Maelys

“I’m hungry,” the drake said again.

“You ate an hour ago,” Maelys said, ignoring him as she watched the progress of the three men traversing the opposite mountainside.

“I’m on fire,” the drake said. “Think of my metabolism.” He still hadn’t given her his name, and she hadn’t given him hers. Both of them had been happy with the arrangement…until he had started nagging her for food. Then she’d really wanted to know his name so she could curse it.

“I thought you said you got your fire from the sun,” Maelys said, distracted. The group on the path across the valley was moving in the same direction they were—toward the Spyre. They weren’t close enough to see their faces, but she was pretty sure they weren’t Ganlin survivors.

Which made them Vethyles. Or friends of Vethyles. Which made them dead.

The drake wasn’t finished whining. “You could easily use that unique talent of yours to grab us a few ground-squirrels, a mountain-hen or two, maybe a nice fat sheep—”

She turned back to glare at him. “How old are you?”

The drake blinked at her, his blazing orange eyes trying to place a reference to her question. “Why do you ask?” he said, suspicious.

“Because I want to know why I feel like you’re the kid and I’m the adult. I hunt for you, find you water, keep you out of trouble—and what do you do? Run around naked and complain.”

The drake let out a huge sigh. “Why does it feel like the world is giving me one huge kick in the nuts after another?”

“Maybe it is. Some people believe you reap what you sow. Rees liked to tell me that, when I wasn’t holding still for him in the Spyre like a good little goat.”

The drake glanced at the mountains in front of them. “You say this is the way to the Spyre?”

“Yeah,” she said, pointing. “The rocks say over that hill.”

The drake squinted at her again. “Since when do Rockfarmers actually talk to rocks? All the ones I know just…got old and died.”

Maelys shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to get old.” She cocked her head at the drake. “Do you get old?”

The drake laughed as if he thought that was funny. “I’m an elemental, girl. I don’t get old. Not like your kind, anyway.”

Maelys reached up and touched her face where the scars from Laela’s bug-trap had been fading over the last couple days. “Can anything kill you?”

The drake gave her a very long, uncomfortable look. “A few things,” he said, his voice wary.

“Like what?”

Dustin seemed to consider her carefully, then said, “Another drake. A tszieni—but only an old one. A very powerful Auld. One of the ones that made the drakes. But they’re all dead. There were a couple creatures Thibault made during the war that made me pretty nervous, but none of ‘em ever got hold of me long enough to find out. There weren’t a lot of fire drakes to start with, but I think most of them killed each other off or something—they kinda just disappeared over time. No idea where they went. A lot like the Rockfarmers, really. Just…disappeared.” That seemed to disturb him, but he shook himself. “Then there’s an Auldhund, maybe, but they really only negate a certain amount of veoh before they run out of oomph, and a drake’s got so much veoh it’s coming out our ears, so we usually have the upper hand.”

“But not a Vethyle?” Maelys pressed. “They couldn’t kill you?”

“Them?” Dustin snorted. “Maybe one of the original founders of the Vethyle veoh-family from Ariod, but these ‘Aulds’ nowadays are really just traveling jugglers in comparison to what came before. So no, I don’t think so. A drake’s basically a concentration of earth-veoh. It has to be unmade before it will die, and it takes a lot of veoh to unmake us.”

“How fast do you heal?” Maelys asked. “Like what would happen if somebody cut your head off?”

“You’re asking questions I normally wouldn’t answer, not to anyone,” Dustin said. He chuckled disgustedly and, gesturing at his state of non-attire and the empty mountainside, “But you’re still the best company I’ve had in centuries, aside from that conniver Rhydderch and maybe his pet Auldhund. They were fun. Wulmaer’s a worrier, though.”

“How fast?” Maelys insisted. Her face had been more or less gnawed half off, and not even Rees’s spell could save her from horrible scarring.

…scarring that was even now fading into smooth, blemishless skin.

“Drakes are essentially puddles of veoh, and you can’t cut a puddle in half,” Dustin said. “Not with a sword, anyway. Give it enough time and it drifts back together.” But he still looked leery. “Why do you ask?”

Maelys dropped her hand from her cheek, which had been showing bone only days before. “No reason. What’s it like to talk to the sun?”

Dustin took a deep breath of obvious longing and glanced up at the sky, wistfulness etched across his face. “It’s bliss itself. It’s like we combine to become one, a piece of me becoming every bit of light that dapples across this entire planet—which is round, by the way—and joining with it as it powers this rock. Gods, it’s been too long.”

Even then, the rocks were showing Maelys a beautiful waterfall three mountains back that hadn’t been seen by human eyes in four hundred years, sending her feelings and pictures of the breathtaking way the water pattered down the stones, caressing them like a lover. She was also simultaneously feeling the dirt pressurizing the rock in the crags and crevices for hundreds of miles in any direction—the valleys, especially—where it had accumulated over the eons, as well as currently enduring the feeling of millions of tiny feet pattering across her surfaces as rodents, birds, and foxes went about their daily lives. She was finding it all very distracting. “Must be interesting.”

Dustin shook his head. “It’s not something a mortal like you could understand.”

“You’re probably right.” Maelys motioned at the people climbing the far side of the valley. “I think those are Vethyles. If they are, you’re going to help me kill them.”

