Dragonslayer

by Tui T. Sutherland

  But eventually something happened that made her realize that Sky was different from other dragons.

  They had been slowly working their way south that whole first year together, intending to get far away from Wren’s village and the mountain dragons’ palace. Sky was a slow traveler (partly due to all the snail-watching stops), but Wren was in no particular hurry once they were outside her village’s usual hunting area.

  Wren was hoping the winters would be easier if they came down from the mountains, but when they followed the river toward the sea, they found themselves in a vast marshy swampland where there were literally dragons HIDING IN THE MUD everywhere. After three close encounters with teeth surging up out of the swamp, Wren and Sky retreated back to the mountain foothills in a hurry.

  Wren kind of remembered the map she’d found in the dragonmancers’ books, although it was sketchy and mostly unhelpful, and every empty space on it had been labeled HERE BE DRAGONS, which made her want to yell, “Oh REALLY, why, THANK you, Mr. Obvious Mapmaker.”

  From that map she knew there was a desert west of the mountains, but she didn’t really know what that meant. She’d never seen a desert or met anyone who had. But Sky seemed to think it was worth a try, so they crossed the mountains through a pass during the warmest part of the year. From what she could tell of the seasons, Wren thought she might have turned eight by now. She didn’t know how fast dragonets grew, but Sky was probably a year old, at least.

  The pass channeled them up and up a winding canyon for days on end, finally ejecting them onto an outlook with a view of the far western horizon.

  Deserts, it turned out, were big and wide and flat and terrifying, if you asked Wren. Sand, sand, sand, as far as the eye could see, and almost nothing else.

  “Hmph,” Wren said, crossing her arms and glaring at it.

  “Hmph,” Sky agreed. He’d started imitating several of her noises, especially her grumpy ones, which was extremely cute. But she didn’t want him to lose his own language, because she wanted to learn it, too. Imagine being the only person in the world who spoke Dragon! Besides, her mouth seemed to work better with dragon sounds than his did with human ones.

  “Look! Yuck!” she said in Dragon, pointing at the endless desert. That was the closest she could get to saying, “There’s no way we can live out there! What a dreadful place! There’s absolutely nowhere to hide from the sand dragons, and we’d probably boil to death on the first day!”

  “Yuck,” Sky agreed, lashing his tail furiously. “Too big! Too hot!” And then he added a few more unintelligible dragon growls.

  Wren looked north — mountains curving away into the distance — and south, where she saw a waterfall pouring out of one of the cliffs. But there were no clues about which way was safest, no signs saying EXCELLENT HOME FOR WANDERING GIRL AND DRAGON HERE.

  She sighed. The one thing she missed about living in a village was having things to read. She didn’t miss a single one of the stupid awful treacherous people (maybe Leaf … don’t think about Leaf), but she missed stories she could bury herself in, or piles of new facts about something she didn’t know. The village school had only had a few books, and she’d zipped through them all before she turned six. That’s why she’d stolen the ones from the dragonmancers, because she’d been so desperate to read something new.

  But at least new books came to Talisman now and then, sold by wandering tradesfolk, or sometimes someone would write a new one. Out here in the wilderness, she hadn’t seen a book in forever, and she missed reading so much, it felt like half her soul was curled in a corner, waiting to be brought back to life.

  Plus, it would be ever so useful to have a new book with a MAP in it to consult right about now. She knew the Indestructible City was farther south and east, between the next big river and the swamps, but the dragonmancers’ map was all question marks and tree doodles and “here be dragons” beyond that.

  “Maybe we could go to the Indestructible City and steal a map,” she said to Sky in her own language, which she was starting to call Human in her head. “I don’t want to talk to anyone. But if we could get in and out without being noticed …” I could steal something to read, too! On the other hand, the Indestructible City was the most well-fortified human settlement in the world. So, maybe not the best place to try to rob.

  “Rrrrrbllrrp?” Sky said, which she thought meant something like “What these words mean?”

