It was lying on the backseat beside Neal. Neal tried to pretend it wasn’t, but Alectis turned around and grabbed it as Neal tried to shove it on the floor. I was lying back in my straps, feeling gray and thinking, We could get away now. I’d better lam them all again. But all I did was lie there and watch Neal and Alectis having an angry tug-of-war. Then watch Lewin turn around and pluck the block away from the pair of them.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said to Neal. “I’ve already erased the recorder. And if I hadn’t had Renick and Palino breathing righteously down our necks, I’d never have recorded anything. It goes against the grain to take in children.”
Lewin pressed the erase on the memo block, and it gave out a satisfied sort of gobble. Neither of the other two said anything, but I could feel Alectis thinking how much he had always hated Palino. Terens was looking down at Wormstow through a fieldglass and trying not to remember a boy in Cadets with him who had turned heg and given himself up. I felt I wanted to say thank you. But I was too shy to do anything but sit up and look at Wormstow, too, between the jags of the rock. Even without a fieldglass, I could see the place throbbing like a broken anthill with all the Slaver troops.
“Getting ready to move out and mop up the countryside,” Terens said.
“Yes, and that’s where most people live,” Lewin said. “Farms and holdings in the hills. What’s the quickest way to the Dragon Reserve?”
“There’s a track on the right around the next bend,” said Neal. “Why?”
“Because it’s the safest place I can think of,” Lewin said.
Neal and I looked at one another. You didn’t need to be heg to tell that Neal was thinking, just as I was, that this was a bit much. They were supposed to help all those people in the holdings. Instead, they thought of the safest place and ran there! So neither of us said that the trade was only a bridle path, and we didn’t try to warn them not to take the van into the Reserve. We just sat there while Lewin drove it uphill and then lumping and bumping and rattling up the path. The path gave out in the marshy patch below the Saddle, but Lewin kept grinding and roaring on, throwing up peat in squirts, until we tipped downhill again and bounced down a yellow fellside. We were in the Reserve by then. The ling was growing in lurid green patches, black at the roots where dragons had burned it in the mating season. They fight a lot then.
We got some way into the Reserve. The van gave out clanging sounds and smelled bad, but Lewin kept it going by driving on the most level parts. We were in a wide stony scoop, with yellow hills all around, when the smell got worse and the van just stopped. Alectis let go of the door. “Worms—dragons,” he said, “don’t like machines, I’ve heard.”
“Now he tells us!” said Terens, and we all got out. We all looked as if we had been in an accident. I mean, I know we had in a way, but we looked worse than I’d expected: sort of ragged and pale and shivery. Lewin turned his foot on a stone, which made him clutch his chest and swear. Neither of the other two even asked if he was all right. That is the Dragonate way. They just set out walking. Neal and I went with them, thinking of the best place to dodge off up a kyle, so that we could run home and try and warn Mother about the Slavers.
“Where that bog turns into a stream—I’ll say when,” Neal was whispering, when a dragon came over the hill into the valley and made straight for us.
“Stand still!” said Alectis. Lewin and Terens each had a gun in his hand without seeming to have moved. Alectis didn’t, and he was white.
“They only eat moving prey,” Neal said, because he was sorry for him. “Make sure not to panic and run, and you’re fine.”
I was sorry for Alectis, too, so I added, “It’s probably only after the van. They love metal.”
Lewin crumpled his face at me and said “Ah!” for some reason.
The dragon came quite slowly, helping itself with its spread wings and hanging its head rather. It was a bad color, sort of creamy through the brown-green. I thought it might be one of the sick ones that turn man-eater, and I tried to brace myself and stop feeling so tired and shaky so that I could lam it. But Neal said, “That’s Orm’s dragon! You didn’t kill it after all!”
It was Orm’s dragon. By this time it was near enough for me to see the heat off it quivering in the air, and I recognized the gamesome, shrewd look in its eye. But since it had every reason to hate me, that didn’t make me feel much better. It came straight for me, too. We all stood like statues. And it came right up to me and bent its neck and laid its huge brown head on the ling in front of my feet, where it puffed out a sigh that made Lewin cough and gasp another swearword.
