Blood of Dragons (Page 44)
Other information also too grave to delay sharing: I have finally heard from Wintrow in the Pirate Isles. You may recall I wrote to him months ago to ask if he knew anything of Selden. As is often the case with letters sent through that region, both my message and his response were greatly delayed. He had no tidings of Elderlings but was alarmed at gossip of a ‘Dragon-Boy’ exhibited in a travelling display of freaks and oddities that had been journeying through his territory. Efforts on his part to learn more were fruitless. He fears that those he has queried have been less than frank for fear of incurring the wrath of the Pirate Queen’s consort. I beg you to use your contacts to ask if anyone has heard of such a travelling exhibition, and where they were last seen.
With great anxiety,
Keffria
City Dwellers
Moving to the city had proved more challenging for the keepers than the dragons, Thymara thought. Kelsingra was a city built for dragons. The broad streets, the immense fountains, the scale of the public buildings all proclaimed that dragons had resided there. Entries were tall and wide, steps were set for a dragon’s tread, and every dimension of every chamber dwarfed humans to insignificance. For keepers who had grown up in the tiny tree-houses of Trehaug and Cassarick, the differences were stunning. ‘It doesn’t feel like I’m inside,’ Harrikin had observed the first time he entered the dragon baths. All the keepers had clustered together, looking up in wonder at the immense frescoes on the ceiling far overhead. Sylve, Thymara, Alum and Boxter had held hands and tried to measure the diameter of one of the supporting pillars. The first night that all the keepers had spent in the city together, they had slept in a cluster in the corner of an immense room, as if the building were a new kind of wilderness in which they had to huddle together against unknown dangers.
The building would have been incomprehensible to her a few years ago. Now she knew at a glance that it was a place for dragons to sprawl on heated sand while watching the life of the city below them or the slow wheeling of the stars by night. She had first seen it when Sintara had summoned her there a few days ago, much to Thymara’s surprise, and bade her search through the cupboards and shelves to see if the tools for dragon grooming remained in their old storage places. While she had looked, Sintara had writhed and wallowed in the sand, near burying herself in the hot particles. She had emerged gleaming like molten blue metal fresh from a furnace.
Time had rendered most of the grooming tools into rust and dust, but a few remained intact. There were small tools with metal bristles of something that rust had not eaten, and brushes like scrubbing brushes, but with the handles crafted of stone and the metal bristles set in clusters. There were metal rasps with the wooden handles long gone, glass flasks with a thickened residue of oil in the bottom, and a gleaming black case that held an assortment of black metal needles and other items she did not comprehend. Specialized tools for grooming dragons, she supposed, and wondered if one day all the niceties of that lost skill would be recalled.
As she realized it, the dragon acknowledged it. ‘I awe you. Perhaps you cannot sing my praises with your voice, but reflected in you, I know I am the most magnificent of the dragons you have ever seen.’