Dragonslayer

by Tui T. Sutherland

  This is a terrible idea. Which way did Wren go? Even if I knew, I can’t steer this dragon. Are we going east? I think we are. Yes, when he risked lifting his head, he saw a ridge of dark mountains on the horizon ahead.

  Sweetface shook herself and peered over her shoulder again. Leaf imagined being her; it must feel like having an invisible squirrel on you would feel to a human. Fairly unsettling, he was sure, but he was also in a spot too awkward for her to reach with her talons. He hoped her scales were less sensitive than skin, and maybe she would get used to his weight after a while.

  She flew straight toward the mountains for a long while, scanning the desert and the skies with sharp movements of her head. Leaf tried to search the sky, too, for any sign of a dragon up ahead. He couldn’t hear anything except the rush of wind, the steady thrum of the dragon’s wings, and the faint thump of her heartbeat.

  Was that something? A flicker of motion in the distance, flying over the silver ribbon of a river …

  Sweetface saw it, too. She whipped her head toward it, then tilted her wings to soar closer.

  Leaf held his breath as they approached. It was another dragon, as pale as Sweetface in the moonlight, flapping its wings with slow, concentrated effort. Leaf wasn’t sure if he was imagining the dark shape curled on its back.

  They were close, nearly close enough to fly right over the strange dragon in a few more wingbeats, when Sweetface checked herself in the air, made a noncommittal noise, and veered back toward the palace.

  Wait! Leaf thought frantically. We were so close!

  He pressed his feet into the dragon’s wing, trying to turn her around. She yelped and twisted in a circle, reaching for her back. He ducked her claws and threw his arms around her neck and leaned hard to the right. With another, more alarmed yelp, she flung her wings out and shook herself vigorously. She was as determined not to turn around as he was to make her turn, but she was probably a hundred times heavier than he was.

  “WREN!” Leaf shouted desperately, at the top of his lungs. “WREN! OVER HERE!”

  He did not see Sweetface’s tail come swinging out of the sky behind him. Suddenly he felt the side of it smack into his chest, knocking him straight off her back.

  With his last coherent thought, he yanked the chain over his head as he fell.

  Wren would have ignored the commotion behind them. She was happy to lie on Sky’s back, feeling the wind in her face as they left the desert and its creepy dragon queen in their dust.

  But Sky’s ears were sharper than hers, especially when they were flying, and he paused to look back.

  “What?” Wren asked.

  “I thought I heard someone shout your name,” he said.

  Wren laughed. “That seems literally imposs — oh, wait, no! I do have another friend now! Is it Rose?” She sat up and looked in the same direction.

  A sand dragon was in the sky behind them having some kind of midair seizure. It twisted and flared its wings and grabbed at its back and whacked itself with its own tail and generally seemed to have lost its mind.

  “Yikes,” Wren said. “I think let’s stay far away from whoever that is.”

  “Wait,” Sky said. He pointed. “Look — she dropped something.”

  Wren squinted. There was something falling from the dragon. Something rather big, actually.

  “What if you were right?” she said. “Sky, could that be Rose?”

  Sky was already powering toward the shape as fast as his wings could fly.

  “But that’s not Smolder,” Wren called over the rush of the wind. “Why would she be riding a different dragon?” She wasn’t expecting an answer. Sky was putting all his energy into his wingstrokes.

  I don’t think we can make it, Wren thought with alarm. It was too far off, and falling fast. Oh, I hope we’re wrong. I hope that’s not Rose. She’d only really spent one day with the other woman, but Rose had found the key to save Sky, and she’d understood everything Wren had never expected another human to understand.

  The strange dragon gave herself one last shake and stopped writhing. She looked down, saw Sky soaring toward her, saw his talons reaching out, saw the shape below her plummeting toward the sand.

  She gave a yell of horror and dove after it.

  Wren leaned forward with a gasp. They were close enough now that she was sure it was a person, arms and legs flailing in the air.

