Dragonborn Read Online Free

“We have to. The seal. Flaxfield’s magic. The boy.”
    She stared at the slabs of black that made up Bakkmann’s face.
    â€œIt’s not over,” she snarled. “Not over after all. It’s just beginning. After all these years. He’s found a boy and given him the seal.”
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Pages from an apprentice’s notebook
    THE THING ABOUT ROFFLES is that there are all sorts of them, but they all look pretty much the same. Some are good and trustworthy, while others can be very sly and unpleasant, and there’s absolutely no way of knowing which is which until you have been with them for a long time. They seem to be very helpful, though a little short-tempered. They only ever come above ground for one reason: to look for stray memmonts.
    The memmonts are curious creatures, and they often find gaps in the ground that they can wriggle through to get Up Top. They like the sun, but they have no sense of direction, so once they are here, they find it difficult to get back home. The roffles love the memmonts, and, although there are many of them and one missing wouldn’t matter, they always try to rescue strays.
    Memmonts, of course, don’t belong to anyone, so the roffles are not recovering their property, just doing a kind thing for a memmont.
    They carry almost everything they own on their backs in hard leather cases shaped like barrels that have been sat on sideways and flattened out. Some people say that this is because hundreds of years ago they were put in barrels as a punishment and tipped down the disused shafts of the mines, and then they found the Deep World. Other people say they were miners once, and that they stayed down there and made the Deep World themselves and came to like it better than Up Top. Still other people say that once everyone was a roffle in the Deep World but the people Up Top came through the gaps and liked it here and stayed. No one knows.
    Roffles have pointy shoes and they are just over half as tall as a grown man or woman. Roffle babies can walk when they are seven months old and talk like grown-ups on their first birthday. Every roffle name begins with the letters M-E-G. It is a very rare thing to see a fat roffle, but there was a famous one called Megantople, who sometimes came Up Top to go to fairs and make money from charging people tuppence to see him. He spent the money on gold and jewels and took them back to the Deep World, where he became the richest roffle ever. Even now, roffles who are descended from Megantople are very rich and powerful.
    Everyone knows how delicious the food is that the roffles grow in the Deep World, but they will not bring it Up Top and sell it, so very few people have ever tasted it. Sometimes a memmont, carrying a basket of roffle apples or plums on its back, will break
through to Up Top, and then the people who find the memmont can taste them, but this hardly ever happens.
    Roffles love to give advice and help people, which is a good thing, if it is a good roffle, but a bad roffle will give bad advice and false help, just for the fun of it.

Starback
    was a Green and Blue. No one ever knows how old dragons are, so Starback could have been a youngster of only a few years or a very old and wise dragon indeed. It was impossible to tell. They never looked any different, or behaved any differently, rolling around and scampering like puppies however old they were.
    Starback watched the wizards very carefully.
    They had worked hard to cut the willow. The woman, Eloise, had started the weaving and they had all taken turns until the basket was complete. Then they had carried it to the house and gently lifted Flaxfield into it.
    The old man’s name was Sandage. He supervised it, and he was the one who arranged the herbs around the body, in a very particular order, different from the one that Sam knew. The boy corrected him almost straight away, but Axestone put his hand on his shoulder.
    â€œThis is a wizard, boy. No