Sunshine in the Dragon's Heart
Page 21
“We are almost home, Emik-kik.” The rumble of Hakko’s voice vibrated through him. It was reassuring, the bulk of him so close, protection against the cool early-morning air and the dangers that dwelt in a forest this ancient.
He’d never felt this vulnerable. Had he?
The foggy remembrance of skin with no scales at all drifted at the periphery of his thoughts. He remembered cold nights, an empty belly. He remembered scratchy blankets. Soft bread, grilled meat. Gentle hands. Hot, wonderful lips….
“And here we are.” Hakko moved aside, depriving Emik-kik of his comfort and whisking him out of his memories—or dreams?
They stepped out from under the eaves of the forest onto a prominence of stone worn smooth from generations of dragons climbing to this point—in scale and skin—to look down on the majesty of one of the greatest remaining dragon achievements. The area where they stood had been cultivated with flowering gardens and stone shelters near the edges of the forest to accommodate mating ceremonies, celebrations, and gatherings of all kinds.
Revealed in the valley at the foot of the sandstone cliffs, the spires of their home rose, pulled from the bones of the earth with magic and will. Rays of sunshine turned the pale rock spires gold with their first caress, while the homes nestled at the foot of the grander castles still slumbered in the last shadows of night.
Far in the past, many generations before their own eggs had hatched, their ancestors had controlled the will of thousands of salamanders who could render such vast amounts of flux into pure magical energy that allowed the dragons to achieve anything. They had forced the land to their own desires. They had built this with nothing more than their will, the borrowed magic, and the bones of the earth. No force could shake the castle whose roots were the backbone of the world itself.
There were no dragons left alive, that Emik-kik knew of, who could harness such power now. The salamanders had evolved from that time and had learned to be wary of dragons in any form. They were harder to control and better protected by their own cunning and the loyalty of the dryads and nymphs who fed them. No such gathering had happened since the Dispersal that had broken the dragon civilisation into the Enclaves and Houses.
Emik-kik was not the dragon to challenge Hakko, so he had fled. He’d torn himself from his home, from everything he knew, to find refuge in a strange, empty land.
And he’d found… what? Solace? Acceptance?
“Is it all you remember, little mate?” Hakko asked. “Is our home everything you’ve dreamed of since you left me?”
“Little mate?” A new voice, one half-remembered from the nest, caught Emik-kik’s attention. “Have you given in, then, my wild one? Are you to give up all your hard-won freedom for a false Sire’s desires? Have you forgotten everything our Bearer taught us about pride? About history? About the dangers of too much power in too few hands?”
Emik-kik turned to face the sinuous, winged form of one he had never expected to see again in this life. “Ananth.”
“You’ve returned.” Ananth’s soft body slinked up next to his, sandwiching him once more against Hakko’s hard, abrasive scales. Their golden hide sent a frisson of happiness exploding right through him. He hadn’t realised how much he missed Ananth until they were pressing up against each other like they hadn’t since they were hatchlings.
“I—” He had returned. It had been for the best.
A waft of clearer air lifted the downy feathers along his ruff as Ananth swept wings in an arc over them all. Only slightly bigger than Emik-kik, that wingspan was still enormous, and finding a comfortable position for them stirred up dust motes and pushed away the heavily aromatic air that surrounded Hakko.
Emik-kik sneezed at the dust and blinked as though a veil had lifted from his eyes.
“Playing with his senses, Hakko. Now is that really fair?”
“Silence, Ananth.”
Ananth grinned, showing rows of sharpened teeth, but said nothing.
“Come, Emik-ki—”
“Emikku.” The correction passed his lips before he could think better of it. “My name is Emikku.” He curled his claws into the rocky ground, rustled his much smaller wings. Nothing grew this close to the cliff’s edge, the land’s magic and life having dried up centuries ago. Gravel scraped the pads of his feet. The satisfying sound of brittle stone cracking under the pressure of his grip steeled his nerves.
