by E. E. Knight
She found a dry gully full of thick thorny brush and plunged into it, snaking along with half-closed eyes. The thorns rattled and snapped on her scales, red flowers above like wounds in the sky—those wretched dogs with their thin-furred muzzles would be miserable following her through it.
A tear—one of the bags had ripped open, caught on a thorny branch that had the tenacity of an iron hook. She turned and sniffed at the coins already falling from the sack.
Nothing to do but eat them.
When she came out of the thornbushes she found that her load was unbalanced, the remaining bag kept sliding over sideways—her makeshift contraption didn’t have much in the way of stabilizing straps. She ate mouthful after mouthful of coin from the other bag as she rested, greedy for each deliciously metallic swallow.
She staggered on, sick with fatigue, the coins in her gut clattering. Step after wretched step after wretched step uphill, until she thrust herself forward using only her hind legs, the front ones folded flat against her side.
The bags were too heavy; that was why her limbs gave out. She abandoned them, ate a few more coins so that they wouldn’t go to waste—maybe her last pleasure in life would be that of silver and gold rolling around in her mouth. Besides, the men would just have them anyway, and go buy themselves new mates or flocks or boots or whatever it was that men did with coin.
But, Father! She tore off one tiny pocket of canvas and spat two remaining coins into it, gripped it in her teeth as she pushed on, keeping three of her four limbs moving on into darkness.
Roaring in her ears now. She felt wet on the interior of her nostrils.
The river!
She could see the prominence ahead. The battered columns, the rocks where Father would perch and fish, the jagged spur he always used to help himself back to the sleeping spot at the old meeting place or whatever it was.
She gave a glad, trumpeting cry and staggered on—at least she wasn’t leaving a blood trail anymore. She’d failed this time, but she knew where to get more coin now, she’d be trebly-careful, cross the man-road by tree limbs above, there wouldn’t be rat bites next time . . .
Wistala limped out onto the peninsula, climbed up to Father’s prominence.
He looked dispirited and sleepy; blood seeped from a reopened wound. Perhaps he’d tried to fly again. “Father!”
“Tala! Back so soon? Bartleghaff’s only just left to see how you were doing in the ruins. But perhaps he marked you—here he comes.”
“I . . . ,” Wistala managed to gasp. Her throat felt too dry for words.
Your contraption didn’t survive the trip, I see.
Wistala squinted against the setting sun. The old condor waggled his wings this way and that on the confused air currents of the gorge as he approached.
A baying like a thousand wolves broke out from the banks of the river, louder even than the sound of water crashing into rock.
“What’s this?” Father asked.
Wistala could manage thought-pictures: “Some dogs smelled me. I killed one.”
Bartleghaff swept low over the peninsula but didn’t land. “AuRel: it’s the Dragonblade and his pack!”
Father blinked, let out a deep breath. “So he’s found me,” he said to no one in particular.
“The Dragonblade?” Wistala asked.
“The dwarves would hire him, I suppose.” His wings drooped a little farther, and he searched the banks. Wistala saw black shapes bounding through the thick mist-washed ferns. Hunched shapes moved in the lengthening shadows of the woods beyond.
“They’re coming off their horses now!” Bartleghaff shouted on another low sweeping pass.
“Fathered by a wolf and mothered by a bear, it seems, with the memory of a tortoise to boot, for his sire was killed by dragons long ago, and he’s been seeking vengeance ever since.”
“Do you suppose he was at our cave?” Wistala asked.
“Dragons must land sometime, and he always finds their refuge,” Father said.
He straightened and got to his feet, a new light in his eyes. He cocked his head at Bartleghaff and flicked a griff up and out. “Go gather your relatives for that feast, old croaker.”
Wistala didn’t like any of this. Father’s words set her trembling with the worst fear she’d ever known. If only she weren’t so small, fireless. Useless, useless, useless. “Father, I did find you some coin.” She spat out the canvas bag-bottom; her spit made it smell faintly of oats. She nosed out two tarnished coins: one of gold, the other of silver.
