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filled up with tears, for it was an expression of which their father had been very fond. Even with Bon Agornin it had been words far more often than deeds, but, as she whirled away the tears, Hanercould just make out the scar in the cornfield where her father had flared up at a recalcitrant farmer five or six years before.
    “I’ll tell you what, though,” said Avan, with a great clap of his wings. “I could take him to law.”
    “To law?” Haner asked, astonished. “Wouldn’t that be terribly expensive?”
    “You said yourself that we have the gold,” Avan said. “We have the right on our side. I have a letter from my father clearly stating that we three were to share what he left. Illustrious Daverak could be made to—”
    “To what?” interrupted Sel. “He cannot give us back what he has taken, and how could he make restitution? Where is he to get the body of a full-grown dragon to give us? It’s hardly such a crime as they’d execute him for it, even if we wanted to leave our sister a widow and her children fatherless.”
    “The courts do give the bodies of those who are executed and not owed to the victim, to restitution in such cases as ours,” Avan explained, lifting off the ground a little in his excitement. “They wouldn’t execute Daverak, of course not, but they’d make him pay gold through his snout and assign one of the spare criminals to us. If they found for us, that is. Daverak would pay. We could not fail.”
    “How much would it cost?” Selendra asked, bringing her brother back down to earth with a bump. “You said yourself that the gold is not much. Our shares may be barely enough to provide dowries for me and for Haner, though not if we wish to marry rich dragons. You have the means to make a living, and to prosper, we maidens do not. That gold and our own persons as we are are all we have. I would rather have the gold than the flesh if it came to it.”
    “Lawsuits are expensive, true, but it will not be above my share,” Avan said, settling back to the ledge a little shamefacedly. He had amassed some gold already, which he could add to hisinheritance. “I was not thinking of asking you to contribute.” What he had said about gold being easier to come by in Irieth than dragonflesh was true, but this last statement was a polite fiction. He had calculated that the lawsuit would cost what the three of them had inherited. But sitting on the familiar ledge with his two beautiful sisters he knew he did not in the least wish to rob them of their prospects.
    “Wouldn’t it be better to ask him politely for some compensation first?” Haner asked.
    “Penn tried politeness and it got him nowhere. No, a firm legal letter is what it will take, and if that isn’t enough, then bring him before the courts to extract our due.” Avan felt seventy feet long as he said this, the bold protector of his sisters, a dragon to watch out for.
     
6. FRELT’S INTENTIONS
    Blessed Frelt’s parsonage lay perhaps ten minutes’ flight east of Agornin, over the mountain. Because of the geography of the underlying terrain this meant two or three hours’ walk for a sturdy dragon. If Frelt had been offered a night’s rest he would have refused it, but he felt it a little high-handed of the clan to throw him out with no more refreshment than the well-gnawed leg Daverak had tossed him in the undercave. In any well conducted funeral the parson was given fruit and beer in addition to his rightful consumption of the eyes of the deceased. As he bade a dry but polite farewell and eyed the upward road that was his way, without so much as a drink of water, he felt he was paying a high price for his earlier victory.
    Penn kept his farewell to Frelt as brief and as formal as possible.He had observed Berend’s haste to remove her household, and had a certain amount of sympathy for it. He was generally a peace-loving dragon himself, he hated rows and explosions. Even before he became a parson he had rarely