City of Dragons: Volume Three of the Rain Wilds Chronicles Read Free

hate us. Some pretend awe and bring gifts, but behind their flattery and cowering, there is hatred for us. Never forget that. In this part of the world, humans have hated us for a very long time. Once, before I emerged as a dragon, the humans here sought to destroy all dragons. They fed slow poison to their own herds to try to kill us. They captured and tortured our Elderling servants in the hope of finding secrets they might use against us. They destroyed our strongholds and the stone pillars by which our servants traveled in an attempt to weaken us. Those few of us they managed to kill, they butchered like cattle, using the flesh and blood of our bodies as medicines and tonics for their feeble bodies.
    I do not recall any of this . Tintaglia searched her ancestral memories in vain.
    There is much you do not seem to recall. I think you were encased too long. It damaged your mind and left you ignorant of many things.
    She felt a spark of anger toward him. Icefyre often said such things to her. Usually after she had implied that his long entrapment in the ice had made him partially mad. She stifled her anger for now; she needed to know more. And the arrow in her side was pinching her.
    What happened? Back then?
    Icefyre turned his head on its long neck and gave her a baleful look. What happened? We destroyed them, of course. Humans are nuisance enough without letting them think they can defy our wishes.
    They were nearing the spring at the heart of the oasis. Human carcasses littered the sand; swooping down into the basin was like descending into a pool of blood scent. In the late afternoon sun the corpses were starting to bake into carrion.
    After we feed, we will leave here and find a cleaner place to sleep, the black dragon announced. We will have to abandon this spot for a time, until jackals and ravens clean it for us. There is too much meat here for us to consume at one time, and humans spoil quickly.
    He skidded to a landing in the pool where a few human bodies still bobbed. Tintaglia followed him in. The waves of their impact were still brushing the shore when he picked a body out of the water. Avoid the ones encased in metal, he counseled her. The archers will be your best choices. Usually they just wear leather.
    He sheared the body into two and caught one part of it before it could fall into the water. He tossed the half carcass up into the air, then caught it in his jaws, tipping his head back to swallow it. The other half fell with a splash and sank in the pool. Icefyre selected another one, engulfing it headfirst, crushing the body with his powerful jaws before swallowing it whole.
    Tintaglia waded out of the contaminated water and stood watching him.
    They will spoil rapidly. You should eat now.
    I’ve never eaten a human. She felt a mild revulsion. She’d killed many humans but eaten none of them. That seemed odd now.
    She thought of the humans she had befriended: Reyn and Malta and her young singer Selden. She’d set them on the path to being Elderlings and not given much thought to them since then. Selden . She felt a spark of pleasure at her memory of him. Now there was a singer who knew how to praise a dragon. Those three humans she had chosen as her own and made them her Elderlings. So they were different, perhaps. If she happened to be near one of them when they died, she’d eat the body, to preserve their memories.
    But eating other humans? Icefyre was right. They were only meat. She moved along the shore of the pool and chose a body that was fresh enough to still be leaking blood. She sheared him in two, her tongue writhing at the feel of cloth and leather, and then chewed him a few times before consigning him to the powerful crushing muscles at the back of her throat.
    The body went down. Meat was meat, she decided, and she was hungry after the battle.
    Icefyre ate where he was, wading a few steps and then stretching his neck out to reach for more dead. There was no lack of them. Tintaglia was more