“Lord Bower?” It was Mother Gorlas, kneeling at Saffron’s side and checking her eyes and neck. “Yes, you did well, she will be fine, but she’ll have a headache.”
“I didn’t want to,” I said miserably.
“Enough of that!” Mother Gorlas was having none of my self-pity. “Get the boy out of danger!” She nodded towards the serving boy was still lying unconscious, just a little way away from where One-Eye was leaping and slashing at the dragons that harried her from above.
“Yes, of course.” I broke into a run, ducking and jumping to the side of some rubble as a spiked tail sailed over my head. One-Eye wasn’t actively trying to kill me, but I was glad that Jaydra and the others up there were keeping the dark dragon busy as I broke cover once again, reaching the unconscious form of Tan, and seizing him awkwardly by the waist. With a heave that reminded me just how much more training I should have done by now, I managed to get the boy onto my shoulders and run back again, dodging the falling masonry and wooden beams on all sides.
The dragons clashed above us as Mother Gorlas pressed a cloth to Saffron’s head, signaling to two more dragon riders to help carry my friend out of the battle.
I didn’t want to leave Jaydra behind me, but neither could I abandon Saffron or this unconscious child, so I ran with the others across the ruins of Kingswood, knowing that now, at least, Jaydra and Ysix and the others could really unleash their fury without us there in harm’s way.
If I had ever thought Mother Gorlas old or infirm, now was the time that she proved just how wrong I was. She didn’t stop running until we had reached the smashed enclosure wall, and then only to readjust the bandages around Saffron’s head, and to force us to continue back down the slope to where the fires and the struggling Zenema lay.
My children? Attacked? Zenema hissed and scratched at the ground, trying to rouse from her healing slumber, but she was still weakened from the infection that One-Eye had set to her body.
“Great Zenema, please, do not further endanger yourself!” I called out as I set Tan down on the blankets next to Saffron. “Your daughters Jaydra and Ysix and the others are there—they will surely defeat One-Eye.”
But above me I heard snarls and shrieks in the night, and sudden flares of flame across the hilltop, illuminating giant bodies of dragons, wings rent, and fangs bared.
“M-mother?” Saffron mumbled a voice, groggily blinking her eyes as she looked up at Zenema’s shaking form rising above us all.
“The Stone Tooth gave her a potion, one that kept away the nightmare-magic. It seemed to help,” I hissed at Mother Gorlas. Where was Dol Agur? I could have cried out. She was on her way here, of course, with the rest of the Stone Tooth, but she was also the one carrying the scrolls containing the recipe for Saffron’s remedy!
The Three Rivers tribe woman shook her head sadly. “I know of no such remedy,” she said, “but if it has been keeping away the king’s influence then I will dearly love to know of it.” Like us, Mother Gorlas seemed to believe that whenever Saffron used her Maddox magic she was in danger, and I believed it when Saffron had looked at me as if she hadn’t recognized me, as if the magic itself were taking control of her.
“Aha!” A moment of rummaging through her things, and the wise woman had found a packet of herbs in a cloth bag. I watched as the wise woman sniffed them. “Hmm. Valerian perhaps? Mountain-root clover?” She shook her head and started crumbling it into a bowl. “What was it, a tea? An infusion?”
“I, I don’t know. There is a healer of the Stone Tooth clan, Dol Agur, who seemed to steep the herbs in a tea…” I gestured, wincing as I heard another crashing boom from the hilltop above.
My daughter must take potions to keep the darkness from her mind? Zenema asked, shaking with weakness and rage.
“Great Zenema.” I turned, holding up my hands to try and calm her down, but the force of her anger buffeted my mind like a gale, and I swayed on my feet.
Enough of this! I can feel a dark presence somewhere here, at the edges of Saffron, and up there, upon Queen One-Eye, Zenema hissed. The dark queen has given her mind and body over to the sorcerous-king, and that is why she fights. My daughter-Saffron will not be similarly used like a puppet.
