by E. E. Knight
The exhaustion of flying became too great.
She found a reef-sheltered isle, in seas she guessed were too rough for the boats of men, and spent a dozen or more days happily in the hardy bush and wind-racked pines atop sheer cliffs, taking various multilegged, pincer-armed crawlers from the sea during the day and plucking the occasional barker at night from the sleeping beaches.
While resting there, she saw not one, but three dragons. The sight shocked her, after spending much of her lifetime without so much as a glimpse of her kind. To see not just one, but three, all at once and together, froze her for a moment. They flew almost wing-tip to wing-tip, a slightly smaller silver leading two big reds.
Wistala threw herself into the air, fringe high and stiff with excitement, flapping madly to gain altitude.
Wing-tips rose in unison as they glided. They must have marked her. All turned gently for a better look.
That was when she noticed the riders.
It was so like horses, she glided for a moment, losing altitude, stunned. The dragons had reins, reins! running forward from the riders to the head and out to the leading wing bones.
Dragons fixed and ridden like horses had no appeal, and she didn’t like the way they were coming around, spreading out a little.
She rolled on her back, dived, headed for the shoreline, where she wove around her plateau island and changed course a little southward so if they were moving to intercept, they might overshoot. She chanced a glance back and saw one of the riders was in difficulty; his dragon was circling oddly. The silver and its rider dived toward her, then came around in a great swoop, leading the other red, which could not match its turns. The pair headed to the aid of the other.
The last Wistala saw of them, as she plunged into the coastal forest, was the silver and undercommand red flanking the other as they turned back out to sea.
Summer days at the top of the world lasted forever.
Wistala saw patches of ground ice that must linger throughout the year, and inlets where glaciers flowed into the Inland Ocean. Heated by sun and perhaps current, the glaciers would groan and crack and send ice plunging into the water with a rumbling sound like a thousand thunderstorms.
Perhaps it was the rich sea diet, or all the exercise, but she found herself in the midst of another growth spurt and losing scales, despite her careful rationing of coin. But for all her loss of shining scale, her wings grew prodigiously, and she suspected that had she left them alone they would have uncased by themselves at this point.
She came to a marsh country, where the land looked like ocean, patterned into regular waves of higher ground mixed with wet patches below. Rabbits with oversize feet, herds of moss-antlered herbivores, packs of wolves, and little brush-tailed foxes thrived here, along with a few hardy humans who kept to the waterways in flat-bottomed boats.
The wind blew hard here, and Wistala used it. Every day she matched herself against the wind, once after the morning’s hunt and again in the evening, every day fighting a little harder for speed, or height, or the length of time she could hang over one spot, gaining strength with each battle against the wind.
And met her second dragon here.
She spotted him while eating on one of the ridges—the wetter hollows were thick with mosquitoes, but the bugs couldn’t cope with the wind on the hill humps—splashing through the wet, approaching her from land.
He looked wider than he was long, reminding her of a toad, and had rust-colored scales edged with white cracks and chips that struck her as unhealthy. He approached, nostrils sniffing her as if she were a dinner of venison, perhaps attracted by her smell or the blood.
“You are stranger, welcome,” he said. It had been so long since she’d heard Drakine, it seemed more foreign a tongue than Elvish.
“UthBeeyan am I, dragon of the coldwinds. Which wind brought you?” He bobbed his head but kept his sii still. She guessed he meant no harm, but she left off eating so as not to be taken with a mouthful of bone.
His mind held nothing but hunger and an eager lust for her green flanks.
“Wistala am I, dragonelle of whatever winds may bear me. Are there many dragons in the coldwinds?”
“I drive away!” UthBeeyan said, which Wistala found easy to believe, as she was downwind of him. He let out sort of a croaking roar. “You hear my song, we mate now.”
“We shall do no such thing,” Wistala said.
