I flapped my wings and made a tight turn at the apex of the arc. “We attack, we turn, we flip around so that the rider can reload, or observe the enemy…” I was almost giddy with excitement. “What if we had two humans and one dragon, each other calling out suggestions and making improvements all at the same time. Six eyes are better than two. That’s how we can fight Zaxx, and how we can keep the other dragon’s safe!” I said, before hurrying to Paxala’s back. “Come on, we need to get these movements down exactly, if we are to stand a chance!”
By the end of the long afternoon we were all weary and bone-tired, but we had also succeeded. Paxala listened to Char’s suggestions – most of the time. She could also turn on the head of a pin, it seemed, and astonished us and amazed us with ever faster and more dangerous aerial maneuvers. It was pretty shaky, and not precise flying – but it was good enough for me. This can work, I thought. If a pair of dragon friends and their dragon can work together, and they can fight together.
And Paxala was fast. Paxala was faster than I could have imagined. Faster than any of my father’s horses. As fast as an arrow? I wondered, imagining what might be waiting for us when we got to the monastery.
We tarried in the wilds. Despite Char’s eagerness to get back, I was adamant that we had to train. On some days it rained, but never for long, and every morning we would awake to the fogs and mists of chill early mornings. We hunted in the mountain rivers and streams until I grew sick of eating fish (Pax never did, of course), until Char eventually said that she had enough of my moaning and decided to ‘take a lesson from her mother’s people’ and hunt. Armed only with a sharpened stake fashioned with an ash sapling, some twine gleaned from her robe, and her knife, she returned with a brace of rabbits. She was, indeed, a far better hunter than I was.
In the mornings, I spent a little while trying to think and talk through the problems that we might face. It was hard to not be worried about what might be waiting for us though. If my calculations were wrong, then that meant that a messenger on a fast horse, or one of the Prince Vincent’s spies might reach the monastery before we returned. That would mean that the monks would be expecting an angry Crimson Red and two students to approach by air. How could we get around that? They might have the monks armed with bows on the walls. They could use the dragon pipes to hurt Paxala’s sensitive ears before we got a chance to confront Zaxx.
“You only get good by putting in the hours,” my father had said, and in this, he had been right. I remembered, too, one of the more generous comments that my father had given me during fighting practice: “It doesn’t matter how good you are, or how good you think you are – just do the work, and you’ll get better! Just do the work!”
On the fifth or sixth day, however, as Char’s anxious urging that we get back to the dragon crater reached a fever pitch, I finally found the missing element that I hadn’t even known that I had been waiting for. I was standing on the ground of a clearing, high in the wooded hills of the wilds, and watching as Char and Pax spun, turned, and swooped through the air. I had taken to using my old cream tunic as a sort of flag, raising it to signal to the flying pair that they should change direction immediately. It wasn’t as good as if we had a training partner in the air as well, I knew, but it was a way to tell them: Turn now! Now! You are under attack – duck! Dive!
I raised my cream tunic on its stick in the air as Char and Paxala swept past. The dragon was powering forward, daring herself to fly as fast as possible when I raised the tunic-flag. Char turned her head, seeing my sign, but instead of what usually happened – Char using her knees and shouting suggestions into the dragon’s ears, I felt that pressure inside my head once again that I knew meant that Char was conversing to Paxala with her mind. The dragon flared her wings, opening one up higher than the other so that one half of her body caught the wind much faster than the other.
Pzow! The dragon turned faster than thought, spinning on an axis and keeping her momentum as she changed direction. It was like a catapult, and Paxala roared in delight at the speed. After a moment, I raised the tunic-flag again, and again, and every time I felt that pressure and saw the girl-and-dragon team move as fast as thought.
“Did you see how fast we were going?” Char told me after she had landed. She was breathless with excitement.
“You didn’t shout to Pax?” I said. “When you made the maneuvers?”