“No, Zenema, wait!” I said, but the White Queen was already turning to the fight above, holding her wings awkwardly against her body. She shook her wounded neck as if to cast off the illness and infection, before repeating the command, this time even more plainly, that she had given to us earlier.
Bower of Torvald: I charge you to find the ritual that will unite the dragons and the humans. Find the right words. Forge us together, for we cannot go on like this.
“Great Zenema, please do not do this! Don’t go into battle again—you are wounded!” I said, appalled, as the great white looked down to the dazed and barely conscious Saffron, her adopted daughter, and snuffed at her tenderly.
“Mother, don’t go!” Saffron said at our feet, and struggled to push herself up from the blankets even though the potion was clearly taking a hold of her in the woozy way she swayed and talked.
Saffron-daughter, know this. You have always been loved. In my family, if not from your own. You will always be my daughter, Zenema said to the feverish and groggy Saffron.
There was an echoing shriek from above, one that I knew did not come from One-Eye, the wild queen, and must have come from either Jaydra or Ysix. The wounded Zenema looked up, growled, and struggled upwards once more. Her voice echoed in our minds as she took flight and disappeared into the smoke and ash of the tumult above. Take heart, friends! The darkness cannot last forever. The flame within still burns!
“This is bad,” Mother Gorlas said and made one of their signs that I recognized the Three-Rivers clan used against the evil eye, but she didn’t stop from her task.
“We have to stop her.” I felt weak and panicky as I looked up at the dragon battle raging above. How did one wild dragon manage to hold off so many others? I wondered. Was she infused with King Enric’s magic? Is that what the king had been trying to learn from Saffron’s mind, how to connect with dragons?
“This is dragon business,” Mother Gorlas said heavily and almost as if she had heard my thoughts, she added, “I have known old One-Eye since I was a girl, and she has a cruel streak in her a fathom wide. I have seen that dark dragon kill and injure more warriors than any. It would have been easy for her to give herself over to King Enric, especially if he has been after her day and night, just as he has with this poor girl here.” Mother Gorlas looked down at Saffron. “We have to save who we can save, Lord Bower.”
In that instant, the sky split with the flare, and like lightning precedes thunder, the dragon fire preceded the crash of great bodies falling to the earth. When the smoke cleared, and the watery sunlight of the dawn broke, a loud, haunting and mournful call rose to fill the foothills, and I knew that although the great queen and oldest dragon alive had saved us and destroyed Queen One-Eye, the task had also cost her life.
17
Saffron, Welcome & Farewell
Even though the wintry sun was up, to me it was as if it did not shine at all that day. My mood remained black, just as the clouds above were overcast and moody, broken only by the distant forms of the Crimson Reds or the occasional island dragons that flew that high.
One-Eye was dead, but so too was Queen Zenema.
I still couldn’t make those words make sense. It felt like nothing made sense any more. I was surrounded by a grey, constricting fog that I couldn’t quite see through. Mother Gorlas said that it could be the potion having its effects on me, but when I brushed my mind against Jaydra’s, or the minds of any others of Zenema’s brood, I found they too shared the same feeling.
So, this is what it feels like to lose a mother, I thought. I have lost two mothers now, and I only got to know one.
“Hey.” Bower, the weary, anguished Bower, slipped his hand into mine. We stood before a great pyre of wood and debris, as yet unlit. Bower looked thinner, a
nd he still had a smudge of soot on his cheek. Absentmindedly, I reached out to brushed it off. He never had a mother either, I remembered. Two orphans. We had that in common.
Three. I heard Jaydra’s low murmur at the back of my mind. The sense of distance, despair, and quiet I got from our connection broke my heart all over again. Not for the first time I wondered if the potion that Dol Agur had made for me was fogging the very connection that I wanted to keep with my den-sister. My only sister.
We humans stood in a line on one side of the bonfire, while around us swirled and swooped the dragons—both wild and island. Despite the fact that there must be a few hundred dragons or so, the air was not full of the sound of their passing, just their mournful calls. Even the wild dragons of dark beat their wings with a slow and somber cadence.
