An arrow shot through the bars that separated us from the fight, and Leontes caught it in his foreclaws. He was carrying Hagen and Luka on his back, while I still huddled in a basket made of Niva’s foreclaws. The alchemist dragon studied the tip of the arrow with a frown, sniffing at it and scraping it delicately with one claw.
“This is dragonglass,” he said after the inspection. “Not stone. It’s no wonder it can go right through a scale. And it’s either poisoned or drugged, I can’t tell. Not a mixture that I’ve seen before. ”
Niva let out a jet of flame as an enemy dragon leaped over us. She grinned with triumph when he howled and flew upward to nurse his wounds out of the fray. “Poisoned? We have to bring an end to this!”
“Take me down,” I told her. “No one up there is listening to us. ”
“Don’t you want to see what happens?” Hagen’s eyes were too bright, as though he weren’t certain whether to be excited or appalled by his first sight of a battle.
“I want to stop what’s happening,” I said. “Take me down. ”
“Yes,” Luka said, and I could see that he, too, was riveted by the battle. “Perhaps if Shardas ordered the fighting to stop. Or if Velika could fly up here. ”
“No, keep them away from this. ” I drew back a little as some flame licked between the bars from the other side. “I’ll stop it. ”
“How?” Luka’s full attention was on me now, and I saw his brows draw together in worry. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to have Niva move those spears again, and I’m going to go down that tunnel and talk to that old dragon. ”
Luka groaned, but slapped Leontes’s neck. “You’d better take us, too,” he said.
“She’s not going alone,” Hagen agreed.
“I wouldn’t mind the help,” I admitted as Niva turned and glided back down through the smoke.
When we landed, we saw that Velika was sleeping, curled carefully around her eggs. Shardas left off hovering over her to join us by the tunnel entrance, and we quickly told him what was happening.
“I forbid it,” he rumbled. “I’ll go up there and stop that fight right now. ”
“You’re more likely to get caught by a stray arrow,” I said, and Leontes and Niva nodded.
“Or,” Leontes put in, “someone will realize who you are and do it deliberately. ”
Darrym, huddled in a corner, raised his head. Shardas snarled at him and the traitor hid his head under one wing.
Pulling free another of the spears that blocked the tunnel, Shardas said, “Then I’ll speak to this aged dragon myself. ”
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“You won’t fit,” I said, my voice kind. I put a hand on his foreleg. “Shardas, let me try to negotiate a peace. It will be all right. ”
Everyone held their breath for a moment, but in the end Shardas nodded. Luka, Hagen, and I slipped between the remaining spears and crept down the hall. Behind us we could hear Shardas and Niva disputing the danger he would be under if he went to observe the battle.
The boys crowded my heels as we went around the bend and hesitated by the outcropping of rock that half-hid the doorway. In the chamber beyond we could see the elderly dragon but there were fewer humans gathered around him.
“We can’t speak dragon,” Hagen whispered in my ear.
“We’ll do the best we can,” I said. “Perhaps we can get one of the humans to follow us back to our cave, and they can speak to Shardas directly. ”
“Is this our best plan?” Luka squeezed my hand.
“Do you have a better one?”
“I’m afraid not. ”
“In we go, then!”
Still holding Luka’s hand, I stepped forward into the light. I thought we would make a dramatic entrance, but only the dragon was facing us, and he was blind. After a moment, Hagen coughed nervously, and all the humans whirled around to stare at us in varying degrees of horror and surprise.
I just looked back at them, and then beyond them to the dragon. I really had never seen a creature so old. I don’t think he could have moved from his couch if he had wanted to. Despite his blindness, his head was tilted as though he were looking back at me.
“Do you speak Feravelan?” I asked loudly and clearly.
Nothing from the humans or the dragons.
“Roulaini? Citatian?”
Still nothing.
I took matters into my own hands, literally. The nearest human was a young woman, perhaps a year or two older than I. She was festooned with beads and bangles, and her loose, black hair hung nearly to her knees. I stretched out my free hand, grasped her by the upper arm, and tugged.
“You will come and talk to Shardas, the king of the dragons,” I told her.
She shook her head violently, pleading over her shoulder with the dragon, or possibly her fellow servants. Some of the words she used sounded almost like a human equivalent of the dragon language, and that made me even more determined to drag her along.
The elderly dragon raised its head a bit more, and said something imperative in the native tongue. The girl stopped squealing, and began sobbing quietly, boneless in my grip. I looked at Luka, shrugged, and then we led her to the dragon king.
“I thought you were going to negotiate the peace,” Shardas said with amusement when we thrust the weeping girl through the spear barricade. “This works just as well, I suppose. ”
And then he began, speaking to the girl at great length and gesturing frequently at Velika. The girl wouldn’t even look at the dragon queen or her clutch. After one sidelong glance at Velika’s reclining form, the girl fell to her knees with a whimper. She responded to Shardas’s words with monosyllables, but didn’t look at him either.
