The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,3

at once, but kept her eyes squeezed shut, as if sheer denial or force of will could quiet her unhappy daughter.

It was a futile hope. Tooth fever, that’s what the infant’s malady was called by the widowed crones, who sat all day beside the neighborhood wellhead. The baby would cry until her teeth came in and the swelling in her gums subsided. Both mother and daughter were lucky to have gotten any sleep at all.

“Do something,” the man grumbled, rolling away from her, taking her blanket with him to pile over his ears.

He was a good man: never drank, never raised his voice or fist, but went out at dawn each morning and sweated all day in the kiln-blast of his uncle’s pottery. He was afraid of his daughter, astonished that something so pale and delicate would, if Fortune’s wheel were as round and true as his uncle’s, someday call him Father. He wanted to do well by his offspring, but now, when all she needed was warm hands and a swaying shoulder, he was reduced to surly helplessness. So, the woman swung her legs over the side and swept her tangled hair out of her eyes.

There was light in the room. She silently cursed herself for leaving the lamp lit. An open flame was a danger to them—her man and her daughter and every other mortal in the neighborhood. It was also a waste of oil, a waste of money, which was scant these days, with her unable to work. In the instant before her vision cleared, the mother saw disaster in her mind’s eye: her man, groggy because he hadn’t slept and clumsy for the same reason, blundering against the kiln, screaming, and dooming them all to poverty, to death.

With that image fresh in her thoughts, she was too distracted to cry out when she saw another woman—a stranger—sitting on the stool beside her daughter’s cradle. She reached blindly for the lamp, which was not lit. The light came from the stranger; it surrounded her and the infant.

“Lame…”

That word, her man’s name, came weakly from the mother’s tongue. It failed to rouse Lame, but drew the attention of the dark-haired stranger whose eyes, when she turned, were huge in her face and gray as the infant’s.

“Rest you, now,” the stranger said in a sweet and gentle twilight voice. “Rest you… Cissa. Come the sun and your daughter’s pain will be gone.”

“Yes,” Cissa agreed slowly. A part of her was caught in panic: a stranger in her home, a stranger holding her daughter. A stranger whom Cissa would have remembered if she’d ever seen her before, a stranger who sat bathed in light that had no source. “Lame—” she called more strongly than before. “Larne.”

“Rest you, both,” the stranger insisted. “The child is safe with me.”

“Safe,” Cissa repeated. The stranger’s smile wrapped its arms around her and vanquished her panic. “Safe. Yes, safe.”

“None in Urik is safer,” the stranger agreed, and Cissa, at last, believed.

She returned to the rumpled bed where her man’s warm shadow beckoned.

The radiant, gray-eyed stranger gave her attention back to the infant. She was not one for gurgly noises or nonsense syllables or mimicking a kank’s jointed antennae with her fingers. She charmed the pained and weary child with a wordless lullaby.

The infant’s fists unclenched. Her little furrowed face relaxed when the stranger stroked her down-covered scalp. The child reached for a thick lock of the stranger’s midnight hair. They shared a trilling note of laughter, and then the stranger sang again—an eight-tone trope, four ascending, then the lowest, then a three-tone cascade through the middle range—theme and variations until the tooth had risen and the infant slept easy in a stranger’s arms.

* * *

He began his journey when the air was cool and the day no more than a bright promise above the eastern rooftops. With his bowl tucked inside his tattered, skimpy tunic and his crutch wedged beneath his shoulder, he made his way from the alley where he slept, safe and warm beneath a year’s accumulation of rubbish, to the northwest corner of Joiner’s Square. The baker’s shop on that corner had a stoop that was shaded all day and wider than its door—wide enough for a crippled beggar to sit, plying the trade he’d never chosen to master. He inconvenienced no one, especially Nouri, the baker, who sometimes let him scrounge crumbs off the floor at the end of the day.

It was a long journey from his alley to the baker’s