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murderers.
Before they had killed his father, these men had treated him with
oily, smiling deference. He wished it were poison he carried
instead of mithnon, and he promised himself for the hundredth time
that when he was grown, these men would die by his hand. Each of
them would die, and Sivich would die slowly, with great pain.
    When at last the men settled around Sivich
before the fire, the edge of their thirst dulled and their mugs
refilled, Blaggen motioned Teb away to his corner. Teb’s arms ached
from the heavy trays. He crouched against the stone wall on a bit
of torn rug, the hump-shouldered jackals crowding close, and stared
up through the small, barred window. A few stars shone in the black
sky, and faint moonlight touched the tower, but he could see no
movement within, and he imagined his sister asleep, curled up with
her stuffed cloth owl. Once there had been a real owl, small and
fat and filled with owlish humor. But Sivich had had the jackals
kill it.
    Now the two jackals began to bicker between
themselves with low, menacing growls, pacing and hunching around
Teb, their lips drawn back over long yellow teeth, the mottled,
greasy hair along their spines rising in anger. They always pressed
against Teb when they quarreled, and sometimes, snapping at one
another, they bit him as well. He pulled away from them and huddled
against the cold stone wall. The warriors were all talking at once,
trying to tell Sivich something, shouting and swearing. What was
the wonder they kept boasting about? What had flown over
them? Teb had heard only snatches of talk as he served the liquor,
a few words, questions broken by shouts for more drink. Now at
last, one man at a time began to speak out under Sivich’s
questioning, Sivich’s own voice sharp with excitement as the dark
leader moved back and forth before the flicking tongues of
flame.
    “ Where on the coast? Exactly where?” Sivich growled. “Are you sure it wasn’t a hydrus?
What. . . ?”
    “East of the crossing. It was almost
daylight. We saw . . .”
    “It flew, I tell you. Can’t no hydrus fly
through the air. And there ain’t no common dragon that big.
Nor that color. Never.”
    Teb shivered, straining to hear.
    “Not a common dragon. Big. Bright. It—”
Pischen’s voice broke as if the thin, wiry man were overcome with
emotion. “Pearl colored, its scales all pearl and silver, and it
reflected the firelight when it came down at us, all red and
spitting flame, too. . . .”
    “Horns as long as a man’s arm,” someone
shouted.
    Teb’s heart raced. They were describing a
singing dragon. No other creature would be that color, and so big.
But were there any singing dragons left in Tirror? He could imagine
it there in the sky, yes, huge, a dragon as luminous and iridescent
as the sea opal, its great delicate head finely carved, its
luminous horns flashing in the firelight. Was it really a singing
dragon they saw? Or only a common dragon, wet from the sea,
reflecting the light of their campfire?
    Even before the five wars began, no one knew
whether a singing dragon still lived anywhere in Tirror. Yet Teb
had dreamed that one might lurk, hidden and secret, in the tallest,
wildest mountains far to the north. He and Camery had stopped
talking about dragons, though, after their mother died. Their
father didn’t like such talk, particularly in front of others, his
soldiers or the palace staff. He would hush them with an abrupt
turn of the conversation, or send them on an errand.
    Well, Teb was used to his father’s anger,
after his mother died. First she had gone away, and his father had let her go, had not gone after her, which Teb could never
understand. Then his mother had drowned all alone, in the tide of
the Bay of Fendreth, when her boat capsized. Though what she was
doing there in a boat Teb had never known. And how she could have
drowned, when she was such a strong swimmer, was always a puzzle to
him. Except, that afternoon had been one of