“I could never live like this,” I whispered to Luka.
“No,” he agreed. “I’ve seen you try to grovel. It’s not very convincing. ”
I flicked his shoulder with my finger.
Finally the girl got unsteadily to her feet and went back to the tunnel. I felt rather useless, but I followed her all the same, with Luka at my side. Hagen stayed behind, and Leontes said he would take him to observe the battle.
The girl reported what Shardas had said, or so we hoped. Then she listened to the elderly dragon’s reply and we returned to Shardas, who heard her out, his face grave.
“This elder is their default leader, since the death of the last royal female,” Shardas explained to us. “He says that all our friends must leave, right away, or be killed. ”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, crossing my arms. I glared at the girl as if these were her orders.
“And I have explained this,” Shardas continued. “They wish Velika to order everyone to leave, but I doubt she will have much success either. ” He cocked his head to one side. “They seem to have regarded their queens as deities. I’m not sure that he understands that our friends could refuse her orders. ”
“So they keep humans as slaves, and were in turn slaves to the queen?” Luka’s eyebrows climbed to his hairline. “That sounds . . . rigid. ”
“To say the least. ” Then Shardas breathed out a sulfurous gust of air and began the task of explaining the unlikelihood of anyone simply stopping the fight and leaving the country just because Velika said so.
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The girl took off before we could follow, so Luka and I waited with Shardas. She was gone a long time, and then a wheezing in the passageway drew our attention to it.
It wasn’t the girl returning, it was the elderly dragon, come to meet this unusual queen and her mate himself. Shardas grabbed the glass spears and wrenched them from the ground to lay them aside.
Scales rattling, breath coughing its way in and hissing its way out, the dragon tottered out into the chamber with humans on each side to guide it. Darrym came quickly over and spoke to the elder with low urgency, but was dismissed with a
n airy wave of one emaciated foreclaw.
That almost made me like the aged beast.
The elder was helped to the edge of the lava, and then stopped there. I didn’t know how they expected to get him across, and I could tell that Shardas didn’t want him any closer to Velika. All of my friends hopped across to stand around the sleeping queen, taking Luka, Hagen, and me with them. Darrym tried to follow again, but a look from Shardas made him stand near the elderly dragon with a falsely casual air instead.
Shardas gently woke Velika, and she looked at the elder dragon gravely. Then she greeted him, with great respect, but without uncoiling her tail from around her eggs. He answered with equal respect, straining forward, his nostrils working as his other senses tried to get a picture of her that his eyes could not.
And then Velika did a very clever thing.
She reared back her head, looming over the blind old dragon and his attendants, and gave him a direct order.
“Stop this battle at once. Leave us in peace. Now. ” Her voice was regal, commanding, everything they could want in a queen, and I turned expectantly to the elder one, waiting for him to comply.
Dragon voices are like rocks tumbling together, but this dragon was so old that his sounded more like sand being poured over stone. Still, his resolve was clear: he would not stop this fight, not even for the queen.
Velika’s tone was anguished, and the dragons in the room gave a general gasp of horror at her next words.
“What did she say?” I grabbed at Niva’s foreclaw. “What was it?” I had caught only a few words.
Niva’s voice shook. “She will crush her eggs rather than let them hatch in this place if he doesn’t comply. ”
Now, belatedly, the humans gasped, and I looked to see that Velika’s powerful tail was flexing around her fragile eggs. I started toward the eggs, my hands outstretched, but Niva stopped me with the same claw I had been clutching.
Everyone stopped. Stopped moving, stopped breathing, stopped speaking.
Then the sand- over- stone voice of the elder dragon came again, to the agitation of his attendants. Velika’s tail relaxed, but only slightly, and Niva breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Darrym took the girl we had commandeered as a translator in his claws, and flew her up to the opening of the chamber high above us. He bellowed, and when the battle above quieted a little, she shouted something that brought all the fighting to a halt.
“Is it over?” I hardly dared to whisper. “Can we leave now?”
“No,” Niva said, sounding relieved yet still wary. “The fighting will stop, our friends may stay. But—”
“But?”
“But they still expect to keep Velika and our eggs,” Shardas said.
Sand Poured over Stone
As the eggs hardened, we grew ever more restless and anxious. The locals, both human and dragon, knew that we wanted to take Velika and her eggs and leave, and they were determined that that wouldn’t happen.
While the eldest dragon, whose name was Mannyl, returned to his lair, he left Darrym to keep watch. Other local dragons came and went, until Velika announced that they were bothering her and must be banned. But apparently not even the queen could ban Darrym, whose smugness made me want to slap him until his scales flew off.
Fortunately, with the uneasy compromise came some amenities. Food, for one thing, and water, for another. There was also rough bedding for us humans, which made things a little easier.