It had felt me coming, the dragon said, and it was here to say sorry. It hadn’t meant to upset me. It had thought it was a game.
That made me feel terrible. “I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I lost my head. I didn’t mean to hurt you. That was Orm’s fault.”
Orm was only playing, too, the dragon said. Orm called him Huffle, and I could, too, if I liked. Was he forgiven? He was ashamed.
“Of course I forgive you, Huffle,” I said. “Do you forgive me?”
Yes. Huffle lifted his head up and went a proper color at once. Dragons are like people that way.
“Ask him to fetch Orm here,” Lewin said urgently.
I didn’t want to see Orm, and Lewin was a coward. “Ask him yourself,” I said. “He understands.”
“Yes, but I don’t think he’d do it for me,” Lewin said.
“Then, will you fetch Orm for Lewin?” I asked Huffle.
He gave me a cheeky look. Maybe. Presently. He sauntered away past Terens, who moved his head back from Huffle’s rattling right wing, looking as if he thought his last hour had come, and went to have a look at the van. He put out a great clawed foot, in a thoughtful sort of way, and tore the loose door off it. Then he tucked the door under his right front foreleg and departed, deliberately slowly, on three legs, helping himself with his wings, so that rocks rattled and flapped all along the valley.
Alectis sat down rather suddenly. But Lewin made him leap up again and help Terens get the broadcaster out of the van before any more dragons found it. They never did get it out. They were still working and waggling at it to get it loose, and Lewin was standing over Neal and me, so that we couldn’t sneak off, when we heard that humming kind of whistle that you get from a dragon in flight. We whirled around. This dragon was a big black one, coasting low over the hill opposite and gliding down the valley. They don’t often fly high. It came to ground with that grinding of stones and leathery slap of wings closing that always tells you a dragon is landing. It arched its black neck and looked at us disdainfully.
Orm was sitting on its back looking equally disdainful. It was one of those times when Orm looks grave and grand. He sat very upright, with his hair and beard combed straight by the wind of flying, and his big pale eyes hardly looked mad at all. Neal was the only one of us he deigned to notice. “Good afternoon, Neal Sigridsson,” he said. “You keep bad company. Dragonate are not human.”
Neal was very angry with Orm. He put my heart in my mouth by saying, quite calmly, “Then in that case, I’m the only human here.” With that dragon standing glaring! I’ve been brought up to despise boys, but I think that is a mistake.
To my relief, Orm just grinned. “That’s the way, boy,” he said. “Not a booby after all, are you?”
Then Lewin took my breath away by going right up to the dragon. He had his gun, of course, but that wouldn’t have been much use against a dragon. He went so near that the dragon had to turn its head out of his way. “We’ve dropped the charges,” he said. “And you should never have brought them.”
Orm looked down at him. “You,” he said, “know a thing or two.”
“I know dragons don’t willingly attack humans,” Lewin said. “I always read up on a case before I hear it.” At this, Orm put on his crazy look and made his mad cackle. “Stop that!” said Lewin. “The Slavers have invaded. Wormstow’s full of Slaver troops, and we need your help.
I want to get everyone from the outlying farms into the Reserve and persuade the dragons to protect them. Can you help us do that?”
That took my breath away again, and Neal’s, too. We did a quick goggle at one another. Perhaps the Dragonate was the way it was supposed to be after all!
Orm said, “Then we’d better get busy,” and slid down from the dragon. He still towered over Lewin. Orm is huge. As soon as he was down, the black dragon lumbered across to the van and started taking it to bits. That brought other dragons coasting, whistling in from all sides of the valley, to crunch to earth and hurry to the van, too. In seconds it was surrounded by black and green-brown shapes the size of hay barns. And Orm talked, at the top of his voice, through the sound of metal tearing, and big claws screaming on iron, and wings clapping, and angry grunts when two dragons happened to get hold of the same piece of van. Orm always talks a lot. But this time he was being particularly garrulous, to give the dragons time to lumber away with their pieces of van, hide them, and come back. “They won’t even do what Orm says until they’ve got their metal,” I whispered to Terens, who got rather impatient with Orm.