Beside Bower stood the other Three Rivers riders, who at least had known Zenema’s brood, followed by the delegation from the newly arrived Stone Tooth clan. Dol Agur and the others had finally gotten to Kingswood in the early morning, and while Bower welcomed their arrival, they were quick to realize that they had come too late to do anything but mourn. Not long after their arrival, other chiefs and leaders had started to arrive. The smoke of Kingswood’s destruction had been seen far and wide, and even Chief Vere had been forced to turn back at the insistence of the Three Rivers Chiefs to lend whatever support they could.
I looked up at Bower, to see that his eyes were shining. This is what he wants, isn’t it? I thought. The Stone Tooth clan and the Three Rivers and the refugees of Kingswood and half a dozen other, smaller family groups all coming together. There must be almost six or seven hundred people here, of varying ages and talents. The largest numbers of resistors to the king’s rule yet.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel like we were losing. We faced an army of thousands, and Zenema, my mother, the one who had united the island and dark dragons once more when Bower could not, was gone.
“Saffron?” croaked a small voice. It was Tan, the boy I had tried to save, endangering myself and everyone else. He looked tired, and he had a bandage strapped across his head, just as I did.
“Is it time?” I whispered, and the boy nodded. He held a long stave that was almost half his height again, with a thick knot of oil-soaked rags at the end. He handed it to me solemnly, biting his lower lip in concentration. He performed his task perfectly and I accepted the unlit torch with a slow, exaggerated nod, before whispering, “You did good, now take my place.” He smiled nervously.
Bower’s hand slipped from mine as I strode out of the line and across the bare earth, holding the spear aloft. Even though this wasn’t the pyre for the great White Queen, as her own brood had seen to that themselves, it still felt, to me, like it was. It felt like my first truly public recognition that Zenema had died, leaving us with the business of carrying on without her. I felt heart-sore, and devastated.
The wind was cold, and, apart from the hooting dragon calls above, the crowd was silent as they watched me stride forward towards the two figures who stood in front of the unlit bonfire: Mother Gorlas, and Dol Agur.
“Friends! Dragons!” Mother Gorlas called out in a loud, strident voice. Together the four of us, Bower, Mother Gorlas, Dol Agur and I, had worked out the generalities of this ceremony just a few hours ago, and it had felt right. Zenema had told us that we needed a new ceremony, and now it was her death that provided the format for it.
“We are here to bid farewell to the past, and to the great souls who we have fought alongside, lived with, and loved,” Mother Gorlas called. “I ask you to think of them now.”
“AYE!” the crowds shouted.
“We are here to remind ourselves that their memory never dies,” Mother Gorlas chanted.
“AYE!” came the roar from the crowd behind me, and I saw many with tears streaming down their faces, matched by the tears that ran down my own cheeks.
“We are here to remember that the flame within never dies!” This time it was Dol Agur who spoke, her tone loud and defiant.
“AYE!” I found myself whispering in time with the others.
“The flame within, never dies!” chanted Bower, and others took it up, little Tan beside him, the Three Rivers riders, the Stone Tooth clan, and finally, the rest.
“The flame within, never dies!”
I held the staff high into the air, and felt an answering call from high above. It was a voice that I recognized, as Jaydra swooped down out of the skies straight towards me as if she were on a hunting run. This was what the old Choosing Ceremony had been based on after all; a dragon hunting a human, and being impressed by their courage. I turned to face the dragon, standing tall and defiant as she roared lower and lower, closer and closer, and then—
WHOOOSH! Jaydra let out a burst of dragon fire in a roar above me, the intense heat of it singing a few of my errant hairs. I barely managed to hold onto the spear as Jaydra flew past, setting my staff alight with her fiery breath.
I held aloft the burning staff. “The flame within”- I chanted in unison with all the others, thinking of Zenema and my lost mother Amelia, and all the other dragons and humans that we had seen fall along the way, “never dies!” As I said the final words of the chant, I threw the spear into the pyre, watching it strike deep into the heart of the carefully layered mound, before the whole thing spat and burst into flames.
