Hoard

It was immediately more comfortable in Maanet’s home, just by virtue of being out of the desert sun. In fact, the cozy dwelling seemed even cooler than it should, and the reason why was clear at a glance: in the center of the chamber, in a pit which was clearly used for a fire ordinarily, a cauldron had been placed to catch the drippings from a large chunk of ice suspended above it by a makeshift wooden stand. It screamed of magic, being cold enough to produce visible mist, and melting far more slowly than looked natural.

“Psst.” Vadaralshi leaned down to murmur in Kaln’s ear. “Something tells me we’ve found your buddy.”

He nodded, taking in the rest of the view. Very fortunately this was a natural cavern, not something the Hiiri had carved out for their own use; there was sufficient head room for not only himself, but the dragons. Well, dragon singular, since Vanimax had still refused to change forms and come inside.

The floor was flat and appeared to be packed sand, what could be seen of it between the carpets and hides layered everywhere except immediately around the fire pit. Most of the furniture was just pillows, but around the edges of the room were decorative stands holding statues. Though carved of mismatched kinds of wood and stone, each was the same in shape: a fox sitting upright, holding its forepaws in a cupped gesture, in which had been placed candles, shiny rocks, or flowers.

“I welcome you most warmly to my home, honored guests,” Maanet declaimed, bowing deeply to them. “Though it is doubtless humble indeed compared to your own, I hope I may provide you some measure of comfort.”

The other Hiiri present assembled themselves in a row behind him, also bowing: four women closer to Maanet in age than the elders, one visibly pregnant. Well, the adult Hiiri did; there were at least half a dozen children lurking just beyond the room, and that was as close to a headcount as Kaln could manage because the heads in question kept poking out from behind curtains hung over tunnel entrances and then vanishing again.

“Oh, this is beautiful!” he said, deliberately not masking his fascination. Granted, it was more because he was intrigued to learn about a new culture than due to being impressed by the furnishings, but to judge by the answering smiles, Kaln’s enthusiasm was appreciated. “It’s so…so lavishly cozy. You know, I’ve never been in a position to really decorate my own living space until very recently and I’ve been kind of floundering. If you don’t mind I think I may have to steal some of your ideas!”

“Nothing can be stolen which is offered freely, friend,” Maanet replied with a broad smile. “Please, please, come in! Sit, be comfortable. Anywhere you like! We’ll bring out something to refresh you right away. If I might make a suggestion, perching by the fire pit will put you at a perfect temperature for hot tea—which I recommend! My Niishi’s brew is peerless. But out toward the walls, it’s warm enough for chilled water with cactus pear, if you prefer to banish the heat that way.”

“How clever,” said Kaln, stepping toward the center. “Actually, if you can believe it, we were just up in the highland steppes, so I haven’t even been in the desert long enough to get overheated.”

“I can hardly but believe it,” Maanet said, grinning. “I do know where aurochs come from, after all—and about how fast dragons can fly.”

As if his movement deeper into the room was a signal, suddenly the curtains fluttered wide and the entire passel of Hiiri children scurried into the room—right past him. No sooner had Kaln turned to greet the little ones with a smile than they’d left him behind, gathering in a semicircle around Vadaralshi.

“Are you really a dragon?” the tallest demanded with open skepticism.

Kaln could not help noticing all four women froze in place, turning to stare in unison—their tails suddenly extending straight behind them and visibly bristling.

“What?” Grinning, Vadaralshi leaned forward toward the kids, claws on her knees. “Don’t I look like a dragon?”

“I thought you’d be bigger.”

“Dragons are huge!” added another child, raising both her hands overhead and hopping once to demonstrate hugeness. For such a tiny thing, those legs gave her a remarkable vertical hop. “Bigger than a caravan!”

“Well, there’s a great dragon secret about that!” Vadaralshi winked and leaned forward further, lowering her voice. “See, you don’t have to be huge to get a view from up high. Not…when you can FLYEEEEE!”

She grabbed the skeptical child around the ribs and hoisted her suddenly high overhead, then set off at a dash around the perimeter of the room, her passenger screaming with delighted laughter and the rest of the clamoring kids bounding alongside and after them. Kaln winced at their clear lack of adroitness and the risks it posed, but it turned out he needn’t have worried. Vadaralshi was every bit as nimble on her claws as during their sparring sessions, and never once stepped on or kicked anyone no matter how they tumbled about underfoot.