He squinted, then his orange eyes widened when he saw them. Immediately, he blinked at her. “How did you…?”

“The stone told me,” she said, patting her perch.

He gave her one of those looks that said he thought she was crazy, but didn’t want to say it. He cleared his throat. “You Rockfarmers must have very good eyes, lass. I can barely see them, and I’m a drake.”

Realizing he still didn’t believe her about talking to the rocks, Maelys made a disgusted sound and stood up. “Let’s go. We can’t kill them if they get away.” Truth was, she could probably catch up to them within a couple of hours if she let the rocks take her, but she was avoiding that route recently, as it still brought with it the leftover nausea and heart-palpitations of being wrapped in the dragonsilk.

The drake hesitated on the slope behind her, his blazing orange eyes following the motions of the other party with foreboding. “Uh, lass, I’m not quite sure I’m ready to kill anyone just yet.”

She shrugged. “I am.”

“Maybe we could go have a chat with them first. You know, see if they’ve got any food.”

Maelys glared at him. “Do you want to go on to the Spyre alone?”

“In all honesty? No. You’re the best company I’ve had in years.”

She blinked, because it was the second time he had said it. “Really? Why?”

“You play chits.” He jingled the stone dicing cup she had made him. “And they’re stone, so I can’t burn them on accident. You have no idea how happy that makes me.” Then he gave her a sheepish grin. “That, and you’re the only one who hasn’t tried to lock me in a tower and throw away the key.”

“You don’t call me names,” Maelys said.

“What is your name?”

She peered at him. Finally, she said, “Maelys. What’s yours?”

“Not telling.”

She gasped.

“Just kidding.” The drake laughed. “I know how jealous you Rockfarmers get about your names. I’m Dustin.”

Maelys broke into a grin, despite herself.

Dustin beamed down at her. “Maelys, huh? That’s the second time a Rockfarmer’s told me their name. Must be some kind of record.”

“What was the first one?”

“He made me promise not to tell.”

She looked down, disappointed.

“But,” Dustin said quickly, “I can introduce you someday, and maybe he can tell you himself.”

Maelys scowled at him. “Rees said the Rockfarmers were dead.”

The drake laughed. “Not this one. He’s tucked away in a hut by the Idorion. Nice guy. Don’t cheat at chits with him, though. He’ll pull out a sword and chase you with it.”

Maelys giggled, trying to imagine someone chasing Dustin around with a sword. She glanced at his ensorcelled irons again, considering taking them off. Then she thought about how many times he’d whined about flying and decided she’d leave them on a few more days, relatively sure he wouldn’t take her to the other Rockfarmer if he turned into a big fire lizard and flew away.

“Mortals have got it all wrong,” Dustin said, shaking his head as he watched the three men trudge across the opposite mountainside. “Those guys… They’re like small-minded ants, chugging away at their daily lives, not looking for anything greater than moving their next speck of sand.” He cocked his head at her. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Maelys said. ‘Ants’ was a good way to describe them, because she was about to crush them like ants.

“Life’s not about power and money and things,” the drake went on. He liked to hear himself talk, Maelys had discovered, when he wasn’t whining. “It’s about bathing in a hot-springs only you know about. It’s about bringing flowers to a pretty country lass who thinks you’re the baker’s son from the next village over. It’s about barley wine, a buxom serving wench, and good company. You wanna boil it all down? It’s about sex and chits. The good things in life. Sex and chits.”

Maelys cocked her head at his little stone chits game, then raised a brow at him. “Sex, huh?”

“You’re too young,” Dustin said, waving a hand. “Besides.” He held up his wrists with the ensorcelled cuffs. “I’m not bedding anybody until I get these damn things off. They’ve bottled up my fire until I can’t even sleep in a proper bed without setting it ablaze.”

Maelys glanced back out at the three men walking along the opposite mountainside, considering. Flying over to the other side would certainly be a lot faster than walking. “Could you kill Aulds if the cuffs were off?”

Dustin snorted. “Like crushing caterpillars.”

She considered. “Would you?”

Dustin made a face. “I’m a lover, not a killer,” he said. “Hell, last time I killed anybody was more than three centuries ago, when Rhydderch Vethyle hunted me down in my den and convinced me to fight in the war with Etro, and it was mainly just tszieni and other abominations that Thibault had put together to kill humans. I don’t like killing humans. It’s…distasteful. I did what I could to level the playing field and almost died a few times for my efforts.”

Maelys grunted and pointed at the three on the opposite slope. “What about those guys? They killed the Ganlins. Would you kill them for that?”

Dustin looked at the men on the nearby mountainside. “See, this is the gray area. I try not to involve myself in human affairs, and the Ganlins did keep me imprisoned for the last three and a half centuries. Doesn’t make me feel particularly wrathful on their behalf.”

“One of the Ganlins that died was my friend,” Maelys said. “That makes me wrathful.”

“And I’m very sorry about that,” Dustin said, “but I’m an immortal, child. We have to stay neutral, or the world would go to shit.”

“I’m not going to stay neutral,” Maelys said.

“And that’s your prerogative as a mortal,” Dustin said. “But for creatures such as myself, we answer to a greater good, otherwise the rest of our kind gang up on us and wipe us off the face of the earth. Neutrality is pretty much the golden rule.”

“I’m not going to stay neutral,” Maelys said again. “I’m going to kill them all.”