The Dragon's Son Read Online Free Page B

but for the fact that every creak could be an act.
    Malfiesto considered himself clever. He had been furious when Anora had been
chosen to lead the Parliament instead of himself and he was quite capable of
deciding that he was above the law. Draconas disliked Malfiesto, whose acid
still burned on his tongue, if no longer in his belly.
    Litard was a middle-aged male, hale and hearty in his late eight hundreds.
He sported flashy green scales, of which he was very vain and took great care.
During previous meetings of Parliament, Litard had spent much of the time
preening and grooming himself, to the ire of the other dragons. He was looking
a bit seedy these days, Draconas noticed, as if he had other matters on his
mind. Litard refused to meet Draconas’s eye.
    Mantas was the age of Draconas, a relatively young dragon, and a mystery to
everyone. He kept his colors dark, as the saying went among dragons, rarely
sharing his thoughts, never speaking unless forced to do so by some direct question.
He was an observer, not a participant. He seemed to have a great many secrets
hidden beneath his blue-purple scales and, because he was such a very obvious
suspect, Draconas had almost written Mantas off. Mantas had no trouble meeting
Draconas’s eye. He held his gaze so long that it was Draconas who looked away.
    Jinat was another elderly male, though not as old as Malfiesto. Red in his
youth, his scales had darkened to burgundy. He was mild and unassuming and
always seemed laden with some heavy sorrow, as though bearing the weight of
everyone’s sins upon his shoulders. He did not make a very good suspect unless,
Draconas thought, the weight Jinat bore was that of a guilty conscience.
    The last of the males was Arat, a sharp and intelligent dragon of early
middle age, cunning and selfish. His scales were red-orange and his thoughts
almost always tended to that color, his brain afire with schemes and plots. He
made no secret of the fact that he despised humans. He went out of his way to
avoid having anything to do -with them and he sat through the meetings with a
curl on his lip, to show that he considered all this namby-pamby care of these
insignificant creatures a waste of time. He ranked high on Draconas’s list.
    Once the dragons had settled themselves—though the darkness was still
restless with their movement—Anora opened the session by relating the terrible
events that had precipitated this crisis.
    Anora told how the dragon Maristara had, several hundred years earlier,
broken the Law of Dragonkind by seizing Seth, a kingdom of humans located in an
isolated valley surrounded by mountains. She had taken human form—not by magic,
as was done in the case of Draconas—but by murder. Down through the years,
Maristara had murdered countless human females, torn the hearts from their
still-living bodies, then used the images of those bodies to rule over the
kingdom of Seth. She had again broken the Law of Dragonkind by giving human
females dragon magic, teaching them to use this magic to defend against dragon
attacks. Thus she and the humans who served her were able to stave off the
members of Parliament, who had tried several times to enter the kingdom in
order to remove her.
    Maristara had a companion in her evil—a male dragon who acted as Maristara’s
spy and informant, and who received payment in the form of all the male
children born to the women of Seth who possessed the dragon magic. The male
dragon had also taken human form, undoubtedly by murdering his victim. His name
was Grald and he ruled over another kingdom—one that was hidden away from the
sight of humans and of dragons. Here he raised the male children who had been
born with the dragon magic, teaching them to use their magic to fight dragons
and other humans.
    “Hoping to stop Maristara,” Anora continued, “Draconas formed a plan. He
recruited a human male and transported him to the kingdom of Seth. There this
human male was supposed to find the human female