“No – I didn’t need to. She was already in my mind, and I barely even had time to see you waving the flag, when Paxala picked up on my thought, and knew what she had to do. It felt...” I saw Char almost lost for words. “It felt like we were one thing. One being.”
“Skrip-ip,” the Crimson Red chirruped, her forked tongue lolling from her wide jaws in clear enthusiasm. All signs of the dragon being annoyed at Char for not letting her fight their attackers in the Queen’s Keep were gone, I saw. The flying as one had bonded them. It was at that moment that I knew that we were as ready as we were ever going to be.
“Tomorrow we fly for Mount Hammal,” I said, and watched as Char grinned at my side. Without needing to say it, I knew that Char felt the same way as I: we might be able to beat Zaxx if we all, humans and dragons, worked together as one.
CHAPTER 23
THE CROWN
It was around mid-afternoon as we reached the Dragon Mountain, and I urged the Crimson Red to fly low over the trees, and follow the rivers to stay out of sight. Several times I saw the spires of the Dragon Monastery above off to our left – but there was no squeal and scream of the dragon pipes. If the Draconis Order had seen our approach, then they were making no sign to us that they had.
“There, the lake,” I said for Neill’s benefit as much as Paxala’s. Already, the great dragon was angling her wings down, and I could feel the immense forces of her muscles as they took the strain of the rushing air. Every time that I thought of how the dragon flew I was impressed. She did it all so effortlessly and easily, despite the pressures, tensions, and winds that her body was subject to.
I’ve had so little time to really pay attention to her, I thought a little sadly, watching how the broad leather of her wings snapped and shook in the wind. Every scale was a marvel, really; every part of her body was covered except her eyes of course, from the tiny finger-nail sized soft lighter-colored scales around her delicate nose, to the great plates of her sides and back – some growing as large as a human shield! Even though her breed was a Crimson Red, the colors of her scales changed, too, from the deep, almost inky red of the largest scales on her side to the sunburst ruddy oranges and lighter rose as they grew smaller.
And now I was asking her to face Zaxx with me, I thought in dismay.
“Paxala can beat Zaxx.” The dragon read my mind with shocking ease. “Zaxx is old. Paxala is young.”
“But Zaxx the Golden is also cunning, and likely knows a lot of tricks,” I murmured, feeling the anxiety mount as the silvery waters of Paxala’s lake appeared ahead of us.
“Sckrech!” the dragon couldn’t help delivering a small chirrup of delight at seeing her home again and I felt it too, now that Queen’s Keep didn’t feel like a home at all anymore. This was her home, of course, this lake, the waterfall, and the secluded river valley it sat upon. Not the crater up above. For a moment, all of my fears intensified – why was I asking her to challenge the Bull of the Crater if she had a home here, but the answer was immediate and obvious: because of the newts and the hatchlings. They needed to be given a future just as I had given the dragon beneath me. Paxala understood this, and I could feel her tacit agreement as a warm wall of confidence against my thoughts. And besides, it wasn’t as if Zaxx would let the Crimson Red survive out here, so close to his territory. We were flying on borrowed time, waiting until the bull got too territorial to stomach a free dragon so near.
I guess this is the closest thing that I have to a home now, too, I thought. Whilst I should have been unhappy at the thought, with the dragon holding me up, and with my friend Neill sitting behind me �
�� I actually felt good about that.
Paxala flared her wings and stretched out her legs as I had seen her land on the lake before – though never with a rider on her back. I held my breath, excited and terrified to be the first dragon friend to ride a water landing.
Woosh! A sudden, great spray of water as she sheared through and along the surface, beating her wings to encourage her to half-fly, and half-float, before she could tuck her legs up underneath her and paddle along the cold waters of the lake to the shingle beach at the far end.
“Woo!” Neill was laughing behind me, and, for just the briefest moment, I had to agree. We were soaked, but we were together.
