“I do understand,” Mella said with dignity. “I just think you’re being stupid.”
Roger actually laughed and, swallowing the last mouthful of dry oatcake, he got to his feet. “Come on,” he said, reaching down to pull her up as well.
They kept climbing, the tunnel growing narrower and the stairs steeper as they went. Once Mella’s foot came down on a slab of rock that crumbled as she touched it, and she slid down several feet before she could catch herself. More than once, piles of rocks, fallen from the ceiling, blocked their way. And once, as Roger climbed over such an obstacle, a light dusting of sand drifted down on his head, and then a few pebbles dropped down around him. He and Mella both froze, holding their breath. But the ceiling held firm.
The second branch Roger had brought burned down. The third. The fourth.
Mella took the fifth torch from Roger’s hand and pushed ahead. She didn’t want to acknowledge what they both knew—that this was the last one.
She wanted to run, but her legs ached and dragged. The stairs were steeper now, and she had to use her free hand to help herself up.
Mella thought that, if she ever got down to level ground again, she’d never leave it. She’d sleep on the first floor of the Inn. In the kitchen, on the hearth. She’d watch the fire all night, she’d bank it and tend it and clean out the ashes, if only she never had to walk up one more stair.
“Mella. Stop.”
She didn’t.
“Mella. The torch is burning down.”
It wasn’t.
“Mella. Look. Your hand.”
Her hand had been uncomfortably warm for a while now. She had been ignoring it. But the sharp bite of the fire was suddenly too fierce, and without meaning to she let the torch drop.
The burning brand broke into pieces as it hit the floor. The red coals glowed in the dark and slowly died. Blackness folded in around them. Mella could almost feel it, soft and clinging as cobwebs, brushing against her face. She’d thought the darkness outside, on a moonless night, had been thick. But it had been nothing compared to this.
Roger stumbled against her, grasped her arm.
“Mella? We have to go back.”
Roger was right, of course. How could they grope their way forward in pitch blackness? Ahead of them, the stairs might be broken entirely. Fallen rock might block the passageway. Chasms might have opened up in the floor. They couldn’t go on, unable to see where they were putting their feet.
But Mella didn’t turn around despite the tugging of Roger’s persistent hand. She felt like a fish on a hook, being pulled upstream. If she turned back now, the hook would be torn out of her, and she might die from the wound.
But how could she tell that to Roger? She’d sound mad.
“Mella. Come on.”
“Look.” Mella whispered it.
She might not have seen it if the torch had not gone out: a patch of light, dim with distance, far ahead. It seemed to dance and swim in front of her eyes. She blinked hard. It was still there.
The two of them groped their way toward the light that became steadily brighter and stronger. Soon the stairs flattened out into a gently sloping tunnel, and they ran. When they tumbled out at last into a wide, stony valley, they had to cover their eyes with their hands, shielding their sight from the brilliance of raw sunlight.
At last Mella, blinking away tears, could look up. The valley was no more colorful than the tunnel, a tumbled wasteland of gray rock. But the blue sky, streaked with creamy white clouds, arched high overhead, and Mella sighed with satisfaction to look at it.
The valley was almost perfectly circular, as if they stood inside an enormous bowl, with a dark lake at its center. The gigantic rock formations scattered around were shaped and sculpted by wind. There was nothing jagged about them, everything rounded and smooth.
“A volcano,” Roger said, gazing raptly around. “An ancient volcano, it must be. Did you feel how warm the rock was when we were coming up?” He laid his hand against the curve of a gray rock that rose above his head. “Here, too. Volcanic…Mella, what is it?”
Mella was looking up, past the walls of the valley. On either side, a pair of matching mountains stood sentinel. Their steep slopes rose to peaks splashed with white.
“The Fangs,” she said shakily. “Roger, look where we are. Between the Fangs.”
Roger followed her gaze. “This is the Hatching Ground?”
Mella spun slowly around to take in the whole of the valley. “It must be. Look—”
She had turned back to face the way they had come, and suddenly her words stuck in her throat.
Where was the entrance to the tunnel? They couldn’t be more than a few yards away, yet Mella couldn’t see it. They were surrounded on all sides by the smooth, round boulders.
