But Peilanne, Darien, and the customers watched nervously, and nobody missed that Gannie paused by the window to scan the sky intently.
When Kory paused breathlessly by the table and set the girl down, Annella grabbed her and held her tight. Elinor waved her arms enthusiastically. “They know all about dragons!”
“Quite a bit,” Gannie admitted. The other adults in the room looked less convinced about this, turning to Darien for confirmation.
“What would I know?” he said irritably. “I run an inn.”
After a moment’s silence he admitted grudgingly, “But I know a little about dragons-the way a man like myself might hear things-and yes, all the details sound real.”
Gannie sat beside Brann, who shrank back from him. “Are you cold?” Gannie gestured at the fire, which was dying to embers. “Soon it’ll be covered with gray ash, like someone waking by a burned-out campfire in the morning …”
*****
They woke covered with a light pall of ashes, as from a burned-out campfire; they looked down the valley and saw that much of it was hidden by smoke. They washed up quietly, not looking at each other.
They headed downhill slowly, in human form, carrying the lance and the saddle. When they reached the villagers, no one glanced at them or wondered at their load; everyone was burdened.
Some were empty-eyed and blank, some were angry, some weeping. All of them carried trunks, awkward and badly tied parcels, or grain sacks packed hastily. Many of them carried children too young or too tired to walk.
Ahead of them the sign for the Inn of Road’s Ease rocked as it flamed, the letters glowing as they burned.
The innkeeper was one of the refugees, half-stumbling as he walked. On his back he bore a rack of pewter ale steins.
He tripped on a rock in the road. Koryon leapt forward to steady his load and hold him upright. “Are you all right?”
The innkeeper looked at him as though he hadn’t understood the words. “He burned our buildings, our farms.” He pointed to the opposite hill, where the ruins of cottages and outbuildings were visible through the smoke. “He burned the second cutting of hay that we needed for the winter.” His brow furrowed. “He said he was warming up for a special fight.”
Koryon and Elgan watched him stumble down the valley. Elgan rubbed his arm where the contract still clung.
Koryon stepped quickly behind the ruins of the grain storage and tossed a coin. “Call it.”
A moment later he muttered darkly and changed forms. “Put the saddle on me.”
Koryon, with Elgan on his back, used the morning wind to drift up the opposite hillside toward the outskirts of the town. A barn, hayrack beside it, blazed in front of them. Elgan tugged on the left rein. “Circle it to the left, hold your wings still to not make any noise, spiral up to the right on the thermal rise from the fire- “I know how to fly.”
Elgan shut up as Koryon dropped toward the blaze. A woman, running back and forth in front of the barn, screamed at the sky, waving a baby aloft. The baby didn’t move. Elgan shut his eyes. “Hurry up.”
As Koryon glided into the edge of the thermal, his right wing tipped up, full of rising air. He rolled toward it and spiraled up, moving in a little at a time until they were running a tight spiral upward. Elgan checked the lance swivel for the ninth time, looking around constantly. “Koryon?”
“Mmm?” Koryon had his lips pressed tight over the bit, swinging this way and that nervously.
“I think he knows-”
“Of course,” a voice beside them said coolly, and Elgan slammed the reins to the left as a dark figure streaked through the space where they had been, claws raking empty air.
“-everything we’re going to do.” Elgan held the lance close to himself, grateful he hadn’t dropped it. As Koryon swung around, he held up a finger automatically, at arm’s length like a wing tip, and tested the breeze. It felt cold.
They hung under the cloud cover, looking this way and that, seeking Jaegendar.
Elgan said finally, “What’s the classic maneuver out of a failed lunge?”