He jumped at her and she backed up, putting her tail point in between his nose and her, ready to crack him across the soft spot between his eyes, but he settled onto her kill and took a mouthful. “You huntress worthy of spring wind. I take dragonshare. Find another.”
Gladly, Wistala thought.
The weather turned cold, bitterly so, almost overnight, freezing the swampy areas and turning the soil on the hill hummocks hard. Snow blew some nights, but could only cling where the wind couldn’t reach it, and Wistala returned to the rocky coastline. During the day everything turned a hard, uniform gray: water, shoreline, clouds, the sun at best a whitish circle behind mists.
She happened across a big boat, of all things, hugging the coast as it crept along south, a dwarf at the tiller and four men pulling the oars. All wore hides so thick, they looked like bears, save for the dwarf, who might be mistaken for one of the sausagelike barkers on the rocks, for his booted feet barely protruded from beneath his coat, looking like flippers.
More hides, entire bundles of them, were lined up in the center and bottom of the boat, along with strings of fox tails and what looked like wolf skins.
Swooping low, she saw the dwarf turn the boat for shore and lift a device that looked like an immense crossbow, wider of bow than she was high. She dropped into the water some distance away, upwind so her words might carry and any bolts fired would have to fight a stiff breeze. The cold, after its first shock, wasn’t so bad.
“May I ask you a question?” she called across the water in Parl.
The dwarf startled, and the rowers bent over their oars and bowed and chanted and rattled strings of shells.
The dwarf lifted a speaking trumpet. “Question away, though I warn you, I’ve no coin.”
“Do you know these lands, good dwarf?” she called.
“Know them? I love them, and will tell you why: Fools don’t survive up here.”
“I seek my kind. Are there dragons to be found?”
“None you wish to find,” the dwarf said. “Wait! There are some decent dragons, though it is a long journey.”
“Where?”
“East, over the Icespine and then across the plains a full two hundred vesk of journey. The Sadda-Vale. I’ve not been there in years, but once a goodly white dragon named Scabia ruled there with her kin and accepted some trade.”
“What is the Icespine?”
“You may know them in the south as the Red Mountains. Cross them and from your heights you may just see the peaks beyond. The Sadda-Vale is pleasant, though rainy, but beware the trolls roaming outside it. They were thick there when last I visited.”
“Thank you, good dwarf.”
“Any news from the south?”
“Wars with barbarians, in Hypat’s northern thanedoms,” Wistala said.
“Ah. One’s been building for a while. Luckily the Ya-yuit don’t go in for such nonsense. Good day, dragon!” The dwarf thickened, and Wistala realized he had bowed. She dipped her head and swam for shore.
She went east with a serious storm, which forced her down to seek shelter in trees. It raged for two days, leaving her hungry and the land thick with snow. She followed a game trail down into a valley and found nothing to eat, save a dead bear frozen solid under a tree, which even her foua could achieve little against without burning the meat to uselessness. She picked at the bits of icy flesh, but it left her with sore teeth.
She flew east in the clear icy day, and came to a river. The local men—was there anywhere men did not go?—had chipped a hole in the ice and were smoking fish in a shack built next to t
he hole. They ran for a little cluster of huts standing in the shelter of a hill at the bank as she passed over, and so great was her hunger that she raided the smokehouse and gorged—even eating the poor iron fishhooks stored there. She broke the film of ice on the fishing hole and drank, then slept right on the ice, wrapped around the small fire keeping the smoke going, feeling as stuffed and pampered as though she were back in Rainfall’s steam-filled health room.
She awoke to chanting and the smell of burning fat.
Downwind on the iced-over river the locals were burning a small fire, with a pot hung over it, and a tent pole stood next to it. When she raised her head, three contraptions went whizzing across the ice, pulled by dogs.
Wistala blinked the crusts of ice and snow out of her eyes and followed the smell, cold muscles only slowly warming to their work. There was no sign of a trap; indeed, if one could imagine a less likely place for a trap than a frozen river one had to put one’s mind to it—but she still felt something was wrong. She probed the ice carefully before taking each step.
