I screamed. Skava squawked and bated off my fist. The dragon gave a start, belched out a jet of flame. I scooted backward, blinded by the stinging smoke, holding my left arm straight out with Skava bating from it. I scrambled to my feet, turned around to go back to the passage—and then drew up short.
I was staring into the eyes of the selfsame dragon; he had alit upon the ledge behind me and now stood blocking my way.
He cocked his head, as if curious. “Hush, Skava,” I murmured. She calmed; I settled her back on my fist. I feinted right, then tried to slip to the left and past him. He thrust out a talon, blocking me.
And a prickling sensation ran up the back of my neck. Something behind me … Slowly, I turned around and peered down into the cavern.
Eyes. At least forty pairs of them. Long and green and slotted. Dragon eyes—staring up at me.
Chapter 17
Dragons shun all prey that kens them.
—THE BOK OF DRAGON
I stood rooted, caught between the multitude of staring dragons and the one that blocked my way.
Back. I must get back. Back into the passage whence I had come—too narrow for dragons to follow.
I wrenched my gaze from the dragons below and fixed on the one before me. Ht was taller than any man, this dragon. His long, thin neck curved down so that he faced me eye to eye. Green eyes he had, with long black slots: fierce beneath protruding ridges. All else was red—soft and chalky on his underbelly, brighter than fresh blood on his gleaming scales. His wings, red-veined, delicate as spider-spin, rippled at his sides.
There was room, I saw, to my right, where I might slip between wing and wall. Slowly, I edged forward.
The dragon’s nostrils flared; his belly swelled with an intake of breath. He spat out a lick of flame.
I jumped back. Skava scolded the dragon with high, angry screams, struck at him with a foot. I coughed from the smoke, which smelled of burning wool.
The dragon’s eyes glittered.
Did he laugh?
Now he sucked in another breath. I flung myself back. Flame splashed on the rock where my feet had been; Skava hissed but did not bate.
Was he toying with me, as a cat toys with a mouse?
Another breath. He was going to flame. I glanced behind me; I had nowhere left to go.
“Stop!” I said. My voice rang against the cave walls, then ebbed in rippling echoes.
The dragon hiccoughed, seemed to swallow his flame in startlement. A blast of smoke escaped through his nostrils; I coughed and edged to one side, astonished that my words had had effect.
There was a murmur below, a low, deep, pulsating thrum that seemed to drift through the throng of them and rumble in my bones. A green-black dragon—one of the largest—was uncoiling herself, was rising to her feet in a slow, fluid motion until she stood tall as a ship’s mast, though still well below. Then others likewise rose, and now all of them were standing, contemplating me.
“What did you say?”
The words burned themselves into my mind and reverberated painfully against the inside of my skull. I clenched against the hurting until it ebbed to a pulsing throb.
The green-black dragon. She had spoken to me.
I answered—not aloud, but silently, deliberately, purposefully, as if I had known how to talk to dragons for all my life: “I told him to stop.”
The murmur rose again, and this time I discerned the feeling of it—a feeling of wonderment. And I thought I picked out a word or two as well, though I could not be certain. She speaks, I thought I heard. Then the green-black dragon asked:
“Did you call Flagra?”
The words pierced my heart. Flagra.
“Did you?”
I looked down into the cavern, at the two-score pairs of dragon eyes staring up at me, and the shame of what I had done engulfed my fear.
“I did, but … I had no choice, they were forcing me to do it, and at any pass I did not recall her … it was so long ago …”
Silence. Mind-silence and ear-silence, with only the plink of dripping water to break it. My words seemed to hang feebly in the dank cave air, with all their cringing and weaseling and excuse-making clear to view. I wished I had stopped at I did.
“Give me your name.”
Her command blazed through my mind, left a raw, throbbing pain in its wake.
“Give me your name!”
“Kara!”
The murmur again. I felt my name drawn out of me, examined, commented upon like a piece of woven cloth from a faraway land, offered in trade by a merchant. A red dragon rose to its feet, seemed to say something to the green-black one.
The green-black one turned to me again. “So … Kara. You also warned two of our kyn of danger?”
A saving grace. I had done so. “Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
I felt the scope of this question contained within it and knew that nothing less than the whole and honest account of all my dealings with dragons would satisfy. Yet I knew not how to begin. “Because Flagra,” I faltered. “When I was young …” And then this, too, was drawn from me—the whole tale, beginning with my illness and my time in the dragon cave. It flowed wordless out of me in drifting shapes, like clouds that billow and twine and blend in the wind, until at last it thinned and dispersed.
And the dragons were looking at me in a way I could not fathom. Would they kill me now? I did not know. This was most strange, this silence. I had been taught that dragons were ravenous beasts, their hunger never restrained or sated. And yet here they stood, with me captive to them, regarding me with measuring eyes.
Then, “Loose the bird,” the green-black dragon said.
I blinked, startled.
“The falcon. Loose her.”
“You won’t … harm her?”
“We hold no grudge against her. Loose her.”
I hesitated, wondering what that boded. Had the dragons forborne to harm me because of Skava?
“Loose her.”