“We have to challenge Zaxx,” Neill said, his tone certain. “As soon as Zaxx knows that the Draconis Order is based on the blood of his young, then surely even Zaxx has to see what should happen?” Something had changed in him since being in my father’s dungeons, I thought. It was like the man in him was coming out, and he wasn’t so much the gangly youth that he had been before. What made him so confident now? Was it seeing us working together as a team? Was it being forced to rely upon himself and not on his brothers or family name? Whatever it was, it made him believe, apparently, that we could perform impossible things.
“Isn’t Zaxx in on it too?” I asked. Neill himself had been the one to tell me that he had overheard the Abbot and Zaxx talking about which crater dragons to cull?
“Then we let the other dragons know, and the students, and the monks, just what the Draconis Order has been up to,” Neill said triumphantly, but I couldn’t bring myself to share his enthusiasm. Killing baby dragons, my heart reminded me, and I heard a low, answering grumble from Paxala beside us.
“But first, there’s something that we have to do,” I said, turning to rummage in my pack as Neill looked at me wonderingly.
“What?” he said, already impatient until he saw the delicate handkerchief that I brought out, the same one that I had wrapped the baby dragon teeth that we had collected in the Queen’s Keep. Standing with her long neck arching over us, Paxala started to make a high, keening noise.
“I know, girl, I know… we’re going to put this right,” I murmured to her as I took out my dagger, and started to dig a small pit in the earth at the edge of the tree line, overlooking the cool lake and the slopes of Mount Hammal below. After just a few moments, I was joined by Neill, using his own dagger to help me dig and clawing out stones.
“Skee-rip.” an impatient sound from Paxala behind us, and suddenly she was nudging us gently out of the way with her snout, before making a few clawing pulls at the same patch of ground, drawing out more rocks and earth in just those two motions than we ever could. I nodded, yes, this felt right too, as the dragon withdrew and sat just behind us on her haunches.
Very gently, I placed the handkerchief and the baby dragon teeth into the hole, before standing up and looking down. Something needed to be said, I knew, but I didn’t know what. What poetry mourned dragons? What would the spirits of the dragons – if they existed – be pleased with?
“Gone before us, but not forgotten,” Neill surprised me by suddenly saying in a clear voice. “Your memory guides us, your life honors us,” he said, before falling silent. The air was still, and the light was sharp over the lake. At last, I found the words that I wanted to say.
“Sleep well,” I murmured, just before Paxala let out a singular gout of flame into the air. A sudden smell of soot, before she started to nudge the rocks and stones back over the baby teeth. It was done, and I looked over at Neill with a tear in my eye.
“I hope that you don’t mind,” he said, looking at me gravely. “They’re Torvald Clan words spoken at a funeral, they were all that I know…”
“They were perfect,” I shushed him, shaking myself. The desire to put an end to this travesty was stronger than ever in me now. “Okay, let’s do this,” I said, still unable to shake my feeling of despair, despite the optimism expressed by my friend.
We walked up to the ridge in the late afternoon light, as I didn’t want to risk setting off the dragon pipes. Still, I knew that the monks might see us at any moment. Beside me, Neill went silent and watchful as a look of determined concentration took over his face.
What if Zaxx decides to kill all of the young after we refuse to give him the crown? I thought. What if Zaxx attacks my beloved Paxala? Should we just give him the crown, I thought, before being horrified at my own defeatism.
“Pfft. Char is not thinking right.” The voice of the Crimson Red suddenly appeared in my head. I nodded that I knew, but was still unable to shake the feeling of despair that we were walking to our doom, and that life would be so much easier if we just gave in…
“Char, look!” It was Neill, hunkering down behind one of the many boulders that littered the other side of the mountain, above the crater itself. He was pointing down towards the broad circular space, down to the green foliage of the hot-loving plants and the rising steams.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked Neill. As far as I could see, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong or different at all.
Neill frowned at me, as if I had sworn at him or was being deliberately obtuse. “No dragons, Char. No dragons on the resting-rocks.”