Back at the houses, the villagers were lined up along the river’s edge, and she heard faint chanting.
Something moved at the pole, a little obscured by the waves of heat coming off the fire. She circled round, again carefully probing the ice.
A girl stood tied to the top of the pole, shivering in the wind. Pieces of dragonscale were fixed to its peak, in imitation of a flower. The stuff bubbling in the cauldron was hot fat, she could smell it clearly now. At the base of the pole were three dogs, old and scrawny looking, also chained to the pole. They were barking and trying to hide among each other at the same time.
Curious.
The girl was young, perhaps Lada’s age when she was returned to Mossbell, and well coated with fragrant fats to keep the wind off her skin.
Or to make her more appetizing?
Wistala decided she was some sort of offering, perhaps a trade off to keep the newly arrived dragon from raiding any more fish shacks. A dragon could destroy a village in other ways than eating the inhabitants or burning them out of their homes. What the dogs were for she couldn’t imagine, unless they were meat to serve as an appetizer or dessert in the manner of the fancy tables Rainfall set.
The girl had her eyes closed, her face turned away, red hair—the only spot of color in the endless whites and grays in this land—whipping in the wind. Wistala reached up a claw and cut the bonds. She fell to her knees but made no attempt to escape.
“Go back to your people,” Wistala said. The girl didn’t move, probably not understanding Parl.
Wistala pushed her by the shoulder with her sii, and the girl finally came alive, struggling against her claws, pounding against her scales. Wistala knocked down the pole and stood on it with her other leg, as the dogs tried to run, still giving a whimpering bark now and then. Wistala put the girl’s hand on the dog chains and broke them away from their fixture on the pole, and as she was pulled away in a shower of ice particles thrown up by the scrambling dogs, she looked at Wistala in wonder with bright green eyes.
After a quick taste to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, Wistala tried the hot fat. Now this was a meal that readied one to face the winter winds again! She even ate the chains that suspended it over the fire before flying off, but sadly the kettle was too large to swallow.
One advantage of a cold wind is that it makes exercise a good deal more agreeable. Wistala managed to cross the line of mountains in a single day, thanks to a strong wind at her back shooting between the mountaintops. Then she was out over dry, treeless plains that she remembered from the day she and AuRon had escaped up the chimney.
Only colder and more barren.
There was nothing to eat on the steppe-lands, as far as she could see. She saw some goats on the mountainside at a distance, but when she flew closer they disappeared, flowing into cracks and behind stones like water. No herds of sheep, no files of elk, just odd two-legged birds that could turn like a zephyr when she swooped in on them, running with bobbing heads and spiny feathers flying. She finally managed to brain one with her tail—by accident—as she pursued another, and got a thin, bony meal that was all skin, tendon, and feathers.
But she could see her objective in the distance, which gave her heart to go on through hunger.
She wondered what the trolls ate until she saw plots of torn up earth around discreet holes in the turf.
The peaks weren’t so high as the Red Mountains, and resembled dry rockpiles, with evenly layered lines stuck up this way and that, as though someone had broken up the upper world’s crust. These mountains were thick with pine and littered with caves. She saw a few sheep with horns like helms and a huge wildcat or two, and smelled troll waste.
But she was now a match for a troll, unless one caught her unawares, and she had no intention of letting that happen. She watched the sides and floors of the canyon as she passed over trees, out of reach of even the longest troll arm from treetop below or concealing rock to the side.
Unfortunately, its attack came from above.
Later she visited the spot, and guessed where the troll had climbed when it saw her course. Perhaps it had been sitting on a high ledge, surveying the western slopes of the rock-strewn mountains, and climbed up a little farther when it saw her coming.
It was a good thing the sun was high when it jumped, for some piece of her noticed the shadow of its fall on the mountainside below, and she turned to avoid it before the rest of her figured out why. The hammer-blow of its arm therefore fell on her side rather than her wing or spine.
