The Dragon Variation Read Free Page A

Thom assured himself around a surge of coldness, the thing ought take no longer. He bowed once more, acquiescence to the Delm's Word.
    "Korval, I do swear."
    "So." Daav reached into the pocket of his house-robe and brought out a silver key-ring clasped with an enameled dragon. "Quick passage, denubia . May the luck guide you to your heart's desire."
    Er Thom took the ring, fingers closing tightly around it as his eyes filled with tears. He bowed gratitude and affection.
    "My thanks—" he began, but Daav waved a casual hand, back in the Low Tongue.
    "Yes, yes—I know. Consider that you have said everything proper. Go carefully, eh? Send word. And for the gods' love leave me something to tell your mother."
     
    "GOOD-NIGHT, SHANNIE." Anne Davis bent and kissed her son's warm cheek. "Sleep tight."
    He smiled sleepily, light blue eyes nearly closed. "'night, Ma," he muttered, nestling into the pillow. His breathing evened out almost at once and Anne experienced the vivid inner conviction that her child was truly asleep.
    Still, she hung over the truckle-bed, watching him. She extended a hand to brush the silky white hair back from his forehead, used one careful finger to trace the winging eyebrows—his father's look there, she thought tenderly, though the rest of Shan's look seemed taken undiluted from herself, poor laddie. But there, she had never hankered after a pretty child. Only after her own.
    She smiled softly and breathed a whisper-kiss against his hair, unnecessarily fussed over the quilt and finally left the tiny bedroom, pulling the door partly shut behind her.
    In the great room, she settled at her desk, long, clever fingers dancing over the computer keyboard, calling up the student work queue. She stifled a sigh: Thirty final papers to be graded. An exam to be written and also graded. And then a whole semester of freedom.
    More or less.
    Shaking her head, she called up the first paper and took the light-pen firmly in hand.
    She waded through eight with the utter concentration that so amused her friends and enraged her colleagues, coming back to reality only because a cramped muscle in her shoulder finally shouted protest loudly enough to penetrate the work-blur.
    "Umm. Break-time, Annie Davis," she told herself, pulling her six-foot frame into a high, luxurious stretch. Middling-tall for a Terran, still her outstretched fingers brushed the room's ceiling. Bureaucratic penny-pinchers, she thought, as she always did. How much would it have cost to raise the ceiling two inches?
    It was a puzzle without an answer and having asked it, she forgot it and padded into the kitchen for a glass of juice.
    Shan was still asleep, she knew. She sipped her juice and leaned a hip against the counter top, closing her eyes to let her mind roam.
    She had met him on Proziski, where she had been studying base-level language shift on a departmental grant. Port Master Brellick Gare himself, a friend of Richard's, had invited her to the gala open house, sugaring the bait with the intelligence that there would be "real, live Liadens" at the party.
    Brellick knew her passion for Liaden lit—Liadens themselves were fabulously rare at the levels in which Terran professors commonly moved. Anne had taken the bait—and met her Liaden.
    She had seen him first from across the room—a solemn, slender young man made fragile by Brellick Gare's bulk. The introduction had been typically Gare.
    "Anne, this is Er Thom yos'Galan. Er Thom, be nice to Anne, okay? She's not used to parties." Brellick grinned into her frown. "I'd show you around myself, girl-o, but I'm host. You stick close to this one, though, he's got more manners than a load of orangutans." And with that he lumbered off, leaving Anne to glare daggers into his back before glancing in acute embarrassment toward her unfortunate partner.
    Violet eyes awash with amusement looked up into hers from beneath winging golden brows. "What do you suppose," he asked in accented Terran, "an orangutan