“What our Bearer named you out of the shell is of no matter. Everything changes as soon as we return to the roost. You know that.” Hakko puffed himself up, heat rising from him in visible waves. A heady scent of hormones and desire rose with it, clouding Emikku’s thoughts.
“You do no one any service by appealing to his baser instincts, Hakko,” Ananth scolded. The tone was light, but the underlying warning was not. “Bearing our future is a lofty post—one best entered into with a clear head and a resolve that will carry him through the decades of confinement that it requires. It is not for the faint of heart or the wild of spirit. Let him make up his mind without your scent-fog clouding his judgement.” Ananth nudged Emikku. “Remember our travels, wild one? How we roamed the woods and danced through the prairie grasses? Do you remember the hours we spent reading the stories and histories, and the days—years even—when we travelled to find the source of the myths?”
Of course he did, now that his head was clear. He and Ananth had spent years away from the castle roaming the lands to find the truth behind the stories etched on the thin parchment pages of their House histories. Something had always drawn Ananth home. Though Emikku had been content to follow them back to the broodnest from time to time, he had never wanted to stay. He thought Ananth hadn’t either, and the last time they’d left without him, he’d believed he would never see them again. He’d believed that he would have to find his own way out of the castle and Hakko’s plans, and he had.
He’d run to the Fold. He’d found Sunny.
“Sunny.” His own voice sounded a little strangled in his ears, like there was an injunction against saying the name at all. He had to struggle to remember Sunny’s face or recall his scent. Every time he almost had it, Hakko’s pheromones overtook him, and he had to shake the mist away again.
With a mighty heave and a blast of air, Ananth rose to hover above them, letting out a screech as only a dragon could. Heavy wingbeats stirred up a gale around them.
Hakko’s scent blew away, and with it, the fog over Emikku’s senses. The heat Hakko produced wafted past him, hot blasts with every beat of Ananth’s wings.
Emikku shook himself and scuttled sideways, distancing himself from Hakko. He stared at his fellow hatchling, huge against the glow of the eastern horizon. The sun was rising, bringing a fresh light and new clarity.
He had allowed his dragon’s instincts to overpower his good sense. “I should not have come.” He backed a few more steps away from Hakko, sliding into the shadow Ananth created.
“You should never have left!” Hakko’s roar was furious, and he rose onto his back legs, snapping at Ananth’s tail, whipping his own tail up to score a gouge through one of the beautiful membranous wings.
Ananth screamed, faltered, tipping sideways in the sky and dipping below the edge of the cliff.
“Ananth!” Emikku lunged for his falling nest-mate, even as the ground shuddered and the scrape of claws on the stone of the mountainside rent the morning.
“Is this what we come to, brother?” Ananth asked, clawing up to level ground. “You would pull me out of the sky, destroy your own broodmate, to get your way?”
“This isn’t about getting my way. It never has been. It’s about restoring what is rightfully ours. What should never have been taken from us in the first place.” He waved a forelimb, indicating the brightening city, the palace with golden light glittering off its highest windows, the indestructability of the ancient home their forefathers had built and their House had inherited.
“We had power once,” he spat. “We should have that power again.”
“What does it matter? The world moved on.”
“Do you know why brownies live underground?”
“They’re brownies.”
“Because the forest they lived in was ploughed under to create our stony, cold haven. Miles and miles of succulent farmland and ancient groves were torn apart so we could build out of rock and stone something that could never be torn down by our rivals. They went underground to try to nurture the last ragged roots of their home. Their world. Do you even know what it looks like now?”
Hakko’s jaw clacked, and he gazed out over his city as the sun rose over the eastern peaks to pour light down the slopes.
“They live in the faintest echo of what they once had. It’s beautiful, don’t mistake me. The hills are hollowed out in places to let in the light, and the water sprites enticed to travel miles out of their way to send rills and trickles through the cracks of stone to feed their underground gardens. Trees knee-high to our human forms that are centuries old, dryads no bigger than the brownies themselves, salamanders the size of our big toes.” Ananth smiled. “They have survived, but it never had to be that way. The land dispersed us for a reason.”