“I know, Shiiri,” Liiri murmured from nearby. Kaln glanced down to find the old woman lightly patting one of the mothers on the back—one who looked frozen in horror at this spectacle. “Trust her—or trust me, if you can’t. Vadaralshi is amazingly good with children, I can attest to that from personal experience.”

Maanet slipped up behind Shiiri and wrapped his arms around her, murmuring into her ear so softly Kaln couldn’t hear anything. Nor did he try, recognizing an obviously private moment. Instead, he turned back to watch Vadaralshi as she switched out passengers and embarked on a ceiling-high tour of the room with the next child.

“Hey, be careful!” he exclaimed as, despite her deft avoidance of the kids underfoot, she clipped a stand with her tail and set the fox statue atop it to rocking, dislodging a few flowers. “We’re guests here, don’t destroy their furniture!”

“Oh, you needn’t worry overmuch about that,” Maanet assured him, still gently rocking Shiiri in his arms as she gradually un-tensed, watching the dragon playing with the children. “All those are sacred figures—devotions to our goddess. She, I assure you, is very much in favor of the sight of children at play. And that of visitors who play with them.”

“Besides,” added another of the women whose name Kaln hadn’t heard yet, “I doubt even a dragon could do more damage to the furnishings than those little squirrels do on their own.”

“You underestimate my sister.”

Kaln turned along with the others as Vanimax stepped into the room, in his smaller form for the first time.

He’d have recognized him even had there been anyone else around with scales and horns; in contrast to his sisters, both of whom looked strikingly like their mothers but with slimmer builds, Vanimax was perhaps the most perfect down-the-middle blend of both his parents Kaln had ever seen in anyone. His skin was a warm medium brown exactly between Atraximos’s almost-white and Izayaroa’s almost-black; he had his father’s lean face and aquiline nose, and his mother’s full lips and high, angled cheekbones. Even his hair, which he kept tied back in a simple bushy tail, was the same riot of black curls Izayaroa had, but shot through with threads of Atraximos’s vivid scarlet rather than her gold.

Vanimax met his eyes and set his chin in a mulish expression. Kaln just gave him a welcoming smile.

Before either of them could speak, one of the little Hiiri broke off from the group, hopping across the room to land in front of Vanimax’s claws, where she jumped vertically, holding out her arms and beaming.

“Up! Up!”

Vanimax recoiled in sudden, visible terror.

Hiiri mothers, as it turned out, could as good as teleport themselves. One of the women crossed the room instantly in a single bound, snatched up the child, and with one more leap was against the opposite wall.

“Little one, you must never bother a guest. Wait for them to come to you if they want to play.”

Kaln took one look at Vanimax’s expression, reached into his bag of holding, and pulled out the Missari meat skewer he’d been saving. Silently, still watching Vadaralshi playing with the others rather than looking at her brother’s face, he held it out to him.

Likewise saying nothing, Vanimax took it and bit off the end.

Kaln winced. “Uh, don’t eat the wooden part. That’s just for carrying; you pull the food off for eating.”

Vanimax curled his lip. “I am not so fragile as your kind. We can chew and swallow much worse than wood.”

“Okay, but…I can’t imagine that would taste very good.”

The dragon stubbornly kept chewing. “It’s not bad. Adds texture. Meat without the little bones lacks…crunch.” He deliberately bit off another chunk, stick and all. “Hmf. And Pheneraxa couldn’t handle this level of spice? Typical.”

“Well, of the three of you, I get the impression she’s the most sheltered. She won’t admit it outright but I don’t think she’d ever tried mortal food before I came along.”

It was a good question when Vanimax had; Kaln didn’t believe for a second this was his first experience with spicy peppers, not as calmly as he was taking it.

His eye was caught by motion in one of the curtained doorways, by a face peeking out at an eye level much closer to his own. It disappeared when Kaln turned his head to study the shifting curtain. However, a second later, it was pulled aside and another Hiiri emerged—this one another adult male, attired similarly to Maanet but with slightly darker fur patterns. The new arrival paused in the doorway, turning back with an encouraging smile, and held out one hand.

