by Marc Secchia
Of more apposite concern was the fact that the whitish disturbance in the Cloudlands had spread beyond their present position. Lia could not imagine what changes might be taking place down there, but whatever was brewing in the cauldron of the deeps, it could not be good news.
The wind from the North was a bitter bully, cutting effortlessly through her thick woollen dress, woollen undergarments and even thicker, fur-lined leather jacket, gloves, scarf and the strange hats these Lost Islanders wore outdoors, with their side-flaps tied by thongs beneath her chin. Well, she appreciated the protection for her pointy ears. She could feel neither fingers nor toes, nor ears nor her nose. Charming location. Give her a nice volcano to sit upon any day.
Actually, volcano-sitting was technically possible for a Dragoness. Wow. She giggled with peculiar solemnity.
The black, heavy cloudbank blanketing the northern horizon remained impenetrable to Human vision. No surprises there. A certain Tourmaline Dragon stubbornly refused to make his grand appearance. With a burdened sigh, Lia retraced her steps via the elevator shaft to her chambers, outfitted for Lost Islands royalty. Shutting the door, she padded over to the fireplace–one of few allowable luxuries–added three dark jalkwood logs, and poked the coals rather listlessly until they deigned to display a few sparks of life. She kicked off her heavy, fur-lined orrican hide boots and used one bare toe to nudge the rush basket containing her white dragonet’s egg closer to the warmth. If it was a dragonet, and not some other base form of Dragonkind concocted by Dramagon’s obscene experiments …
Stinking windrocs! In a brief but satisfying fit of petulance, she divested the rest of her cold-weather clothing and flung the items in various directions around the room. Yinzi would grumble at the mess. Ha. Lia slipped into soft, fresh undergarments of a cotton-like cloth made from huzik plant-fibres, and a white linen smock such as those worn by Lost Islands girls, only, the ‘standard’ size reached to her knees. Decent. The material was rather sheer, but since the undergarments resembled the grandmother-issue coverall variety of ladies’ attire, Hualiama chortled to herself, she might just take the risk. Even Eastern Isles warriors managed to manufacture more comely undergarments–but they also did not go ripping them to shreds when their Human form morphed into a Dragoness.
Long habit made Lia set her Nuyallith blades close at hand, before she returned to contemplating the egg. Was it snug enough? The right temperature? Sapphurion said that Dragon eggs incubated at precisely seventy-three degrees, a temperature the brooding mother Dragon maintained by heating her body as she curled around her eggs. Dragonets were different, however. Perhaps she should sit on the egg? Brood over and sing to it, as her shell-mother had sung over Lia’s egg?
Very softly, Hualiama sang the opening lines of one of her favourite ballads:
Alas for the fair peaks, my love, my fierce love,
Alas for the scorching winds, which stole thee away …
That melancholy song had been one of Flicker’s favourites, she remembered. It spoke of the abiding love of a Dragon and Dragoness separated by many long leagues, as she and Grandion had been unwittingly separated, and as death now separated her from her dearest and truest friend. Oh, Flicker! What she would not give to feel his hot little paw wind its way around her neck one more time, or the nip of his fangs as he threatened her earlobe with a fate most horrific. Straw-head. That was his preferred insult. Snarky little pest. He had made up a whole library of insults especially for her–but Flicker had given his life to protect her from Ra’aba, valiant to the tragic end.
A tear plinked down on the egg with a curiously musical sound.
Crossly, Hualiama reached out to wipe the shell dry with her fingertips. “Ouch! What?”
She sucked her right forefinger by instinct, then checked the tip. Cut? Pinprick? No. She glanced sidelong at the egg, smooth and innocent and … oh. Alive? Was there hint of flame which spoke to the flame within her?
Charily, she reached out. Sulphurous greetings, little one. Nothing. Still, the tough, jewel-like surface felt chill, as if the heat of the fire were not quite the right sort of heat or … Hualiama slipped her hands tenderly around the egg and cupped it to her cheek, then into the crook of her neck, as Qualiana had once cradled the life of a Human babe.
