Chapter 9
For Rylana’s first daylight dragon ride, the sun came out from behind the clouds.
It gleamed on Jildarin's silver scales and allowed her to see the powerful muscles rippling beneath them, the incredible span of his wings, and the two sharp horns on the top of his head. She’d never witnessed a dragon ram into an enemy with those horns—nobody would liken his kind to rhinoceroses—but even they appeared quite dangerous.
As she’d promised, she’d slung her bow and quiver across her back and belted her sword to her waist, but she couldn’t imagine needing either while in Jildarin's company. Of course, if another dragon showed up—if his mother showed up—an armory might not be enough to save Rylana.
They’d checked one ruins site and found it far enough from a main road that it hadn’t been visited often.
Creeping ogrethwart vines overgrowing the crumbling structures had almost obscured them from the sky.
If not for the map, they might have missed it through the trees. Regardless, Vormalt hadn’t been there.
As they skimmed over aspens and pixie pines lining a river that flowed out of the Icefang Mountains and toward Luminous Lake, Rylana worried she had dragged Jildarin off on a pointless errand.
Not that he was using his telepathy to complain to her.
If anything, he dipped and dove and tilted, even adding what she might call a sashay to his flight, and the movements suggested he felt good.
Glad to get out of the city and assume his native form?
She didn’t blame him for enjoying his flight, but she had to flatten to his back and wrap her arms around it each time he got exuberant. The tilting was especially alarming. She’d never even ridden a horse without a harness and saddle, and it was a lot farther to the ground from a dragon’s back.
They flew over a road that followed the river, a line of donkey-pulled carts containing ore likely heading to the smelter at the north end of the lake.
Dwarves on the benches looked up warily as the silver dragon passed over their heads.
A couple of the carts veered off the road and into the trees for cover.
As Rylana well knew from being an enemy to dragons, those trees wouldn’t help that much if one attacked, but Jildarin merely twitched his tail and continued onward.
They flew over wetlands to either side of the river, the bare-branched aspens starting to bud out, and found a knoll of high and dry ground.
At the top stood a pyramid-shaped temple surrounded by stone ruins, clumps of slabs thrusting up from the earth, the roofs of the ancient structures long ago fallen and eroded by time and the elements.
Movement near the edge of the knoll drew Rylana’s gaze. A horse tied to a tree stamped its hooves and tried to pull away. Its wide eyes were turned toward Jildarin as he spread his wings and banked, circling the area.
Another dragon has arrived and is watching from afar, Jildarin spoke into Rylana’s mind.
She’d been peering at the ground, looking for whoever’s horse that was, but his words made her sit up in alarm and look toward the horizon.
Her eyes were sharp, but it still took her a moment to spot a black form in the distance.
The dragon was perched unmoving on a rocky outcropping a couple of miles away, wings folded in as it looked at them.
“Someone you know?” Rylana didn’t know whether to hope the answer was yes or not.
An exhalation like a sigh emanated from Jildarin. Lysilria.
“That’s not one of the sisters.”
She is my aunt.
“Oh. Do you think your mother sent her to talk to you in her stead?”
Possibly. I deem it more likely that they traveled this way together, though I don’t yet sense my mother.
Rylana bared her teeth at the thought of facing two dragons. They wouldn’t be a threat to Jildarin, but to her… They might want to make sure she wasn’t responsible for distracting him from the mating duties they believed he should be attending.
“Why don’t you set me down in the ruins, and I’ll reassure that horse and look for its owner?” Rylana suggested. “Then you can go visit with your family.”
A desire for visiting is not what brought my aunt.
“I know, but this is an opportunity for you to tell them all about the wonderful things you’re doing with coffee rubs and how successful your diner has become.”
Things that will interest them not in the least. Jildarin banked to circle the knoll again.
Was he looking for a place to land and set her down? Or avoiding going over for a conversation he dreaded?
Rylana wouldn’t blame him for the latter, but the black dragon sprang from its distant perch and flew toward them.
“You can set me down right on that temple,” Rylana blurted.