The troll grappled her with its awful rubbery fingers and she felt a tearing at her wing edge. She instinctively folded it down and out of the way, and her careen through the mountains turned into a one-wing plunge into the stony slopes. She had just enough sense to roll over so the impact struck the troll—mostly—and her tail rather than more vital limbs.
The impact knocked the wind from her, and for a second she did not know where she was.
Fury took over when the troll’s fingers locked around her neck, trying to twist, trying to throttle, and she clawed at it, but it moved with that horrible, rubbery mobility she remembered. She batted it about the body with her wings, and may have struck the sense organ cluster, for it backed off and swung up a rock, leaving smears of blood as it squeezed into a crack. She righted herself and spat her hunger-weak foua after it, but did not know if she hit it or not.
Fearing another sudden jump from above, or thrown boulders, she backed down the hillside, watching the black smoke of her fire disappear into the winter sky.
She flapped her wings experimentally. The right was sore but worked. She launched herself into the air and saw the troll wedging itself through a crack. It retreated beneath an overhang like a wary spider.
“Call it a new throw,” Wistala said, using the slang of the Hypatian dice pits for when a bet is neither paid nor lost. She was breathing and unharmed, and wouldn’t risk her wings going after a troll on a point of honor.
Her injuries allowed only a short flight before she had to stop and rest, but she made it to the other side of the mountains. From a prominence she looked out upon the Sadda-Vale.
The vale reminded her of a half-filled cauldron. Water filled the center of the valley, though unlike the Ba-drink, green flats and low hills surrounded the water. The water was calm and the color of polished steel, the grasses around a deep green that reminded her of seaweed. Forests grew in the spaces between the toes of the mountain.
Capping the cauldron were low-hanging clouds, made of mists rising from the water, or so it seemed from the sheets of moisture rising in slow spirals. The rock face on the inner ring of mountains was black with moisture. Wistala felt the cold wet on her face.
The temperature had risen considerably on this side of the mountain; Wistala no longer felt frozen and windstruck, but simply chilled and damp. She didn’t like this much wet in the air, it fed itchy growths that lived under your scales.
As sh
e rested she counted waterfalls. It seemed every mountainside had a trickle or two running down, more easily spotted at a distance, as they cascaded between the thick fern growth—higher up they looked like faint veins against the rock face.
An orange flash caught her eye, a gout of flame that welled and slowly faded. The odd shape to it was evocative of a dragon’s—no, there was a dragon there, on a ledge where the mountain was broken by a crack, like a smashed plate unevenly repaired.
So excited was she—hope died hard in Wistala—that she immediately launched herself off the prominence, flying for the dragon as fast as sore wings would carry her.
The dragon—she saw it was a male by his distinctive coloring: a dull orange like a fading sunset that alternated with stripes of black. The pattern intrigued her; in her experience scaled dragons were usually uniform in color. Auron sometimes showed stripes like that against his gray, but he’d been born without scales.
She landed a little up the ledge from him—she folded her wings as she came in, absorbed the impact with her tail and settled with only a slight slip. She wanted the advantage of height just in case.
Though she thought it a well-done landing. But the dragon ignored her.
He nosed in a pile of broken rock, grasping pieces with his tongue and swallowing them. He had four horns, and two more buds, rising from his crest. Older than she, younger than Father, and there was a strange gold behind his griff: he had a ring threaded in the skin of his earhole.
He extended his long neck, took a big mouthful of water, then swung his neck to the other side, where the mountain face was broken. Wistala looked closely at the rock—there were threads of metal in the rock, like bits of ragged sewing.
The four-horn spat water into the broken rock. His head bobbed as he read distances, then he spat flame where he’d placed the water. The rock flamed and hissed, cracking, and with a suddenness that surprised her and made her edge back, he whipped up his tail and struck the flames. Pieces of broken rock slid down and hit the ledge, and he commenced nosing again, still ignoring her.