  The other dragon’s claws caught him a few heartbeats above the ground. Sky landed beside her a moment later, just as the dragon was gently setting the human on his feet.

  Wren slid off Sky’s back and floundered through the sand.

  “Rose?” she called.

  The human turned toward her. It was not Rose.

  It was a boy, around Wren’s age, with short dark hair and a sword strapped to his back and an oddly familiar dumbfounded expression.

  “Wren?” he said.

  She stopped short and stared at him.

  He said, “Wren,” and then he said it again, “Wren — it is you. Isn’t it?” and it didn’t make sense because nobody knew her, nobody said her name like they were looking for her, nobody was out there thinking of her … except here was somebody who said “Wren?” like she had actually been missed by someone, all these years, after all.

  He came toward her through the sand, wobbly and awkward as though he’d just flown on a dragon for the first time. There were tears in his eyes.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Your brother. It’s Leaf.”

  Wren found herself looking down at the sand just to see if it was still there, and then at the dragons; yes, they were there, too, watching curiously. She was not somehow back in Talisman, and she was not dreaming.

  “Well, that’s … surprising,” she said.

  He laughed, a kind of bark of relief, and then he was suddenly hugging her, and three moons, human hugs were nothing like dragon hugs. Wren couldn’t remember if this had ever happened to her before. Had her parents ever hugged her, before they fed her to dragons? Or any of her sisters?

  No. Only Leaf, long ago, when I was small and lost the snail he carved for me.

  “Wren,” he said. “I just rode on a dragon! And fell off! And nearly died! I have to sit down.” He dropped onto the sand, shoved something in his pocket, and rubbed his face.

  “Clumsy of you,” Wren said. “I ride a dragon, like, all the time and haven’t nearly died even once.” She sat down next to him. Next to her brother. Her brother, who remembered her name, who’d ridden a dragon to find her.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said. “All these years … Mother and Father said you’d disobeyed the dragonmancers and so the dragons got you.”

  “I knew they would say that!” she cried. “I told you they would, didn’t I?” She turned and looked at Sky, who nodded sympathetically. “That’s such a total lie. Those lying liars!”

  “I can’t believe I believed them,” Leaf admitted. “Rowan finally told me the truth not too long ago. When I think about all the people who lied to me, who knew exactly what the dragonmancers did to you, but did nothing to help you — it makes me so angry, Wren.”

  “Welcome to my life,” she said. “How funny that it was Rowan. She wasn’t even there. I always wondered whether any of our sisters knew the true story.”

  “She tried to stop them, actually,” Leaf said. “They ended up locking her in the cellar while they took you.”

  “Rowan tried to stop them?” Wren tried to wrap her head around that. Rowan had never paid one iota of attention to her littlest sister. On some days, Wren would have guessed that Rowan didn’t even know her name; on others, she knew she’d annoyed Rowan enough that she’d have happily fed Wren to the dragons herself. She would never, never have imagined Rowan trying to fight for Wren’s life.

  Leaf took a deep breath. He lifted a handful of sand and watched it pour through his fingers. “The truth is, she thinks she’s the reason you were sacrificed. Mother found one of the books you stole from the dragonmancers, and
Rowan told her you took it.”

  “Oh, she would!” Wren cried. “I mean, I guess that’s fair, though, since I did.”

  “Do you remember what was in it?” Leaf asked. “I figure you must have read some awful secret about them, and that’s why they decided to get rid of you.”

  Wren remembered the feel of those books in her small seven-year-old hands, heavy and smooth and crisply important-smelling. She barely remembered anything inside them, though. Lots of columns of numbers, she thought.

  “Do you think that’s really why?” She pulled her legs into her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I thought they just decided I was annoying and loud and awful and they didn’t want me there anymore. I thought maybe … maybe everyone agreed with them.”

  “Oh, Wren.” Leaf put his arms around her again. It was different from having wings around her, but still comforting. She rested her head on his shoulder.

  “Not me,” he said, “I missed you so much. You have no idea. I never stopped thinking about you.”

  “Really?” she said. “Not really. I mean — you were only eight.”