“Marvelous, daughter,” Father said, nuzzling her fringe. “A pair, alike and yet not twins. Like you and Auron.” He took them up with his tongue, carefully placed them to either side in his mouth.
The dogs let out another joined cry.
Must get away . . . “Are we going to run from the dogs?”
“Tala, I’m never going to fly again, in the air or on land. This fellow’s killed more dragons than you have teeth, but he’s never tried his luck against me. If I can—”
“Let me help you. I’ll draw off the dogs.”
Father stamped the ground, hard enough to cause Wistala to bounce.
“NO!”
His roar echoed off the gorge walls, louder than the rushing water, louder than the baying dogs.
Frightened, she tucked her head down into her wounded joint.
“Tala, you’re too young for this fight. The best way for you to avenge your brother and sister is to have clutches of your own. Each hatchling of your own who lives to breed avenges them thrice over.”
“The dogs—they’ll bite and hold.”
“I’m not afraid of the dogs or anything else that walks or crawls or swims. Now go.”
The dogs must have caught a fresh scent, perhaps Father’s blood on the wind, for they set up an eager clamor.
She stood there, shaking. She’d led them right to Father! That was why they’d sent a single old dog to nudge her along! “I won’t. I can’t.”
“Promise me, Wistala. Clutches of your own. Lots and lots of hatchlings.”
He nosed her over the edge of the precipice and looked once more down on her. His eyes crinkled, and he no longer looked fearsome and angry.
Love. Wistala’d seen it before when he gazed at Mother as she slept.
“Thank you for the coins, Tala.”
With that, he turned. She saw his tail whip briefly overhead, its bronze catching the last of the setting sun. She heard him growl something to Bartleghaff, but couldn’t catch it over the churn beneath.
No. She’d climbed up and escaped before. She wouldn’t climb down this time. Not even the pain in her dog-bitten sii could stop her.
She slipped over the lip of the cliff and wormed between two pieces of fallen masonry. From the crack, she watched Father advance down the ridge of the narrow peninsula, choosing a rocky outcropping difficult to approach.
Dogs ran toward him in a mass of limbs and white-rimmed eyes and teeth. Behind the dogs, a file of men approached, led by a tall, broad figure in black armor. He was carrying a spear in one hand and a great sword in the other, helm with wings reaching up and almost touching above his crown.
The Dragonblade?
As the dogs approached, Father roared:
Foe and friend ’tween cave and sky
All hear me now before I die
Fire and blood this night will see
When filial vengeance I take of thee!
If any of the assassins understood his death song, they showed no sign of it.
Father ignored the dogs as they swarmed around him, leaping to reach his joints and claws. Barbed shafts flew from the archers and broke against his crest and scales. Father sent a great jet of fire up and across the crest of the peninsula, striking man and pine woods beyond. As the trees exploded into flame, she heard men’s voices cry out. Wistala saw flaming figures fall down the steep sides of the pathway.
The dogs—all alike and bearing the same painted design on their sides as the old on
e she’d killed by the bank—jumped and bit and hung from Father’s belly and limbs, planting their feet and pulling, arching their backs as they tugged at his flesh. Father was screaming in pain and turned into a whirlwind, biting and lashing at the dogs with his claws. But there were so many, and new slavering beasts jumped up to take the place of each one he killed.
The man in the black armor advanced, raising his spear. It sparked and flashed like distant lightning, lighting his armor and throwing shadows all around.
A hot lump burned in Wistala’s breast. Father couldn’t kill the Dragonblade with dogs pulling at him from every direction. She dragon-dashed forward, squeaking out a roar.
She’d never smelled such a thick blood odor in her life, if anything made sharper by the oily smell of burning dragonflame.
Mad-eyed dogs came at her, and she recoiled, but as her head came up, muscles in her breast took over, and she spat. A thin jet of flame arced out at the dogs, but they jumped aside or over the pathetic puddle of flame.
The dogs, moving so fast they seemed shadow rather than flesh, piled on her.
