‘How wondrous then that she dreamed of the Servants and Clerres! I take it neither you nor she have visited that far place?’ Feed him some bits of my information to see what he might betray. Above all, maintain a calm demeanour. Pretend this was a social visit rather than a mutual assessment of strengths.
My ploy worked. His face lit with joy. ‘Never! Those are real places then, real names? It must be a true memory she recalled, not a yearning dream!’ His chest rose and fell with excitement. His eyes that had been so guarded were suddenly wide and open. I felt something go out from him. It was neither the Skill nor the Wit. A peculiar blending of the two? Was that what bonded keeper and dragon? I knew then that he had kept his walls up while we spoke, but now he opened to Heeby and shared with her that her dreams were true recollections. Somewhere in Kelsingra, a dragon trumpeted in joy. The distant caw of a crow echoed it, or had I imagined that?
I nudged him with words. ‘Clerres is real, as are the Servants. I have little other information to share with you, I fear. Our journey carries us toward the unknown.’
‘For vengeance,’ he queried me quietly.
‘For vengeance,’ I confirmed.
His brow creased, and for a moment he looked almost human. ‘Then perhaps we should join you. For what Heeby recalled of that place was dark and distressing. She hates and fears it in equal measures.’
‘What does she recall?’ I asked gently.
He scowled. ‘Little detail. There was treachery and betrayal. A trust violated. Dragons died. Or were, perhaps, slaughtered.’ He stared at the wall as if seeing something at a great distance and then snapped his eyes back to me. ‘It isn’t clear to her. And so it is all the more disturbing.’
‘Would the other dragons recall what she does not?’
He shook his head. ‘It is as I have told you. All the dragons of Kelsingra emerged from their cocoons with incomplete memories.’
Tintaglia. And IceFyre. I held my features still. Neither of those dragons had been members of the Kelsingra brood. Tintaglia had hatched years before the Kelsingra dragons and had believed herself the sole surviving dragon in the world. My personal experiences with her had been exceedingly unpleasant. She had tormented Nettle, invading her dreams and threatening her. And me. All in her pursuit to have us unearth IceFyre for her. That truly ancient dragon had chosen to immerse himself in a glacier when he believed himself the last dragon in the world. The Fool and I had broken him free of that ice and restored him to the world. His recall of what befell the other dragons should be intact. And from what I knew of him, my chances of learning from him were very small.
General Rapskal was still musing on his dragon. ‘My Heeby is different to the other dragons. Always smaller, stunted some would say, and I do fear that she may never grow as large as the others. She seldom speaks, and when she does, it’s almost exclusively to me. She shows no interest in making a mating flight.’ He paused and then said, ‘She is younger than the others, both as a serpent and now as a dragon. We believe she was of the last surviving dragon generation before the final cataclysm took them all. Once, when dragons were many, dragon eggs hatched yearly into serpents. The serpents within then quickly made their way into the sea. There they would remain, swimming and eating, following the migrations of the fish until they were large enough to return to the Rain Wild River and travel up it to the cocooning beach near Trehaug. So it was, once. Many of the dragons have ancestral memories of helping serpents to form and enter their cocoons. And the following summer, the dragons would emerge from those cocoons, strong and fully-formed, ready to take flight for their first hunts.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘It was not so for our dragons. They … got lost. They remained as serpents far too long, for some great disaster changed the coast and the river so greatly that they could no longer find their way to their cocooning beaches. Heeby and I believe that several generations of serpents were caught in that disaster. Trapped in the sea for far longer than they should have been.’
I nodded. Speculations of my own had begun to boil within my mind, yet I knew it was essential to hear all he had to say. No need to tell him that I knew more of those two elder dragons than he did.
‘Heeby suspects that not all dragon kind died when the Elderling cities fell. Certainly IceFyre did not.’ His voice went very dark. ‘I have given this some thought as well. It might seem that all the Elderlings who lived here in Kelsingra died. But they did not. I have walked in the memory of one Elderling who lived through whatever event split and shattered this city. Through his eyes, I watched the ground tremble and Elderlings flee. But where? I think to other places marked on the map in the tower.’ He paused and looked at me. It taxed all my discipline to keep my face bemused as he said, ‘I do not know how the magic was done, but they fled through the standing stones. The same stones where I first encountered you.’
‘They fled through stones?’ I asked as if uncertain of what I had heard.
‘Through the stones,’ he said. He watched me carefully. I kept my breathing slow and steady while regarding him with great interest. The quiet stretched long before he spoke. ‘I grew up an ignorant boy, Prince FitzChivalry. But not a stupid one. This city has a story to tell. While the others have feared to be lost in the memories stored in the stones, I have explored them. I have learned much. But some of what I have learned has only led to more questions. Does it not seem odd to you that in one disaster every Elderling and every dragon in the world seems to have perished?’
He was now speaking as much to himself as he was to me. I was content to let him talk.
‘Some Elderling settlements were destroyed. We know that. Trehaug has long mined the remains of one buried Elderling city. Perhaps others fell as well. But humanity did not die out, nor parrots nor monkeys. So how is it that every Elderling vanished from the world, and every dragon? Their population would surely have been greatly reduced. But to die out entirely? That is too strange. I saw many flee when the city died. So what became of them? What became of the dragons who were not here when the city fell?’ He scratched his scaled chin. His nails were iridescent and made a metal-on-metal sound against his face. He lifted his eyes to mine. ‘Heeby recalls treachery and darkness. An earthquake is a disaster, but not a betrayal. I doubt that Elderlings would be traitors to their dragons. So whose treachery does she recall?’
I ventured a question. ‘What does IceFyre say to your questions?’
He gave a snort of disdain. ‘IceFyre? Nothing. He is a useless bully, to dragons and Elderlings alike. He never speaks to us. When Tintaglia had no other choice she took him as her mate. But he proved himself unworthy of her. We seldom see him here in Kelsingra. But I have heard a minstrel song of IceFyre’s freeing from a glacier. An evil woman, pale of skin, attempted to kill him. A White Prophet, some call her. And this is what I wonder. If someone had killed the dragons and Elderlings, would they not wish to put an end to IceFyre as well?’
The tale of IceFyre and the Pale Woman had reached as far as Kelsingra. I had been known as Tom Badgerlock then, and few minstrels knew of my role in the downfall of the Pale Woman. But Rapskal was right. IceFyre would certainly have a reason to hate the Pale Woman and perhaps the Servants as well. Was there any way to waken that hatred and persuade him to aid me in my vengeance? I rather doubted it. If he would not seek vengeance for his own wrongs, he would care little for wrongs done to a mere human.
I led his thoughts away from IceFyre. ‘I do not understand all you have told me. The dragons of Kelsingra are different ages? But I thought all the Kelsingra dragons had hatched from their cases at the same time?’
He smiled indulgently. ‘There is so much the outside world does not understand about our dragons. From a mating to the