She is already speaking with me. She says my mother is in the area and will arrive shortly.
“Take the conversation to them. That’s polite. After you set me down. Right there is good. See that missing rock and flat spot?”
Was the black dragon picking up speed? Maybe she’d noticed that Jildarin had a rider and wasn’t happy about it.
Fortunately, after another sigh, he descended to land on the peak of the temple.
That wasn’t quite the spot she’d had in mind, the flat area being halfway down its angled side, but she scrambled off anyway.
With a grunt, she landed and grabbed the worn apex of the temple.
Jildarin sprang from the perch, the flapping of his wings stirring Rylana’s hair as he gained altitude.
Long before she found her way to the ground, he’d disappeared from view.
The distressed calls of the horse promised it hadn’t been delighted by the nearness of such a deadly predator.
“It’s all right,” Rylana called softly to it as she looked around.
With most of the ruins half-toppled, there weren’t many places for someone to hide, at least not from dragons flying overhead, and she hadn’t spotted Vormalt or anyone else as Jildarin had glided in to land. “Where’s your person?” she asked it.
The horse stomped a hoof, still trying to pull away from the tree. No doubt the scent of dragon lingered in the air.
Rylana walked around to the front of the temple, finding a large tunnel, one that had been built for a troll’s substantial height.
Enough daylight filtered through the aspens to reveal carvings and faded paintings on the stone walls.
They reminded her of the decorations from the chamber under the castle, but she didn’t know enough about troll history to guess if they were similar enough in style to suggest they’d been created during the same era.
To her untrained eye, these ruins looked older than the temple under the castle, but being exposed to the elements might have aged them more quickly.
“Vormalt?” Rylana called into the tunnel and then again around the ruins site.
The horse screeched in dismay. Then a snap sounded. It had broken its reins and taken off toward the river.
“Maybe it knows his mom was coming and isn’t pleased.”
Rylana untied the tranquility knots so she could use her weapons if needed.
All the while, she eyed the sky, worried that Jildarin hadn’t succeeded in intercepting the aunt, that she and his mother were about to fly into view.
But for the moment, the sky remained clear, a soft breeze rustling the branches.
She considered checking inside the tunnel, but she hadn’t thought to bring a lantern and didn’t know how deep she could go before having to grope in the dark.
Another look around the ruins revealed something she’d missed earlier.
A book rested on a slab near where the horse had been hitched, a pencil perched on top of it, as if someone had just left it there for a moment.
Rylana trotted over to pick it up. It wasn’t a book but a journal, and was that Vormalt’s handwriting? He’d never deigned to send her love letters or anything of the sort, and she couldn’t remember it well.
She expected notes about archeology and the ruins, but only a couple of pages had writing on them, and they were filled with a list of names with notes beside them.
“Mayor Sedgewick,” she read.
It was the third on the list and the first that was familiar.
The gnomish Sedgewick family had been governing the city for more than a century.
Supposedly, mayor was an elected position, but the gnomes who voted for officials had kept drawing from that same family for their leadership.
Rylana only recognized one other name—High Priest Miknog, who supposedly conveyed the new god’s wishes to all.
She’d been out of the city for so long that she wasn’t abreast of its politics or who the other leaders and important people were, but all of the names had a gnomish flavor to them.
“What would gnomes have to do with these troll ruins?” she mused.
And what did Vormalt hope to achieve?
Rylana reminded herself that she didn’t yet know this was his book or that he was in the area. Maybe a gnomish archaeologist was out here poking around.
“Except that a gnome wouldn’t have ridden that big stallion out here,” she murmured, looking around again. The horse had disappeared. She hoped it was Vormalt’s mount and that he wouldn’t be able to recover it. He deserved to walk back to the city.
A great thud came from the other side of the ruins, a quiver reverberating through the ground. Rylana dropped the book and drew her sword as she spun in that direction. A small animal scurried away, stirring lingering leaf litter from the past autumn, but nothing else moved.
“What in the two hells was that?” she whispered, then raised her voice to call, “Vormalt?” again.
Nobody answered.