“And you sell their blood?” Dumery asked, mildly revolted by the idea of raising the animals just for that. It seemed awfully wasteful.
“That’s right,” Kinner said, nodding. “We kill them and sell the blood. It’s a fine business, too. There are plenty of wizards out there who need the stuff, and there isn’t a lot of dragon’s blood around. It seems, from all we’ve heard, that the other old dragon-breeding operations, the other ones that the army ran during the war, alldid shut down. At least, we’ve never heard of any others, and we don’t seem to have much competition out there selling blood. I guess the other breeders didn’t see that wizards would still need dragons even in peacetime-or maybe they just didn’t want to disobey orders. So they must have all killed their stock, or set it free. So we’re the only dragon farm left.”
He smiled, and added, “At least, as far as we know.”
“So you...” Dumery began, then stopped and tried again. “So this one farm is where all the wizards in the World get the dragon’s blood for their spells?”
“Well,” Kinner said judiciously, “maybe not all the wizards in the World. We have a good-sized operation here, though. We can satisfy most of the demand from wizards in the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, and throughout the Baronies of Sardiron, and that’s where we sell. The wizards in the Small Kingdoms-what few there are, magic isn’t very popular there-well, anyway, in the Small Kingdoms, or in the Tintallions, or in any of the other northern lands, the wizards have to get their dragon’s blood elsewhere. They can buy it from middlemen in Ethshar, where there’s always some trader who’ll get it from us and double the price, or they can try to obtain it magically, which isextremely difficult-I mean, it involves things like demons-or else they can buy it fromreal dragon-hunters.”
He laughed, and Dumery didn’t like the sound of it. “If you think we dragon-farmerscharge a lot, boy,” Kinner said, “you should try buying from a dragon-hunter!” He sobered. “There’s a good reason for it, too-a beginning dragon-hunter is lucky to live more than a few months. Or maybe days.” He shrugged. “We know dragons here, since we grew up with them and work with them every day; they’re dangerous creatures, no doubt about it. And the wild ones can grow bigger than we ever let them get here. There are ways to deal with them, but it’s risky. Dragons aremean, sometimes. It was a dragon that did this.” He gestured with the stump of his left arm. “Not a wild one, either-one here on the farm. After that happened I decided I was getting old, and I let my son Kensher make the sales trips down to Ethshar and run things around here, instead of doing them myself. And my granddaughter Seldis does the run to Sardiron of the Waters.” He smiled reminiscently. “Seldis killed a wild dragon once-that was how she met her husband, Wuller. This dragon was preying on his village, and they sent him for help, and he saw Seldis in Sardiron of the Waters selling dragon’s blood and talked her into getting rid of it for them. But we know dragons, as I said-she did that with a trick, she didn’t hunt the thing down out in the open, with a sword or a crossbow or something. And my other sons, besides Kensher-two of them took up dragon-hunting, and last I heard, one of them was still alive. We’ve lived with dragons all our lives, and we don’t do anything stupid. Most dragon-hunters don’t live long enough to learn what’s stupid.”
Dumery struggled to take this all in.
It was too much. He fell back on the bed, trying to think.
Kinner realized he’d been rambling, taxing his guest’s strength. He called quietly, “You rest, boy.” Then he herded the remaining children out of the room and stepped out himself, closing the door quietly.
Dumery looked at the closed door for a moment, then lay back, decided it wasn’t worth the effort to think about it all just now, and fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The witch and warlock had left hastily, without even a word to the innkeepers at the Blasted Pine-Adar’s only hope of escaping the Calling was to get far enough from the Source to resist it before Teneria passed out from exhaustion, so there was no time to spare. Teneria quietly rebuked herself for wasting time in explanations and histories, while Adar cursed his own stupidity, and his insensitivity in not seeing how tired Teneria was. He levitated both of them effortlessly and began flying north.
He found that he could not move quickly, though; the Calling was fighting him every inch of the way, slowing him, trying to pull him back south. If he sped up he found himself turning, his path curving back toward the southeast; if he kept himself firmly on course it was like fighting a strong headwind, forcing himself northward yard by yard.
And Teneria was fading; she had put in a long day walking, had carried Adar a quarter-mile on her back, and now she was maintaining a tricky and unfamiliar spell constantly. The meal and brief rest at the inn had helped, but weariness was closing up around her.
If Adar had been a witch, Teneria thought, he could have passed her some of his own energy-but of course, if he had been a witch, she wouldn’t have needed to stay awake. And warlocks did not seem to be able to transfer energy as witches could; Adar was completely unfamiliar with the concept.
After all, why should warlocks need to share energy? They all shared the same inexhaustible Source.
All the same, despite the differences, Teneria thought that she might have been able to tap Adar’s energy if she weren’t so tired, and if she weren’t doing anything else.
She couldn’t possibly do it in her current state, though. And she certainly couldn’t do it without dropping her defenses against the Calling.
If they had met elsewhere, under other circumstances, Teneria was sure that they could have done much more, could have shielded Adar against the Calling with his own energies-but that wasn’t what the gods had wanted.
So they flew unsteadily northward, Teneria in Adar’s arms like a bride being carried across the threshold, and she might have enjoyed the sensations and the novelty had she not been so desperately trying to stay awake.
Perhaps half an hour after their departure from the inn she dozed off for an instant, only to be awakened by a shriek from Adar.
Quickly, she restored her dropped spell, but both were shaken by the incident.
They survived that one.
They had survived that one, but it wasn’t the last.
Teneria never did know exactly what had happened; the events blurred in her memory, lost in a fog of fatigue. She knew that she had finally lost consciousness somewhere over the forested hills, in the black depths of the night-that much she remembered.
But that was all she knew until she awoke atop a bed of pine needles, lying on her back with dawn’s golden light in her face.
She lay on a hillside, surrounded by trees, their shadows black on the ground around her, the sun bright in the east. Her cloak was draped over her.
There was no sign of Adar.
She guessed that when she had passed out he had been unable to wake her, and had had enough control to put her down gently before being carried off to the southeast.
She hoped that they had gotten far enough north to be safe, and that he had put her down and gone on home by himself-but she didn’t believe it, no matter how hard she tried.
And when she used her magic to locate herself, and realized that she wasn’t north of the inn at all, but east, she knew that she would never see Adar again.
Maybe he had headed back, and had been able to stop partway and put her down.
Maybe, in the darkness and fighting against the compulsion, they had drifted off course or unwittingly circled back even before she passed out.