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He found that if he smeared himself first with slime from the receding pools and then with dragon-waste, they couldn’t smell him, thanks to the wet, and would often get within a jump’s distance. But he learned an enervating lesson when he overhunted the garbage pile, for the rats quit coming. He took to visiting it only after the other hatchlings ate something Father brought back, for sometimes they missed a tail or an ear or a bit of marrow. Then he hunted the pile with an appetite that would have taken many, many rats to fill, but took away only one or two for all the filth and bother.
Of course, this necessitated a good deal of washing afterward.
While scrubbing off after one meal he heard a high, pleasant trilling coming from the egg shelf above. The words and tune warmed him like the sunlight he dreamed of. The running, splashing water devoured the words, so he climbed up the egg shelf and peeked over.
Farther down the egg shelf, almost out of the mosslight, his mother slumbered, and he saw the tail of the Gray Rat wrapped around her tail-tip. Wistala’s nose peeped from under Mother’s tail.
The longer and thinner of his two sisters lay across the trickle, arching her back in the water cascading down the side of the cave, warbling to herself:
Paint my wings, as a stranger in paradise,
Take me not from the city’s light,
through white towers I long to soar…
“Oh,” she squeaked, seeing him. She shrank against the cave wall.
“Why did you stop?” he asked.
“Do you want to use the trickle?”
“Use it?”
“The cascade. It’s marvelous for cleaning under the scales, especially that bit that falls all the way from the ceiling.”
“Your name is Jizara,” he said, marveling at how easily the word formed in his mouth.
“That’s just for songs and such. Zara rolls off the tongue so much easier. You don’t speak very well. I suppose you don’t get much chance for talking.”
“Will you sing more?” He felt the clumsiness of his words.
She uncoiled a little. “You like my singing?”
“It’s beautiful.” He edged up on the other side of the trickle.
She turned a little deeper green as her scales rose and fell. “You won’t…you won’t jump on me?”
“Why should I?”
“Auron does it all the time.”
It felt so good to talk, he was wondering if he wanted a song to interrupt. “I’ll stay on this side of the trickle.”
“What do you want to hear?” she finally asked.
“What was that you were singing before?”
“A song of Silverhigh, the ancient. They made such beautiful songs. I can only sing them when I’m alone.”
“Why?”
“You sound just like Auron! Mother said it was a wicked place full of foolish dragons.”
“But they made beautiful songs. Sing.”
She went on, and he found himself relaxing, joint by joint, claw by claw, lulled by the music. Then he was asleep.
He woke in glorious warmth. Jizara lay wrapped right around him, nose-tip to tail-point. But then she had an extraordinarily long neck.
