by Liz Flanagan
Her hand still cupped Iggie’s sleeping head. With every moment that passed she loved him more. She silently thanked Kara for her instructions. ‘Thank you,’ she bent and whispered to Iggie. ‘Thank you for choosing me.’
Then Milla watched the duke, his face illuminated in the glare of the flames. He was grinning as he waited, eyes aglow.
The egg began to move, shaking slightly in his hands. A very faint tap came from inside it, fainter than the others had been. A tiny piece of shell fell away, leaving a thin white membrane still in place. Then the egg fell silent. Moments passed.
‘Is it stuck?’ Milla asked. Iggie woke and looked up, then stiffened. She felt his claws grip tighter.
‘Mraa!’ the dragon said, as if he were trying to warn her.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ the duke demanded. He got to his feet, looking panicked. ‘It’s got to get out, it needs air.’ He crossed to the table, lifted the egg and broke it against the surface of polished wood.
‘No!’ Milla, Vigo and Tarya all called out together, feeling their dragons flinch.
It was too late. The egg shattered with a damp crunch.
The duke pulled it apart, flicking away pieces of shell with his fingers. He lifted up a limp body streaked with blood. It was dark russet gold, like damp beech leaves. The dragon didn’t move.
It couldn’t be dead! Not when the others were all safely hatched? Milla clung to disbelief to keep her afloat, but she felt herself sinking.
Olvar looked down at it for one long moment, and Milla watched the hope turn to despair and then anger in his face. The duke slung the body down onto the yellow cushion and then stormed from the room before anyone could speak.
Serina hurried after him. A moment later they heard a loud bellow, and the sound of something heavy being hurled across the room through the archway.
Milla heard the duke’s fury and curled her arms over her hatchling. Vigo and Tarya mirrored her, shuffling their chairs closer to the fire.
Nestan and Finn stood apart, muttering in low voices, their eyes on the door.
Isak walked over to the four-leaf table and gently picked up the lifeless dragon. He joined the other three by the fire and sank to his knees. He draped the small orange body across his lap and started stroking it lightly, one finger after another. The light of the dancing flames made its scales gleam like those of a goldfish, Milla saw, just as they turned Isak’s glasses to small suns.
Isak began to sing to it, a heartbreaking lament, sweet and sad and soothing, all at once. His voice was hoarse and gentle, and he broke off to cough now and again.
Milla’s eyes filled with tears for the life that hadn’t had a chance to begin, for all that beauty and potential, now lost. She stroked Iggie in sympathy.
Iggie seemed to stir then. He uncurled himself and tumbled down from her shoulder. She caught him on her knees and he craned forward, chirruping excitedly.
‘What? What is it?’ Milla whispered. ‘Are you sad too?’
But he didn’t seem sad. He turned his head back to her and forward again, gesturing to the orange dragon. Iggie hopped on the spot, impatient.
‘You want to go nearer? Isak, I think he’s telling me … Can I show him?’ she asked, edging closer, with new hope kindling in her heart.
Without stopping his song, Isak nodded and made space next to him. Milla knelt down and lifted Iggie so he could see the golden hatchling’s body.
Iggie lifted his head and called, a soft whistling noise that echoed the notes of Isak’s song.
Just then, Isak’s hands stopped moving. He raised them, and froze.
‘She … she moved. I felt her!’ He bent lower. ‘Come on, little one, come on!’
Iggie stretched so far forwards Milla was worried that he’d fall. He kept up a constant song.
The other two dragons, still recovering from hatching, also lifted their heads and watched intently.
Milla stared at the fourth dragon, willing it to be true. One of its feet twitched. Then the tail flapped once, like a fish out of water. Finally, the head lifted and one green eye opened.
Isak bent his head and murmured soft words to the dragon.
The dragon stared hard at him, listening.
The servant holding the platter of chicken moved forwards, offering meat.
Isak took a piece and put it in his own mouth, chewing it hard. When it was soft, he took it out and passed it carefully to the dragon on his knee. Without getting up, she accepted the food and swallowed it down, then closed her eyes again, resting.