  She hopped off the boulder and found a stick she could use to scrawl in the dirt. Carefully she drew the vague shape of the continent, with a little palace up near the top (she was pretty sure that’s where Sky had come from) and a small dot for her own village, plus rivers and mountains and the big desert to the west. She circled the whole thing and tapped it. “Map. Map? Map in Dragon?”

  He nodded wisely and made a sound, which she imitated until she could remember it. She hoped this was the right word for map and that it didn’t mean drawing or scribble or you’re such a weird little human, Wren. Sometimes she wasn’t entirely sure Sky even knew the words she was asking about. He was so tiny when she found him; he might have been thrown away by his parents before he learned about maps.

  But he always acted very confident about whatever word he was teaching her, so she went along with it. At least he seemed to understand her — and she couldn’t exactly stroll up to another dragon and check.

  “Need map,” she said in Dragon.

  Sky shrugged and gave her a toothy grin. “Happy us,” he answered.

  She grinned back. “Yes, happy us.” In Human she added, “But it would be useful to know where we can go without being eaten, or to find a safe place where we could live. Don’t get me wrong — I love strange places because they’re far away from my family and those rat-faced dragonmancers. But every strange place could be hiding a danger we don’t even know about, and I want to keep you safe.”

  “Safe,” Sky repeated in Dragon, nodding sagely.

  “Well,” Wren said, regarding her sketchy map. “I guess we can at least try heading toward the Indestructible City. If it looks too alarming, we can go right past it.”

  That night, as they made their way over a large rocky plateau, Sky nudged Wren and pointed to their left. A faint orange light was coming from behind one of the boulders.

  Wren dropped to the ground, making herself as small as she could. Sky did the same beside her.

  They listened for a long, still moment, waiting to see if the light moved. It didn’t, but Wren thought she heard distant growls. She glanced at Sky and saw his ears pricked toward the sound.

  “We run away,” she whispered in Dragon.

  He shook his head. “Want to see.”

  He almost never argued with her, especially about which direction to go or how fast. So she nodded and followed him as they crawled quietly toward the light.

  It turned out to be coming from a hole in the rocks, along with a thin wisp of smoke. There must be a cave underneath them, Wren realized, and someone down there had built a fire.

  Sky wriggled to the edge and peeked over, blinking as smoke wafted into his face. Wren stretched out on her stomach next to him.

  There were dragons down below.

  Could be worse, Wren thought, propping her chin on her hands. Could be humans.

  She counted four small dragons galloping around the cave, chirping and rawring and wrestling one another. Another was curled on an outcropping, holding something in his claws. Something that rustled and rolled like paper, which he had his snout buried in with a riveted expression.

  Is he reading that? Wren thought with surprise. Dragons can read?

  Sky was probably too little to have learned to read Dragon before she found him. She wondered if she could teach him to read her language.

  Hang on, she thought. All of those dragons are different colors. She squinted. The firelight and the fuzz of smoke made it difficult to tell at first, but she was pretty sure she could see five different sets of scales — yellow, blue, green, black, an
d brown. The only one that was familiar was the brown, which matched the mahogany scales they’d seen on some of the swamp dragons.

  None of them were red or orange, like the dragons Wren was used to seeing. In the last year, she’d occasionally seen a few white ones flying overhead, and some that were a pale yellowish white, but neither of those were down there either.

  Are there really that many different kinds of dragon?

  And how can they all be together without killing each other?

  She’d thought the red dragons and the brown dragons were enemies. She’d assumed all the dragons fought with any others who looked different from them.

  But maybe they’re actually friends. The baby dragons in the cave all looked happy enough to be together — even the black one, who kept making remarks in a scolding tone from his perch on the wall. Maybe dragons are better at getting along with each other than people are.

  This fit nicely with her current Theory of the World, which was that dragons were better than people in every way, full stop.

