Chapter 11

Serali lay on her side in the town square while people walked all around her. It seemed like only yesterday that she'd first come here as a dragon, but counting back she realized it was more than ten years since the day she had walked into the center of the village to greet a fearful and uncertain group of humans who shied away from her timidly. Now they walked around her golden bulk without even thinking about it. Children would sometimes dare each other to jump over her huge tail, or even climb up it onto her back. She always held perfectly still when they did, she didn't want to cause any injuries.

But that was the least of the changes that had taken place during those years. Land's End was no longer the small, homogeneous, insular place it had once been. It was still, perhaps, quite small by the standards of cities, but you could no longer call it a village, it was a town now. And while the dark-skinned people who had founded the village long ago were still slightly in the majority, people of nearly every color and of nearly every race lived there now.

It had started with the smith. Not Breck, but Darielothras. Serali had been very confused when she'd first met him. He looked almost human, but his ears were long and pointed, quite obviously elven. And yet half elves tended to not have facial hair, and he had a rather impressive beard. His name was definitely elven. But elves are almost never smiths, and he introduced himself as "Darielothras the Smith." When Serali ventured to ask, he explained. He was indeed a half elf, but his other half was not human, it was dwarven. Dwarves generally don't approve of half-breeds, so his training had been in human-style smithing, he could get no dwarf to teach him. But he had learned from the best, and above all else he was an expert at the art of forging dragonsteel.

Which was what brought him to Land's End. He had noticed an increase in the always slender supply of dragon scale, and had traced it to the town. He wanted to set up his smithy at the source and export the things he made from there. "And," he had added, "any town where dragons are welcome is probably a town where an elf-dwarf won't be spit on." And he hadn't been. The villagers had, by and large, been very impressed by him. He made swords for kings! And he paid in gold and silver for the scales that they got from the dragons in trade or found sometimes around the town. They weren't going to object to his presence, and he and Breck had hit it off immediately.

Darielothras was only the first. Slowly others trickled in, and most of them said more or less the same thing. They were, in various ways, regarded as outsiders among humans, and had come to Land's End to see if a town that welcomed dragons would welcome them too. Half-breeds, largely, but also other oddities, like the young man whose eyes were two different colors, or the woman, hardly more than a girl really, who said her parents had thrown her out as a baby for having a strange birthmark on her face. They had all come, and though at first the villagers had been nearly as uneasy about the strangers as they had been about the dragons, Serali had said it to them often, and Jerda, having come very far from his childhood ways of thinking, had agreed. "You all have benefited from having a dragon here. These people are far less strange than I am. And having them here may benefit you as well." And between the two of them they had brought more or less all the villagers around to their way of thinking. And steadily more people trickled in, and the village grew, and soon nobody looked twice at someone with fair skin or pointed ears or blue eyes or any of the other countless differences among them.

More dragons had come too, though only a handful. All mountain dragons, they had fled Skrissish, and on learning that Serali, who some of them were beginning to regard as the rightful ruler of the dragons, was living among humans at Land's End they had braved the presence of a human village to come live near her. The broken land just north of the plateau where the cattle now grazed in great numbers held nearly a dozen of them, some alone and some living in mated pairs. They all insisted that they weren't living together, they weren't plains dragons! They just happened to have their lairs not too terribly far apart, that was all. Serali refrained from pointing out their faulty logic and welcomed them all.

They sometimes hunted, but they more often traded their scales to Serali, who was the owner of the herd, for cows they didn't have to hunt down. She in turn used them to pay the villagers who tended the cows, and to buy fodder for them during the winter, and gave a certain number of them to Jerda, as a sort of "putting up with dragons tax," for the benefit of the town. Already a proper town hall, which they'd never had before, had been raised using those funds, and Jerda got bright-eyed whenever he talked about the other possible improvements he could build.

Breck the blacksmith was standing by Serali's head as she lounged in the center of town. They were discussing the possibility of installing a big glass window in the lair she and Kethro had dug out under the northern bluff. An adventurous pair of youngsters were sitting between her folded wings giggling and whispering. Serali suspected that they were going to try and run down her neck and jump off her head, or something similar. One of the pair was her own nephew, though he didn't know it. He was youngest child of her brother Dentol. Serali kept discreet track of her family, though she tried to avoid seeming too interested.