Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [65]
“When he started assisting his father in Tyr duties, I took over the Aerial Host. My name back then—oh, it doesn’t matter. I’m DharSii. I like it better anyway.”
He watched a new stream of molten rock start down the side of the Lavadome, bright and almost yellow in its heat. “My command of the Aerial Host is better remembered now than I thought it at the time. While living it, it seemed as though I was making one dreadful error after another. Each victory seemed to cost me dragons, yet when we’d return to the Lavadome we flew around the Imperial Resort to roars of praise. Seems a hundred years ago. Perhaps it was.”
“You don’t look so old.”
“It’s the waters of the Sadda-Vale. I think that’s why the summer palace was up there; they’re filled with minerals dragons need, I believe.”
“I could use a few mouthfuls I think. All this back and forthing and keeping everyone placated—it would tax old Rainfall’s patience.”
“You must tell me more of him, sometime.”
“Finish your story.”
“It’s not a happy ending, I’m afraid. AgGriffopse and I became, I suppose you would say, rivals. The Tyr liked us both a great deal, I believe. His blood called to AgGriffopse, but I’d like to think that part of him considered me as a possible future Tyr. You always want to look back at yourself in the best possible light, but I find myself unable to do that. I believe I was ambitious, perhaps too ambitious.
“The Tyr had a daughter, as well. Enesea. She was silly and headstrong, decent looking enough but a little on the weak side—never flew for exercise, in that she resembles our friend Imfamnia. Not surprising, Enesea being her aunt.
“If ever a dragon courted, so I courted Enesea. I gave her merits she didn’t deserve, though I will admit she always made me laugh. In the right way, through wit, not in the wrong way, through foolishness. She enjoyed mentioning other young dragons as rivals, but I believe in the end she would have had me. Not from affection or real respect based on knowing each other’s strengths. No, it was status. My position in the Aerial Host made some of her friends sigh and hoot and ripple-wing when I was about, and she enjoyed their jealousy to the fullest.
“I was working myself up to sing my lifesong to her—an old-fashioned proposal is best, don’t you agree?”
Wistala did agree, most sincerely, but perhaps Dharsii was blind to just how much she was like-minded.
“But the moment never seemed to come,” he said. “One night, after a particularly wine-filled feast, we went for a flight around the river-ring. We were jostling and knock-winging. I was nipping at her tail and she was batting me about the face with her wingtip, young dragon play, when suddenly she threw herself into the cavern ceiling on some sharp rocks. I tried to assist her and she began to roar and call as if I’d been murdering her, and the next thing I knew there were some griffaran flying about and a pair of the Aerial Host on exercises were flying to my aid—
“She flew back to the Imperial Rock as quickly as her wings could carry her, bleeding all the way.
“Well, to make a very long and very angry story short, she accused me of attacking her. To this day I don’t know what was in her mind. Did she have a fit of some kind and hurt herself? And when I tried to support her she thought it was a mating embrace—or did she, from the very first, mean to hurt herself and go flying to the Tyr with a story that I’d attacked her.
“I do know this: She closeted herself with the Tyr’s mate, Tighlia, and wouldn’t see me. Looking back on it now, it seemed clever Tighlia meant to put at least one of us out of the line of succession—if she was very lucky, both, as things turned out—
“AgGriffopse went absolutely mad. That’s the only word for it. He challenged me to a death duel. No quarter given until one or the other of us would lie dead. Even if we were each too wounded to finish the other off, the one least able to have his limbs hold him up would be finished by the Ankelene duel-physician.
“So we met