Free Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire by E.E. Knight Page A

the pairs of dragons at this feast. Stay about the fringes, and for the Four Gifts’ sake, don’t come near me when Imfamnia’s about. I think she suspects you and I communicate in secret.”
    She quieted, and switched over to mindspeech. I’m unsettled, AuRon. Imfamnia and NiVom are up to something with this feast .
    But what? Whatever would they try, with so many of the leading dragons of their Empire in attendance?
    I may not show it, but I’m so glad you’re here. I feel safer with you about .
    AuRon warmed at that. He felt the pulse of emotion returned across their mind-link. Very well. I’ll keep to the fringe of the crowd .
    “You’ll need to blend in,” she mused aloud, half to him and half to herself.
    Now it was his turn to cock his head in astonishment. “That’s my specialty.”
    “No, with the Empire throng. Paint and such.”
    “You are the expert,” he said, wondering if she had thralls just to run tools back to the worktables while her cosmeticians worked on scale.
    She gestured with her tail at a bowl set high up, out of reach for a hominid but accessible to a dragon-neck. “You’ll need some coin. I keep some silver around for guests who want a polite mouthful. Take some of that.”
    “Where does it come from?” AuRon asked.
    “What does that matter?”
    “You know how I feel about this whole Dragon Empire. Organized robbery.”
    Natasatch stiffened. “There were some bandits in the mountain pass—you know, the high road above the capital. I found their camp, burned out the bandits, and recovered a good deal of livestock and bundles of fabrics. The Merchants’ League gave me half the worth of the recovered goods in exchange. This was two years ago, and a good deal of it is left. As Protectors go, I don’t live high. Our cave is still much as you remember it.”
    AuRon felt ashamed, both by the explanation and by her use of “our cave.” To him, their cave was back on the Isle of Ice, the shelf where their eggs had been hatched. Her use of the phrase suggested that her most happy days had been spent with him in the Protectorate.
    Humans, elves, and even dwarfs, he supposed, had elaborate notions of love. They all had elaborate rituals for courting and aligning with prospective mates, oftentimes with extensive involvement of both families. Blighters looked on wife-gathering much as a herdsman tries to increase his herd—it meant more wealth and power. He’d heard stories from the ancient black dragon NooMoahk, his mentor after the loss of his family, of dragons in the distant past tending more toward the blighter view than the human. With several females surviving hatching to each male, powerful males sometimes accumulated what NooMoahk called a “harem.”
    Dragons used the word “love,” and it meant something that was oddly more practical, yet deeper than the human notion. A male dragon did not obsess over the object of his affection or write odes to her various perfections, but he usually admired the one he wanted for his mate for specific, practical reasons. Once mated, it was his duty to provide and, if necessary, to lose limb or life defending her refuge.
    With Natasatch he admired her courage in adversity. He would have given in to despair had he spent most of his youthful years chained in the dark, as she had. He liked her wit and her open-mindedness to his ideas that dragons could— must! —do better, lest their kind fall into twilight and then vanish from the world.
    Her expression of concern, desire for him to be there, troubled him. She was a dragon who was hypersensitive to trouble, the way you could feel a thunderstorm before the dark clouds appeared. Perhaps it was all those years in the dark hatching cavern on the Isle of Ice.
    He scooped up a mouthful of coin.
    “I’m grateful,” he said, meaning so much more than the money.
     
     
    Even in the predawn, dragons were already preparing themselves for the feast. AuRon saw a mass of torches in a mountain