The dragon made a frown. "Is this a rule of the humans?"
"It's my rule," said Kyra.
The dragon nodded.
"Good. Now come, let me give you your new cape."
Tosch lowered his head, and Kyra tied the red cloth around the dragon's neck. It was a pitifully small splash of red against the creature's massive body, but Tosch didn't seem to care. He was thrilled with his new appearance and he revelled in it — posturing every which way and asking how he looked in every pose.
To Seron, it was all rather silly, but Kyra took the dragon seriously, giving him her best advice on how to wear the cape to his best advantage.
Finally, Tosch stood still and turned to Seron. "Your wife gave me a wonderful gift," stated the dragon. "What are YOU going to give me?"
"I'm going to paint your picture," he calmly replied. "Once humans have seen your portrait, they won't be so surprised when they see you in the flesh. Isn't that what you want?"
Tosch looked at Kyra. "Can he draw?" he asked.
"Raise your right wing just a little higher," said Seron, as he painted Tosch's picture in the forest clearing where they had first met. "Just a bit higher. Yes. Good. Don't move."
"I think I look better with my wings lower and my head higher," complained Tosch. "And I've got a great profile from the left side. You said so, yourself."
"My purpose is to create a dramatic effect," the painter reminded him, "not necessarily to make you look your best."
"I don't understand the difference," sniffed the dragon. "If I look good, the picture looks good, right?"
"It's the other way around, my friend," laughed Seron. "If the picture looks good, you'll look good."
"Hmmph."
No one else was offering to paint pictures of Tosch, so he remained a willing model despite differences with Seron. The peacemaker was Kyra. She often joined them in the forest clearing, stroking the dragon's head when her husband released him from a long, torturous pose.
Tosch, however, was not the easiest model to paint. The brass dragon would often arrive late for sittings;
sometimes he wouldn't come at all. Often, he would quietly mutter a magical incantation, slap his tail against the ground three times, and make Seron's brushes disappear. The dragon seemed bent on driving the artist to distraction.
But Kyra always soothed Seron's anger by explaining yet again that the dragon tales of her youth told of the creatures' freewheeling nature. "A brass dragon," she said, "comes and goes as he pleases and likes to play tricks. It's his nature; don't blame him."
And so the painting continued. At least for a short while…
Tosch might have stayed for years instead of a few short months, but when the Highlord and her forces invaded Flotsam, the young dragon fled to the mountains.
Seron and Kyra might have done the same, but Flot sam was all they had ever known; they had both been born there, and neither of them had ever been anywhere else.
The truth was they were afraid to leave. Times were hard after the dragonarmy took over. But even so, Seron eked out a living. He managed to sell his pictures of Tosch, despite the fact that dragons were now far more commonplace. One of Seron's portraits went to the owner of the inn where he worked as a cook. He sold another to a fierce female ship captain who said she would hang it in her cabin. Yet another was bought by a traveling peddler. All of the buyers admired how skillfully the artist had, at once, captured both the youthful innocence and the natural arrogance of the dragon.
With each sale, Kyra became ever more proud of her husband. His reputation as a painter was growing, yet nothing really changed. They still lived in the same small hut, their clothes were still second-hand rags skillfully repaired by Kyra, and Seron still had to work at the inn to supplement their income.
"You won't believe it!" exclaimed Seron in a rush of words as he burst into their one-room home. "I was up on Cold Rock Point," he explained, "and I saw the Highlord atop her blue dragon. She was leading a whole phalanx of soldiers riding their own dragons. The entire sky was filled with them. Everywhere you looked there were dragons! Their wings were flapping with a power that nearly blew me off the cliff, and their great mouths were screaming in cries that nearly deafened me. But the sight of it, Kyra! I've got to paint it!"
For days, then weeks, he worked on the image he had seen. It consumed him. He had to finish it before he forgot how it looked, how it felt, what it meant.
Kyra watched him work. At first she saw only dark outlines, then the dragons appeared, one at a time. And each of the dragons was more malevolent than the last. There was danger in the picture. The Highlord and her dragonarmy soldiers took shape with menacing faces, and the sky was dark and forbidding. Kyra could feel the cold wind from the wings of the huge beasts, sense the hot breath from their snarling jaws, and she knew — all at once — that the painting had captured the ineffable horror of their conquerors.
Of course, they couldn't sell the painting. If the Highlord or any of her soldiers ever saw it, they'd cut off Seron's hands. Nonetheless, he wasn't sorry that he had done it. And neither was Kyra. They both hoped that eventually the dark days would pass, and his picture would be a valued — and valuable — reminder of this evil time. More than that, they both hoped it would forever establish Seron as Krynn's pre-eminent artist.
They kept the bleak masterpiece hidden in a wooden crate under their bed. However, it soon began to rankle them both that Seron's greatest work had no audience. What was the point of having painted the picture if no one ever saw it?
It was then that they conceived their daring plan to smuggle the painting to Palanthas where it might be prominently displayed in a gallery. But they would need help.
"Let's send word to Tosch," suggested Kyra. "He could fly here one dark night and take the painting away with him."
"Do you think Tosch would really do it; would he risk his life for a painting?"
"We have nothing to lose by asking," she said.
Two days later, the peddler who had bought a Seron painting of Tosch carried a coded note out of the city and into the mountain warrens. The note asked their friend to come to them after sunset during the night when the two moons were at their smallest. It was a great favor, and they didn't ask it lightly. And they said as much in the note. If Tosch felt it was too dangerous, they said, he shouldn't come; they would understand.
But still they hoped he would glide down to them out of the dark sky.
The nights passed as slowly as a gnome builds a machine. The days were even longer. Eventually, though, the moons went through their glowing phases. It was almost time.
As the sun descended, sending long shadows across a sad, beleaguered city, Kyra and Seron grew anxious. Tonight was the night.
"Do you think the note actually reached Tosch?" wondered Kyra.
"I don't know."
"What if the peddler were intercepted? If the Highlord deciphered our message — »
Suddenly a loud knock sounded at their door. Instinctively, they both reached for each other. Neither of them uttered a word. The worst, it seemed, had happened. They had been found out.
The pounding on the door continued, matched only by the pounding of their hearts. Seron took a deep breath and kissed his wife lightly on the forehead. "Let's try to be brave," he said in a voice that nonetheless betrayed his fear.
She nodded.
Seron got to his feet and opened the door.
"What did I do, roust you two out of bed?" roared Seron's brother, Long-Chin Cheb. "What took you so long to open up? It's not as if you had so far to go to reach the door," he added, glancing disdainfully at the walls of the tiny hut.
"We… we didn't expect to see you," said Seron, catching his breath. "This is quite a surprise. What brings you to Flotsam? Is — is anything wrong?"