He was right. At various points around the insides of the crater there were large slabs of rock that must have been thrown up by the volcano long ago, or else fallen in from the tall sides. They acted as natural sun traps and heated slabs from the many steams and hot pools that bubbled up down there. And all dragons loved them. They were the place to sun themselves or to sleep, and the biggest and largest dragons commanded the best spots throughout the day.
But this time, there were no dragons in sight at all – not even the smaller Messenger dragons that usually flitted and darted through the trees like swallows, constantly chittering.
“Where are they all?” I asked. “Pax?”
In answer to my question, the Crimson Red carefully sniffed the air, breathing in and out to let the scents of the other dragons run over her forked tongue. “Below ground,” she informed me. “And afraid.”
Oh no, I thought, as we hurried down towards the lip of the crater. Had we taken too long in coming back to the mountain? Had Zaxx already started fulfilling his promise to me, that he would start to kill the younger dragons and the students – any one I loved, really-- as a punishment for not bringing him the Great Crown?
“Remember Char: we have something that he wants…” Neill whispered as we got to the lip, all three of us standing side by side and looking down into the crater. I could feel a burning ball of anger rising in the Crimson Red at my side as her claws extended from their sheaths to clutch onto the rocky walls of the ridge. Zaxx had killed her parents and smashed the brood eggs of her brothers and sisters. Paxala could never forgive him. If it weren’t for me and Neill, then Paxala probably would have thrown herself down into the crater already and challenged Zaxx alone.
It’s not only Neill who has grown confident in his abilities while we’ve been away, but Paxala too, I thought. So then, why did I feel so terrible? I bit my lip as I looked at my colleagues, to see Neill watching me expectantly. This was my fight to start, I saw. I was the one who had saved Paxala and raised her first, so I was her guardian.
“Zaxx…?” I called out, my voice sounding weak and fearful – probably because that was precisely how I was feeling at that moment as well.
What was wrong with me? My fear grew. Wasn’t this precisely the moment that I had been waiting for? The chance to confront Zaxx?
“Zaxx the Golden…” I coughed, “I call you…” my voice sounded small and far away, and Neill glanced at me in alarm.
“Char? Are you feeling alright?” he said. “We’re here, right beside you.”
“I’m fine,” I lied, knowing that both he and the Crimson Red could see right through it.
“Zaxx!” This time, with the support of my friends, my voice carried down into the crater, and this time, something
answered.
“RuuaarghhK!” came a grumbling, rumbling sound-- not from the crater itself – but from behind us. The ground shook, and rocks fell into the crater and at our feet as we stumbled back from the edge. At my side, Paxala hissed and lashed her tail in frustration, her head whipping this way and that as she sought to identify the bull dragon’s location.
“Ruaaaarghhkk!” The sound grew larger and closer, and it was undeniably coming from the training tunnel Monk Feodor had taken us to. As the ground cracked and shook, my sense of fear and terror only increased. We can’t do this. This is madness. This is impossible.
“Char. This is not you. These are not your thoughts,” Paxala said into my mind, and leapt in front of me, half shielding me with her wings.
“But… but what do you mean?” I shook my head, looking down to see that my hands were already untying the knot in the bundle of rags that held the crown. When had I decided to do that? I knew that I wanted to give the crown to the great and mighty Zaxx – but why?
“Char is thinking with Zaxx’s thoughts,” Paxala snarled as the ground in front of us heaved, as if something giant was tunneling its way out of the earth below…
Of course. The Abbot had managed to hypnotize us students with his meditations – was it possible for a dragon to do the same? A dragon that was as powerful and as ancient as Zaxx was?
“Child.” This time, the voice of the dragon in my mind wasn’t that of Paxala – it was the mighty gold dragon Zaxx himself, and rocks and debris flew everywhere, as he exploded out of the training tunnel like a fat worm.
The fear and terror that I had been feeling fell upon me in waves, and it was all coming from this dragon in front of us. I even saw Neill quailing beside me, his face draining, and his eyes going wide.
Dragon Dreams (The First Dragon Rider Book 2) Page 22
