Shadowed By Wings Read Online Free PDF Page B

concern.”
    “It will be, if I start urinating all over the place. How much do you want Temple angered?”
    He leapt toward me, slapped my cheek. My head snapped back and thudded against the silo, and the stinging ring of the blow, so instant, so unanticipated, clouded my ears and vibrated like a hornet in my head.
    His raised hand clenched into a fist, as if he were struggling with himself not to strike me again, and his eyes rolled briefly in their sockets.
    I stared at him and held my breath.
    “You are mortal, Skykeeper’s Daughter,” he finally gasped, chest heaving. He dropped his hand to his side. “Never forget that. Mortal and subject to my authority.”
    I touched my burning cheek gingerly, tears from his blow blurring my vision.
    His face twisted and, as if of its own accord, his hand sprang up to strike me again.
    “Your response is ‘Yes, Komikon’!”
    “Yes, Komikon,” I gasped. Yes, Master.
    He leaned down into my face, his chin braid like a rat’s tail upon my throat, his breath as foul as bile. “You can be hurt, rishi whelp. You bleed. Never forget that.”
    I swallowed.
    “I won’t, Komikon.”
    “You’ll build yourself a latrine, understand? You’ll pay to have it monthly purified, as you’ll pay to have the apprentices’ quarters cleansed.”
    He waited, then tensed.
    “Yes, Komikon,” I said hastily.
    “Good.” With a snort, he turned to leave.
    “How?” I dared ask. “How will I pay? Komikon.”
    He paused, then turned back to me. He gave a tight, venomous grin.
    “You’ll do my bidding, girl. That’s how you’ll pay. Now, get back to your hammock.”
    And I had not the heart to ask, then, what his bidding would be.

THREE
     

    A s the dragonmaster had bid me, I returned to the empty stall designated as mine.
    It was well past middle-night, and the dark was chill and dew-laden. The stars were as hostile as a thousand eyes, all glaring at me from the silken sheets of night’s bed, as if, by my very passage, I’d woken them from carefree sleep. It was a night of cloaking black, as airy and dark as watered silk, with the merest bowed splinter for a moon; the darkness reminded me of a clan’s pidi-nos, the treasured strips of black silk used to tie a woman’s wrists to the chancobie, the throne of submission and apology upon which a woman sits during a Claiming Ceremony.
    Each stable yard I crossed looked much like the last: rows of stone stalls, all ringed about a square court, each stall housing, behind an iron gate, a sleeping dragon. The scaled beasts slept without care, secure in the dragonmaster’s domain, their snouts settled like roosting birds upon dewlapped throats or their necks stretched long between foreclaws, muzzles prone upon the ground. Some dragons slept with neck curled over spine, head thrust under one wing; others stood on all fours, head drooped low, firm lips almost brushing the ground. Ribs rose and fell. The occasional limb dream-twitched. A stomach rumbled here, a tail thwacked stone there.
    I knew that no such restful sleep awaited me, for I feared the animosity of my stable peers and wondered whether they’d dare oust me from the dragonmaster’s domain this very night, even with the Komikon somewhere present within the stable yard walls.
    I therefore didn’t lay upon my coarse twine hammock at first, but paced about my stall, bedding chaff shushing round my ankles like wood shavings falling leaflike from a carpenter’s lathe. The slate beneath the bedding was cold and damp on my soles.
    Sometime toward dawn, exhaustion wore me down. I found a good-sized stone, and, clutching it to my chest, clambered onto my hammock. The old twine creaked beneath my weight.
    I stared at the stars as they faded to the color of rain in the gray murk of the oncoming dawn, vowing not to let my heavy lids close.
    I jerked violently awake much later, when the rock I held thudded to the ground. Heart pounding, I blinked and squinted against the brightness of the