Raff’s family hut was larger than many kobold dens. In fact, it sprawled across what would have been several streets in every other part of the city Kaz had seen. From above, he could tell that some other enormous buildings were nearby, also surrounded by high walls, but Raff’s was the largest, other than the palace itself. That was so huge Kaz thought even he might have become lost in it, so he was glad they had decided to stay with Raff instead. The large male was also correct that there was plenty of room for the dragons, which was good.
They landed in an open area surrounded by flowers, with a convenient pool of water in the center. The dragons immediately began to drink, with a few even trying to climb in for a bath. It wasn’t large enough for that, however, and they broke a large piece off the statue in the center, which was unfortunate, because it wasn’t as pretty with only one arm and no head.
Even Raff seemed a bit chagrined as people poured out of the building, many of them looking angry. Jinn was there, in a clean dress, with her bright red curls tamed into a puff at the back of her head. Kaz recognized a few others from the group they’d rescued, and they, too, looked clean and far more relaxed, though their faces were still drawn and tense.
Once Raff explained what was going on, though his mother looked ready to nip his ears, most of the people went back inside. Kaz lingered with Snen and Li, watching as the xiyi checked each dragon with well-practiced confidence.
“Sso long as they have enough meat, I should be able to keep them from hunting,” Snen said, stretching his sibilants as he seemed to do when he was worried or upset. “There are deer in the woods nearby, and they scented them.”
Indeed, several of the dragons were staring toward the broad swathe of woods that grew between this building and the palace. Now that they weren’t thirsty any longer, they were thinking about their bellies instead, and the meat Kaz had fed them earlier obviously wasn’t enough.
Li said wonderingly, staring at the dragons as intently as they stared at the trees.
Kaz had no idea, but he couldn’t feel it, except through her. It was a distant gnawing in the pit of his belly, and he probably wouldn’t even have noticed it if she hadn’t mentioned it. He had spent a great deal of his life hungry, after all. Apparently these dragons hadn’t, or else the feeling was far stronger than what he sensed, because they looked ready to fly away.
And they could also loose a dozen powerful, intelligent dragons in the middle of the human city. Now that he’d had time to think about it, that seemed like an even worse idea than it had originally, and he wondered if he should have simply had Snen fly them out of the city altogether. Besides, almost all of the other dragons were larger than Intong, which indicated they were probably older. Removing their runes would be more difficult, if it was possible at all, and both Kaz and Li were already tired, however much his dragon might try to deny it.
“We should wait until we’re rested,” he said, scratching the scales at the base of Li’s horns. It was hard for her to reach there, and he could feel her satisfaction when his fingers found just the right spot.
She sighed.
Kaz threw a look at the huge building. He had to admit to some curiosity as to what the inside of a human home looked like. He had been in barracks and public buildings, but not a house. Did humans really have separate rooms for everything and everyone, rather than the whole family sleeping together? It made sense that they all had separate beds in the barracks and inns, but those were strangers or tribe-members, not members of the same family. How would they know if one of the pups had a nightmare, or that they were all safe in case of an attack? Was that how Raff’s family had been captured in the first place? Were they taken one by one in their too-private rooms?
Raff had gone inside with the rest of his family, but now he emerged with several more people trailing behind him. These weren’t the warriors who had emerged before, wielding weapons and many still in armor. These looked like average people, of the type who walked the streets of the city, though their clothes all matched. Why did humans all want to look the same?
“Oi, Snen!” Raff called. He was trying to appear as cheerful as ever, but there were dark circles beneath his eyes, and lines etched at the corners of his eyes and between his brows. Seeing it, Kaz moved closer to him, and sent blue ki into his friend, finding that his own power was now so dense that he could push a cloud of pure ki toward the other male even from a short distance.
“Ma agreed to let me have all the meat in the kitchens, including the dried venison she takes when she sails,” Raff straightened a little, attempting a grin, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “That’s a real privilege. Mostly, she prefers Mariner food, which is a lot spicier than ours, but she gets tired of fish when she’s aboard, and Cook has a special way of-”
He broke off, rubbing a hand over his face. The first traces of his beard rasped against his palm. “Doesn’t matter. The important thing is this.” Raff waved, and the people behind him came forward slowly, each carrying a crate or pushing a hand-cart. When they reached Raff, they dumped these on the ground, and a mountain of meat slowly began to form. Once each human unburdened themselves, they all but ran back toward the building.
