“I see,” she replied. Her pen flew, but she glanced up briefly as he held up the pouch he wore on a string around his neck.
“So I built a fire to warm up my dragon and waited for someone to see it and find us. But no one did. But there was pretty good hunting in the meadow place. There were these animals, maybe goats, maybe sheep I think, from what my dad used to tell me. They weren’t deer or riverpig, anyway. They weren’t very fast, and at first they weren’t very scared of us. By the second or third day, they started to be scared because they figured out that Heeby liked to kill them and eat them. So we were eating those, and then we found this place back near some trees. It had a get-warm place for Heeby that she knew how to make work. And a stone building, mostly fallen down, but two rooms of it had good roofs, so that was plenty big enough for us. And Heeby hunted a lot and ate a lot, and so did I. And sometimes we slept on the get-warm place, and sometimes we slept in the old building. Heeby started to grow and get brighter colors, and her wings were growing, and her tail, and even her teeth! And we kept doing her flying lessons, you know what I mean. You used to see us doing them, right?”
“Yes. I used to see you trying to get her to fly.”
“Yes. Well, her wings just got bigger and stronger, and one day she flew, just a little bit. And the next day, she could fly more, and then more. But she couldn’t fly for a long time then, not for a whole day. But she could fly long enough that it got so she could hunt really good. And that girl of mine, all she wanted to do was hunt and eat and sleep on the get-warm place and hunt and sleep some more, and she just kept getting bigger and stronger all the time.”
He shook his head, smiling indulgently. Then he stood up again and looked longingly down at the riverbank. Some of the keepers and their dragons were splashing one another and shouting and laughing. Tats had Fente on the bank and seemed to be scratching her with sand. The dragon looked stupefied with pleasure. Alise looked at her wet letters. She sprinkled sand over her page to dry the ink, waited a breath, and shook it clean. She set out a fresh page. “And then?”
He paced a turn, restless as a tethered dog. “Oh, you know. Ate more, slept more, and got even bigger. We both got lonely, and Heeby said one day, ‘So, let’s go to Kelsingra.’ And I said, ‘Can you find it?’ and she said she thought she could. And I said, ‘Can you fly that far?’ and she said she thought she could, as long as she could find places to land and rest at night. And no landing in the river because she knows she can’t fly up from water, and after being stuck in the tangle of wood and in water for days, she hates it now. So I said, ‘Well, then, let’s go,’ and we did. And we found Kelsingra, but no one was here. And I was really sad thinking you all must be dead, but she said, ‘No, I can feel some of the dragons, but they don’t or can’t hear me.’ So we just started flying around every day, looking and looking and calling and calling. And then one day we heard dragons trumpeting, and it sounded like a big fight starting. So we went to see and found out it was just Sintara having a fuss. But we found you all up in that slough and told you to come here and here we are.”
He was silent until her pen stopped moving. Then he asked with a trace of impatience, “So. It’s done now, right? Posterity will know.”
“It will indeed, Rapskal. And your name and Heeby’s name will be remembered, generation after generation after generation.”
That seemed, finally, to give him pause. He looked at her and smiled. “Good, then. That’s nice. Heeby will like that. She wasn’t sure about her name at first. And maybe I should have thought of something longer and grander, but I’d never named a dragon before.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “She got used to it. She likes her name, now.”
“Well, she will be remembered by many, many people as the dragon who gave Kelsingra and its history back to us.” Alise once more stared at the gleaming city on the other side of the swiftly flowing river. “It’s a torment to see it and not be able to get over there. I cannot wait until the day I can walk those streets and enter those buildings and find what is left to us of them. I dare to hope for their city records, for scrolls and perhaps even a library…”
“Not much there, really.” Rapskal dismissed her dreams with a shrug. “Most of the wood is gone rotten. I didn’t see any scrolls or books in the places where I slept. Heeby and I walked around over there for a couple of days. Just an empty city.”
“You’ve been over there!” Why had it never occurred to her before? He and his dragon would not be inconvenienced by a dangerous current. Of course they had gone first to the main part of the ancient Elderling city. “Rapskal, wait, come back. Sit down. I need to know what you’ve seen.”