Ostvel performed according to expectation: his soup spoon clattered from his fingers into his bowl, overbalanced, and flipped onto the table, sending a splash onto his tunic. Jahnavi forgot himself and gave a whoop, quickly silenced by Walvis’ attempt at a stern glare. But the Lord of Remagev was soon grinning along with the rest of them as Ostvel struggled valiantly to recover his dignity, forfeit to a soup stain on his clothes.
“Alasen!” he finally bellowed, and silence erupted into laughing congratulations.
Riyan signaled to Jahnavi to refill all the wine cups. The castle folk down the hall, seeing the merriment at the high table, were attentively quiet as Riyan got to his feet and raised his goblet.
“The Princess Alasen!” he announced. “And my father the Lord Regent, who’s to be a father again!”
The echo rang out from more than seventy throats, and cups were emptied down those throats an instant later. Skybowl’s people had been, until three years ago, Ostvel’s people; Riyan knew that in many ways they still were. He saluted his father with his goblet and grinned.
Wearing a You’ll pay for this, boy look, Ostvel cleared his throat, blotted ineffectually at his tunic with his napkin, and rose to make the required response to his son’s toast.
But he had barely drawn breath when a rush of wings filled the hall and the sky trembled with a hundred trumpeting calls. A stunned instant later, everyone scurried for the windows or to get outdoors. The dragons had come to Skybowl.
Sionell and Jahnavi’s mother, Feylin, was the first of those at the high table to escape the hall. Riyan saw her dark red head in the crowded foyer, but she did not join the rush out into the courtyard. She nudged her way clear of the surging throng and turned for the stairs, bounding up them three at a time.
Sionell grabbed Riyan’s hand. Her round cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes brilliant with excitement. “Hurry!” she cried, and pulled him forward.
They found Feylin where Riyan had suspected, in the uppermost chamber of the main tower. She was leaning precariously out an open window. Sionell let go of Riyan’s fingers and joined her mother. He shook his head, smiling, and put an arm around each to keep them from falling.
“Mother, just look at them all!”
“Hush! I’m counting!” Feylin responded almost frantically.
The dragons were swooping in over the lake for a drink. Some plunged directly into the water for playful baths, while others landed almost daintily on shore. Still more flew lazy circles over the bowl of liquid sky from which the keep had taken its name. A few dragonsires drank their fill, then perched on the rocky heights of the ancient crater to guard their flight of hatchlings, females, and dozens of three-year-old immature dragons.
Riyan watched, enchanted. He told himself that even if not for the honor of holding Skybowl and mining dragon gold for his prince, with all the trust this implied, he would gladly have taken the keep for the sheer delight of watching dragons. As bathers left the water, green-bronze and gold and black and russet hides glistening in the sunlight, wings were spread to flick showers of droplets and reveal contrasting underwings. No, Skybowl could have been as barren and rough as those who had never seen it believed it to be, and Riyan would still have counted it a privilege to live here.
The dragons seemed inclined to linger, and Feylin gradually relaxed as she was given time to do a second count and a third. Sionell and Riyan faithfully repeated the numbers she gave them.
“Three memories are better than one,” she said, “especially when one of them is a Sunrunner memory trained by Lady Andrade.” Stepping back from the window, she sighed. “Just the population I expected from prior statistics. But unless they find more caves, the extra females will die at the next mating the way they did this year, and three years ago, and—damn it, we need more caves!”
“There’s Rivenrock,” Sionell said.
“Which they won’t go near, after so many of them died of Plague there. Oh, they fly over it, it’s on their path through the Desert. But if they’d only use the caves, their numbers would increase to a safe level. I won’t feel confident until we see upwards of eight hundred after hatching.” She paused, then pointed and exclaimed, “See that one over there, the russet one with gold underwings? That’s Sioned’s dragon, Elisel!”
“The one she can speak to?” Sionell almost lost her balance and Riyan held on more tightly to her waist.
“Careful!” he said. “She doesn’t really talk to her—more like shares feelings and pictures with her. Although Sioned says Elisel knows her name.”
“You don’t believe she does?” The girl turned her head, brows raised. “You’re a Sunrunner, too—have you ever tried it?”
“Never.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Of course!” Riyan answered. “But Sioned isn’t really sure how she does it, and she’s cautioned the rest of us not to attempt it until she understands what really happens between her and the dragon.”
“A wise precaution,” Feylin added, eyeing her daughter. “It’s a good thing you’re not a Sunrunner, my pest, or you’d be wild to find a dragon of your own!”
“It’d be wonderful,” Sionell murmured, gazing wistfully at the dragons. “It doesn’t seem fair—I know I can’t ever touch one, but the faradh’im can, and Sioned won’t even let them try! Think of all the things we could learn from them, and what we could tell them!”
Riyan blinked and nearly lost his hold on Sionell. There was one thing that dragons needed desperately to know if their population was to increase to a level Feylin considered safe. Could Sioned communicate it to her dragon?
He asked; Feylin shrugged. “She tried. She conjures a picture of hatchlings coming out of the caves—and Elisel whines and trembles, and shows her dragon corpses. Even though she’s not old enough to have seen it for herself. Which indicates,” she added with a pleased glint in her eyes, “that they communicate information to each other from one generation to the next rather neatly.”
The sires keeping watch on the crater’s lip bellowed suddenly, and the hatchlings reacted with a flurry of splashing water and flapping wings. Soon the evening sky was thick with dragons, circling over the lake until all were airborne. The sires trumpeted once more and the group set off for the south, where they would winter in the hidden canyons and valleys of the Catha Hills. Several of the females lingered behind, including Sioned’s russet dragon, to chase the slower hatchlings along. Riyan wondered if Sioned would be waiting at Stronghold for Elisel to fly past, waiting to greet her dragon on the last of the autumn sunlight.
Dinner being perforce over, Riyan ordered Jahnavi to have small cakes and hot taze sent up to each bedchamber, and dismissed his new squire for the evening. He then went to help Camigwen’s nurse put her to bed—not an easy task, for the child had seen the dragons, too, and wanted an instant repeat of the morning’s game with her big brother. To the nurse’s dismay, he obliged. Wearing wings made of a blanket, he swooped around the room while Jeni squealed with laughter and tried to “slay” him with a wooden spoon. At last Alasen came in, calmed the uproar, and had her daughter smartly in bed with the promise of one more game of dragons tomorrow before they left for Stronghold.
“But I thought you were going to stay for a little while,” Riyan protested as they left Jeni to sleep under her nurse’s watchful eyes. “I know Sorin wants Father’s advice about Feruche. I was thinking of riding up there with him and Walvis tomorrow.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. You three can go while I visit Sioned.” She gestured him to a chair and seated herself on a couch, leaning forward to pour cups of steaming taze from the pitcher which had been placed on a low table. “Rohan wants us to look in on the work at Dragon’s Rest, so we’ll return to Princemarch through Dragon Gap. Just us and the horses, no baggage wains or anything. Although your father will probably spout some nonsense about having me carried in a litter the whole way. Sioned says he was absurd when your mother was pregnant with you and he was certainly that way before Jeni’s birth.”