The dragon spoke. 〈You have brought us the little ones; we are in your debt. For that, I offer my name: Byrn.〉
Byrn turned toward Embyr and Pyro, who still twined around Kaeldra’s legs. Kaeldra felt but did not understand the current of thought the dragon directed at them. Still, she sensed the tone of it, the tone of a she wolf’s growl to her cubs, of a falcon’s call to its chicks.
The draclings uncoiled from Kaeldra’s legs. Tentatively they stretched their long necks upward toward Byrn, then all at once the air was rent by a high-pitched musical tone.
The draclings shuddered, then froze.
“What—?” Kaeldra spun round to find the source of the sound, of that shrill, continuous note. A file of soldiers marched out the fortress gate. They were led by a man on a horse. Some were armed with crossbows; others held something to their mouths. Pipes. Small silver pipes like the tone pipe Jeorg had. Kaeldra started to flee, but the stream of soldiers split; she stopped, confused. They marched no longer at her, but around her, forming an enormous encircling arc.
Far across the bluff, Jeorg let out a shout. He ran toward her, pointing up.
Kaeldra looked. Still hovering, the dragons seemed sleepy. Their eyes were hooded, their wings slack. Slowly, as if dazed, they drifted toward the ground.
The man on the horse rode toward her. His mount pranced erratically, shying from the dragons; the man lashed it fiercely. It was Modin, she saw. Jeorg, still running, yelled at her; she could barely make out his words. Something about pipes. Something about a dance? No, a trance.
A trance. Kaeldra recalled the tale Jeorg had told about Porphy, the man who had momentarily tranced a dragon by means of a tone pipe. But these men had many pipes, and the tones would not be disrupted when one of them ran out of breath.
The bowmen were fitting bolts into their crossbows. They paused, bows aimed, as though waiting for orders.
“Embyr, wake up! Pyro! Listen to me!” Kaeldra shook the draclings, but their glazed expressions did not change; the cool, relentless pipe tone held them in its thrall.
“Byrn!” Kaeldra screamed. The big green dragon blinked when Kaeldra uttered her name, and she felt a stirring of hope. But then Byrn’s eyes clouded again; she continued slowly to sink.
Modin reined in his horse beside Kaeldra. The stallion danced sideways, wild-eyed, nostrils flared. It snorted and tossed its head.
“What are they doing?” Kaeldra cried. “Tell them to stop!”
“My dear, I do regret this. It’s nothing against your dragons, I assure you. It’s just that we are losing the war against Vittongal and it would aid us greatly to have a corps of invincible men.” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, this is the only way. Perhaps you should go elsewhere until it is done.”
“No! Make them stop!”
“Stop? Now? After the days and nights I’ve spent plotting for this moment? After the years I’ve spent groveling before that sentimental fool Landerath?” Modin laughed, a short, hard bark. “No, my dear. I used you, but it might have been worse. Now if you’ll just move out of the way—”
Kaeldra threw herself at Modin. His horse bucked and whinnied; Kaeldra stumbled and fell to the ground. Across the plateau she saw Jeorg wielding his sword against a group of soldiers. Then Modin yelled, “Loose!” and a hail of bolts swarmed upward, embedded themselves like tiny needles in the belly of a scarlet dragon. The dragon plunged to earth, grunting with pain, spurting blood; still it did not rouse from its trance.
A cheer went up from the bowmen. But the pipers did not join in; the piercing tone continued undiminished. There was a ratcheting sound as the men cocked their bows again. Kaeldra ran to the draclings, grabbed them, turned, careened into a soldier. He pried the draclings out of her grasp and flung them down. Clamping his arms around hers, he dragged her away. Then Jeorg’s sword flashed against the man who held her; she was free.
“Loose!” Modin called.
Another rain of bolts; another dragon crashed down. Overhead, birds screamed and soared.
Kaeldra made for the draclings, but a soldier flung her down and sat on her. She lifted her head in time to see Jeorg rushing at Modin with his sword. “Fool!” Modin said. “I ate the lame one’s heart. Your sword is powerless against me.” Jeorg lunged at Modin. Modin laughed, and in that instant, when the older man let down his guard, Jeorg grabbed for the stallion’s reins. He jerked hard. The horse screamed and reared, throwing Modin. Two soldiers seized Jeorg, knives at his throat.
