Free Dragon Rule by E. E. Knight Page A

did.
    She’d refused several friendly loans of “body thralls”—slaves, really, to help her prepare for the victory banquet by filing and shaping her scale. “A healthy dragonelle is perfectly capable of attending to her own scale, and I wouldn’t care to go into a fight with those oversharp talons you underground dragons seem to favor.”
    Fashionable dragons are such a bore , she thought to him. He’d never been more proud of her.
     
    They had good weather for the feast, with just enough wind to disperse the dragon smell so that the humans could enjoy themselves. The only part of the banquet AuRon enjoyed was the fact that Natasatch gloried in the polite exchanges and friendly conversations. It did his hearts good to see his mate so happy.
    It was held before the Directory, a vast building where the Hypatians met and schemed and governed, a place of alliances and betrayals, of promises public and secret agendas, or so Wistala’s quick history of it explained when AuRon and Natasach were shown inside. There were circular ranks of benches fitted for humans running around the walls looking down on enormous statues of the beasts of the world: Oxen and dolphins and lions and such, along with a dragon who had the wrong number of toes and his crest-horns growing in the wrong direction.
    Wistala had a high opinion of the traditions of the place, something to do with some old elf friend of hers who’d been a “Knight of the Directory.” To AuRon the place only echoed with noisy vanity.
    AuRon noted an empty place next to his brother—where his Queen Nilrasha would be had she not been restricted from travel by injuries. Perhaps for the first time since their hatching he felt a pang of sympathy for the Copper. Tyr RuGaard was grave and ate little, though he offered elaborate praise and politenesses to his guests. On his other side Wistala reclined, supplying him with names when he forgot the identity of this, that, or the other so-and-so.
    “My tongue does you an injustice,” his brother said, after mispronouncing the name of a human thane from the north.
    The human, awestruck and uncomfortable in the presence of a throng of dragons, assured “my Tyr” that he was utterly unable to pronounce half the dragon names in attendance.
    When it came time for the banquet, the dragons ate on the great pillar-bordered street leading up to the immense Hypatian Directory. Even that vast building couldn’t fit this many dragons, at least in such a way that they might be fed. Using a road allowed oxcarts to carry food to the dragons, stretched out on their bellies in a vast rectangle—the oxen were blindfolded and had Ghiozian camphor rubbed in their noses to cover up the dragon smell to forestall panic.
    Dragons, humans, and a smattering of elves and dwarfs and even a blighter or two with hair neatly bound and ribboned dined in two long lines flanking the road. The dragons lay on their bellies to eat and many of the humans and elves did likewise, reaching for tidbits from bearers carrying plates in endless procession.
    AuRon and Natasatch, with Istach trailing behind, were both last and first. They were the last dragons to be introduced—as “distinguished visitors from the north and relatives of our great Tyr,” ahead of various humans and elves and dwarfs representing their kind.
    In the interval between the feast and the ceremonies Wistala talked with a dozen rather wizened, bent-over humans, whom she introduced as “librarians”—keepers of knowledge and secrets.
    “Oh, would you look at that little bit of tail?” Natasatch said, spying the mate of one of Hypat’s “Protectors.” “Dyed all in red. She looks like she’s trying to pass as male.”
    AuRon glanced over at the dragon who’d chosen a bright shade of red favored by the Red Queen, who’d ruled Ghioz until she settled on war against the Dragons of the Lavadome. He’d had more than a claw in the killing of the strange creature who claimed to be too