Essad Pasha poured down cup after cup of thick, sweet, strong, muddy Hassocki-style coffee. It did wake him up, which only made him more poignantly aware of his state of crapulent decrepitude. His hand shook. He didn’t spill coffee on his tunic, though-he had a napkin draped over it this morning.

Max also seemed somewhat the worse for wear, but did manage to eat his-inevitably-fried eggs. I enjoyed mine. Essad Pasha’s sat on his plate, staring up at him. The whites of his eyes were almost as yellow as their yokes. He belched softly. Sometimes, among the Hassocki, a belch shows you’ve enjoyed a meal. Essad Pasha’s showed that his insides were as rebellious as the kingdoms of the Nekemte Peninsula.

“North and south, east and west…” he began, and belched again. He shuddered. “In any direction, in every direction, I am unwell.”

“Perhaps the hair of the dog that bit you,” Max said. After a moment, he added, “Perhaps the hair of the dog that bit me, too.”

“’Twas no dog bit me-’twas a viper,” Essad Pasha said. But then he brightened all the way up to suicidal. “Perhaps the scale of the snake would serve.”

He shouted to the servant who’d brought in breakfast, but flinched from the sound of his own voice. More quietly, he put his request to the man. In due course, a bottle and three glasses appeared. After flicking away the ritual drop, Essad Pasha and Max proceeded to have several scales apiece. I drank a bit, too-just to be sociable, you understand, and as a digestive aid.

Essad Pasha’s cheeks regained some color. Up till then, he’d looked as if he’d been staked out for vampires. He even toyed with his eggs, though he didn’t actually eat much. He said, “Now when we hunt the dragons, I may hope we catch them, and not the other way round.” Maybe he really had been suicidal, then. If a dragon caught him, he might not go out in a blaze of glory, but he would certainly make an ash of himself.

After breakfast, he showed us our weapons. No clockwork mechanism on these crossbows-they were hand-cranked, the way they all were till fifty years ago. With these, if we all shot our bolts and missed, it would be the dragon’s turn for quite a while after that.

On the other hand, the quarrels we shot would take the quarrel out of a dragon or anything else if they struck home. They were large and stout and heavy: rather like shooting Essad Pasha out of a crossbow, as a matter of fact, though they weren’t so blunt.

He sent me a sidelong glance as I picked up my crossbow and rather dubiously stared along it. “Your Highness’ marksmanship is renowned all through the Empire,” he remarked. “We shall rely on you today.”

“Of course we will,” Max said. What he didn’t say was, Now look at the mess you’ve got me into-and yourself, by the way. His eyebrows and the corners of his mouth were uncommonly eloquent, however.

If you can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs, you probably don’t understand the situation. Here I at least thought I did. I’d never shot this particular heavyweight monstrosity, but I did know what to do with a standard military crossbow…and the Hassocki Army had taught me. My marksmanship might not have been renowned all through the Empire, but I generally managed to frighten what I aimed at.

Then again, aiming at a dragon frightened me.

Essad Pasha pointed northward. “Do you see, your Highness? Dragons in their courting flight.”

By the way they spun and skipped and tumbled through the air, I had taken them for ravens. If they were that much bigger, then they were that much farther away-where that much meant a demon of a lot. And they were, for I saw one of them swoop behind a mountain peak. I could make a pretty fair guess about how far away that peak was. That made the dragons even bigger than I’d thought. Oh, joy, as Max would say.

Out tottered a white-mustached Shqipetari shepherd, a man who’d seen a better decade or six, leading a sheep with very little to look forward to. He tied it to an iron stake set securely in the ground, gave it a couple of tender pats on the head, and then cut its throat. Somehow, that spoke volumes to me about the way Shqiperi works.

The shepherd stumped away. The sheep lay there, twitching and bleeding. I suppose things could have been worse. If they hadn’t left it out for dragon bait, they probably would have fried its wool and served it up to Max and me as a delicacy of the countryside.

Another Shqipetar came out, this one a good deal younger and sprier. He bowed to me, then to Essad Pasha, and then to Max. That done, he began a chant of a sort I’d run into before. The language was different, but the rhythms were the same as the ones I heard whenever I put to sea. Eliphalet fry me for sheep’s wool if he wasn’t a weatherworker.

He knew his trade, too. He wasn’t as good as Stagiros, but who is? He was plenty good enough to send a strong breeze wafting northward.

Why he was wafting a strong breeze northward, I couldn’t have said. Essad Pasha could, and did: “We’d better take cover, your Highness. The dragons will scent blood soon.”

“Oh,” I said after a pause that, if not pregnant, was certainly out long past its bedtime. Everyone hears stories about how keen dragons’ noses are. In the days when knighthood was in flower, knights would have smelled even more like fertilizer than they did anyway if they hadn’t bathed before they hunted dragons. Their ladies, no doubt, would have appreciated that more if they’d bathed very often themselves. But foul hide seldom won fierce dragon, as someone probably didn’t say.

Still…Those dragons fluttering around that peak had to be miles away. Could a weatherworker send the scent of one sheep’s blood that far? Now that you mention it, yes. Watching, I could tell exactly when thoughts of courtship ended and thoughts of breakfast began. It was when the dragons started flying straight toward me.

“I really think we ought to take cover, your Highness,” Max said, in lieu of screaming, If we run for our lives now, maybe the dragon will eat the sheep instead of us.

A lot of what gets called courage is fear of looking like a coward in front of other people. Soldiers mostly don’t go forward because they’re wild to slaughter the bastards on the other side. They know the bastards on the other side are getting it in the neck from their generals, the same as they are themselves. But they don’t want to let their pals down, and they don’t want to be seen letting their pals down. Death before embarrassment! may not sound like an earth-shaking motto, but it’s won more battles than Eliphalet and no quarter! I ought to know. I’m no braver than I have to be; the proof is, I never had the nerve to run away.

And so, instead of doing what any sensible human being would do with several dragons bearing down on him-which is to say, vacating the premises as fast as ever I could-I hunkered down behind some boulders that would have done fine as cover against crossbowmen but were essentially useless against anything that could flame from above. They call this sport. I have another name for it-several other names, in fact. The mild ones are hotter than dragonfire. They go up from there.

“You have the privilege of the first shot, your Highness,” Essad Pasha murmured.

I was proud of myself. All I said was, “Thanks.”

One thing did go right in the next few minutes. Between their mountain and ours, the dragons had a disagreement about who would eat the sheep they’d scented. Being dragons, they settled it by fighting. People would have formed committees and alliances and taken much longer to come to the same conclusion: the largest, meanest one got to do what he wanted, while the rest flew off dreaming of being the largest, meanest one the next time they smelled something good to eat.

The winner was an impressive beast, silvery below and a metallic blue-green above. His wings were the wings a bat might have if a bat were the size of a dragon. The size of a big dragon, I should say-this fellow was to dragons as Max is to ordinary mortals. I wished I hadn’t thought of it quite that way; it made me feel much too ordinarily mortal myself.