“Ma says I have to replace it all from my own funds, unless I can find some other way to pay for it,” Raff said as a relieved Snen began to call dragons forward. Even Raff stepped back as the great beasts began to eat, and Kaz didn’t think it was only because they were messy.
Only when Kaz caught Raff watching him did he realize that the male’s words were a hint. He knew the humans well enough by now to understand that this much food would be very expensive, since it had to be brought in from outside the city. That was yet another thing Kaz didn’t understand. Why did the humans gather in groups too large to sustain themselves? Not even tribes in the Deep did that.
Sighing, Kaz pulled a gold ingot from his pouch, then, after a moment’s thought, he removed two more. Turning to Raff, he held them out. Raff’s mouth dropped open, and even he hesitated before reaching out to accept them.
“Blue,” Raff said softly, trying to take only the top bar from the stack. “This is too much. You’ll need the rest.”
Kaz shook his head. He’d implied he had less gold then he did, but even so, he didn’t think he’d need it. “I have to go home,” he said. “I can get more there.”
Not that he thought it would matter how much gold he found. As much as he liked his human friends, the sheer number of people in the city was overwhelming. Even Wheldrake, which was tiny compared to Cliffcross, had really been larger than he was comfortable with. When Kaz left the mountain again, he thought he would stay away from humans entirely, at least for a while, so there would be no need for gold.
Raff frowned, but accepted two of the bars before pushing the third firmly back to Kaz. “This’s enough to pay Ma for the meat and replace most of my armor. With what Lianhua still owes me, I’ll be sitting pretty for a while. It doesn’t feel right to take more than I need, and that’s not something I say often.” He gave Kaz a lopsided grin that lightened his expression for a moment.
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Li nudged Kaz’s hip. Now that the other dragons were happy, she’d settled down as well, but when he glanced at her, she opened her mouth, revealing rows of sharp white teeth.
Kaz laughed at this reminder of the greedy little hatchling she’d been not that long ago. He was tempted to give her the ingot, but stopped, trading the gold for the enormous red ki-crystal he had snapped off on his way out of the hoyi nest. It had been far too large for Li at the time, but now he thought she could handle it.
“Here,” he told her, placing it gently on her tongue. His dragon bit down, gripping the crystal gently with her teeth before tilting her head back, swallowing it whole. Her throat rippled, bulging oddly as the crystal slid down, and then warm red ki began to pulse out of her, filling both of their channels with heat. It was like sitting beside a fire, feeling it chase away the chill of the caves, and he almost slumped at the sudden loosening of his muscles.
When he looked up, he found Raff and Snen both watching him. Raff looked a bit confused, but Snen was nodding in satisfaction. “Dragons need a great deal of ki,” he said, reaching out and stroking his hand down Intong’s neck absently. “Their first meal needs to be from a cored beast, and it’s best that they have meat or some other high-power food every day for the first month at least. I wondered if you knew, since she’s so small, but perhaps she’s simply still very young?”
Kaz blinked. How old was Li? For that matter, how long had it been since he met the humans and started down through the mountain? A month? Two? He thought two was closer, but even tribes within the mountain didn’t all maintain the same schedule, and he certainly hadn’t slept or eaten regularly enough to provide a normal rhythm to his days.
“How old is Intong?” he asked, rather than trying to answer.
Snen hissed thoughtfully, looking at the brown dragon. Only then did he seem to realize that he was still stroking Intong’s neck, and jerked his hand back. Intong was no longer a pet or a mount, after all, but his own person. The dragon just thrust his large head back under Snen’s hand, however, much as Li sometimes did with Kaz, and Snen gingerly began to stroke the smooth scales again.
“Intong is almost two years old,” Snen said, then looked startled as Intong tilted his head and spoke.
Snen gave a soft, rasping laugh. “Not a lot, no. You still have a good deal of growing to do.”
Looking around at the other dragons, Kaz had to agree. He had a feeling Intong was simply a smaller, slimmer dragon than some of the others, but he still had a ways to go before he was as big as the red-scaled dragon who was eating what looked like half of a niu on the other side of the pool of water.