“The world was jealous of our power.”
“And rightly so!” Ananth took a step towards him. “We destroyed entire civilisations to best our own kin. Because we could.”
Hakko turned his attention on his golden nest-mate in a searing glare, but Ananth rose up, meeting his eye, unafraid. “So everything our Sire and his Sire before him have done to strengthen our House, you would throw that away?”
“I would ask you why. Why do we need to strengthen our bloodline so much? Why do we need more power than the others?”
“Every generation they pull back, refuse to mingle their blood with ours. Every Sire has more difficulty convincing the other Houses to hold to the Dispersal agreements and allow us to nurture their eggs.”
“Did you ever think that perhaps they held back not out of jealousy, but out of fear? That amassing so much magic in our small valley might be making them nervous? Did it never occur to you that multiplying the power you hold might be the reason they refuse to hold to old agreements that would make them even weaker?”
“Ananth is right.” Emikku stepped forward. “They all know the same things you do about how our magic multiplies. The rules about egg sharing and honouring the Egg-bearers were created for a reason.”
“It was a flawed law.” Hakko’s voice took on a threatening snarl.
“Was it?” Emikku edged himself between Ananth and Hakko. “We protect the Egg-bearers of all Houses, all the Enclaves, because we will never know which Bearer holds our own offspring. That is how it should be. Our Grand-Sire was the jealous one, not telling his Bearer the truth, trying to manipulate the outcome. What he did was wrong.”
“A lot of good it did.” Hakko’s face twisted with anger as he turned to Emikku. “I will never produce the egg he hoped for if you refuse to cooperate, Emik-kik.”
“If I agree to this, the magic our offspring bears will be double yours. Our offspring would be so strong none of the other Houses could stand against them. You would not stand against them.”
“Why is that a bad thing?” Hakko’s words roared out over the valley. “We have been the smallest, the weakest for so long. Why can’t we be the ones with the power for a change?”
“Because look what we do with it.” Emikku backed a few paces away from his Sire, keeping his voice low and Ananth out of Hakko’s reach. “Manipulation. Harm.” He nosed at Ananth’s wing. “A dryad older than any dragon living—dead so you could prove to a nonmagic human how strong you are. It was our own hubris, our own shortcomings that brought on the Dispersal, and we have yet to learn the lesson we were meant to learn from that, even hundreds and hundreds of years later.
“Yes, the brownies have moved on, the forests have regrown, the water sprites have forgiven, if not forgotten, what we did to their sacred pools and clear rivers. We are the ones who still need to learn.”
“Listen to him, Hakko,” Ananth said, voice a soft, gravelly purr. “Step back before it’s too late.”
Hakko swung his head around to stare at Emikku. “And if I agree that everything you two have said is true, then what? I let you go? Become a Sire with no offspring? Our House dies here.”
“Perhaps that is the penalty we were always meant to pay for the damage we did, the harm we caused to so many others.”
“I won’t let our House die with me,” Hakko vowed, moving towards Emikku. “You will give me the egg I need, and if I can’t convince you to carry it and care for the hatchling, I’ll take it.” He rose, claws sharp and glinting in the morning sunshine, fangs dripping acid that steamed when it hit the ground, crumbling the smooth rock into pockmarked, treacherous terrain.
“I won’t.” Emikku lowered his head. “That is one thing even your most persuasive manipulations cannot force me to do. You will have to kill me. Even an egg will feel the violence of such a beginning. Would you scar the hatchling in such a way, risk so much damage to an innocent, just to get your way?”
Chapter 31
SUNNY’S STOMACH grumbled, forcing him out of a fog of unsettled sleep he couldn’t remember falling into. He shifted, straightening cramped back and leg muscles, to find himself surrounded by tiny, wrinkled little creatures with huge moon-coloured eyes and skin like spun silver but streaked with dirt and clumps of soil.
