“Stand up, and hold your bow close to your body.”

She did so, and in the next moment the softness under her feet hardened; the sides of the container—stomach?—closed in, and she was back in the dragon’s mouth, peering out between the teeth. Ahead was a fast-moving shape of white flame, but the dragon was faster.

“String your bow.”

Arian strung it. Questions raced through her mind, but she said nothing. The dragon, she hoped, knew what it was doing and questions might distract it.

“Take out five arrows; put them point down in my tongue.”

In the tongue? Arian took out the arrows and set them point down; they sank a little into the tongue that felt so solid under her feet. As she looked, the steel points changed, glowing first red, then white, without losing any of their elegant deadly shape.

“That fire below is my child. I cannot consume it; it is against all law. And your arrows alone would not touch it, but now they are tipped with dragon fire. Aim where I tell you.”

In another instant, she was standing on the ground, with the raging flames coming toward her, their heat beating in her face, and beside her stood the man-shape she had seen before, the flames reflected in his eyes. He held out a handful of her arrows.

“Right in the middle—see the purplish ones?”

Arian set an arrow to the string and drew; the blackwood bent as sweetly as ever, and she sent that arrow straight and true into the purple-white flames. At once, those flames died, leaving a black hole in the wall of fire.

“There next!” He handed her another arrow. Arian shot again, and again the flames died; the others sank a little. He handed her another, and directed the next shot and the next. Each time the remaining flames lowered, and with the last shot, they all sank to nothing. The yellow fires to either side also wavered and died by themselves. The wind softened to nothing.

“Like daskin arrows for a daskdraudigs,” Arian said.

The man murmured something she could not understand and then sighed. “Yes,” he said finally. “And also no. For a daskdraudigs pierced by daskin arrows returns to its true self, which is stone, freed of the evil that animated it. Dragonfire arrows kill the young and destroy their true nature.”

“That was … a young dragon?”

“Our young are perilous, even for their fathers,” the man said. “What they are, we all have been, but those of us suffered to live grow old and understand the consequences of actions, ours and others.”

“Why do you call me Half-Song?” Arian asked. “Because I am half-Sinyi?”

“It might have been that, but no. You are half a song this land wants to sing. The other half of the song approaches, but the time is not yet.”

“Kieri?”

“Your names have no meaning for me. Sorrow-King, I name him.”

“He’s coming here?”

The man looked at her, his eyes now glittering fire though the other fires were out. “And we must go.”