“Not much of a mother, am I, if I don’t know the simplest things …”
Body heat. Contact. Queen Shyana taught classes for expectant Fra’aniorian mothers, and one of her mantras was the need for connection between mother and baby from the time of conception onward. Babies heard, sensed and responded far earlier than mothers imagined, she said. Babies thrived on contact, preferably skin to skin, and interaction with parents, carers and siblings. Did Hualiama not know this truth for herself, her earliest Human memories being the haunting echoes of hatred, death, and a flight across the Island-World in a mad Dragoness’ paw, which had nigh killed her?
The egg seemed dormant now, but Lia knew what she had felt–just the briefest flicker, as if a candle guttered in a strong breeze.
Sparks must be fanned into life. Fires, stoked.
Hualiama sang:
Gliding, soaring, dipping over the brow of the Island-World,
Suns in our faces, wind buoying our wings …
Weeping quietly over the egg, holding it against the pulse of her neck, she curled into a foetal position on the rug. Willing the flame to return, to flicker into life. Should her warmth drive away the freeze of a thousand years? Impossible. Yet she crooned:
Freedom to roam as widely as our hearts desire.
Moon-riding, windroc-hiding, tickling the clouds with our toes …
She did not know how long she lay there, communing with the egg by the fireside, when she sensed movement, perhaps the furtive scuff of a foot upon the thick, brown orrican-fur carpet.
Snatch up a blade! Leap, whirl … what?
Her hands stayed the blow, juddering with the force of her shock.
Transported through time, six years funnelled into the space between heartbeats. Before her, his hands carefully held apart to indicate a lack of threat, stood a young man clad in the purple of the Fra’aniorian Royal Guard. A decidedly leopard young man. Her sword-point would not stop quivering. Lia began to lift a hand self-consciously to her hair, but the limb refused to obey. For what arrested her was neither his uniform nor the powerful, muscled frame with its trim waist set off by broad shoulders, nor the flip of jet-black hair that softened a noble brow. It was his eyes, crinkled up by his smile, which etched familiar striations in the young man’s cheeks and around his mouth as if he was much accustomed to smiling, particularly at weak-kneed royal wards.
Blue eyes. Eyes of inhuman, sparkling gemstone hue. Tourmaline blue.
“G-G-G …” Hualiama spluttered. Ugh. She was not a blushing sixteen anymore! “Get out! I mean, what are you doing here? Stinking windroc eggs! Are you … Grandion?”
The smile only broadened. Great Islands, he was tall, and how dare he appear so perfect and ultra-leopard and toy with her heart like this? Despicable Dragon!
She heard Flicker’s voice echo in her memory, his dying words. Silly, beautiful fire-eyes. Choose the Dragon. He’s a rascal, but a noble one. Noble? She’d have his ruddy noble head with one swish of her blade! That, or she would be obliged to kiss him. Immediately. And evermore.
The blade moved, but Lia halted the forward thrust an inch from his neck. “How real is this projection, Grandion?”
“Ah … real enough to bleed,” he said, his smirk slipping toward alarm. “Probably real enough to die.”
“Where are you, right now?”
“Mostly here, but my residual consciousness remains with my Dragon body at Sarzun Dragonhold. I’m stuck behind the storm.” She growled ominously. How formidable must he be to project over so many leagues? “A storm of volcanic particles, toxic gases, strange winds and powerful magic, Lia. We Dragons have never seen anything like it.”
Briefly, an image of a downward-pointing whirlwind slipp
ed into her mind. Rocks and ash roared around in a circle, together with a bluish glow of electrical discharge or magic, funnelling down into the Cloudlands.
“Numistar’s work,” said Human-Grandion, unnecessarily. “Affurion ordered all Dragons to take shelter and wait out the storm. I will return as soon as I am able. And, may I note how divine you look, o Princess?”
“No, you may not!”
“The facts are incontrovertible.”
“Roaring rajals, you rock-headed, insensitive … splodge of windroc spit!” The man flickered noticeably as the Dragon’s control slipped beneath the heat of her ire. “This is not real! How dare you sashay in here all inhumanly fit and gorgeous and oh-so-kissable, and be a construct of your benightedly sneaky Projection magic–don’t you see? I want you; I need you so desperately and I can’t have you and this does not help! Neither on this Island, nor any Island of the future!”
