“No! I must see him; I must tell him—”

The man’s shape vanished; the dragon returned, bulking huge in the darkness; only its eyes were alight. “This is not over; more fire will come before I find all my foolish sons. One who should be here is not; we must learn why, and fetch her hence.”

“The Lady …” Arian breathed. “But she hates me.”

The dragon’s eyelids lifted. “What matter, when her realm is imperiled? I must have you, for the strength of your bow, and the land must have her, to command the taig—you cannot do that, can you?”

“No,” Arian said. “I can sense it, and help it, but not command it.”

“Then once more, come. There is no time to waste; by dark tomorrow we must have that immortal back, who should never have left.”

Arian found the experience as strange as the first time and more disquieting. The Lady had laid glamour on her once—what if she did it again? What if the Lady bespelled her into thinking she did not love Kieri? Could she resist all the Lady’s magery? If the Lady was so angry with Arian that she had stayed away, let the forest be burned—but that was a violation of the taig. The Lady could be wrong; the Lady could be selfish …

But when the dragon once more let her see out, it was another fiery scene, and once more she thrust arrow tips into the dragon’s tongue and took them out tipped with the dragon’s fire … and once more the arrows stopped the scathefire. This time, others were close enough to hear: the shouts of terror as the flames towered over the trees, the shouts of relief when the flames fell.

They left quickly, and the next thing Arian saw out the dragon’s mouth was a small, beautiful vale surrounded by mountains. She had no idea where it was, physically, but she knew what it was: the elfane taig, the holy center of the Ladysforest. Had the Lady come here to calm herself? Or sulk?

“It is a complicated matter,” the dragon said. It had not changed back to a human form this time. “The history between us—the Sinyi and dragonkind—reflects certain fundamental differences in our natures. We are more comfortable, for the most part, with rockfolk, and of the rockfolk, with the kapristi, who are of the Law.”

Arian had no idea how this bore on the problem of scathefire or her relationship to Kieri.

“I am very old,” the dragon said. “And it is the nature of dragons to grow more wise as they age. It is not so for all.” It rubbed its chin on the knuckles of one foot. “Sinyi … the Sinyi have beauty and wit and grace and share with the First Singer and Adyan the gift of making beauty. What they do not have is the clarity and logic of elder dragons: they are unable to think out the long consequences, and thus they make foolish mistakes.”