Isak sang again, changing it from sad to hopeful, adding energy and life.
The dragon opened her eyes and this time she managed to stand.
‘Bright star, Belara, brave one,’ Isak named her, praising his dragon.
She spread her wings and flapped once, accepting this name, accepting him.
Milla was smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. She stared from Vigo to Isak to Tarya. She felt giddy, breathless, intoxicated. She checked back at the duke’s closed door.
Four dragons had hatched, and not one had chosen Olvar. She couldn’t guess what he would do next.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Four dragons had hatched on the night of the full moon. They’d chosen four people to bond with.
Hardly able to believe it, Milla stared at her dragon, drinking him in. Her fingers traced his little blue body, learning every detail: his tiny claws, the smooth, cool flanks, the ridges along his tail, the rounded chest that felt warmer than the rest of him.
‘So pleased to meet you, Iggie!’ she said. ‘At last. All that time, it was you in the egg, and I didn’t even know. But I dreamed of you.’ She knew it now. ‘Did you dream of me, too?’
Iggie crawled up her chest to listen. He opened his green eyes wide.
‘I always liked the blue one best.’ Now it felt as if she’d always known him. She couldn’t remember what life had been like, before Iggie.
He raised his head, and croaked softly.
‘Did you hear me, inside your egg?’ Milla asked, bending her face to him. ‘Did you recognise your song?’
He reached up and touched his nose to hers, light as a moth.
Something burned between them, a fierce pure blaze of love that grew with every heartbeat. It grew and grew till it was the biggest thing in the room, in the island, in the whole world. A new sun, warming her bones.
‘Wait till we get home!’ Milla said. ‘I can’t wait to show you to Josi. And what will Rosa and Thom say when they see you? You’ll give them something to talk about!’ She pictured their life together. ‘You can sit on my shoulder while I work. We’ll be a team …’ Everything would be better, now Iggie was here.
Iggie listened to her, drinking in her words. Then he crawled back to his first roosting place in her collarbone, his body wrapped around her neck. Milla held him carefully in position. What if he got cold or sick? He seemed so fragile. So small. Worry spread like a black cloud across the sun.
Tarya, Isak and Vigo sat in a circle round the fireplace, talking to their dragons. She read the same mixture of joy and fear in their faces.
Tarya caught her eye. ‘What just happened? Oh, Milla!’ She jumped up and came over to hug Milla, one-handed, while the other hand held her red dragon against her chest.
‘Make space for me!’ Isak said, coming to join in with Belara on his shoulder.
Vigo hung back, awkwardly.
‘Come on! What are you waiting for?’ Tarya called to him.
The four of them made a circle, hugging and laughing, while their dragons called raspily to each other, sounding like flint on steel.
Eventually they sat back down, letting the dragons clamber at their feet, bolder now.
‘So, what do we do? I mean, it feels like Belara chose me. But will he let me keep her?’ Isak said, looking at the door Olvar had stormed through.
‘Of course Belara chose you: she’s yours and you’re hers.’ Milla was grateful he’d asked that question. If the
duke chose to take a dragon, how could they resist him? They had each other. He had an army.
‘I’ll fight anyone who tries to take Heral from me,’ Tarya said fiercely.
Milla looked at the other three. It was different for them: they were used to having all they wanted, giving orders, being obeyed. ‘These dragons chose us, and everyone here witnessed it.’ She tried to recall exactly what Kara had told her. ‘So the duke can’t take Iggie from me, not without hurting him. He wouldn’t hurt a dragon, would he?’
She chose not to mention Kara, not yet. Milla’s bruised arms reminded her how the guards treated prisoners. First she needed to listen and learn, before she dragged Kara into danger.
‘My father must see that,’ Vigo said. ‘He didn’t take Iggie from you at the start.’
‘That was when he still had three chances left,’ Milla said, hoping he was right. She was warming to Vigo, but she still felt a little shy in front of him.
‘We won’t let him, Milla,’ Tarya said. ‘These dragons are ours.’