Orm said the best place to put people was the high valley at the center of the Reserve. “There’s an old she-drake with a litter just hatched,” he said. “No one will get past her when she’s feared for her young. I’ll speak to her. But the rest are to promise me she’s not disturbed.” As for telling everyone at the farms where to come, Orm said the dragons could do that, provided Lewin could think of a way of sending a message by them. “You see, most folk can’t hear a dragon when it speaks,” he said. “And some who can hear”—with a nasty look at me—“speak back to wound.” He was still very angry with me. I kept on the other side of Terens and Alectis when the dragons all came swooping back.
Terens set the memo block to repeat and tapped out an official message from Lewin. Then he tore off page after page with the same thing on it. Orm handed each page to a dragon, saying things like “Take this to the fat cow up at Hillfoot.” Or “Drop this on young vinegar lady at Crowtop—hard.” Or “This is for Dopey at High Jiot, but don’t give it her; give it to her youngest husband or they’ll never get moving.”
Some of the things he said made me laugh a lot. But it was only when Alectis asked what was so funny and Neal kicked my ankle that I realized I was the only one who could hear the things Orm said. Each dragon, as it got its page, ran down the valley and took off, showering us with stones from the jump it gave to get higher in the air than usual. Their wings boom when they fly high. Orm took off on the black dragon last of all, saying he would go and warn the she-drake.
Lewin crumpled his face ruefully at the few bits of van remaining, and we set off to walk to the valley ourselves. It was a long way. Over ling slopes and up among boulders in the kyles we trudged, looking up nervously every so often when fat bluish Slaver fliers screamed through the clouds overhead. After a while our dragons began booming overhead, too, seaward to roost. Terens counted them and said every one we had sent seemed to have come back now. He said he wished he had wings. It was sunset by the time we reached the valley. By that time Lewin was bent over, holding his chest and swearing every other step. But everyone was still pretending, in that stupid Dragonate way, that he was all right. We came up on the cliffs, where the kyle winds down to the she-drake’s valley, and there was the sunset lighting the sea and the towers of rock out there, and the waves crashing around the rocks, where the young dragons were flying to roost, and Lewin actually pretended to admire the view. “I knew a place like this on Seven,” he said. “Except there were trees instead of dragons. I can’t get used to the way Eight doesn’t have trees.”
He was going to sit down to rest, I think, but Orm came up the kyle just then. Huffle was hulking behind him. “So you got here at last!” Orm said in his rudest way.
“We have,” said Lewin. “Now would you mind telling me what you were playing at bringing those charges against Siglin?”
“You should be glad I did. You’d all be in a slaveship now if I hadn’t,” Orm said.
“But you weren’t to know that, were you?” Terens said.
“Not to speak of risking being charged yourself,” added Lewin.
Orm leaned on his hand against Huffle, as you might against a wall. “She half killed this dragon!” he said. “That’s why! All I did was ask her for a kiss, and she screams and lays into poor Huffle. My own daughter, and she tries to kill a dragon! And I thought, Right, my lady, then you’re no daughter of mine anymore! And I flew Huffle’s mother straight into Holmstad and laid charges. I was that angry! My own father tended dragons, and his mother before him. And my daughter tried to kill one! You wonder I was angry?”
“Nobody told me!” I said. I had that draining-away feeling again.
I was quite glad when Terens took hold of my elbow and said something like “Steady, steady!”
“Are you telling the truth?” Neal said.
“I’m sure he is,” Lewin said. “Your sister has his eyes.”
“Ask Timas,” said Orm. “He married your mother the year after I did. He can take being bossed about. I can’t. I went back to my dragons. But I suppose there’s a record of that?” he said challengingly to Lewin.
“And the divorce,” said Lewin. “Terens looked it up for me. But I expect the Slavers have destroyed it by now.”
“And she never told you?” Orm said to me. He wagged his shaggy eyebrows at me almost forgivingly. “I’ll have a bone to pick with her over that,” he said.
Mother arrived just as we’d all got down into the valley. She looked very indomitable, as she always does on horseback, and all our people were with her, down to both our shepherds. They had carts of clothes and blankets and food. Mother knew the valley as well as Orm did. She used to meet Orm there when she was a girl. She set out for the Reserve as soon as she heard the broadcast about the invasion, and the dragon we sent her met them on the way. That’s Mother for you. The rest of the neighbors didn’t get there for some hours after that.
