By the time spring had raged its final storm and turned gentle, all five young were out of the egg and curling and twisting about the nest, raising their little heads up blindly into the warm spring light. In another ten days their eyes were open and they had begun to perch out on the edge of the nest flapping their young wings, and to cluster around Dawncloud, slithering up her sides and listening intently to the songs she sang to them. She had sung to the eggs, too, all during the incubation, and now the dragonlings pushed at her with demanding little horns to hear the songs again, and to hear others. Without the songs, a dragonling is nothing; the songs were as much a part of them as their brand-new fangs and their fiery breath.
They were very alike, these young, yet each was its own creature, bold in its own way, clever in its own way. They named themselves, as is the custom among dragons, with names chosen from the wealth of the songs. Three were females; two were males. The males would grow darker later. They were heavier and broader of head. The males named themselves Starpounder and Nightraider. The females were Windcaller, Moonsong, and Seastrider. It was Seastrider who began to yearn first out toward the vast world of Tirror, to lean out on the winds staring eastward as if something drew her there, where the sea lay beyond Windthorst. As the summer grew warm they all began to flap on the edge of the nest, and then in late summer to soar down to the lower peaks. Dawncloud was very protective of them, for fear of common dragons and hydruses, and would not let them fly out over the bays at all, for fear of the more formidable sea hydrus she knew lurked somewhere there.
She had sensed the hydrus during all her long months on the nest, and sometimes an ugly song of him touched her. It was not a good time on Tirror; the dark was growing bold. And the young humans who could turn the tide were not many. One boy, one girl, and if there were others they were distant, and vague in her mind.
She did not know just where the boy and girl were, but not far. Surely on, or near to, Windthorst. The wild, larger scenes that marked Tirror’s history filled her mind now, the battles and movements of armies, perhaps because of the growing warfare that scoured this world, and it was harder to touch the unique, small scenes and thoughts. The boy’s songs touched her sometimes, though, pleasing her and exciting Seastrider unbearably. Did the boy sense the young dragon’s yearning? Was he even aware of her?
Dawncloud herself had begun to know a yearning, as fragile as mist, so small a feeling that she could hardly trust it. Was there to be another bonding for her? She had not heard her own name spoken by a human voice since her tall, sandy-haired bard, Daban, had leaped to her back for the last time calling her name and laughing with her and singing. When Daban was murdered she flew to Tendreth Slew and crawled into the mud and went to sleep there, heartbroken.
Was there another calling now?
Did someone stand at the doors of the black palace, perhaps, come from another world? Or was someone meant to come to those dark doors soon, approaching the vague gauze of Tirror’s future? From no other place, she thought, would the sense come, then vanish so elusively. It was a woman, she thought. But the pale aura of her presence was so very faint, nearly without substance at all.
Dawncloud was far too busy tending her young to dwell long on her own needs, for she was driven to hunt ever harder to feed the rapacious young fledglings, to sing to them long into the night, and to watch over their still-clumsy flying. Starpounder still held his tail too low in the wind and grappled at the nest before launching out in unsteady flight; his three sisters laughed at him before leaping skyward themselves. Nightraider kept to himself, diligently strengthening his wings. It took the males longer to master flight because of their added weight. But summer was young yet; they would all be skilled by fall.
*
The owl returned to Nightpool after the last spring blizzard, and then again two days later. When he learned that Teb was the son of the murdered king of Auric, he flew at once to Auric’s palace to search for Camery, but within two days was back, to say she was not in the tower.
“Did you look for her in Bleven?” Teb said, his heart sinking. “Maybe Garit took her to Bleven.”
“I went to Bleven to the place of brewing, as you said. Ah, fine brew, such as was left. There wasn’t much, an open crock, and the brewer himself gone, no sign of anyone, the place ransacked and the whole town deserted.”
“And Camery was gone?”
“Yes. If she was ever there.”
“And you didn’t see a redheaded man?”
“I saw no one.”
“I must go to look for her.”
“Where will you look that the animals cannot? Already the foxes search for her up through Mithlan and Baylentha and over into Ratnisbon. The foxes send you greeting, Tebriel. Did you know that Luex and Faxel tried to rescue you there on the battlefield at Baylentha and drove the dying horse off your leg?”
“No. I don’t remember. . . . But what happened to them? It must have been their cries that Charkky and Mikk heard.”
“Chased by jackals clear to the western ridge, where they went to ground and lost them,” Old Bloody Beak said, grinning. And then, “Here,” he said, pushing out a small object that had lain under his feathered posterior where he had dropped it. “I found this in the house of the brewer, underneath a girl’s ragged gown and tangled beneath a pile of bedclothes.”
Teb took the small, leather-bound diary eagerly. It was Camery’s, the spine sewn with linen thread by a little girl’s hand, the vellum pages covered with her neat, familiar handwriting. She had been at Bleven!
He turned the pages, hoping they would speak to him. But he could read no word, only a few scattered letters and his own name. The writing was very small and crowded, and she had written on both sides of the paper. The last entry was hastily written, scrawled angling across the page.
“I can’t read it,” Teb said, ashamed. “Can you?”
“No owl can read. Our eyes are not suited to such work. Nor can otters,” he said, anticipating Teb’s thought. “Owls can see small birds at great distances, and an otter can see clearly underwater. But letters on a page are altogether a different matter.”
“I must know what it says. Maybe the last pages tell what has happened to her.”
He put the diary into his tunic pocket. He would not look at it again until after the meeting in the great cave, where Thakkur bid the owl come for prayer.
*
Teb sat at the side of the cave with Charkky and Mikk and Jukka and Kkelpin, ignoring the sour looks from Ekkthurian’s friends. More otters than not smiled at him, twitching their whiskers, and he heard soft hahs across the cave in gentle greeting. The owl sat up on the dais next to Thakkur, surrounded by the twelve, Ekkthurian scowling among them, along with Urikk and Gorkk.
“Old Ekkthurian’s lucky he doesn’t have to look at himself,” whispered Charkky. “That frown would make a person sick to his stomach.”
“He doesn’t like having Red Unat up there,” Mikk said. “He doesn’t think it’s seemly.”
“He doesn’t think anything’s seemly,” Charkky said. “Except making others miserable. I wish the hydrus would eat him.”
“Does it eat folk?” Teb said, frowning.
They all stared at him. “Of course it does,” Kkelpin said. “What else would it be wanting?”
“I don’t know.” But it seemed to Teb it wanted something else. He could still see in his mind the lure of those three terrifying faces. “I don’t know what else it could want.”
His songs had returned to him shortly after the hydrus attacked them. But there were new songs, too, come into his head then, ugly songs filled with a sense of the hydrus. And if it had put them there, why had it?