“Roger—” Mella’s voice came out faintly. She felt a powerful urge to throw herself into a hole and hide. But where? And from what?
She blinked.
That smell—it had been days now since she’d smelled the familiar whiff of sulfur and ashes. And the rock just in front of her was changing color.
A wash of warm, light brown spread across the dull gray stone. But it didn’t stay brown. It brightened every moment until it was the bronze of late sunlight, then the yellow of buttercups, then the brilliant gold of newly minted coins.
At the same time, it moved. A wave of rock shifted and stretched, becoming a shoulder. Another rounded like a back haunch. A long, thin, snakelike neck unwound itself, and a crack in the rock opened and widened until Mella was looking into a deep black eye larger than her head.
All around them, the same thing was happening. Rocks that were not rocks, rocks that were hidden dragons, sat up, their wings stretching to the sky, their unfriendly eyes on Mella and Roger.
“Um, Mella,” Roger muttered. “Do you think they—they know? Why we’re here?”
The great golden dragon opened her mouth. Her words came out among wisps and curls of steam.
“Trespassers. Humans. This place is forbidden to you.”
Mella’s tongue was stuck, her jaw stiff. She’d forgotten—how could she forget?—how big the true dragons were. And this one was twice the size of the one she had encountered near the Inn. She shrank back a step, until a puff of steam, hot and damp on the back of her neck, made her jump forward again.
“They don’t know,” Roger hissed in her ear.
Well, you tell them! Mella wanted to snap. But she didn’t. It was her place. She was the keeper.
“We’re not—” she croaked. Oh, that was terrible. She tried again. “We came here—”
The golden dragon’s head snaked closer to Mella. Her nostrils flared and her black eyes widened.
“The Egg,” she growled. Her tail slapped the ground, scattering stones. “I can smell it. What have you—”
“Yes!” Mella burst out. “We brought it, I promised, here, here it is, we…” She yanked at the cloak draped over her shoulder. Her fingers, awkward and clumsy, fumbled with the knots. At last she pushed the rough cloth away and held out the metal box to the dragon. “See, here it—”
But the box was hot, hotter than it had ever been. The scalding heat bit deep into Mella’s fingers. She would never have dropped it on purpose, but her hands simply wouldn’t hold it. She gasped. Roger let out a cry and fell to his knees, trying to catch the box, but he was too late. It hit the stony ground with a sharp crack.
Mella nearly shrieked, but the sound caught in her throat, sharp as ice.
“Oh, no,” Roger whispered. “Oh, no, Mella, look…”
The lid of the box had sprung open when it hit the ground. Inside, Mella could see the Egg, a network of fine cracks webbed across its surface.
“It’s broken. Mella, it’s broken.”
Mella felt a broad grin spread across her face. She looked up into the dark eyes of the golden dragon.
“No,” she said. “It’s hatching.”
Chapter Sixteen
The next few mome
nts were very confusing.
The golden dragon pounced. Roger flinched, and Mella yelped, but the dragon ignored them, only scooping the Egg up tenderly in her long, curved black claws. As though in a cage, it lay cradled in them, quivering with the energy of the hatchling inside.
The golden wings spread wide, and the sun glowed through them. Then the wings swept down, and the dragon was aloft. Mella and Roger ducked down as she flew over their heads toward the center of the valley. The other dragons followed, their wings stirring up a storm of wind that tugged at Mella’s skirts and showered her with dust and grit and tiny pebbles. In seconds the two humans were alone.
The mouth of the tunnel they had come through was visible now, a crack between two slabs of stone.
“Maybe we should…” Roger nodded at the black hole in the mountainside.
“But it’s hatching!” Mella stood up. The valley that had seemed bare and lifeless before was alive with dragons, all flying or leaping over rocks and boulders toward the dark lake in the center. “Don’t you want to see?”
“Not if I get eaten for it!”
It was very sensible, Mella knew. One dragon in the woods near the Inn had been frightening enough. Here was a whole valley full of them. And they’d already been told that they had no right to be here.
But—the Egg was hatching. Her Egg. The Egg she had left her home and herd for. The Egg she’d saved. How could she leave now?