Hualiama lowered the sword before she yielded to the temptation to carve her feelings into his flesh. On second thoughts, she put the weapon down on a plain table, which held a clay water jug and a small basket of bread. Safer.
“Hualiama.” The gravel, the hurt in his voice!
“Grandion, stop.”
“Lia, my nature is to burn truly, to burn so brightly that only truth can remain in that crucible.” He stepped toward her; she retreated behind the low table, crossing her arms as if to ward off the ardent Dragon’s regard. “I am fire, Hualiama. I blaze, but I will never consume you. I promise, upon my wings, that I will never hurt you again.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
The tourmaline eyes pleaded, a blue so intense, Lia gasped and floundered as if she were drowning. He said, “Did we not breathe soul-fire together?”
“Stop! Please, Grandion. You are a Dragon and right now, I am Human and this … this … it freaks me out, it’s so wrong and perverse, seeing you in the guise of a man … ugh!” Hualiama squeezed her eyes shut, fighting for control, holding the dragonet’s egg against her stomach. “I cannot destroy your honour, for that would drag you to destruction. I’m no good for you, Grandion.”
“Good?” He stopped just beside the table, close enough to touch, the chiselled fingers held out as he pleaded, “You’re more than good for me. You’re my fire-life, the song of my wings, the breath–”
“I’m a freak! A ruzal-tainted freak!”
She wept a storm, more than startled to hear a crackle and smell a faint tang of ozone in the room. Had she done this?
Grandion responded at once by singing, very softly, How do you love the fire?
Yet she had not become the fire, as they had sung together. She had become one-of-a-kind, the loneliest of all creatures. She had tempted this beautiful Dragon into transgressing the deepest mores of his kind; now, he acted unrepentant. Worse, her treacherous heart–he was not attractive! No! He was thirty-plus tons of magical lizard, so love could never factor in the equation … oh, the damage she had wrought! Why would her traitorous heart not listen? The pain, stabbing through her abdomen in a ghastly echo of Ra’aba’s wounding attack …
Ever so tenderly, his left hand caressed her cheek, fingered the strands of her long hair and then thumbed away the tears collecting in the corner of her eye. Hualiama could not trust herself to look at him. Love an image? Tempting. Just pretend all was well. If the physiological processes which had formed the warm hand, the caring touch, and the timbre of his voice could be so perfect, what did the metaphysical side matter? Except for that flicker. And the thousand details she knew she would soon regret, like the burning temperature of his skin and the unnatural light in the eyes and his scent, unmistakably draconic. That hint of cinnamon was a dousing of cold reality. Still Dragonkind. Still forbidden.
Grandion said, “If this is painful to you, Hualiama, then know that my pain is as real as yours. Yet no matter how much you fear our oaths, you cannot hide from them.”
Had he conferred with Sapphurion? Had the older Dragon betrayed her confidence?
He added, “I believe in the power of oath-magic. Not blindly, but with dark-fires and trembling–even I, a mighty Dragon.”
Unable to hold back any longer, Hualiama lifted her gaze to search his eyes. The magic was crystal-clear, but the host of feelings she saw seething there, far less so. Panic thrashed her heart. Had she succeeded in driving him away? Truly? No! Come back, my Dragon! Come back!
He said, “These oaths will bring us together again, without a shadow of dark-fire doubt. Yet the time of that flight lies, as yet, at an unseen juncture of our lives. So, I am not returning to you. Not yet.”
She bit her tongue rather than cry, ‘No!’ More separation? Could she bear to live?
Lacing his fingers into hers, Grandion the man drew her irresistibly to her feet. “Aye, I am Dragonkind, as patient as the seasons are long. I never forget a promise. I bid you watch the skies for sign of a Tourmaline Dragon, Hualiama of Fra’anior, Shapeshifter Princess.”
“Grandion!” Her fingers clutched his, painfully tight. “Where are you going?”
