Traitor's Moon

that!”
    â€œYes, I did. I can’t stand them all fussing over me while they slap you down at every opportunity.”
    Seregil pulled him to a halt. “They aren’t doing it to insult me, you damn fool!” he whispered angrily. “I brought this on myself a long time ago. You’re here for Klia, not me. Any insult you offer to our hosts reflects on her.”
    Alec stared at him a moment, hating the resignation that underlay his friend’s hard words. “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” he mumbled, pulling his pack down from the saddle and carrying it into the tent assigned to them. He waited, expecting Seregil to come in. When he didn’t, Alec looked out through the tent flaps and saw him back at the water’s edge, watching the others swim.
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    Seregil kept up his air of cordial distance, speaking little but making no effort to retreat from the main company. When Amali invited the Skalans to walk along the shore that evening, he joined in without comment or apology.
    She led them up to the outcropping of dark stone. Bulging up from the surrounding stone and skree, it spread like an ink stain to the edge of the lake.
    â€œLook closely,” she told them, running her hand over a curving slab.
    Examining it, Alec saw nothing out of the ordinary except the peculiar smoothness of the weathering in places.
    â€œIt’s skin!” Thero exclaimed from the other side of an upthrust slab. “Or at least, it was. And here’s the ridge of a spine. By the Light, was this a dragon? It must have been over three hundred feet long, if we’re seeing all that there was of it.”
    â€œThen it’s true what I’ve read,” Klia mused, climbing around to where the crumbling edge of what might have been a wing bone jutted from the ground. “Dragons do turn to stone when they die.”
    â€œThis one did,” Amali replied. “But it is the only one of this size ever found. How they die, just as how they are born, remains a mystery. The little ones appear; the great ones disappear. But this place, called Vhadä’nakori, is sacred because of this creature, so drink deeply, sleep well, and attend carefully to your dreams. In a few days, we will be in Sarikali.”
    Seregil knew the Akhendi woman had not meant to include him in her invitation at the Vhadä’nakori; she’d been unfailingly distant since Gedre. Perhaps her ill will accounted for his poor sleep that night.
    Curled beside Alec in the tent they shared with Torsin and Thero, he tossed restlessly through a dream of uncommon vividness, even without aid of the waters.
    It began like so many of his nightmares had over the past two years. He stood again in his old sitting room at the Cockerel, but this time there were no mutilated corpses, no heads gummed in their own blood on the mantelpiece chattering accusations at him
.
    Instead, it was as he remembered it from happier days. The cluttered tables, the piles of books, the tools laid out on the workbench beneath the window—everything was just as it should be. Turningto the corner by the fireplace, however, he found it empty. Alec’s narrow cot was gone
.
    Puzzled, Seregil walked to the door of his bedchamber. Opening it, he found himself instead in his childhood room at Bôkthersa. The details here were equally clear and achingly familiar—the cool play of leaf shadow on the wall above his bed, the rack of practice swords near the door, the rich colors of the corner screen in the corner—painted by the mother he’d never known. Toys long since lost or packed away were there, too, as if someone had collected all of his most treasured belongings and laid them out for his return
.
    The only discordant element were the delicate glass orbs strewn across the bed. He hadn’t noticed these when he’d first come in
.
    He was taken by their beauty. Some were tiny, others the size of his fist, and they gleamed like jewels, multihued and translucent. He didn’t recognize them, but in the strange way of dreams, knew that these, too, were his
.
    As he stood there, smoke suddenly seeped up through the floorboards around him. He could feel heat through the soles of his boots and hear the angry crackle of flames from below
.
    His first thought was to save the orbs. Try as he might, though, a few always slipped away and he had to stop and pick them up again. Looking