Hastily, I freed Skava’s jesses from her leash. She looked about her, roused, then sailed down into the cavern, alighting with a tinkle of bells upon the back of a big green dragon. Serenely, she began to preen.
Something seized me from behind. My pack straps yanked up hard under my arms; I was moving.
The floating dragon. He held me.
A scream escaped me as the ledge dropped away from beneath my feet. The floor of the cavern swooped up. A jarring impact—my legs buckled, straightened—and I was standing in the cavern amidst the dragons.
They were immense.
They had seemed so from above, but now I felt as if I stood in a great dark forest with trees that glared and breathed.
Hot breath. Dry and metallic, like a forge.
I shrank back from the dragons’ formidable feet: gnarled as tree roots, tipped by talons long as scythe blades.
The younger dragons—each taller than I and more massive than a bull full grown—moved toward me through the spaces between their elders. One brought her head down near me—so near that I could feel her warm, smoky breath, could see the mottled greens that patterned each particular scale. She nuzzled my stomach with her snout, then snuffled round to my pack. My food! She wanted my food. Then the other young ones began sniffing at me, poking, prodding, nudging. I did not sense that they wanted to harm me, but they were so big and their muzzles so hard that they hurt. I tried to back away from them, but they pressed me close on all sides; there was no room to move. Then a ripping noise—my pack! I whirled around, but then another snout poked me hard, and I fell backward onto the cave floor. They were crowding in nearer, breathing on me, a circle of curious, probing dragons when—crack!—lightning in my head.
The dragons turned as one toward the big green-black female, then slowly backed away from me. I had not understood the words—if words there had been—but the meaning was clear. They were not to harm me.
Not yet, at any pass.
The young dragons stared at me for a tim
e, making low, grumbling noises. Then one flicked another with her tail, and still another shot flame at the tail-flicker. And they were off, cavorting in the pool at the center of the cave and playing what looked for all the world like a child’s game of chase.
The older dragons settled back down, and a rumbling murmur arose from among them, so low that I could not tell for certain whether I sensed it with my ears or with my mind or only in the marrow of my bones. I strained to understand them but could not. Which was strange, I thought, since the green-black one’s words to me had been blazingly clear.
I stood uncertainly, not knowing what to do.
Might it be … they would let me go?
I looked for Skava and found her still preening lackadaisically on the same green dragon she had flown to before. One of the dragon’s back scales was notched—broken off, perhaps. I nearly called Skava but stopped, not wanting to draw notice. Anyway, I was irked at her. She had abandoned me readily enough.
I edged round the sleeping bulks of several dragons that lay between me and the cave mouth, skirting them widely, before I marked the dragon stretched across the mouth of the cave. Blocking it.
I took pause.
It did seem to be sleeping. And there was a gap between its tail and the cavern wall. Yet that tail … A ridge of crimson spines traversed it, sharp and jagged as shards of glass. I had just begun to sidle along the wall when the tail whipped in front of me and neatly closed the gap. I looked back at the dragon’s head. One huge green eye surveyed me, as if I were not worth the effort of opening two.
I was a captive.
But why? What would they do to me?
I looked about to find a secure place to stand where I would not be trodden underfoot. Near the pool, I saw, the broken-off roots of a cluster of dripstone icicles jutted up from the cavern floor. About forehead-high they stood—my forehead, not a dragon’s. I worked my way through the cave to them, giving the dragons wide berth. Some few of the clustered stone columns had been broken off lower to the ground; gaining purchase on those, I climbed to the top.
When I looked down, all had changed.
The dragons were moving. I shrank back from them, but they did not come for me; they moved all around me and past me toward the mouth of the cave. Their wings rustled; their tails scraped against the sand; their breaths warmed me as they passed. Their gait was light—astonishingly light—lithe as a cat’s.
A jingling sound: Skava streaked across the cavern and lit upon my shoulder. “So the traitor returns?” I said softly, scratching her feet. She stretched up and tweaked my hair. I considered seizing her jesses and taking her to fist but decided against it. The dragons seemed to … disapprove of my holding her captive—although they did not scruple to do the same with me.
They milled about at the mouth of the cave, where moonlight rippled like water across their great ridged backs.
The hunt, I thought. The nightly hunt.
They prodded one another, swished their tails. I heard a murmuring in my mind!, and, though I could not separate out words, I felt the thrill of their exuberance.
Now one alone stood poised at the lip of the cave. She leaned slowly forward in utter silence … and disappeared.
I gasped, staring at the place where the dragon had stood. And then she reappeared in the air beyond, pumping up from below, her wings glinting with needlepricks of light. A cool draught of air gusted into the cavern. Another dragon launched itself, disappeared, pumped up into view—then another and another—a liquid tide of dragons flowing out of the cave and dwindling in the distant sky. There was a hush about them, which the whoosh of air beneath their wings seemed only to magnify.
Then the smaller ones took wing—quickly, clumsily, eagerly. They did not sink so far but seemed to bob on the air like hoarnut shells on a swift-flowing stream. They slipped side to side, stalled, dived one upon the other in what seemed like sheer joyous frolic.
And now Skava gave a cry, pushed off my shoulder, joined them in the sky.
“Skava,” I called, “come! Come!”