For a moment, his free hand stroked the fingers of her left hand, still cradling the dragonet’s egg, as if seeking to imprint upon her heart a message of caring, of faith that the flame could still burn in the most adverse of circumstances. Then he slipped that hand behind the nape of her neck–a touch awkwardly, as though he had once observed the gesture but did not quite know how to reproduce it–and his heated lips pressed against the blonde crown of her head. Again, the muscles did not move as required for a proper kiss. Grr. She should teach him … if she succumbed to the sweetest burning …
“Tickles,” he guffawed, rubbing his lips. “After an unspecified number of days I intend to spend with Affurion’s kin, working on a few ideas and passing on some teaching, I will depart on a personal mission which I am confident will be of infinitely greater value to you than a return to Chenak, which places me at risk of being used as a pawn to secure your good behaviour.”
“You’re downright infuriating,” she congratulated him.
“I certainly hope so,” he agreed, beginning to fade. “Besides, this should free you–”
“Grandion!”
“Magic … interference …”
His image wavered, before solidifying again. Hualiama took that moment to throw her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek to his stalwart, uniformed chest. Oh. Three hearts? Evidently, the Dragon’s anatomical knowledge needed a touch of adjustment. The real danger lay in her visceral response to his entrancing beauty.
She said, “Be careful out there.”
“I will never stop–”
Hualiama stumbled forward into nothingness. A sharp cry escaped her lips, quickly crushed between her teeth. Aye, well done, Island girl. She had chased away her Dragon. Provisionally. Whereupon he had turned around and unveiled a plan which must have been brewing in his devious lizard-mind all along. She had earned herself a draconic stalker. Marvellous. And a Cloudlands ocean of heartache, a new source of worry, and another cup of her dear mother’s bile …
What would he never stop? Loving her?
Raising the egg to the firelight, she saluted the absent Tourmaline Dragon drolly. “Shall you and I watch the skies, o most noble and puissant egg? That’s the problem with Dragons, and Human Princesses, for that matter. We’re both as stubborn as the foundations of our Islands are deep.”
The memory of Flicker’s dry laughter made her smile.
Straw-head.
* * * *
The following afternoon, Hualiama stood on the forward gantry of her mother’s Dragonship, watching the last stragglers of Azziala’s forces gathering around Chenak. The weather ahead was glorious. The weather aft, diabolical. Lia had seen Fra’aniorian thunderstorms aplenty. The huge, open caldera generated unique forms of weather worthy of celebration by the balladeers, such as ball lightning, wind-shear so powerful it tore Dragonships in half, and localised ‘liquid ice’ updrafts which had several times snat
ched unwary Dragons into the skies, immobilised them in icy tombs, and hours later dashed the hapless creatures to the ground in a shattering explosion.
The sky behind, for want of a better word, looked hungry. Clouds of a night-dark, filthy green hue appeared to boil up out of the Cloudlands over a storm-front thirty leagues wide and four high, a rampart so great, Sapphurion said, that no Dragon could fly over it. A number of previously Human-controlled Islands, which had been observed to be on the move, now lay behind that barrier, along with all of the Dragon Territory. The previous evening, Azziala had ordered Lia to despatch a Dragon team to investigate. Five Dragons had tried to fly around the storm, vanished, and so far had not reappeared.
The storm-front kept pace–exact pace–with their progress, which had accelerated to an estimated two and a half leagues per hour. At this rate they should cover the fourteen hundred leagues to Kerdani City in a matter of seventeen further days’ travel.
“What’s this nonsense? Blue hair?” Azziala said coldly, flipping Hualiama’s braid over her shoulder.
“Whaaa–”
“Even more freakish than usual, daughter. Now we’re playing with hair dye?”
Dragonsoul, you are in so much trouble!
Not my doing. Dragon-Lia sounded three-quarters asleep. How was that possible? Souls slept? She could tell that other-Lia slept in whatever realm or plane of existence she inhabited now?
Human-Lia settled for a shrug. “Only so much fun you Dragon-Haters have in the evenings.”
The Empress vented a snort of pure disgust. “Frivolous child! Ready your Dragons. I want our utmost resources available when we take control of this beast.”
“They are not used to operating in a mental network–”