“Pardon me.” The low, hissing voice near her elbow made Mella jump. A dragon sidled around a boulder to peer at them. He had creamy white scales and eyes of a clear, amber brown.
“You are the human children who brought the Egg?”
Mella nodded. This dragon was much smaller than the golden one, smaller even than the gray green dragon near the Inn. But it was still quite big enough to bite off her head, or Roger’s, if it chose.
“Well, then.” The white dragon’s tail beat a quick rhythm in the gravel. “Well, well, well…”
It was clearly torn by indecision. Its wings quivered eagerly, and its amber eyes darted from Mella to Roger to the lake at the valley’s center, where the golden form of the huge dragon could be seen glowing in the sun.
“Then come,” the white dragon said, seeming to make up its mind. “Join me. The Hatching—I cannot wait—but you should witness.” He dipped his neck low to the ground and crouched. “I am Alyas. Hurry!”
Mella and Roger shared a glance. There was the safety of the tunnel behind them. But there was Alyas, waiting—and the Egg, hatching.
“Come on,” Mella said roughly, as if Roger were delaying them. “He said to hurry!”
She stepped as lightly as she could on Alyas’s bent knee and threw one leg across his shoulders, just where the neck joined the body. Roger scrambled up behind her. She felt Alyas’s muscles tense as he crouched even lower and jumped into the air. He grunted. His wings beat frantically. He was quite a small dragon, Mella realized. The two of them together made a heavy burden for him.
Then Alyas gained some height, his wing beats steadied, and they were soaring toward the lake.
Dragons were thronging the sky, in all the colors that Mella remembered from her own herd—lichen green, tawny brown, soft gray, glossy black. A few were white like Alyas. Only one, the dragon that had taken the Egg, was golden; none of the others were as big.
Alyas made good use of his small size, darting between larger dragons. Mella was thrown forward along his neck as he dove toward the ground, and Roger clutched her from behind with a startled “Oof!” With a deft turn, Alyas glided in to claim the last open space in a ring of dragons by the lake shore.
Mella and Roger tumbled off Alyas’s back. The golden dragon crouched in the center of the ring, the Egg still clutched in her claws. Carefully, she laid it down in the center of a circle of smooth black rock. As the dragon backed away, Mella saw, inlaid in the rock, the same symbol she had seen below, the two triangles with the wavy line beneath them. Flight, fire, serpent. Dragon.
The Egg rocked. Mella’s breath got stuck somewhere behind her breastbone. She found she was holding Roger’s hand, squeezing tightly enough to hurt.
The strange symbol, made of a dull silvery metal laid into grooves in the rock, began to brighten. At first Mella thought it was a trick of her eye or a stray beam of sunlight. She blinked. But the symbol glowed steadily brighter and brighter, its shine rippling across the glossy scales of the dragons and sparkling in their eyes. Mella glanced aside at Roger’s face and saw it washed in pearly light.
Then the symbol flashed, for an instant seeming brighter than the sun. Mella had to close her eyes. When she opened them again, blinking away tears, the Egg had fallen open. A tiny golden dragon tumbled and rolled among the glistening black eggshells, a snarl of legs and wings and neck and tail.
Mella’s hands ached to hold her, to steady her and help her stand, to carefully stretch the damp wings to the sunlight, as she would have done with a chick from her own herd. Beside her she heard Roger let out his breath slowly in a long “ah.”
“A queen,” Alyas breathed. “A queen!”
All over the valley the dragons roared, sitting back on their hind legs, lashing their tails. Some leaped to the skies to soar in great loops, their wings casting shadows that flickered over Roger and Mella and the dragons still on the ground. Even the chick joined in, stretching her neck out and roaring as well. It sounded like an avalanche and a thunderstorm together, and Mella and Roger had to cover their ears, huddling down as the sound crashed and boomed around them.
At last the tumult died away. The newborn dragon, frantic with delight, scampered toward the great golden one. She must be the leader, Mella decided, cautiously uncovering her ears and straightening up. The queen. And this chick would be the next queen. She would grow up to rule.
The queen dragon swooped her head down to touch noses with the chick and then gently scooped her up under one wing. Mella felt an ache swell up inside her like a bitter, salty wave. She should have been happy. She’d done what she’d promised. She’d brought the Egg safely to the Hatching Ground. She’d done a keeper’s job.
