could keep his passions so contained.
Night came and went. They slept in beds divided only by a thin curtain of silk, yet Zafir slept with an ease she couldn't remember, not since Jehal. The second day passed as the first, filled with talk and more apple wine. She took his hand on the second night when they were drunk again and looked at the lines there and told him his fortune in some preposterous way that made him laugh, and then he took hers and did the same. He didn't flinch from her touch, merely chose not to seek it. He was ever kind and gentle and yet somehow oblivious. She came at him from every way — coy, sly, eager, angry, bitter — and none of it made the slightest difference. If there were gaps in his armour, ways to reach through to the soft heart inside and fix her talons around it, she didn't find them. It was a failure that vexed and intrigued her. Maybe he simply didn't have one?
‘People assume a great deal,’ he said as they slipped under their separate sheets on their second night in the sky. ‘Do not let it concern you.’ And she realised that yes, people did assume so very much, and that she'd come to count on it.
‘What are you trying to show me with this?’ she asked. ‘Do you have some guard here I cannot see who keeps you safe from me? Alone, so very much could come to pass. It still might.’
‘And little of it good — ’ he yawned ‘- and yet here we are and you haven't murdered me even once.’
‘It's always there, that thought.’
‘I suppose it is, and I'm quite sure you could have done so if you wished. I am just a fat old man, after all. And no, there is no guard.’ He laughed. ‘Although of course I might be lying.’ He smiled again. ‘I knew another slave once. Like you in some ways, very different in others. You wouldn't kill me even if you were certain there was no hidden guard to stop you. If you wanted to die, you'd be dead. And we will never quite trust one another, and one day, if I'm foolish enough or you're clever enough, you'll find a way to be free. But I don't think I can have what I want from you any other way.’ Another chuckle. ‘Yes, Dragon-Queen, you're being tested just as you have been testing me. We both know this. I think we've both done quite well too. Perhaps even surprised one another.’
Tested? But in more ways than the obvious, surely. She felt the answers there as she fell asleep, flitting and fluttering at the edges of her reason yet always dancing between her fingertips as she reached for them. It dawned on her as she dreamed that this t'varr might be a lot more dangerously clever than he seemed.