The fire grew stronger and stronger, burning many times higher than the height of a man. Its heat radiated across all of us, and seemed to whip the dragons above into a frenzy of flying as they whirled again and again, closer and closer to the flames, their wings sucking the flames up in spirals. Zenema would have approved of this fire, and all of those here coming together. There was something primal about it, something older than what we said or did or thought about the ceremony, just the fire and our feelings.
“Riders! Dragons!” Mother Gorlas called and the next part of the ceremony began. One by one, the Three Rivers riders who already tried to bond with a dragon stepped forward, and jogged up to the bonfire to snatch a burning branch from the flames, Mother Gorlas or Dol Agur asking each of them in turn, “Do you swear to protect your dragon, as long as you both shall live?” to which the rider would nod or agree.
As the first of the Three Rivers riders made his vow and took off running, past the bonfire and up the slope, holding his burning branches aloft, there was a cry from above. One of the dragons broke ranks and swooped down to catch him.
Perhaps the ceremony of old was full of the pomp and serious gravity—we did not know. All we knew was that this new ceremony was built on passions, on shared grief, and rage, and joy, and fire. The dragon swooped down to snatch the torch from the Three Rivers rider’s hands, and that was it. He had been caught. I knew that Queen Ysix had told the dragons only to catch a human who appealed to them, who drew their heart irresistibly, and to whom they felt some sort of kinship. If a dragon were strong enough and brave enough, they might pick up to two humans, but they had to be able to snatch two upraised torches in their claws, talons, or beak, mostly island dragons who seemed a little more confident about the benefits of bonding with humans. The wild dragons of dark almost invariably only chose one human, and when they caught the torches they did so in a flurry of movement and snarls, almost as if they were hunting them for real. Most of the Three Rivers dragons seemed to choose to bond with the same human they had already been training with, but now they appeared closer, bonded through tragedy and joy rather than just circumstance.
As the last of the Three Rivers riders was selected, the Stone Tooth would-be riders stepped forward. They were mostly young women, with a few men as well who were eager for the opportunity to earn a dragon’s respect. It didn’t take long until the hillside was alive with swooping dragons and dodging, weaving torches.
I stood by Mother Gorlas and Dol Agur, and caught Bower’s eye over the crowd. He was smiling, but it was a fierce smile. He knew as well as I did the price it had taken to get to this point. I nodded at him, and he at
me. Not every dragon that flew above chose to chase and capture a human. The Crimson Reds didn’t, and neither did Queen Ysix, who instead swooped above us in slow, endless circles. Some of the dragons preferred to remain riderless, but would fly at the direction of their brood mother, Queen Ysix—who was now queen, not just of her own brood, but of her mothers’ as well. She and the other of Zenema’s brood had carried the old queen’s body off at the break of day to a place far away in the mountains, where Jaydra had told me they had dug a pit and burned her body. No human had been allowed to come, and no more would my sister tell me of what strange dragon rituals they had conducted. It felt odd not to be invited and, if I were honest, it did indeed make my heart hurt, but I knew that I was not a true dragon. As close as I was to Jaydra, Zenema, Ysix, and the others, I knew they shared something I never could. Realizing this fact only made me feel even more lonely.
When, finally, all of the dragons who would participate had, Mother Gorlas raised her voice to cheer at the spectacle and announce. “Now, you must feast. Listen to your dragons, as they listen to you! Let them eat as they wish!” I knew that the new human riders would return to the smaller cook fires, there to participate in the meager feast we could provide with the help of the Kingswood refugees. In gratitude, they had offered the few cattle that remained, to be added to the river fish and whatever we had hunted. It would be enough to feed everyone for a few days, but after that we had to find some other source of food for the entire amassed company of people.
Den-sister. I am hungry. I am going to eat fish with Queen Ysix, Jaydra said, and I sent her my affection and pride as she dipped one of her blue wings. In a flash, she had joined her sister high above, slowly gliding towards their dinner. I felt a little stung that she had not chosen to come down and feast with us, or ask me and Bower to go with her, but that was that.
Dragons of Dark (Upon Dragons Breath Trilogy Book 3) Page 12