“Wait,” Modin said, struggling to his feet, his face flushed. “If he’s so blessed fond of the beasts, let him watch.” He turned to the bowmen.
“Loose!”
More bolts; another dragon fell.
They’re slaughtering them, Kaeldra thought. They’re going to kill them all. The draclings . . . She squirmed to free herself from the lout who sat on her back, but he was too heavy; she could not budge.
〈Embyr! Pyro! Wake up!〉 Kaeldra reached with her thoughts to find them and felt her mind sucked down through a silvery vortex of pipe sound. The world slipped away, a dim, echoing tumult of crashes and shouts and twitterings. She hurtled through a tunnel of bright, clear sound; she felt the draclings ahead—
“Kaeldra!”
She was wrenched away, and the draclings were gone. Kaeldra blinked. She was on the highland; Jeorg was calling her name. Modin stood by the draclings, glared down at her. Fear, for the first time, showed in his eyes.
“I can’t allow you to do that,” he said. He drew his sword from its scabbard, pointed it at Embyr’s neck.
She must bring them back.
〈Embyr! Pyro!〉 Kaeldra plunged into the mind-tunnel again, seeking the draclings, bending her thoughts toward them through the shrill pipe stream.
〈Embyr! Pyro!〉 Why could they not obey her, just this once? She called again and felt an answering nudge; then the pull of the current tugged them away. Again she called, swirling deeper and deeper until she reached them and touched them and would not let go. She broke through to a bright, soaring place where her body felt light and her breath tasted of smoke and her throat burned liquid-hot.
And a voice was calling . . .
“Kaeldra!”
It was calling . . .
And she was jerked backward through the stream, and the draclings came with her. The current surged and parted around them as if they were boulders in a rain-swollen rill. Then the draclings fell away; she felt the pressure of the soldier’s knee against her back and the stab of a sharp rock beneath one arm. She heard Jeorg’s voice:
“Kaeldra!”
And the draclings were rearing up at Modin.
Kaphoom!
A blaze of light engulfed him. He screamed horribly, consumed by flame. The pipe music thinned, broke, resumed in sporadic bursts, then ceased altogether as the soldiers gaped, aghast, at their leader.
A wounded dragon let out a piteous bellow; the others began to rise. Through the flurry of birds Kaeldra saw the flash of dragon eyes, no longer glazed, but enraged.
Flame whooshed past her cheek. Kaeldra screamed; the soldier who held her fled. Flame rained in jagged ribbons from the sky. The soldiers were shouting now, running. There was a beating of air overhead. Kaeldra gathered the draclings to her, felt the rapid heartthrobs in their throats. They were all right. Modin had not harmed them. She must have found them more quickly than it had seemed.
The throng of soldiers dispersed around her. They were racing, Kaeldra saw, for the fortress, pursued in the air by flaming dragons. Three dragons lay dead upon the bluff. Blue smoke wafted up from the place where Modin had stood; it swirled away in the wind.
Then Jeorg stood beside her, apparently not badly hurt. Embyr and Pyro nuzzled him and flicked their tongues.
Slowly, Kaeldra stood. Her ears pounded; the ground felt unsteady beneath her feet. “I’m sorry for what I said before,” Kaeldra said. “Your calling—it brought me back.”
Jeorg nodded. “They say it is possible for a dragon-
sayer to get lost. Do you know where you were?”
Kaeldra gazed at the dragons, who had driven the soldiers inside the ruined fortress and now circled, flaming, above it. “I felt what it is to be a dragon,” she said.
Jeorg offered his hand; she grasped it and held tight.
A spray of bolts spewed up from the fortress and clattered harmlessly upon the ground. With a burst of flame, the dragons turned in a twisting current and soared across the sky to hover above Kaeldra and Jeorg and Embyr and Pyro. Byrn dipped down and eyed the draclings. Again Kaeldra could not understand what she said, but a soothing tingle rippled through her mind.
Gingerly, Embyr stepped forward. She stopped, turned toward Kaeldra.
〈Go,〉 Kaeldra said.
The circle of hovering dragons tightened. A vibration rose around them like the hum of a thousand bees or the liquid sound of harp strings in the hills. Embyr looked up toward the dragons, then back again at Kaeldra. The dracling stepped away, puffed up, and floated into the air.