I didn’t think Mother’s face—or Timas’s—could hold such a mixture of feelings as they did when they saw Neal and me and the Dragonate men all with Orm. When Orm saw Mother, he folded his arms and grinned. Huffle rested his huge chin on Orm’s shoulder, looking interested.
“Here she comes,” Orm said to Huffle. “Oh, I do love a good quarrel!”
They had one. It was one of the loudest I’d ever heard. Terens took Neal and me away to help look after Lewin. He turned out to have broken some ribs when the blast hit the van, but he wouldn’t let anyone look even until I ordered him to. After that Neal, Alectis, and I sat under our hay cart and talked, mostly about the irony of Fate. You see, Neal has always secretly wished Fate had given him Orm as a father, and I’m the one that’s got Orm. Neal’s father is Timas. Alectis says he can see the likeness. We’d both gladly swap. Then Alectis confessed that he’d been hating the Dragonate so much that he was thinking of running away, which is a serious crime. But now the Slavers have come, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a Dragonate anymore, he feels quite different. He admires Lewin.
Lewin consented to rest while Terens and Mother organized everyone into a makeshift camp in the valley, but he was up and about again the next day, because he said the Slavers were bound to come the day after, when they found the holdings were deserted. The big black she-drake sat in her cave at the head of the kyle, with her infants between her forefeet, watching groups of people rushing around to do what Lewin said, and didn’t seem to mind at all. Huffle said she’d been bored and bad-tempered up to then. We made life interesting. Actually that she-drake reminds me of Mother. Both of them made me give them a faithful report of the battle.
I don’t think the Slavers knew about the dragons. They just knew that there was a concentration of people in here, and they came straight across the Reserve to get us. As soon as the dragons told Orm they were coming, Lewin had us all out hiding in the hills in their path, except for Mo
ther and Timas and Inga’s mother and a few more who had shotguns. They had to stay and guard the little kids in the camp. The rest of us had any weapons we could find. Neal and Alectis had bows and arrows. Inga had her airgun. Donal and most of the farmers had scythes. The shepherds all had their slingshots. I was in the front with Lewin, because I was supposed to stop the effect of the Slavers’ collars. Orm was there, too, although nobody had ever admitted in so many words that Orm might be heg. All Orm did was to ask the dragons to keep back because we didn’t want them enslaved by those collars.
And there they came, a huddle of sheeplike troops, and then another huddle, each one being driven by a cluster of kingly Slavers, with crowns and winking V-shaped collars And there again we all got that horrible guilty compulsion to come and give ourselves up. But I don’t think those collars have any effect on dragons. Half of us were standing up to walk into the Slavers’ arms, and I was ordering them as hard as I could not to, when the dragons smelled those golden crowns and collars: there was no holding them. They just whirred down over our heads and took those Slavers to pieces for the metal. Lewin said, “Ah!” and crumpled his face in a grin like a fiend’s. He’d thought the dragons might do that. I think he may really be a genius, like they say Camerati are. But I was so sick at that, and then again at the sight of nice people like Alectis and Yan killing the sheeplike troops, that I’m not going to talk about it anymore. Terens says I’m not to go when the Slavers come next. Apparently I broadcast the way I was feeling, just as the Slavers do, and even the dragons felt queasy. The she-drake snorted at that. Mother says, “Nonsense. Take travel pills and behave as my daughter should.”
Anyway, we have found out how to beat the Slavers. We have no idea what is going on in the other of the Ten Worlds, or even in the rest of Sveridge, but there are fifty more Worm Reserves around the world, and Lewin says there must be stray Dragonate units, too, who might think of using dragons against Slavers. We want to move out and take over some of the farms again soon. The dragons are having far too much fun with the sheep. They keep flying over with woolly bundles dangling from their claws, watched by a gloomy crowd of everyone’s shepherds. “Green dot,” the shepherds say. “The brutes are raiding Hightop now.” They are very annoyed with Orm because Orm just gives his mad cackle and lets the dragons go on.
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