‘How do we know what they need? It’s such a responsibility.’ Isak looked down at Belara, pushing his glasses up nervously. Then he took the glass vial from his shirt pocket and swallowed the last of his medicine.
‘I think they’ll tell us!’ Tarya watched Heral ripping into an enormous piece of chicken.
‘But there’s so much we don’t know,’ Isak said. ‘We don’t even know why they are the last dragons. What went wrong before? We have to find out!’ He looked at each of them in turn, growing more urgent: ‘Don’t you see? We have to find out, or how do we stop it happening again? If we don’t get it right, they might leave us. Or they might die.’
There was a pause while that sunk in.
‘People are always talking about it, what happened to the old Arcosi and the last dragons – how it couldn’t have been a fire or an earthquake, ’cos everything was left so perfectly. How it wasn’t a famine, ’cos they left food behind, how it wasn’t a plague, ’cos it didn’t spread to Sartola …’ Tarya sped through the options.
‘I don’t know what people are always talking about: I never hear them,’ Vigo said quietly.
‘My friend Rosa spoke of a mad king. Rufus? What do you know of him?’ Milla asked. ‘He was the one who fought against Sartola …’
‘I know about that war, all right. Every Sartolan does. My mother made sure I learned the history of her country.’
Tarya turned to Vigo, and Milla could see how hard she was trying to be polite and patient with him. Things had changed between them. After last night, they were on the same side, all four of them. ‘And you live in the palace. So, you must also know something about the people who lived here once?’
Vigo shook his head. ‘I know Sartolan history, but no one knows what happened here.’
‘All this stuff?’ Tarya gestured around them.
Milla looked at the elegant room, the high glass windows, the carved ceiling with its gold leaf. She didn’t belong here. She barely dared to touch anything in case she broke it. She kept waiting for someone to tell her to leave, or to clear up the mess of plates at their feet.
‘I mean, it’s theirs, right?’ Tarya was saying. ‘It belonged to the ancient people. The Arcosi, the last dragonriders? The Norlanders had nothing when they arrived here, none of it survived the voyage. So, there must be evidence somewhere?’
‘We need to find it, for their sakes,’ Isak agreed with his sister. ‘What if it was something to do with the dragons? Maybe they got sick? Maybe the dragons killed the people?’
‘They wouldn’t do that!’ Tarya said. ‘Maybe it was the other way round!’
‘I’m just saying, we have to keep an open mind. But we need more to go on. There must be pictures, maps, scrolls somewhere, if they left everything behind?’
Milla had kept quiet, till now. But here was a task. She thrived on those. ‘Does your father have a study? Where does he keep his papers?’ she asked Vigo.
‘Not that I know … Oh, wait.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘He always keeps the northern turret room locked. No one else is allowed in there.’
‘Shall we look?’ Milla asked.
‘I said it’s locked.’
‘I’m, er, good with locks,’ Milla said, feeling the heat rise to her cheeks. Had she really just suggested breaking into the duke’s private rooms?
‘We can’t do that!’ Isak said.
‘Can’t we? We have a duty to our dragons. I’ll do anything for Heral,’ Tarya said stubbornly. ‘Look, it’s getting light. We should go now before everyone wakes.’
‘Let’s just look, no harm in that,’ Vigo agreed. ‘I’ll answer to my father.’
Tarya looked at him quickly, her expression unguarded. Then she gave Vigo a dazzling grin.
Vigo blushed and muttered, ‘He can’t think any worse of me than he does already.’
Milla was curious: that was the second time he’d spoken of his father that way.
‘Come on, I’ll show you the way,’ Vigo told them.
A few moments later, they were standing in front of the turret room door: wooden, solid, arched at the top. Milla ran her hands over its polished surface and tried the iron handle. Locked.
‘Tarya,’ she said, bending down to examine the lock, ‘can you pass me two of your hair pins?’
She draped Iggie round the back of her neck so both her hands were free, bent one of the pins double, twisted the end of the other, and gently poked them both into the lock. It was a trick Josi had taught her, and now she realised she’d never thought to ask why.
