Once they both had a long drink of water, he handed out food. He wasn’t hungry, but Etheg had always fed him when she knew he was upset. Qanath held the food he had given her without eating, eyes turning repeatedly onto the nearby trees.
When a deeper shadow passed above, he glanced idly up. A formation of three birds went by, fleeting south, but there was something wrong with the scale. His mouth fell open. “No.”
Qanath glanced at him, then followed his eyes. When she saw what he was staring at, she grunted. “Sons of Kur.”
He kept his eyes on the winged shapes until they dwindled into specs and vanished. He hadn’t needed the girl to tell him what he was looking at; for birds to appear that size, they would have been close enough to touch. What had just soared by above them was as big as a horse. To the best of his knowledge, there were only two types of winged creatures that grew that big, and the Great Birds stuck to the wild places, venturing down out of their lofty eyries only to confer with shamans who earned their respect. They didn’t fly in numbers over the Empire’s heartland, mostly abandoned or not.
He heaved a sigh and yanked off his boots. “Are you really not impressed or can you just not admit it because you don’t want to sound like the ‘barbarian’?”
“That would be pretty embarrassing,” she agreed.
He had been trying to start a fight, but that made him laugh. Then he shook his head and put the food away. “Why ‘sons’? Can dragonriders not be girls?”
She huffed a laugh. “You have hold of the wrong end of the stick.”
“I feel like the obvious joke is just too on-the-nose.”
She rolled her eyes. “I meant the aviators can be any gender, it’s dragons themselves that are always boys.”
“No shit? How do they reproduce?”
“That, I cannot tell you. Membership in the order runs in bloodlines, it’s how they keep their secrets close.”
“I thought the Scolate was a meritocracy. I thought there were no hereditary ranks.”
“There aren’t. The Sons of Kur belong to the Hakam, it lends them out at its discretion to carry messages and scout.”
Havec shook his head, wondering how anyone could possibly keep track.
“Did he ever tell you the story? Of where they come from?”
“What?”
“Dragons.”
He wanted badly to hear the tale, but every admission of ignorance was a confession of need and worse: an opening of a new debt. She was offering to tell him, though, he hadn’t asked. He had seen renderings of the creatures in Xar’s books, mule-sized and fearsome, looking like some hideous middle stage of transmutation from dog into snake. Unable to resist, he said, “No.”
Without further prompting, Qanath launched into the tale of Adaba, goddess of chaos, who was the beginning and ending of all things. She gave birth to reality and time and also the First Gods, who existed to no real purpose and mostly just tried to keep out of their mother’s way. Over time, the First Gods became increasingly impatient with this state of affairs, because they wanted to build and create, and yet everything they made, she immediately ate.
He got confused at this point, because there were a lot of gods even way back then, none of whom he had ever heard of. Qanath wasn’t the best storyteller, either; she wanted to relate every little detail, and it was easy to lose sight of the plot. Still, he got the gist. Chief among the rebels was the goddess Sut, who rallied her siblings to war. The campaign was a stalemate: they couldn’t defeat their mother but managed to pin her to the sky with their spears. Then Adaba poured down from the heavens in a torrent that created an endless flood from which was born the first dragon, Kur, and it tore the gods apart.
Once it had eaten all of her brothers and sisters, Sut stepped in with a javelin made of lightening and stuck it down the dragon’s throat. It was the final move in a terrible battle, and at the end, she fell down on the drying, new-made firmament and died. Where chunks of her flesh were torn by Kur, they melded with the dirt and became new gods, and where her blood rained down, it hit the dust and bloomed into mortal life.
She stopped talking at this point, but it was another minute before Havec realized she was done. “And?”
“What?”
“What about Adaba? Your story left her pinned to the sky.”
“…because that’s how the story ends?” she said slowly, like she couldn’t see his point.
“So, at the dawn of time, the first gods, who are all dead now, went to war and lost.”
“If it hadn’t been a draw, the world would be a different place.” She gestured at the deeply blue dome above them. “If she had won, we wouldn’t be here. If they had, there would be no death.”
“But can’t she get loose?”
“One day she will. Then she’ll take apart everything she ever made, including substance and time.”
Havec glanced uneasily at the sky. He didn’t believe any of it and yet… Searching after a less unsettling subject of conversation, he suggested, “Maybe they have a piece of the original dragon and that’s how they make more.”
The girl shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.” She made a face. “A piece of million-year-old carrion, that would be really gross.”
He laughed, relieved that they had moved on to lighter things. It startled him when, a moment later, she stood up. It looked like it hurt. “What are you doing?”
She gestured back down the road. “I can’t stay here. Not all night. I’ve been sitting here for the last twenty minutes failing to convince myself I’ll be able to close my eyes.”
Her chin went up as she said it, like she thought he would make fun of her for being afraid. Havec had only suggested they stop in an effort to husband her health; he didn’t care to linger in the area either. He didn’t want to be within fifty miles of that stream bed and reached for his boots at once.
Once he had them tied, they set off down the hill to regain the road. “What do your people believe?”
He frowned into the nearby woods. “There was a… time a long time ago when… the gods followed a white stag they were hunting down from their palace in the clouds…”
He trailed off, at a loss. He was aware of the girl’s gaze but didn’t take offense at the expression on her face. He was wondering the same thing: how could he possibly have forgotten? He had been kidnapped as a teenager, a young adult. Not a small child. Yet he could no longer recall where his people thought they came from or where their world came from itself.
When she never said anything, he demanded, “Not going to take this stellar opportunity to make fun of me, Carries-Around-Her-Degree?”
“I guess I feel like an Avatethura Master already has more than enough on his plate.”