  She glanced at Sky and saw the saddest look she’d ever seen on a baby dragon. It made her want to cuddle him and surround him with bunnies and snails.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered in Dragon.

  He pointed to the biggest baby dragon, the brown one. It was playing with the others, but every now and then it would stop to go back to the fire and breathe a few more flames on it, making sure it stayed alight.

  The little yellow dragon bounded up beside him and did the same, adding her tiny flames to his. The brown dragon nudged her side and accidentally knocked her over, then looked comically alarmed when she bounced up and jumped on him.

  Immediately the blue dragonet ran over and leaped on top of both of them, and they rolled for a while, yipping and roaring. A year ago, Wren would have thought those were roars of fury and that they might tear each other apart. But now she recognized the sounds Sky made sometimes. The little dragons were laughing.

  Wren didn’t know the word in Dragon for lonely. She didn’t know how to ask whether Sky wished he had dragon friends like that instead of her. She did know she didn’t like the feeling she had at that thought, as though something had bitten a large chunk out of her heart.

  “You want to go there?” she asked awkwardly, pointing down into the cave. She didn’t know how to get him there; the hole for the smoke was too small even for a tiny dragon to fit through. But she’d help him search for another way in, if that was what he wanted. There must be an entrance to the cave somewhere nearby … and if Sky needed dragon friends, she’d help him find some, no matter how long it took.

  He gave her a puzzled expression. “Me there?”

  “Need dragons?” she tried. “Happy yum friends?” Yum was obviously not the right word for this question, but it was the closest she could think of to something you love and want and are excited about.

  Sky wrinkled his snout and made a little snort-chortling sound. “Eat dragons no thank you,” he said.

  She tried one more time. “Happy us,” she said. “More happy you them?”

  To her surprise, tears suddenly appeared in his eyes. He leaned his long neck over and buried his face in her hair at the curve of her shoulder. “No no no,” he mumbled. “More more more happy you me us all the days.”

  Wren’s heart swelled. She slung one arm around his neck and hugged him closer. “Are you sure?” she whispered in her own language. “You want to stay with me instead of joining other dragons like you?”

  However much of that he understood, he nodded fiercely.

  “Happy me,” she whispered in Dragon.

  A louder growling came from below them, and a full-grown red dragon suddenly swept into the cave. She knocked the wrestling dragonets to the side and roared something at them as they scurried back against the walls. Wren saw the little emerald dragon sidle into a nook where she’d be out of the red dragon’s line of sight.

  Sky gasped, a faint breath of air against Wren’s cheek. He wiggled closer and stared at the red dragon.

  Wren wouldn’t have recognized her, except that Sky started trembling like a leaf, exactly the way he’d trembled the first day she held him, and she’d never forget that.

  The red dragon in the sky, searching the river …

  Could this be the same one? Wren waited until she turned her head — and yes, there was the burn scar she’d seen before, dark against the red scales.

  “Who is that?” she whispered to Sky. The closest she could come in Dragon was, “What called this?”

  He mumbled something back that she didn’t understand, but she didn’t need words to see that he was still scared of the red dragon.

  “Let’s go,” she said, crawling back from the hole. She stood up and lifted Sky into her arms, although he was getting too big and heavy for that. “You’re safe with me. Safe us.”

  Sky snuggled into her arms and took a deep breath, in and out. “Safe us.”

  Wren kept walking for the rest of the night, long after Sky fell asleep on her shoulder, putting as much distance as she could between them and the mysterious cave of multicolored dragons. Whatever they were doing down there, and how all those different kinds of dragons had ended up together, she didn’t need to know. It had nothing to do with her.

  All Sky needed was her, and all she needed was Sky.

  As the golden line of the sunrise appeared over the ridge to the east, Wren remembered the little dragons breathing flames on the fire. Those dragons had been a lot smaller than Sky. But they’d had no trouble breathing fire.

  It’s not a dragon thing, she realized. It’s a Sky thing.

  He doesn’t have any fire. He’s supposed to, but for some reason, he doesn’t.