Pyro coiled around Kaeldra’s legs. 〈Go,〉 Kaeldra said. Pyro whined and flicked his tongue. 〈Go!〉 Slowly, he uncoiled from her legs. He looked back in reproach. Kaeldra pointed sternly at the dragons. Pyro puffed up and bobbled upward.
The dragons glided down to welcome them, thrumming. Two green ones twirled in the air beneath the draclings, creating little swirling updrafts on which Embyr and Pyro bobbed like nutshells in a stream. A red dragon, Kaeldra saw, had gone down to find Synge and clasped the dracling’s limp body in its talons. It laid Synge beside one of the fallen dragons. Then the others, mingling breath with blazing breath, set fire to their dead.
Kaeldra stood still, watched the luminous, blue flames lick the sky. Above the roaring pyre she heard the dragons keen: a singing ululation, steeped in sorrow. She blinked against the drifting smoke; tears streaked down her cheeks.
Then the dragonkyn began to spiral overhead. The wind picked up as they planed off in a great fluid sweep for the north.
Kaeldra felt Jeorg tug her hand. She watched the draclings shrink in the darkening sky. She strained to hear them, but could only feel the pulsing bone-throb of the dragonkyn in flight.
“Kaeldra, the soldiers. They may pursue us.”
She let him pull her down the embankment and through the trees. When she looked over her shoulder, the bluff blocked the draclings from view. At last Kaeldra and Jeorg emerged on the road. Looking back, she could barely make out a dark, curving line on the horizon. And a familiar voice drifted, whisper faint, within her ken.
〈Hungry,〉 it said.
chapter 26
Carve out my name on the blackwood bole,
Carve out my croft from the stony loam,
Carve out my peace when the thunders roll:
Carve out a place for to call my home.
—Elythian folk song
Jeorg led her to a cove west of the place where she had come ashore with Modin. There, in a cleft between two boulders, Jeorg had stowed the shore boat he’d stolen from the merchant ship. “I had a friend among Modin’s guards,” he said, “and he helped me escape. He told me Modin had been seeking you and planned to take you here, to Rog.”
It was nearly dark. They had seen no sign of pursuers; Jeorg thought it likely that with Modin dead the soldiers would lack a clear plan. Still, it was better to be safe. They must leave Rog, and soon.
Together they carried the boat over the rock-strewn shore to the water. They pushed it through the surf and climbed inside.
Jeorg rowed. The sea was calm now, bereft of spume. Kaeldra watched the fire on the bluff as it faded to smoldering orange, watched the stars burn holes through the sky. There was an aching in her chest, as though she were hollowed out inside.
“They could not have stayed here,” Jeorg said softly, seeming to know her thoughts. “Now they will be safe.”
“All but Synge—” Kaeldra’s throat closed up, and she could not finish.
“Kaeldra,” Jeorg said. “I’ve been thinking. . . . Were it not for the birds that gathered around Synge, I would have gone directly to the fortress, would have been captured by Modin’s men. I could not have warned you about the pipes. I could not have called you back.” He paused. “Synge saved us all, by her death.”
“It was a cruel exchange,” Kaeldra whispered.
Jeorg nodded and said nothing.
“They shouldn’t have had to leave!” she cried in sudden anger. “They have a right to be here! They belong to the earth as much as we!” Kaeldra hugged herself, shaken by sobs. The plash of water ceased; Jeorg enfolded her in his arms.
When her tears at last subsided, Jeorg asked, “And what will you do now, Kaeldra? Where will you go?”
“Home, to Elythia,” she said. “And you?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I’m a disgrace to my family. I’m not sure I want to win their favor anymore. And now Landerath is dead—” He shook his head. “Oh, Kaeldra, I was so stupid! He was trying to tell me all along, to tell me what you just said: that dragons belong here as much as we. He could not tell me directly, not until I was ready to hear. And I—an idiot!—did not comprehend his true meaning because I was determined to be a dragonslayer, a son my bloodthirsty father would deem worthy. And now it’s too late. . . .”
Kaeldra’s hand drew toward him, rested lightly upon his arm. “How is it you understand this now, when you did not before?”
