Straight to Gont it flew, straight to the Ovenfell, straight to her. She saw the glitter of rust-black scales and the gleam of the long eye. She saw the red tongue that was a tongue of flame. The stink of burning filled the wind, as with a hissing roar the dragon, turning to land on the shelf of rock, breathed out a sigh of fire.
Its feet clashed on the rock. The thorny tail, writhing, rattled, and the wings, scarlet where the sun shone through them, stormed and rustled as they folded down to the mailed flanks. The head turned slowly. The dragon looked at the woman who stood there within reach of its scythe-blade talons. The woman looked at the dragon. She felt the heat of its body.
She had been told that men must not look into a dragon’s eyes, but that was nothing to hen. It gazed straight at her from yellow eyes under armored canapaces wide-set above the narrow nose and flaring, fuming nostrils. And her small, soft face and dank eyes gazed straight at it.
Neither of them spoke.
The dragon turned its head aside a little so that she was not destroyed when it did speak, or perhaps it laughed-a great “Hah!” of orange flame.
Then it lowered its body into a crouch and spoke, but not to her.
“A hivaraihe, Ged,” it said, mildly enough, smokily, with a flicker of the burning tongue; and it lowered its head.
Tenar saw for the first time, then, the man astride its back. In the notch between two of the high sword-thorns that rose in a now down its spine he sat, just behind the neck and above the shoulders where the wings had root. His hands were clenched on the rust-dark mail of the dragon’s neck and his head leaned against the base of the sword-thorn, as if he were asleep.
“A hi eheraihe, Ged!” said the dragon, a little louder, its long mouth seeming always to smile, showing the teeth as long as Tenan’s forearm, yellowish, with white, sharp tips.
The man did not stir.
The dragon turned its long head and looked again at Tenar.
“Sobriost,” it said, in a whisper of steel sliding over steel.
That word of the Language of the Making she knew. Ogion had taught her all she would learn of that tongue. Go up, the dragon said: mount! And she saw the steps to mount. The taloned foot, the crooked elbow, the shoulderjoint, the first musculature of the wing: four steps.
She too said, “Hah!” but not in a laugh, only trying to get her breath, which kept sticking in her throat; and she lowered hen head a moment to stop her dizzy faintness.
Then she went forward, past the talons and the long lipless mouth and the long yellow eye, and mounted the shoulder of the dragon. She took the man’s arm. He did not move, but surely he was not dead, for the dragon had brought him here and spoken to him. “Come on,” she said, and then seeing his face as she loosened the clenched grip of his left hand, “Come on, Ged. Come on. . . .
He raised his head a little. His eyes were open, but unseeing. She had to climb around him, scratching hen legs on the hot, mailed hide of the dragon, and unclench his right hand from a horny knob at the base of the sword-thorn. She got him to take hold of her arms, and so could carry-drag him down those four strange stairs to earth.
He roused enough to try to hold on to hen, but there was no strength in him. He sprawled off the dragon onto the rock like a sack unloaded, and lay there.
The dragon turned its immense head and in a completely animal gesture nosed and sniffed at the man’s body.
It lifted its head, and its wings too half lifted with a vast, metallic sound. It shifted its feet away from Ged, closer to the edge of the cliff. Turning back the head on the thorned neck, it stared once more directly at Tenar, and its voice like the dry roar of a kiln-fire spoke: “Thesse Kalessin.”