A white-tipped spear erupted from Father’s neck, and he turned mouth wide and roaring at the black-armored figure who stood atop a rock, silhouetted against the burning trees behind. Arrows that glowed as they flew struck Father all about the neck and jaw and burned there.
Wistala staggered forward, feeling the dogs pull at her. She spat the last of her flame at dog haunches clustered at Father’s back leg and pulling him over, and was rewarded by agonized yelping above the snarls of the three dogs dragging at her.
Father rolled, crushing the dogs, sending others spinning off into the darkness, the spear lodged in his throat like a great bone. The Dragonblade leaped forward and slashed at Father’s belly, opening a wound fully the length of Wistala.
Other men stood at some kind of machine on the peninsula. It sent an oversize arrow into Father’s side, punching through scale as easily as her claw-tip could go through a leaf.
“Father!” she cried.
The Dragonblade ducked under Father’s bite and swept up with his sword. Father’s head and neck crashed down, almost severed.
Wistala forgot the pain, forgot the dogs trying to pull her limb from limb.
She looked into Father’s eyes as the battle fire faded and they went dry and glassy. AuRel, Bronze of the Line of AuNor, had joined Mother in the stars above.
Wistala wailed out her pain to the sky.
The Dragonblade knelt and kissed the pommel of his sword, and his men broke into some manner of song.
Wistala bit into a dog, exchanging pain for pain. It howled, and the Dragonblade’s men left off his victory song and turned toward her.
Other men, some carrying two-handled saws, gathered behind.
She wouldn’t end up on these rocks, her head and claws sawed off. Wistala gathered what remained of her strength and managed to stand. She tottered a few steps toward the edge of the cliff, dragging dogs at every step. The dogs pulled back, at war with her body.
Perhaps the Dragonblade read her intent. He ran forward, bloody sword held out, waving on the others, who stood gaping at Father’s bloody wounds.
The two still-living dogs snarled and fought her every step, their muzzles covered with blood, the spiky hair on their backs standing straight up. They dragged her back, away from the ledge, toward the Dragonblade.
“You shan’t have—,” Wistala grunted. She swung her tail, knocked a dog off its feet, and lunged at the ledge. She got the claws of one sii over. Now she had some real traction.
Tearing—pain.
Fly! She’d fly once before she died.
She got a saa at the edge, and the dead dog fell over the side, its jaws finally relaxing. Freed of its weight, she coiled her spine and jumped.
Wistala felt light as one of Bartleghaff’s long tip-feathers as she spun through the air. She struck the prominence Father used to climb up from the river, rolling over on a growling dog and hearing a snap, and felt free air one last time before she plunged into the cold, roaring river.
BOOK TWO
Drakka
WHOSOEVER SAVES A SINGLE LIFE HAS SAVED A WORLD.
—Hypatian Low-Priest Proverb
Chapter 11
Drifting, flying, but the air—so cold. Impossible to see through the clouds.
Tiring—so she glided. A hurtful pull in the back—had a wing joint slipped?
Now she could see.
A hominid bent over her, face shadowed. Can’t raise her claw to strike it—
A sound, sharp and regular tap-top-tap-top, movement in time with the beats, lulling her, and she slept. . . .
Fighting for breath—cold. Nose must be kept out of water. Drowned dog pulling me under, if I don’t get free, I’ll die. Bite! Tear! Rushes of warm blood in the cold. Nose up! Nose up! One more breath before I go under!
Wistala stretched, unbelievable warmth and well-being suffusing her body, dreams fair and foul gone.
She opened an eye. She lay stretched out on hairy fabric that caught in her scales. A vast presence, white and curved like a huge dragon egg, gave off heat from a mouthlike opening in its side. Woof-woosh woof-woosh woof-woosh—the sound in her ears reminded her of Father when he got out of breath from his climbs up from the river. She rolled her head and saw a hominid, its back to her, working an apparatus that opened and closed like a dragon’s mouth, complete with folding griff at its sides.