“I think Li is about two months old,” Kaz offered cautiously, suddenly realizing that if she was a kobold, she would only just be starting to eat solid food. She really was still just a baby.
she told him, leaning so heavily against his leg that he actually stumbled to the side.
“She is small, then,” Snen said, making Li glare at him, though he redeemed himself with his next statement. “Dragonlings mature very quickly in the first few months. They can double in size almost daily for a few weeks before they slow down. We usually start training them when they’re about a month old, by which time they are already larger than Li.”
“Great Pellis’ porpoises,” Raff muttered. “No wonder it seems like dragons are already big enough to destroy a village by the time we find them.”
Snen looked sad. “Few wild dragons remain now, and when they are found, either humans or Jianying kill them.”
Kaz and Li focused on the xiyi, their attention caught. “Why would Jianying kill other dragons? I thought you xiyi captured and trained them instead.”
Shaking his head, Snen said, “Not the adults. If there are eggs or hatchlings, Jianying would kill the parents while scouts gathered the young.”
Kaz looked from her to Snen. “About two months ago, Jianying attacked an adult dragon with mostly blue scales. Nine hatchlings flew down the mountain while the adults fought. Do you know what happened to them?”
“Nine?” Snen hissed softly. “If you’re talking about the ones that had nested at the top of Shensheng Mountain, we only caught five. The mother, a gold, chased us away before we could catch the rest.”
Kaz felt a rush of hope. He had assumed that Li’s other parent had been killed, since it wasn’t there during the battle, but what if it - she - was alive? Alive and raising four of Li’s siblings? He leaned forward as Li asked,
The xiyi hesitated. “There is only one place where my people’s eggs will hatch, and most of our offspring survive. The hatchlings are there.”
“But you won’t tell us where it is,” Kaz said.
Snen fell to his knees, leaving Intong hissing unhappily as he glared uncertainly from Kaz to his xiyi. “I cannot! If anything happens to our home, it means the end of my kind. Please understand. I will ask the Kus if you may come, and even if they deny me, I will bring the younglings to you. I swear it.”
Silence hung between them until Raff said, “You gotta admit he has a point, Blue. Seems like wherever you go, things fall apart.” Li whipped around, glaring at the human, but Kaz held her back. After all, Raff was right. Even though Kaz knew logically that most of what had happened lately was the result of years of conspiracy and machinations coming to a head, it did seem like his presence always hurried things along in one way or another.
Kaz didn’t miss the ‘I’ rather than ‘we’, and his heart clenched painfully. “Yes,” he said, “we will.”
She turned her head to focus on him.
Kaz felt like he was going to split in two. Everything in him said that he had to go home. He needed to return to the mountain, and the sooner the better. Finding and freeing all of the dragons could take years. Years he would happily spend with his dragon, but not yet. Something in him was still incomplete, and the only way to finish it, to become what he was meant to be, was to go back.
But he also had to fulfill his promise to Li, not only because he might lose her if he didn’t, but because the longer Li’s siblings bore the curse, the harder it would be to remove. If Intong was only two years old, and the last rune was already too integrated to be dislodged without damaging his dantian, then they had perhaps a year to find her family before permanent damage was done.
“What?” he asked, completely lost.
It did. Li was growing larger almost daily, and she was right. In a month, she would probably be able to carry him on her back without any great difficulty, at least for short distances. And it would give Snen and the xiyi time to decide what their lives would be without Jianying and the qiu stones. But Kaz could feel the conflict driving the colors in her eyes. She was so close to finding at least some of her siblings, but she was willing to wait. For him.
Kaz sank down onto his haunches, finding that even in his human shape Li’s eyes were now above his own. Leaning forward, he rested his forehead against her chest, listening to the beat of her heart, as she had done with him so many times.
“One month,” he agreed. If he couldn’t finish whatever needed to be done in that time, then it would have to wait. However long it took, he would fulfill his promise. That still left a hundred other things uncertain, including the promise he’d made to help Lianhua’s grandmother, but once Li could carry him, surely it wouldn’t take that long to reach the Sheng Empire. Yes, it would all work out, if only he had time.