‘I really don’t think we should …’ Isak began.
‘What are you doing?’ Vigo asked. ‘And can you teach me?’
‘Sshh! I need to concentrate, Your Grace,’ Milla said, closing her eyes so she could feel for the inner workings of the lock.
‘I think this takes us beyond Grace,’ he said. ‘Call me Vigo.’
Milla’s fingers grew damp with effort, and she tried hard not to think about what would happen if the duke found her now. With a light click, the last pin of the lock shifted. She turned the handle and opened the door.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The heavy door swung inwards to reveal an entirely round room, generously wide, with narrow windows letting in faint shafts of light all the way up the turret. Milla tilted her head to see the top, making Iggie mew sleepily from his position round her neck. It was lined with curving shelves, reaching right up above their heads, ending in ornate beams at the top of the tower, carved with dragons, birds and fishes.
They all stood there, gaping.
‘You guessed right,’ Milla told Vigo.
‘I don’t believe it!’ he said, staring. ‘I never knew this was here …’
Milla spotted strange wooden ladders built on four legs, to let the reader climb high and reach down scrolls or books from the upper shelves. She went across to the nearest one and lifted down a book. Leather bound and heavy, it fell open to reveal fine hand-written script, with beautiful flamelike illustrations framing each page.
‘Oh! There’s dragons in this one, look!’ She held it open for the others to see. She moved her finger slowly across the page, sounding out the words in an old-fashioned version of Sartolan. ‘This must be the language of the ancient Arcosi – the ones who lived here once.’ She paused, looking at this still, bright room. What secrets had they left behind? ‘Remedies for … a spring chill. Oh! It’s about healing. That’s good, we might need that.’
The others copied her, each moving to a different shelf and taking down books to read about dragons, as the sun rose and the room grew light.
Milla lifted down a new book and a little scrap of paper fell out. She laid down the book and picked it up carefully. It was smaller than a page: no more than a fragment, with words written across it in a curling, looping hand. ‘Hey, listen to this one. I think it’s a poem.’
And she read:
The dragons will return one last time
Wh
en the trade winds blow from the east.
Walls must fall, peace must reign.
Or the nest be forever lost.
Daughter of the storm, three times reborn
Who bears the sign of the sea.
When four seasons wane, for this bright dawn,
She will be given the key.
Milla felt a shiver down her spine.
‘It sounds like a prophecy, not a poem,’ Vigo said slowly. ‘Can you read it again?’
Milla did.
‘Do you think it’s about our dragons?’ Tarya laughed out loud. ‘Hear that, Heral? You’re so important, they foretold you.’
‘I hope not. It sounds a bit ominous,’ Milla said. ‘That stuff about the nest being lost forever …’ She squinted down at Iggie, checking his breathing.
‘Don’t worry, it’s just a poem,’ Isak said. ‘And if you’re worried about prophecies, peace looks to be reigning just fine on Arcosi, so there’s nothing to fear.’ And he went back to the scroll he was reading.
She met Vigo’s eyes. He shrugged and smiled and returned to his book.
When the others weren’t looking, she folded the paper and tucked it into her waistband. It sounded important to her. She vowed to memorise it later and puzzle it out, however long it took.
‘If it’s about danger to you,’ she whispered to Iggie, ‘then I want to know, so I can protect you.’
He didn’t wake up, so she settled down to the next book.
They were all concentrating so hard they didn’t hear Duke Olvar walk in, followed by Nestan and Finn.
‘Here they are – we found them!’ Olvar called over his shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked them. ‘And how did you get in?’
Milla jumped in fright and dropped the book she was holding. It landed on the floor with a loud slam. With one hand over Iggie’s sleeping body, still draped around her neck, she backed away from the duke.
Without speaking, the four of them assembled into one united group: Milla flanked by the twins, Vigo at the front, with his green dragon, Petra, on his shoulder.
‘We need to know how to care for the dragons. You can’t blame us for that!’ Vigo raised his voice to his father. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this was here? That’s so typical, keeping the best hidden away, just for you …’