But she did not.
I watched until bird and dragons disappeared among the stars, and I was seized with a strange, wild longing to go with them, to cast off from this cave and soar.
But that was not to be. I was earthbound; they were free.
One dragon remained standing on the cave lip—the big dark red one. The guard dragon.
I stood watching, willing him to go so that I could escape.
He turned around, cast me a hard, glittering gaze, then stretched across the cave mouth and went to sleep.
Chapter 18
Clean your trencher.
—PARENTAL ADMONITION, KRAGLAND
It was quiet in the cave. The only sounds were the rumbling snores of the guard dragon and the echoing plinks of dripping water: round and musical where they dropped into the pool, flat and hard where they spattered on rock.
I had eaten a meal on my dripstone platform—eyeing the guard dragon all the while. But he had not so much as broken the rhythm of his snores. Still, I had no doubt that if I approached where he lay he would waken soon enough.
Now I looked about me for another passage out. The cavern was vast. Toward its mouth, it was silvered by moonlight—patching across the floor, glistening in the masses of dripstone high above. Farther back, all melted into shadow.
I could not possibly reach the passage I had entered by; the walls loomed too high, too sheer. But far back in the cave … who could know? I eased myself down the jagged steps to my platform and made my way across the sandy floor.
Movement flickered behind the watch dragon’s eyelids, but they did not open.
I groped my way to the nearest wall and edged along it, running my hands across the cold, slimy surface, probing at every niche and hollow as high as I could reach.
It seemed a very long time that I felt my way in this wise, finding nothing but a crack or two for mice or voles to leave by. I had traversed but a small portion of the cave wall when I heard something—a faint, distant clanging from somewhere outside and below. Familiar somehow …
Shields! It was soldiers clashing swords against their shields! I stumbled to the front of the cave, as near to the watch dragon as I dared.
The clanging faded, trailed off. And a wave of loneliness engulfed me. I ached to see Rath and Myrra, to see Corwyn and the birds in the mews. Even Skava had abandoned me. And Kazan. I wondered … did he search for me? Was he sorry that I had gone?
Well, no matter about Kazan. I must get out.
I had just begun exploring the wall again when a soft jingling caught my ears.
Skava. She streaked through the cave mouth, grazed the watch dragon’s back ridge. I held out my gloved hand and called her. She lighted down, burbled, then walked up my arm to perch on my shoulder. There was blood on her feet, I saw, and she had the fat, contented look of a bird that has eaten its fill.
“Your training is ruined,” I scolded her. “Hunting on your own! I have plenty of mice to feed you.” Calmly she ran her talons through her beak to clean them. I sighed, feigning vexation, but I knew I could not hide my gladness from her. “You’re a traitor,” I said, gently scratching her feet.
I had still found no passage when the first of the young dragons returned. There was a rush of air; I looked up in time to see the dragon tilt precariously to one side, right itself, teeter too far the other way. It belched flame, plummeted, and skidded onto the cave floor, flapping its wings and scrambling frantically for purchase, with all the grace of a duck landing on a frozen pond.
More young dragons came hard behind—tilting, flaming, dropping in a wild, ungainly commotion. Some brought prey with them—three or four rabbits I saw, and some ptarmigan, and a single gray fox. Each dragon with prey tore into it the moment it alit; the others crowded round, stealing bits and pieces as best they could.
I crouched beside the wall until the flow of dragons ceased, then quickly made my way back to the safety of the pla
tform.
And just in time—for now the big ones came.
They soared into the cave one by one on thundering gusts of air—breathing out flame, trailing smoke—and then lit down with a fluid, sinuous ease that made them seem light as whiffle fluff. I crouched down low on my island, afraid that they would collide with it, but they never came near. Through the swirling smoke and the fine, choking dust I could make out their prey—large prey—a reindeer, an elk, a big buck ox. And yet most, so far as I could see, brought nothing.
Skava pushed off from my shoulder and alit on the back of a green dragon—her friend of the chipped ridge plate. The cave soon filled with a terrible, echoing cacophony of crunching bones and tearing flesh. It grew hot; the reek of blood mingled with the scorched, dragony smells of sulfur and smoke.
Yet there was an odd peacefulness about this feeding. I had thought that dragons would fight for prime morsels, as the sled dogs did. But these dragons did not fight. One yielded to another, or so it looked to me, save for the young ones, who wriggled in and out at will among their elders.
All at once, the dragons’ heads jerked up. They stood as though listening, their eyes fixed on the cave mouth. Then I saw it too. Another dragon was flying toward the cave—plummeting sharply, lurching laboriously up again, wobbling from side to side. It skimmed over the watching dragons, hacked out flame with a plaintive mew, then thumped down, sprawling, at the foot of my island.
I felt a wail from one of the dragons; a murmur rippled among the others like a storm wind stirring the treetops. They crowded around the latecomer—a young red dragon—snuffling at it, poking it with their snouts. They loomed frighteningly near; I drew far back on my island. Still, the hurt one’s cries pulled at me so, I could not help but watch.
Then a sudden hot blast blew into my mind: “Humans!”
And they were staring at me now—all of them—as they had not since they had first discovered me here.
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