Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [107]
Or when Scabia told some old tale of desperate vengeance. Then he grew attentive and his griff twitched as he stared at Scabia through lidded eyes.
RuGaard frightened her at such times. She could almost feel the violence in his thoughts.
Thank the spirits she had the comforting presence of DharSii beside her at such times. Caught between the quiet, reserved AuRon, creepy in his ability to disappear into the scenery and his own thoughts, and RuGaard’s gloomy brooding, she needed a companion to provide mental, and a bit of exhilarating physical, escape.
There were flowers in green meadows the colder altitudes just above the ground that could support trees. Spring had come at last.
Spring. Her hatchlings would be above ground this spring.
Wait, not her hatchlings. They counted Aethleethia as their mother, even if they could barely comprehend a mind-picture from the lazy ninny.
The offering of her hatchlings had been Scabia’s price for giving the exiles from the Dragon Empire refuge at Vesshall in the Sadda-Vale. Her daughter Aethleethia was unable to have eggs of her own and both were eager for hatchlings in their hall. Almost as soon as she laid them—the other dragons thought their father was Aethleethia’s mate NaStirath, a foolish dragon of proud lineage, had mated with Wistala to produce the eggs—she’d lost her clutch.
She, DharSii, and NaStirath had conspired to hide the truth that DharSii was the true sire. Though one of the males did bear stripes as dark as DharSii’s, the suspicious Scabia had been placated when Wistala pointed out that her brother AuRon was also a striped dragon.
No matter who they counted as mother, the three males and two females would be ravenous, and if they were to have anything besides the bony fish or carapace-creatures and snails of the lake to eat, she and DharSii would have to find and kill the trolls that had been raiding sheep, goats, and caribou from the mountain slopes and patches of forest in the valleys.
DharSii and Wistala had discovered the remains of troll-eaten game on one of their flights to get some privacy from the other dragons of the Sadda-Vale. A troll could easily eat as much as a dragon, and according to DharSii if the food supply was truly superlative, it would reproduce.
Scabia’s blighter servants had been frantically breeding cattle, sheep, and goats and releasing them into pasture ever since the Wistala and her exiled companions arrived. There was ample game for a whole family of trolls, though the solitary trolls didn’t form anything that might be recognized as family.
So now they were on the hunt for what might be called the most dangerous vermin in the world.
Wistala liked a hunt. She liked it doubly well with a dragon she loved and admired. She’d long since learned she could admire something without loving it, or love someone without admiring them, the combination of the two went to her head like wine. DharSii—“Quick-Claw” in the dragon-vernacular—when on the hunt spoke and acted quickly and efficiently, with none of the stupid roaring and stomping a typical male dragon, NaStirath, say, indulged in upon spotting the prey.
“Troll tracks,” DharSii said, waggling his wings.
She followed him down to a felled tree on a steep slope. She had to dig her claws into the earth deep to keep from sliding.
A long, muddy skid-mark stood on the lower side of the fallen tree, the mosses and mushrooms devouring it were smashed and smeared where the troll had placed a foot, and it had slipped on the soggy mud beneath, sliding a short way on the slope. They could see broken branches on another tree a short distance downslope where it had arrested it’s slide.
Wistala sniffed.
“Scat, too,” she said. She followed the bad air to a mound of troll droppings, though the less said about it the better for all concerned. For all their strength of torso and limb, a troll’s digestive system was rather haphazard, sometimes expelling food barely absorbed. This mass of skin, bones, and hair was disgustingly fresh and hardly touched by insects yet, a beetle or two