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"You’re not of our clan, Haz You speak hardly a dozen words of our tongue How do you knoe’ve suffered fro your flocks and herds with a grown one of these around Then tellthem a chance"
She reached out and touched his neck Her skin was greasy compared with his dry hide He felt dirty where she placed her hand "A suffocated hatchling won’t bring us et a purse of silver for this one’s hide There’s no iker ht want his bones, but that won’t replace your stolen sheep after we’ve had our cut"
She spoke into his ear, her tone soft, but he couldn’t understand the words One sounded like it ain and returned to her conversation "I can’t bear seeing any creature tortured Even dragons"
The others just shook their heads and laughed
The sea Auron had heard of it, had seen his parents’ visions of soaring above its jagged coastline on their ht of it was as a choppy bay seen through the angled bars of a cage
It wasupside doith its claws pointing in the air Two trees grew out of the center of the construct, but they were striped bare of branch, twig, and leaf It s that hominids used to cross water Shirtlessto pull on lines, or helped dwarves carry more constructs on board All around was man-laid stone, man-cut wood, man-flattened earth Only the birds retained their natural shape, though Auron wondered ifto the eye against the bright sky
He smelled the ocean, and he didn’t like it It snant e, one at each corner, and walked up a ramp to the ship Auron’s lion ride, and his circulation flowed more freely It was the closest he had been to coot his first look at the li the world in two They set Auron down on deck, and he felt the surfaceon below," he heard the now-familiar voice of Hazeleye order
"What, to the hold? He’s riding on deck with the horses--we have enough cleaning to do as is"
"He’ll die of thirst in this sun Below, or by Helo, I’ll take it to the captain or find another ship" She clih deck at the back of the ship and looked out at the quay with her hand shielding the sun froly elf-witch," one of the sailors muttered to the other as they picked Auron up They attached a line to his cage and lowered hi lay everywhere: bound around cargo, piled on the floor, hanging li They ensnared Auron in another layer of it, securing his cage to the ship’s side, as if the leather bands and cage weren’t enough to keep hiht, and another day in the stuffy hold Rats nibbled at the sore spots the leather had made on his hide Hazeleye fed hie The water disappeared into soive you so a little blood-mixture into the nasal tube He still hated the tube He felt as though he were starving anyway, so hea piece of leather threaded through his snout twice daily No lared, she persisted in her feedings
Two other hatchlings arrived, caged as he was One was hardly out of the shell, a young silver dragon with a barely healed wound where its egg tooth had been It an and looked at hionelle
Auron ot such a wave of confused anguish that he had to break off the conversation before it even started He read all its history in a flash The dragon had been hatched in captivity, had never known the smell of its mother or the proud eye of its father Just sohter who had cared for it, and poorly at that It was harder to know the mind of the female; she must have been a ain, si to re but bare words
"Youname?"
"Notassuch"
Not as such? What did that ray Father AuRel Father bronze Your naainst the deck Wasn’t she paying attention? "What?"
"Not as such"
Auron broke it off and rotated his neck so his eyes faced the wall But for soons, the feel of their minds, comforted him In some ways, wretched as he was, he had it better than they The dragonelle didn’t have the knack of g, he was utterly lost At least Auron had known his ons and knehat he was