“Uh.” He sat up and scrambled back, expecting to fetch up against the willow dryad’s thick body, but he was alone. Well. Alone except for the curious—fairies?
“Hi.” He waved one hand, keeping his arms close to his body.
The creatures crouched and mimicked him.
“I don’t suppose you speak English?”
Some of them tilted their heads to one side, while others giggled. An exceptionally wizened one rose on legs far longer than human-proportioned to a pot-bellied, stout torso, and took a few steps towards Sunny.
“Human?” the creature asked.
“Um. Yes. I am.” Sunny tried a smile. Most of the creatures around him mimicked the expression, revealing mouths full of wide, flat teeth and thick red tongues that a few of the younger creatures stuck out to waggle around like they were sensing the air.
“No magic,” the old creature said.
“No. Not really. Not like you would call magic, anyway.”
“You do here?” One gnarled finger pointed to the ground.
Sunny assumed the little creature was asking why he was on the wrong side of the Fold for a human. “I’m looking for my friend. He’s a dragon—”
A horrified gasp went up among his watchers, the smallest of them vanishing, some literally, others by ducking behind older, bigger members of the group.
So. They didn’t like dragons. This might be a problem.
“He’s kind,” Sunny hastened to assure them. “Gentle.”
“Dragons raze.” He swept his hand out in a horizontal sweep, like he was wiping away everything in its path. “Old man know.” He thudded a palm on his chest, then propped his hands on his narrow hips and scowled. “All dragons.”
“Not this one, I promise. He ran away from the other dragons.” Sunny pointed back towards what, in the morning glow, looked like an unassuming, perfectly unmagical willow tree. “He crossed the Fold. That’s where I met him.”
“Dragons kill,” the little man insisted.
“I am afraid other dragons might hurt—or kill—my dragon. Please. All I want is to know where they might have gone. Can you help me?”
“Help dragon?” His fierce scowl deepened, turning his
face into a scrunched study of stubbornness with bushy brows. “Help human.” He shook his head. “No help brownies.”
“Brownies? Is that what you are? A brownie?”
The man looked at him like he was an idiot, then huffed and slapped his own chest. “Root and tree and seed and care and back and back and back.” He waved a hand, indicating the passage of time.
“You take care of tree roots?” That seemed an odd occupation, but what did Sunny know of brownies?
“Trees. Roots. Time. Better trees. Back and back and back. Best to better to always.”
Like he could hear Daisy’s voice in his head, he finally made sense of what the little man was trying to say. “You’re a tree biologist.”
The man’s eyes got huge and he gaped.
“You improve tree stock. You make trees better by planting the best ones and keeping them safe.”
This time the wide, round-eyed look was accompanied by an equally wide smile and a vigorous nod that sprayed small chunks of soil from the man’s beard and hair across the ground at his feet. “Yes, yes, yes. Human thinks.”
“I try,” Sunny muttered. He smiled at the little man. “Okay. So what do I call you?”
The man tipped his head to one side, shuttering the pale glow of his eyes behind narrowed lids.
Sunny touched his chest. “I’m Sunny.” He fingered his hair, pointed at the sky, then tapped his chest again. “Sunny.”
The man nodded, touched his chest, and a long exhalation of sound, like roots digging into earth, pebbles tumbling over one another, and water running and dripping through echoing stone caverns came out of his mouth all at once. He nodded, grinned at Sunny, and once more tapped his own chest.
“Um. O… kay.” Sunny sighed but shook his head. “I’m not going to be able to repeat that. Mind if I call you Rootstock?”
Rootstock nodded and tapped his own chest. “Rootstock.” He shuffled over to an elderly female brownie and laid a loving arm over her shoulders. “Rootstock’s best and other.” He waved behind him. “Rootstock’s more Rootstocks.”