After a second, a human hand emerged to take it, and then the rest of the human followed, shifting her stare rapidly between the dragons and Kaln with clear apprehension.

“Ah, and this is my brother, Naaren,” Maanet announced, gesturing with his free hand. His other, Kaln now noticed, was holding the braided cord still attached to Shiiri’s wristband; she had unfastened it from the shoulder and unwound it from her arm to place the end in Maanet’s grasp, and Kaln was suddenly so fascinated by the cultural implications of this that he was grateful there were ongoing introductions to distract him from making a pest of himself. “How truly blessed I am, given the privilege of introducing guests to each other at my fire! Isabet, we are honored today by the return of an old and precious friend of all the tribes who has been missed for generations now. Vadaralshi was a valued and gracious companion to us long ago, and I dare hope shall be again.”

“Glad to meetcha!” Vadaralshi said cheerfully, currently balancing on one leg with Hiiri children dangling from all her other limbs—tail included—and also one horn.

“She has brought us the great honor of meeting her brother, the great and esteemed Vanimax,” Maanet continued, bowing to the other dragon, who looked painfully uncomfortable under the attention. “And their own comrade, Kaln, whose tale I truly cannot wait to hear.”

“Kaln?” Though visibly frightened of the dragons, she did a double-take now, focusing her attention on him fully. “Wait—it is you!”

“Hi, Isabet,” he said, waving. “I’m glad to see you made it safely!”

“Oh? I never imagined you were already acquainted,” said Maanet.

“That’s why we came here in particular,” Vadaralshi replied, tossing two madly giggling little Hiiri gently with both claws. “Pa—that is, Kaln needed to meet with the leaders of the Hiiri. There were several places I thought of looking, but he was concerned about the ice mage he met a while back and I figured Riincroft is where she’d most likely have ended up, so this is where we came!”

“I hope that’s all right,” Kaln added. “I got the impression you were…rather firmly minding your own business, and we’ve no intention of prying into it. It’s just a relief to learn you got out of the desert all right.”

“She came out rather better than all right,” Naaren commented with a faint smile.

Isabet blushed, which looked borderline luminous with her fair complexion. She was so blonde her hair verged on white. “Ah, well… I appreciate your concern, I suppose. While I don’t care to be…reacquainted with my origins, let us say, this…is clearly not that.” Once again, she looked warily between the two dragons.

Between Vadaralshi’s rambunctious impromptu childcare and Vanimax managing to look awkwardly clumsy in his two-legged form even while standing completely still, they had probably never looked less threatening. Still, she was Valefolk, and they were not only dragons, but specific dragons she probably knew, by reputation if nothing else. Kaln could scarcely imagine how terrifying it must be to find herself suddenly under a roof with them, or how strange it must be to see them like this in particular; his own culture had no comparable all-consuming horror.

“Oh?” Liiri had limped forward, leaning on her staff, and now looked contemplatively up at Kaln. All the Hiiri were, he now saw, save two of the women of the household, who were watching Vadaralshi and their kids like hawks. “Two dragons come to visit us bearing gifts, and apparently it’s at the instigation of their human tagalong? That development I did not expect.”

“Elder Liiri, no one welcomed to our fire is a tagalong,” Maanet said with gentle reproof. “Your pardon, friends. I don’t know about you, but I for one am eagerly looking forward to being old enough that I can just say whatever I like and nobody dares call me down.”

“You’re on a path to not getting there if you keep sassing me, young man,” Liiri threatened, brandishing her staff at him.

He winked. “And I am all the more eager to hear more, now! Please, please, sit! Be comfortable. Permit us to display our hospitality, and you will find us eager listeners indeed.”

Isabet looked like she was seriously considering slipping backward through the curtains, but Naaren gently nudged her forward with a hand at the small of her back. He had to reach up to do it, but she grimaced and stepped forward, as warily as if expecting to be devoured if she put one foot wrong.

It occurred to Kaln, belatedly, that maybe coming here in particular hadn’t been the best plan. Well, nothing for it now but to put on his best face.

“So, all these idols you have are quite interesting,” he said in his most disarming voice, seating himself cross-legged amid the cushions while one of the ladies of the house brought forth earthen cups and a steaming pot of fragrant herbal tea. “And as good a starting point as any! Concerning Hii-Amat…”