But now that job was over. Now she was just a keeper far from her own herd, with nothing to watch over.
“Alyas.” The voice rumbled, deep and threatening, across the Hatching Ground. “What are you doing with those humans? What business have humans here?”
The speaker was a large dragon, his scales the russet brown of oak leaves in the winter. His neck arched now so that the crest along it stood up threateningly. He was at least twice Alyas’s size.
“Ah.” Alyas blinked nervously. “I thought…that is, considering…it seemed to me…”
“To you!” The brown dragon’s voice rose scornfully. “It seemed good to you that these should witness a Hatching?”
“Peace, Chiath.” The golden dragon turned an eye sternly on the brown one. “We will not mar the Hatching with a quarrel.” Mella let out a shaky breath, relieved. But then the queen swiveled her head to transfer her glare to the small white dragon. “Alyas. You take much upon yourself.”
“Pardon, my queen.” Alyas dipped his head in a quick, obsequious gesture. His crest lay flat along his neck, and he seemed to be trying to look as harmless as possible. “I thought…”
“You thought to bring humans here,” Chiath hissed. “When none have set foot on the Hatching Ground since the days of Coel the Traitor. Outsiders. Trespassers!”
“We are not!” Dragon or not, Mella decided, she didn’t like Chiath. He was just like Blackie in her own herd, bullying the smaller dragons. “We were asked to come here,” she continued angrily, chin up, fist clenched at her sides. “We were asked to bring the Egg.”
“Mella!” Roger breathed urgently in her ear.
“Asked?” The queen tipped her head slightly to take in both Roger and Mella with one dark eye. “And who asked you to do so? It was Kieron who was sent to bring the Egg here. We have waited two days, but he did not arrive.”
/> Too late, Mella understood Roger’s warning. Should she tell this circle of dragons, some looking easily as hostile as Chiath, that they had been asked to deliver the Egg by a dying dragon, killed by a dragon-slayer?
The dragons waited, their eyes on Mella and Roger. The long claws on Alyas’s front feet scratched anxiously at the gravel on the ground. They all had claws like that, Mella thought. Maybe she and Roger should have bolted for the safety of the tunnel when they’d had the chance. Claws and teeth and breath of fire…
“My sorrow, but Kieron will not return,” Roger said clearly, stepping forward. “He was slain.”
Mella glanced at him in alarm. Surely he would not confess to being a Defender’s squire? She broke in quickly before Roger could be overcome by an attack of honesty. For all she knew, it might be something to do with those rules of honor he was overly concerned with obeying. “But before he died, he told us where to come,” she said. “He gave the Egg to us.”
No one spoke. Mella did not know how long the silence lasted. She was watching the queen dragon, and she felt as if those black eyes were pools deeper than the earth’s core. Dizzy, she seemed to be standing on the very edge.
“For long now, humans have been our enemies,” the queen said at last. Chiath hissed in agreement, and she cast him a quelling glance. “But it was not always so. Once every hundred years an Egg is laid, and it can only hatch here, where the first of our kind broke free of their shells. If this one had been lost, great would have been our sorrow. We are in your debt.”
Alyas let out a long sigh, hissing through his nostrils in relief. To Mella’s surprise, Roger made the dragon queen a formal and elegant bow. She followed his lead and bobbed a curtsy.
“I am Roger Astorson and this is Mella Evasdaughter,” Roger said. He sounded quite dignified. “We are glad to have been of service.”
The queen looked as if she might have said more, but a harsh-edged roar from far above made everyone look up. It came from one of the dragons that had taken to the sky earlier, and the alarm in his voice was clear to Mella—her herd would roar so, in challenge and warning, when they heard a hunting cat howl from the woods. Now the beast plunged out of the sky, its wings close to its body. Mella thought it had been hurt somehow and expected another to leap to its aid, but the dragon’s wings snapped out when it was not far above their heads, and he landed deftly in the center of the circle, next to the silver symbol in the rock and the shards of eggshell. His scales were glossy black, his wings smoky gray, and his crest rippling up and down in agitation.
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