  “Yeah, but you were my favorite sister,” he said. “And my best friend. I just … I didn’t know how to be without you. I felt like I couldn’t figure out who I was or what to do with myself, or who to trust or what was real.”

  “I could tell you those things,” Wren said. “I’m pretty clear on all that.”

  “I know!” he said. “I missed that. It was awful without you. I decided to be a dragonslayer, can you imagine?”

  She couldn’t. Leaf as she remembered him had been a quiet, obedient kid who followed the rules and never caused trouble. She would never have pictured him with a sword or chasing after dragons.

  “Why a dragonslayer?” she said. “The only one I’ve heard of sounds like a jerk, I have to say.”

  “Because of you,” he said simply. “I had this whole plan to avenge you. Rowan was training me, and I was going to go kill the dragons who ate you. We got all the way to the mountain palace. But guess what? It turns out it’s really hard to stab a dragon!”

  “Eh.” She shrugged her shoulders under his arm. “Not that hard. I’ve done it a couple of times.”

  “By all three moons, of course you have,” he said with a laugh. “Have you managed to kill one, too?”

  “Yes, actually,” she said. “But he really had it coming.”

  “Are you serious?” He pulled back to stare at her.

  “Long story,” she said. “Go back to yours.”

  He told her all about his time in the mountain palace, the dragons who nearly ate him and the dragons who saved him, and Rowan and her friends, and how they were looking for treasure, and then his quest to find the Dragonslayer — who really was a jerk, she was right about that — and the city of Valor, and Ivy (Ivy Ivy Ivy), and looking for Rose (and how she didn’t want to be rescued, which made perfect sense to Wren), and how he had ended up flying on a strange dragon in the middle of the night.

  “Wow,” she said when he finished. “It sounds almost as exciting as my life! Not quite, but close.”

  He grinned at her, and she had a flash of being seven again, back when her primary goal every day was to prove that she was just as smart and brave and tough as her big brother.

  “I can’t believe you rode a dragon just to find me,” she said. She wouldn’t have thought there was a human in the world who would do that for her.

  “I would have ridden a different wild dragon every day to find you, if I’d known you were alive,” he said. “I really should have known. My first thought when they told me was, Wren would never stay still long enough to be eaten by dragons! And what dragon would be dumb enough to try to eat her?”

  Wren laughed.

  “So how did you survive?” he asked. “Tell me everything about your life. Everything I missed.”

  I actually want to tell him, Wren realized. She’d always kept her life with Sky so secret, it was strange to think of sharing it all with someone else. First Rose, and now Leaf; what was happening to her?

  “Well,” she said, “let me introduce you to the most important part.”

  Behind them, the two dragons had been chatting quietly. From the snatches of conversation she’d overheard, Wren gathered that the sand dragon was asking Sky about where he’d found his human pet and how often he had to feed her. Wren had decided not to be outraged about this, since the dragon had saved Leaf from falling to his death, after all.

  “Sky,” she called. “Come meet my brother.”

  “Brother?” Sky echoed in Human, bounding over to them. “Hello, brother!”

  Leaf’s eyebrows made a run for his hair and his mouth dropped open. “Did that dragon just talk?” he asked. “He can TALK?”

  “They can all talk, goober,” Wren said. “But he’s the only one who speaks our language, because he’s a perfect genius. This is Sky.” She put one hand on Sky’s snout. He leaned into her palm, his cold scales like river pebbles under her fingertips. One of his wings folded around her back, shielding her from the desert night wind. “He’s my very best friend. Sky, this is my brother, Leaf.”

  “Leaf,” Sky said. The name sounded a little odd in his voice, but also quite right. She could see that Sky was trying to make a good impression, perhaps to prove her “perfect genius” description. Using only Human, he said, “It is most beyond wonderful to meet you.”

  “It is most beyond wonderful to meet you, too,” Leaf said. Sky stuck out one talon, and Leaf gravely rested one hand on it for a moment. “Thank you for taking care of my little sister.”