  He wasn’t sad about not having dragon friends — he was sad that he can’t breathe flames like that.

  I bet that’s why the red dragon threw him away. The mountain tribe didn’t want a baby dragon with no fire. She was probably searching the river to make sure he’d really drowned.

  Poor little Sky.

  “I’d love you with or without fire,” she whispered to his snoring snout. “You’re perfect just the way you are. Even if you are weirdly obsessed with snails.”

  His eyes popped open and he blinked at her.

  “Snails?” he chirped hopefully.

  Leaf would not have guessed that his second-favorite sister would turn out to be Rowan. She was the oldest, and she usually ignored her five — now four — little siblings as though they were ants running about underfoot. She much preferred to be off with her friend Grove, hunting or fishing and talking about whatever teenagers talked about.

  But one day when he was nine, after he’d asked her to tell him the Dragonslayer story for the four hundredth time, he came out of school and found her leaning against the schoolhouse wall, holding a thick book.

  “Rowan,” the teacher said, eyeing the book suspiciously. “That’s an unusual accessory for you.”

  Or for anyone in our family, Leaf thought sadly, except Wren.

  “I’m going to help Leaf study,” Rowan said, with an air of innocence that struck Leaf as far more ominous than anything else. The teacher didn’t seem to notice, though. “Mother and Father think he could be chosen to be a dragonmancer’s apprentice. So naturally I want to help prepare him.”

  Behind the teacher’s back, Leaf raised his eyebrows at her, but she kept her gaze on the teacher and didn’t crack.

  “Hmmm. I’m not sure your level of scholarship would be any use to him,” the teacher said snippily. “But if your parents are fine with it, I don’t suppose I care.” She turned and regarded Leaf for a moment. “Of course … if you are chosen to be a dragonmancer, dear boy, I hope you’ll remember your real teacher fondly.”

  She swept away down the path, leaving Rowan and Leaf alone. Rowan burst into giggles as soon as she was out of earshot.

  “Old toad,” she said. “Bet you she’ll be a lot nicer to you from now on, just in case you do end up a dr
agonmancer.”

  “Thanks,” Leaf said, slightly awed by the sight of a grown-up being expertly manipulated by a sixteen-year-old. “Are you really here to help me study?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but not this boring stuff.” She dropped the book in her bag and beckoned him around to the back of the schoolhouse and then into the woods, weaving through the trees until the village buildings were out of sight. In a small clearing, she tossed her bag at the foot of a tree and scrambled into its upper branches. A moment later, two wooden swords fell with a clatter onto the grass.

  “Oh!” Leaf said, wide-eyed. “What? Really?”

  Rowan swung down out of the tree and put her fists on her hips, grinning. “Well, if you’re really going to slay a dragon one day, you’ll probably need to practice a little first.”

  “You’re going to teach me to fight?” he cried.

  “I’m going to train you to be a great warrior,” she said, “but only if you promise not to tell Mother and Father. As far as they know, we’re studying for the dragonmancer exams.”

  “But then … won’t I have to take the dragonmancer exams?”

  A sly look flitted across Rowan’s face. “Well, sure, but you won’t actually pass them, don’t worry. Hardly anyone does. They’ve had only six apprentices in the last ten years, remember? And I’m not sure they’re learning anything besides how to fetch and carry and make goat cheese. The ones who’ve survived, that is.”

  Leaf picked up one of the wooden swords and slashed it through the air. “But I’m going to learn to be a great warrior. Hah! Hiyah!”

  “Rule number one,” Rowan said, eyeing him skeptically. “Don’t shout like a maniac and warn the dragon you’re about to attack. I mean, seriously.”

  From then on, they went into the forest and trained every day after school. It was hard work, nowhere near as fun as following Wren around and listening to her notice things and complain about the village. But it made Leaf feel like he was doing something, or at least, getting ready to do something — something Wren would be proud of him for, if she were still here.