"You look grim," Carabella said to him.

"I lack appreciation of this art," he answered.

It seemed to Valentine that Gorzval could entirely have filled the hold of his vessel, large as it was, with the proceeds of this one school of dragons. But he had chosen a handful of young and only one adult, not by any means the largest, and had deliberately driven the others away. Zalzan Kavol explained that there were quotas, decreed by Coronals in centuries past, to prevent overfishing: herds were to be thinned, not exterminated, and a ship that returned too soon from its voyage would be called to account and subjected to severe penalties. Besides, it was essential to get the dragons quickly on board, before predators arrived, and to process the flesh swiftly; a crew that hunted too greedily would be unable to handle its own catch in an effective and profitable way.

The season’s first kill seemed to make Gorzval’s crew more mellow. They nodded occasionally at the passengers, even smiled now and then, and went about their own tasks in a relaxed and almost cheerful way. Their sullen silence melted; they laughed, joked, sang on deck:

Valentine and Carabella heard the singers — it was the squad barreling the blubber — and went aft to listen more closely. Carabella, quickly picking up the simple robust melody, quietly began to finger it on her pocket-harp, adding little fanciful cadenzas between the verses.

"Look," Carabella said. "There’s Zalzan Kavol." Valentine glanced across the way. Yes, there was the Skandar, listening at the far side near the rail, all his arms folded, a deepening scowl on his face. He did not seem to be enjoying the song. What was the matter with him?

Valentine laughed and clapped his hands. That brought an immediate fierce glare from Zalzan Kavol, who strode toward them looking huffy with indignation.

"My lord!" he cried. "Will you tolerate such irreverent—"

"Not so loud on the my lord," Valentine said crisply. "Irreverent, you say? What are you talking about?"

"No respect for a terrible tragedy! No respect for a fallen Coronal! No respect for—"

"Zalzan Kavol!" Valentine said slyly. "Are you such a lover of respectability, then?"

"I know what is right and what is wrong, my lord. To mock the death of Lord Malibor is—"

"Be more easy, my friend," Valentine said gently, putting his hand on one of the Skandar’s gigantic forearms. "Where Lord Malibor has gone, he is far beyond matters of respect or disrespect. And I thought the song was a delight. If I take no offense, Zalzan Kavol, why should you?"

But Zalzan Kavol continued to grumble and bluster. "If I may say it, my lord, you may not yet be returned to a full sense of the rightness of things. If I were you, I would go to those sailors now and order them never to sing such a thing again in your presence."

"In my presence?" Valentine said, with a broad grin. "Why should they care dragon-spittle for my presence? Who am I but a passenger, barely tolerated at all? If I said any such thing, I’d be over the rail in a minute, and dragon-feed myself the next. Eh? Think about it, Zalzan Kavol! And calm yourself, fellow. It’s only a silly sailor-song."

"Nevertheless," the Skandar muttered, walking stiffly away.

Carabella giggled. "He takes himself so seriously."

Valentine began to hum, then to sing:

"Yes, that’s it," he said. "Love, will you do me a service? When those men are through with their work, draw one of them aside — the red-bearded one, I think, with the deep bass voice — and have him teach you the words. And then teach them to me. And I can sing it to Zalzan Kavol to make him smile, eh? How does it go? Let’s see—"

A week or thereabouts passed before they sighted dragons again, and in that time not only Carabella and Valentine learned the ditty, but Lisamon Hultin as well, who took pleasure in bellowing it across the decks in her raucous baritone. But Zalzan Kavol continued to growl and snort whenever he heard it.

The second school of dragons was much larger than the first, and Gorzval allowed the taking of some two dozen small ones, one mid-sized one, and one titan at least a hundred thirty feet long. That kept all hands busy for the next few days. The deck ran purple with dragons’ blood, and bones and wings were stacked all over the ship as the crew labored to get everything down to storable size. At the captain’s table delicacies were offered, from the most mysterious inner parts of the creature, and Gorzval, ever more expansive, brought forth casks of fine wines, quite unsuspected from someone who had been at the edge of bankruptcy. "Piliplok golden," he said, pouring with a lavish hand. "I have saved this wine for some special occasion, and doubtless this is it. You have brought us excellent luck."

"Your fellow captains will not be joyed to hear that," Valentine said. "We might easily have sailed with them, if they had only known how charmed we were."

"Their loss, our gain. To your pilgrimage, my friends!" cried the Skandar captain.

They were moving now through ever more balmy waters. The hot wind out of Suvrael relented here at the edge of the tropics, and a kinder, moister breeze came to them out of the southwest, from the distant Stoienzar Peninsula of Alhanroel. The water was a deep green hue, sea-birds were numerous, algae grew so thick in places that navigation was sometimes impeded, and brightly colored fish could be seen darting just below the surface — the prey of the dragons, who were flesh-eaters and swam open-mouthed through swarms of lesser sea-creatures. The Rodamaunt Archipelago now lay not far away. Gorzval proposed to complete his haul here: the Brangalyn had room for another few large dragons, two more of mid-size, and perhaps forty of the small, and then he would drop his passengers and head for Piliplok to market his catch.