The icy wind hit him like a hard slap across the face, leaving his right cheek red and stinging. He blinked hard, trying to keep his vision clear; it felt as if teardrops were freezing in the corners of his eyes.
“Cold,” he remarked, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.
Kensher looked at him, startled. “A little,” he said. “For this time of year, especially, I guess. But it’s not that bad, really; you’ve just been curled up indoors for too long.”
Dumery gritted his teeth and didn’t answer.
“Of course,” Kensher went on, as they strolled across the yard to the first of the pens, “you’re from Ethshar, aren’t you? It doesn’t get very cold there, does it? Not like up here in Aldagmor.”
“No,” Dumery said, “I guess not.” He had always thought that Ethshar of the Spices got quite cold enough in the winter, when the snows came, but by the middle of spring-which it now was-the snows were long gone, and the spring rains getting progressively warmer. Warm, damp breezes would be blowing in from the Gulf of the East, nothing like the cold, cutting blast that swept across these northern mountains.
He shuddered, literally, at the thought of what this place must be like in the winter.
It occurred to him that maybe he didn’t want to stay here after all.
He thrust that thought aside and looked around.
He and Kensher were standing at the first pen, where wrought-iron tracery connected black iron beams as big around as a man’s thigh. The pen was perhaps thirty feet long and fifteen feet front to back, and the iron barrier was at least ten feet high. The ironwork continued across the top in a graceful arch.
The ground behind the metal was bare stone.
Inside the pen, a dozen tiny dragons were staring up at them.
Dumery stared back.
“Hatchlings,” Kensher said. “Broke the shells a sixnight ago, while I was on the way back from Ethshar-I’d wanted to be here to help, but I didn’t make it. Just two clutches this year; we usually do better.”
The largest baby dragon, which was also the closest, was black, with golden eyes and gleaming white talons. From nose to the tip of its tail it was four or five feet long, Dumery estimated, but most of that length was in the long, curling tail. It had four legs, thin and bony, each one ending in five long, curling claws; its head was long and narrow, with long, upright, pointed, set-back ears. The gleaming yellow eyes had black slit pupils, like a cat’s.
When the dragon realized Dumery was staring at it it opened its mouth and hissed, and Dumery glimpsed a pointed, yellowish-red tongue surrounded by hundreds of tiny white teeth.
They looked very sharp.
It had wings on its back, great black wings, shaped like the wings of a bat, rather than any sort of bird, with thin, leathery skin stretched over a bony frame-except that the wings hung down limply.
“The wings...” Dumery said, pointing.
Kensher snatched the boy’s finger back away from the bars. “They bite,” he said.
Dumery gulped, and looked at his finger, making sure it was still there.
“Broken,” Kensher said.
Dumery looked up at him. “What?”
“The wings are broken,” Kensher explained. “We have to do that to make sure they don’t fly away. We don’t want a bunch of wild dragons running around loose in the woods down there.”
“Oh,” Dumery said, looking back at the little black dragon. “But you have a roof on the cage.”
“Yes, of course we do, but...” Kensher stopped, groping for the best way to explain. After a moment’s thought he continued, “Look, when they fly, they’re a lot harder to handle. If you go in the cage they can knock you down and slip out the door and get away, and there’s no way to catch them if they can fly. That black one there must weigh thirty or forty pounds, and it’s still a hatchling. In a month it could be fifty or sixty pounds; in three months it could top a hundred. You do not want to argue with a hundred-pound flying dragon. It’s bad enough when they can’t fly, believe me.”
“Oh,” Dumery said, looking through the bars.
Behind the big black hatchling were about half a dozen green ones, smaller, but still big enough to be frightening. A reddish-gold one was pacing about in a far corner of the cage; two blue-green ones and a red one were curled up together asleep.
All of them, Dumery noticed, had broken wings.
“So dragons really can fly,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” Kensher said. “Most of them, anyway. Some don’t have the wingspan, or the muscles don’t develop right, but most of them can fly. At least when they’re young.”
“Do any of them really breathe fire?”
Kensher grimaced. “Not around here,” he said. “There are fire-breathing dragons, all right, and back during the war they raised them here, but it doesn’t make any difference in the blood, and that’s the only market we have left, so my great-great-great grandfather culled them all. They’re just too damned dangerous to have around. My ancestors used to have to wear armor just to go near them, and even so, a couple of several-times-great uncles got fried. Sometimes we get a throwback-the trait’s not completely weeded out of our bloodlines yet-but when that happens, we kill it as soon as we find out about it.”
“Oh,” Dumery said, looking at the hatchlings. “So none of these can breathe fire?”
“Not that we know of, anyway, and usually they start to at least spit sparks by now.”
“Oh,” Dumery said, stepping back.
“Come on, let’s look at the yearlings,” Kensher said, beckoning.
Dumery followed him around to the right, past the hatchlings’ cage.
The next cage was several times the size of the hatchlings’; Dumery didn’t care to guess its exact dimensions. The wrought-iron tracery was much simpler, but much heavier, with larger openings. Four dragons, each ten or twelve feet long, occupied it; two were green, two golden yellow. There was a strong and unpleasant odor to the place-Dumery wrinkled his nose at it. He noticed the pile in a corner that was presumably the source for most of the stench.
All four dragons were clustered around the remains of a steer, eating noisily.
One gave the two humans a red-eyed glance, then turned back to its meal.
All four had wings, and again, all the wings were broken and hanging limp.
“Those are just a year old?” Dumery said, looking at the curving talons, claws bigger than his fingers.
“That’s right,” Kensher said.
Dumery noticed a golden wing flopping. “Don’t the wings heal up?” he asked.
“Of course they do,” Kensher replied. “That’s why we have to break them again every year.”
“You do?”
“Of course. Look at those things-four hundred pounds each. And we can’t remove the claws or fangs, because then they can’t feed themselves. We can’t let them fly.”
Dumery looked, just as a green dragon lifted its head with a bloody mouthful of beef. He shuddered. “No,” he said, “I guess you can’t.”
The tour continued, past two more cages of yearlings, and then a dozen huge pens for older, more mature beasts. These ranged from about twelve feet long up to twenty or more, and glared fiercely at the two humans. Every so often one would roar, and Dumery would cover his ears against the sound.
A heavy outer fence ran around the entire group of pens, enclosing much of the plateau. Kensher noticed Dumery looking at it as the pair walked on.
“Sometimes they get out of their cages,” he said. “We don’t know how they do it, sometimes, but they do-dragons are tricky. When that happens, the fence there stops them from going any farther.”