  “Oh HECK NO,” Wren objected. “I take care of him!”

  “It is quite difficult,” Sky said seriously to Leaf. “She is always getting into trouble. Really it’s very lucky that I —” He dissolved into giggles and fell over on the sand.

  “You are an extremely silly turtle-face,” Wren told him affectionately in their hybrid language.

  “Ivy would love to see this,” Leaf said. “She believes that humans and dragons could get along instead of fighting.”

  “I think that’s true of most dragons,” Wren said. “And some humans. Maybe.”

  “Can I take you to her?” he asked. The sky was turning a pale orange the color of Sky’s scales as the sun rose beyond the mountains. “I should take this back to her so she can get out of the palace.” He took out the invisibility chain and held it so it gleamed in the sun. Sky made an ooh sound and touched it with one claw.

  “I don’t want to take Sky back into the desert palace,” Wren said. “I’m worried about that queen — we avoided her before, but we might not be so lucky a second time. But maybe this dragon with the adoring expression can take you back and get you all out of there, and then I can meet you somewhere safe.” She turned toward the sand soldier and switched to Dragon. “Hey, friend. Could you do us a favor?”

  The dragon looked enormously delighted. “She makes dragon noises!” she said to Sky. “You’ve trained her so well! That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “I don’t just ‘make dragon noises,’” Wren said crossly. “I speak Dragon.”

  “That’s so impressive,” Sweetface said, still talking to Sky. “Wow! I didn’t know they could do that! I don’t think Smolder has his trained nearly so well. What else can she say?”

  “I can say HEY STOP BEING A DIMWIT AND LISTEN TO ME!” Wren shouted.

  “Awwwwwwwmygoodness,” Sweetface cooed. “I love her! I want to snuggle her and put little hats on her!”

  Wren threw her hands in the air. “Sky, would you please ask this ridiculous dragon to fly Leaf back to the palace safely? And then to hop him and Ivy and Stone back over the wall to their horses before anyone catches them?”

  Sky relayed those instructions with a wickedly amused expression. Wren had a feeling she’d be hearing about “little hats” for years.

  Sweetface — whose real name turned out to be Cereus, but Wren rather thought the name
Sweetface suited her better — was delighted to be helpful to the “adorable scavengers” and thrilled to give Leaf another ride. “A safer one this time,” she chortled. “What a clever little squirrel he is. Invisible! So cute!”

  “We’ll meet you back in the forest below the mountains,” Leaf said. He described the burned village to Wren, and where it was in relation to the twin-peaked mountain at the southern end of the range, and who she might run into once she got there.

  “We traveled down there a couple of years ago,” Wren said. “We didn’t stay long, but I probably walked right over Valor and didn’t realize it was there. Ooh, I can add it to my MAP! Which, incidentally, is much bigger and more detailed than your little mountain palace map.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Leaf said with a laugh. “So — see you in a couple of days? You promise you’ll be there?” He was holding one of her hands like he was afraid it might vanish if he let it go.

  “If I’m not,” Wren said, “just hop on another dragon and fly around until you run into me.”

  “I WILL, though,” he said. “You’d better be there, or I’ll tear up the whole continent looking for you.”

  She punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Deal.”

  He climbed back onto Sweetface, with a lot of ineffectual help and little boosts and enchanted baby talk from the sand dragon. Wren leaned against Sky and waved as they took off into the sky and arrowed west toward the palace.

  “That dragon was GOOFY,” she said to Sky once they were gone. “I had no idea there were dragons as silly as my sister Bluebell.” She hadn’t thought about Bluebell in years, or Rowan, or anyone else in Talisman. Only Leaf, when she couldn’t stop herself, and the dragonmancers, when she couldn’t keep the nightmares at bay.

  “I had no idea there were other humans as marvelous as you,” Sky said.

  “Almost as marvelous,” Wren said. “He missed me, did you hear that part? He actually cared that I was gone.” She felt like her heart was doing what Sky’s wings did when they caught a new air current, rising up and up toward the sun.