Trip jumped down, but landed on a puddle leaking from the bottom of the planter and slipped. He pitched against Therrik, their shoulders bumping. Trip had encountered marble statues with more give.
Therrik glowered at him again. Trip would definitely not be squeezing his butt.
“My apologies for the tightness, Captain,” Angulus said, glancing at the shivering branches of the fig tree. “I wasn’t expecting someone to bring a vehicle to the meeting.” He looked to the side—somehow Shulina Arya had made it to the head of the table and stood near him, her hand resting on the handlebars of the crate scooter.
“A vehicle?” Shulina Arya asked. “This small human toy?”
“Perhaps I could make her a more compact version,” Trip said, feeling the urge to be helpful, especially since a lot of people sitting at the table, some he recognized and others he didn’t, were frowning in his direction. “Or a folding one.”
“How does one make a crate fold?” General Zirkander asked dryly from one side of the table, shoulder to shoulder with Sardelle. She’d found her seat quickly. Maybe she had levitated.
“It wouldn’t be that difficult, sir.” Trip eyed the contraption, ideas already percolating in his mind.
“Don’t ask her how she got it,” Rysha whispered to him. “Or about the forlorn youth wondering if he’ll ever get it back.”
“She stole it?” Trip’s mind boggled at the idea of a dragon mugging some teenager in a back alley.
“She landed a couple of blocks away from the castle—I suggested we not come down in the courtyard and alarm any trigger-happy guards on the grounds—and startled some boys racing each other in the street. They fled, leaving their toys behind. She thought their racing game looked like great fun, so she took one of the scooters…”
“I will most certainly return it,” Shulina Arya said, her human voice sounding every bit as perky out loud as it did when it resonated in Trip’s mind. “I simply wanted to try it. I—”
An older man with copper hair stepped forward to draw Shulina Arya away from the table. He wore spectacles and a blue suit a size or two too large for him. An unlit pipe stuck out of one pocket. When he pulled her back, it was to join another copper-haired man with similar fashion tastes, though the second fellow wore quirky inventor’s goggles with the lenses lifted up.
It belatedly occurred to Trip that those two were dragons. Between Phelistoth’s and Shulina Arya’s presences, he hadn’t noticed the pair in the back.
“Are those… her parents?” Rysha whispered.
“They are dragons shape-shifted into human form.”
It seemed strange to refer to the two men—two male dragons—as a set of parents, but Shulina Arya apparently considered them to be that.
“I see that everyone who was invited to this meeting is here,” King Angulus said, nodding around the table, and also toward those standing in the back.
Trip was surprised he wasn’t holding this meeting in his big audience chamber, but perhaps he considered the table and the plant-filled setting more intimate than addressing people from the throne atop his dais. There was still room for servants to move around the solarium, filling drink glasses. If Trip hadn’t been wedged between Therrik, Rysha, and the fig tree, he wouldn’t have found the space that crowded.
“A couple of dragons who inform me that they are scientists have come to speak with us,” Angulus went on, extending a hand toward the professorial types. “They’re not trying to solve Iskandia’s dragon problem, but from what I’ve heard already, it’s possible some of what they tell us will spark some ideas among our brighter minds.”
Angulus looked at Sardelle and then at a bronze-skinned Cofah man with shaggy black hair who sat near the end of the table by Captain Ahn. Tolemek Targoson. Trip had met him the night his siblings had been removed from the stasis chambers.
“Should I be offended that he didn’t look at me when he said that?” Zirkander whispered to Sardelle, not that softly.
“Your people are here to provide aerial transport to those with bright minds who come up with worthy plans to try,” Angulus told him, his eyes narrowing.
“Still the flying rickshaw service, I see,” Zirkander murmured.
Sardelle stuck an elbow in his ribs. They looked at each other, and Trip suspected a telepathic conversation.
He asked why she did that, and she said because General Ort retired and isn’t here to kick him under the table, Jaxi explained.
Are you supposed to be sharing their private conversations with me? Trip asked.
If I didn’t, who would?
Trip wondered if Jaxi had been missing him since he’d returned her to Sardelle’s care. It was a strange thought since she had spent so much of their adventure remarking on his failings.
The dragon professors—dragon scientists?—stepped up to one corner of the table, leaving Shulina Arya to sit on the lip of a long rectangular hedge planter. Trip was sure it was only his imagination that she was sulking after some parental reprimand.
“Greetings, humans,” the dragon in the blue suit and spectacles said. “I am Wyleenesh, and this is my colleague, Bhajera Liv.”
The other dragon tipped his head, and his goggle lenses fell forward, the dark shades covering his eyes. He pushed them back up.
I’m beginning to see why Shulina Arya was drawn to Rysha, Jaxi spoke dryly into Trip’s mind.
Because she likes smart intellectual types?
Or beings with spectacles.
“We are bronze dragons and scientists among our kind. We enjoyed studying our world of Serankil before we left, and we enjoyed studying the great volcanoes of the new world we entered through the Portal of Avintnaresi, and now we are studying here again. We are researching the populations of dragons, humans, and various herbivores—our preferred dietary staple—on the continents here.”
Is it me, Azarwrath said, or is it not clear from the way he created that list that humans aren’t part of the preferred diet?
Don’t worry, Azzy, Jaxi said. Nobody likes to eat swords. Especially grumpy ones.
“We estimate there are four hundred to five hundred dragons that have returned.” Wyleenesh looked at Angulus.
The king nodded and looked at Trip. “That’s what we’ve heard.”
“Didn’t we kill some of them?” Zirkander grumbled.
“Not enough to put a dent in the estimate,” Sardelle said.
“Indeed,” Wyleenesh said. “And there have been a few new births already. Very encouraging for our kind.”
Nobody at the table looked encouraged.
“But there is a problem.” Wyleenesh removed his spectacles and used his shirt to wipe them. He frowned at a resistant piece of gunk on one lens. Trip felt a tiny bit of power being called upon, and a flame appeared on the glass, burning off the gunk. The dragon wiped the lens again, then replaced the spectacles on his nose. “The human population has increased drastically since we lived in this world last.”
“Drastically,” his colleague agreed, his goggles rattling as he nodded.
“There are fewer wild lands where dragons can hunt, especially on this continent and on the large one across the ocean.”