“The draclings,” he said. “When they came to me and nuzzled me and made that throbbing in their throats—Then when Synge—when I saw what Modin had done—” Jeorg swallowed and looked away. “Something Landerath said went through and through my mind. ‘All things bleed the same blood,’ he said, and at last I understood.”
Jeorg fumbled inside his tunic and pulled something out: an enameled brooch, Kaeldra saw. It was pale blue, trimmed in gold, wrought in the shape of a dragonpod bloom.
“Landerath’s brooch,” she breathed. “Granmyr told me of this.”
“He gave it to me as a talisman to show your granmyr.” Jeorg began to unlace his boot. “I don’t deserve to keep it.” He tied the lace in a loop, stuck the brooch’s pin through it and slipped it over Kaeldra’s head.
“But this doesn’t belong to me,” Kaeldra said.
“Mirym told me you lost yours. You deserve it more than anyone.”
Kaeldra held the brooch in her hand, ran her thumb across its smooth, enameled surface. Never had she seen an amulet so beautiful.
She looked up at Jeorg. “If you don’t go home, where will you go?”
Jeorg shrugged, brushing his hair from his brow.
“Is there any place you want to go?”
“I—” Kaeldra saw in his eyes an entreaty he was too proud to voice. She remembered what he had said to her, before. I care for you, he had said. And she knew all at once that parting with him would leave an empty place inside her, just as parting with the draclings had done.
She pulled the thong back over her head and slipped it over his.
“But I mean for you to have it,” he protested. “I’m giving it to you.”
“And I,” Kaeldra said, “am granting it to you.”
* * *
They traveled on foot to Radnor, the town where the merchant ship had docked. Kaeldra stayed hidden in a burlnut grove while Jeorg made inquiries about a ship. He found a fisherman who—for a price—would take them across the Kragish Sea to a cove south of Regalch. They would buy horses, then, and take a southerly route overland so as not to cause a stir.
Without dragons, a dragon-sayer would be of little use to those who had pursued her in the past. Still, they deemed it best not to court trouble.
“Thanks be to Hort that my friend managed to return my gold,” Jeorg said, untying a brightly colored bundle. “Our passage will be dear; and these were not cheap, either. Milady, your disguise.” He unfurled a gown of deepest scarlet, embroidered in purple and green and gold. It was shorter than the gowns Kaeldra was accustomed to
. He draped a multicolored sash across the gown and pointed to a pair of high leather boots.
“You’ll look like a high-born Kragish damsel. No one who searches for you in those”—he nodded at the rags she now wore—“will recognize you.”
“They’re beautiful,” Kaeldra said, fingering the fine, soft cloth. “But why did you pay so dearly for things I cannot wear in Elythia? They are too bright. People would stare.”
“People ought to stare at you.”
Kaeldra felt the blush creep up her face.
“I don’t see why you always tried to make yourself look like something you weren’t,” Jeorg went on. “You aren’t of Elythian descent. You’re a Krag. Trying to make yourself into an Elythian is like trying to turn a dragon into a—a sun lizard. You, too, belong to the earth, you know.”
Kaeldra thought of all the folk she had seen on this journey, folk of every height and girth and complexion.
I belong to the earth. She tried on the thought as she would try on a new gown. She had never considered it quite that way before.
* * *
One day in early fall they arrived at Granmyr’s cottage. When they crested the last rise, Kaeldra caught her breath. A pale blue froth spilled down from the foothills and pooled like milk around the cottage.
“Dragonpod blooms!” Jeorg said. “A whole raving sea of dragonpod blooms!”
Kaeldra did not have time to marvel, for just then a shriek rent the air.
“Kaeldra! It’s Kaeldra!”
And a thin, glossy-haired girl was running out to meet them. Kaeldra swung down off her horse and scooped up Lyf in her arms. She pulled away to look at her, at the shocking green of her eyes. Then Mirym was there, too, hugging and giggling in a most ungrown-up fashion. They took Kaeldra’s hands and dragged her toward the cottage, where Granmyr and Ryfenn stood. Kaeldra gave Ryfenn a formal little hug, which was stiffly returned, then wrapped her arms around Granmyr, careful not to crush her. “Whatever have you done to your hair!” Granmyr said sternly, holding Kaeldra at arm’s length. Then the old woman ducked and swiped at something in her eyes.
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