Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [13]
Only one thing lacked to complete her happiness in the fall sunshine. There should be birdsong in the sheltered vales around Galahall, but the hammering and calls of dwarvish workers had chased them away.
The dwarf foreman, hearing some shouts from the roof, trotted over to her, whipped off his cloth sweat hat, and made a sweeping bow.
“Your Protectorship, there’s another difficulty . . . ”
Dwarfs were great ones for finding difficulty. The difficulty could usually be resolved at additional expense. This one had to do with the need for steel-reinforcing cable. There would be a delay of some weeks in completing the project, though they could finish other matters while they waited for cable.
Wistala felt her firebladder pulse with vexation.
Easy there, Wistala, she could almost hear her old guardian elf—and adoptive father—Rainfall say. Civilization is founded on mastering your emotions and guiding your tongue.
There’s nothing less civilized than stomping a workman you hired into hot, soggy mush.
“I’ll give you some funds to purchase it. If it’s light enough, I can fly it here myself. That would be a savings, yes?”
The dwarf bowed again. “Of time and monies. Your Protectorship is judicious.”
The foreman always complimented her when she agreed to his solutions for difficulties. It lessened the sting of suspicion that the dwarfs were padding the bill, but didn’t do much there for the vexation. At this rate, she’d be beggared before she could assume the dignity of her office from a proper resort.
Wistala, even by buying and eating blacksmith scraps and rusted tools to feed her scales, still had little coin left over for her own expenses—particularly since she insisted on purchasing her own cattle and sheep for consumption. Other Protectors demanded feed and metal as their just due, but Wistala asked only for a small yearly contribution from each town and village she “protected” (mostly, she admitted to herself, just by being in the thanedom), leaving it to the local thanes and heads of households and mining interests and craftsmen to work out among themselves. But they tended to pay her in chickens or knitwork, neither of which did much to fill her gold-gizzard.
The dwarfs were putting up a roof over the old ruins of the thane’s manor house, once called Galahall but soon to be renamed Northflight Resort, the local seat of the Thanedom’s draconic Protector. Long ago, as an unfledged drakka, she’d infiltrated the place to retrieve her elvish guardian Rainfall’s granddaughter, who had come under the spell of an ambitious young Thane. The Thane died in the vicious human-dwarf race-wars which had seen the Wheel of Fire, a clan of violent dwarfs who’d murdered her mother and sister, humbled. Since then, it had fallen into disrepair—Ragwrist, while technically the local thane though he considered the office well-managed by attending celebrations to offer toasts at births, marriages, and deaths, didn’t care for tall, gloomy halls. To add insult to negligence, Galahall had been sacked by marauding Ironriders a few years ago in the war that ended with the Grand Alliance.
Wistala had grown sick of sleeping in a barnlike structure, half cave and half thatched roof, near Mossbell. Though warm, it made her feel a bit like a cooped chicken, and her fellow Protectors of Hypatia, when visiting, almost dropped their griff in amazement at the rusticity of her dwellings. They’d all long since at least started on stone palaces surrounded by gardens of water and stone. They’d laughed at her and said their thralls lived better than the sister of their Tyr.
She had plans to make Galahall her official residence, or resort, as Protector of the Northern Thanedoms of Hypatia. All the walls would be linked by a single roof, lined with her own dropped dragonscale and supported