A crackling and a glowing came from the huge egg’s mouth. She smelled burning charcoal. The heat increased, and she basked in it before she slept again.
She woke to a salubrious greasy smell, like the road-dwarf’s sausages, only more powerful.
A steaming double-handled iron pan appeared before her, filled with a greasy broth. She glanced around, saw a roof above held up by thick rounded beams. Doors wide enough to fit a full-grown dragon had been flung open to the summer air and light.
The faint smells of horse and goats interested her, but not half so much as the broth. She found enough strength to take two tonguefuls.
The hominid, standing so still, he might have been one of the timbers holding up the roof, watched her from a good dragon-dash away. Probably a male: he had prominent, angular features, a lean, narrow-hipped body, and a clean-shaven head covered with a thick film that reminded her of the high mountain rocks with winter lichens she and Auron had climbed.
An elf.
Father’s stories about the killing prowess of the elves came back to her in a rush of imagery. . . .
He stayed away. There were windows and the wide doors closer to her than he—though with her body feeling limp and drained, she wondered if she could even manage to right herself for a dash—
A mist-colored horse at the other end of the interior regarded her warily. This place was divided into a number of smaller chambers along a central alley.
Another sip of the hot liquid, and she felt newly hatched, despite the strange surroundings full of disconcertingly straight lines.
Wistala examined her wounds. Cracked scales and any number of brown-stained injuries marked every limb. The brown stains puzzled her. They didn’t smell of dried blood, but a sharper smell. But stained or no, the wounds were certainly healing up nicely. She rolled onto her other side and saw that a terrible rend in her saa interior had been sewn like a hominid garment.
Perhaps the elf was healing her to make better sport of her later.
She rested a few minutes, then had a little more broth, rested and then lapped, until finally by midday, the pan had been licked clean. Then she slept, deep and dreamless.
After sundown, she dragged herself—standing hurt her wounded limbs too much—to a central stone cistern, where she smelled water fed by an outlet coming down from the roof beams. She drank deep. Then she slept against the stone.
A gentle cough woke her. The elf stood there, perhaps twice the length of her body away. He squatted, toadlike with his gentle eyes and long, folded limbs.
This time she didn’t tremble. Whoever he was, whatever his aim, she read in his eyes that he meant her no harm. He rocked on his haunches. It took her a moment to realize he was inching forward, putting one or the other leather-strap-bound foot after another an almost imperceptible length.
The horse didn’t seem to like her presence at the trough. He expelled an angry breath and stamped, chewed on a wooden rail in a sidelong manner. Wistala thought horses timid creatures, but this one seemed to be eager to get out of its alcove and at her.
The elf reached one long hand out, palm empty and toward her. He tickled her under the chin. She couldn’t help her griff lowering a little or her fringe standing on end, not with her nostrils full of the terrible odors of elf and horse from that day she lost Auron.
She watched his eyes. They never seemed to be the same color. Brown when they looked at one of the beams holding up the roof, a dull red color when they glanced down at the bricks paving the floor, green when they briefly rested on her. Now, looking at the water in the trough, they became dark and reflective.
The elf pulled up a handful of water, let it trickle through his fingers. “Anua,” a voice like a soft fall of rain said. “Anua.”
She tried making the sound in her throat. “Ennuh,” she managed.
The elf brought a handful of water to her mouth. “Anu sah.” He put his lips to his palm and sucked up the water.
“Ehnu-ssa,” Wistala repeated, and lapped up some water.
His mouth crinkled. “Anu sah!” he said, pushing a wave of water to her. She took another tongueful.
“Ahnu-ssa,” she said, and nosed a wave at him. She splashed him a little by accident, but he didn’t seem to mind. Next he taught her his name: Rainfall.
After that, Rainfall drank with his mouth turned up at the corners.
In the following days, as her strength returned, they made slow progress with her Elvish. He learned her name, though he preferred to call her by the familiar Tala, as it was easier for him to pronounce. Dragon traditions weighted lightly on her. She took her lessons in turn, naming things around the stable.