The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [197]
“She knew me in her last life?”
“Jill didn’t truly know you, but she’s the one who deciphered your name in the first place.”
Arzosah gently laid her head upon the ground between her paws. “Another poor dragon felled by the blows of wyrd,” Arzosah said. “I should have just thrown myself into a fire mountain and been done with it long years ago.”
“Oh, by the Dark Sun herself!” Dallandra said. “What’s so wrong?”
“To think that a dragon should be brought so low by the machinations of a lump of ectoplasm, a bit of etheric ooze, a gobbet of astral slime! That wretched Evandar, in other words. Curse him for writing my true name on rings, letting it fall into the hands of dweomermasters! It’s the indignity of it all that hurts.”
Dallandra set her hands on her hips and considered Arzosah for a long moment. “It’s truly hard to feel pity for you,” she said at last, “when you’re larger than a banadar’s tent.”
Arzosah snarled, but she did lift her head and cross her paws in front of her chest.
“That’s better,” Dallandra said. “And speaking of the rose ring, it truly is time we had our little chat about Rori. What’s happened? Something evil has, hasn’t it?”
Arzosah groaned. “I suppose if I don’t tell you,” she said at last, “you’ll only command me with my true name.”
“I was thinking of that, truly, but I’d rather spare you the humiliation.”
“Oh very well! There is one thing dragons hate above all else, and that’s admitting we were wrong. We’re so rarely wrong, of course, that we don’t have much practice at it. Perhaps that’s why we hate it so much.”
“Perhaps,” Dalla said. “Wrong about what?”
“I should have listened to you, there in Cerr Cawnen. You were right. I should have let Rhodry die and then gone off alone to mourn him. And—oh, yes—since I’m abasing myself, allow me to apologize for threatening to destroy the entire town. I was out of my mind with grief.”
“I know you were. I was furious with you at the time, but I’d never hold it against you.”
“My thanks, then. After he worked the transformation, I was almost ready to forgive Evandar. With Rori mine, I was no longer alone. Everything seemed splendid—for a while. But then, well, everything changed. Oh, bitter, bitter wyrd!”
“Would you please stop wallowing in self-pity and just tell us what happened?”
“Humph! You’re certainly rude enough for two, but then, the dweomer seems to take people that way. Oh, very well! Rori went mad. It was the wound, you see. It’s never healed.”
“You can’t mean the one that Raena gave him.”
“Yes, I can. Just that.”
“How—it shouldn’t—it’s been fifty years!”
“I know that, but it’s never healed. It’s not much of a wound, a mere scratch to a dragon, just as we said at the time, but it drips and oozes and keeps him awake. He licks it and licks it until I screech at him to stop, but he can’t seem to just let it be. He goes about in a constant rage over it. Sometimes he just flies off, and I don’t see him for months on end. Then he’ll return, and all will be well for a little while, until that wretched, cursed wound drives him mad again.”
Salamander grunted in disgust.
“It’s a hard thing to hear,” Dallandra said. “Arzosah, Rori could come to me. I might be able to do something for that cut now. Before there just wasn’t enough time, since he was on the verge of bleeding to death and all.”
“Oh, I suggested he find you years and years ago. He wouldn’t hear of it.” Arzosah paused, thinking. “He feels shamed, I suppose. He wouldn’t listen to you either, that day in Cerr Cawnen, but now he knows that you were right.”
“I’d never gloat or suchlike.”
“I know that. You know that. He refuses to see it. The wound’s never going to heal on its own, is it? It must have evil dweomer upon it.”
“Not necessarily. The silver dagger punctured a lung, you see. That’s why he was dying from such a small cut.”
“How horrible! But it certainly doesn’t run that deep now. It’s probably because of the thickness of our skin.”
“Yes, your scales must be quite solid.”
“Indeed