Seeing Over the Mountains: Chapter Six

Dragonfire lamps twinkled through the steam, which swelled into the lungs and wreathed the bodies of the hot spring patrons. The ceramic tile patterns on the cavern walls pressed into my back, creating a small cluster of coolness. Water splashed as Syraine stretched. Deeper in the pool where it was less crowded, she had room to submerge herself up to the shoulders.
     Around us, people chatted in clusters or lounged in the thickly bubbled water. Ripples lapped against my belly as a young dragonlet's mother stopped him from blowing bubbles in the water, resting her tail on his shoulder. I shuffled forward to press my feet to the tiny vent in the rock so the new water surged up between my toes.
     I sank a little deeper into the water as someone flung aside the crimson curtains across the hallway to the exit. An impatient courier dragon stalked in, ribboned sash fluttering. For just a moment, he wrinkled his nose at the acrid, sulfur-spiced air.
     "The princess Kiara and companion Syraine?" he bellowed. Syraine dipped her head lower into the water, leaving just two yellow eyes and a crown of red frill poking out above.
     He shook his head and peered through the misty veil, making the chains of beads on his horns clatter. "Princess Kiara," he called. The woman beside me turned to whisper to her husband.
     "Your mother will be upset." Syraine reminded me privately. "Ask the courier what he wants."
     "My lady!" Damn. His claws clicked across the stone as he trotted over to me. "Your esteemed matron wishes me to present this to you." Can't he just say "give"?
     "I am not to leave until I see this in your hands." The tip of his tail flicked back and forth against the rock.
     I groped for my towel on the ledge behind me. After my hands were dry, I reached up for the courier's message. The paper crackled as I untied and unscrolled it.
     My mother's court script requested my presence at the herbalist's office at once. There was some kind of delivery to be picked up and presented to Ellia in the palace tower.
     "This must not be that important if she neither retrieves nor receives it herself," Syraine opined, raising her head from the water and flicking her frill, causing a max exodus of cloudy drops.
     The courier flinched back, then padded over to us again, where he hovered shifting his weight between paws.
     Turning around and putting both hands on the stone, I hoisted myself out of the water. The mountain air trickling in through the curtains grazed my bare skin as the courier turned around and made for the exit.
     I wrung out my hair with one hand. The splat of water on stone cued my dragon in that I was serious and she trailed out after me, leaving a far bigger trail of water glistening on the cavern floor.
     In the spring's steamy breath, I toweled myself as dry as I could get. Syraine spread her wings and tossed her blue towel at me. I mopped the pooled water from her back with her towel and she plucked mine off the floor in her teeth.
     We deposited them both in a nearby basket for the spring's three dragon priest-caretakers to wash. I pulled on my robes and my dragon her sashes, both grateful for the sudden, dense protection from the outside wind's darts.
     She handed me the courier's note from where it had fallen to the floor and I took my place between her wings. The purple dragon padded through the curtained doorway and out onto the ledge, where the air's chill surged through my still-damp dark hair.
     Syraine shook her head, casting away a last few sparkling droplets, and we took to the sky.
     "Now, where does this man, if you can even call him that... reside?" I asked.
     "Over by the falls, you know that. And he seems man enough to me, on those times when he cares to have all four limbs in their natural states."