It was quite boring to sit in the hot, smoky chamber day after day and simply stew, however. Shardas and Leontes took turns teaching us the dragon language, partly as a way to pass the time, and partly so that we could better understand the locals. From time to time I would hide on the far side of Velika’s bulk and work on my wedding gown. Hagen and Luka would practice fighting: Luka taught Hagen to use a sword, and Hagen taught him how to box like a Carlieff Town local, which involved a lot of shouted insults and the occasional head butt.
And then at last the eggs were hard.
Shiny and opalescent, they gleamed with the reflected orange fire of the nearby lava. Shardas and Velika hovered over them with proud concern, feeling for any weak spots, and we spoke in low voices about what to do next. Darrym tried to listen in; he even asked quite politely if he could touch one of the eggs, but Shardas told him that if he came any closer, he would find himself missing a tail.
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“We can arrange some sort of carrier,” I said quietly. “A basket. Or a net. ”
“Then we’ll just have to burst out of here,” Shardas said, not entirely rejecting the idea. “And outrun the guards. ”
“They don’t harass our friends above,” Niva mused. “But if they saw us trying to escape with the eggs, they would be sure to follow even if they didn’t dare to attack. ”
“There can be no true escape,” Velika said. “We must find a solution for all of us. If we run, they will hunt us, and we shall never have a moment’s peace. ”
“But they will not back down from their position,” Shardas reminded her. “Either you will rule them, and them alone, or we must wait until one of the eggs hatches and give them the firstborn female. ” His claws clasped gently around one of the eggs in an unconscious gesture of protection.
“They must be made to see that if they truly accept my sovereignty, they must let me go free and rule them from our home,” Velika said crisply. “And if what Leontes suspects is true—if it is the fumes from the volcanoes that are causing them to die off—then they should come to the Far Isles anyway. ”
“But they’ve lived here for centuries,” Hagen pointed out. “Why are they only getting sick now?”
“The volcanoes were dormant until a century ago,” Leontes said. “The brown female who brings our meals told me. Many of their homes were destroyed or made unlivable by the smoke and lava, just in the last few decades. ”
“Then they must come with us,” Velika said firmly.
“You would really let your captors live with you in the Far Isles?” I stared at her in astonishment. I was not that forgiving.
“I am their queen,” Velika said with simple majesty.
“But, ma’am, how do we convince them to come?” Luka shook his head thoughtfully. He had his arm loosely around my waist, and I squeezed the hand that rested on my hip. “For all their awe of you, they don’t even seem to think that you have a will of your own. ”
“They must be made to see,” Velika repeated. “Somehow. ”
“Well, I need some fresh air,” I said. “Perhaps Luka and Niva and I could go up to the jungle, and talk to our friends for a bit. ” I made a slight jab with my chin in Darrym’s direction.
“Yes,” Shardas agreed.
He and Niva flew up to the opening of the cavern high above and began removing the spears of glass that still blocked the entrance. It made us all feel safe to leave them there, and so Feniul had been passing us food and sharing news through the barrier.
When they had removed enough to allow Niva to pass through, Luka and I gathered a few things and prepared to mount the huge, green dragon. I didn’t even notice that Darrym was gone until he came back out of the tunnel with Mannyl, the elder dragon, on his heels.
The sound of the elder’s voice was mesmerizing. The steady rush, rush, scrape, grate caused me to gaze at the pitted scales of his muzzle without blinking until Hagen nudged me.
“Are you paying attention?”
“What?” I blinked sleepily at my brother. “I only understood one word in three. ”
“Then you really should be paying better attention,” Hagen said. “He’s saying that none of us can leave. ”
“Wait! What? He is?”
My little brother nodded, certainty in the grim set of his mouth. Hagen and Leontes had been spending a great deal of time together, and it seemed that Hagen’s mastery of the dragon language had surpassed mine by leaps and b
ounds.
I focused on Mannyl’s words, instead of on the sound of sand on rock, and heard him repeat what he had just said. He did not like the idea of us going up there. It was not “safe. ”
Snorting loudly, I turned to Velika. “Perhaps it is time to remind him who the queen is,” I said to her.
“Exactly. ”
She loomed over the smaller, older dragon, and in no uncertain terms let him know that she needed her friends to go up to the surface.
If the elder’s voice had been a gentle fall of sand before, now that he was angry it was a torrent, a landslide. The sound filled my head and made my teeth shiver as if I were biting into a piece of ice.
Velika bared her fangs, and fire glowed in her mouth as though she were barely keeping herself from blasting Mannyl to oblivion. “By the First Fires, you shall not order me like some slave!”
Her words were clear even with my limited knowledge of dragontalk.
And so was Mannyl’s reply, for there was no mistaking the reaction. Through the newly opened entrance in the cavern roof, summoned by the grating, rushing shout of their elder, came ten strange dragons.
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They filled the cavern, eyes hard and breath even more sulfurous as it combined with the fumes from the river of fire. Before we could react, they were upon us. Luka was seized, and Hagen. Two each took on Niva and Leontes, throwing nets around their heads and wings so that they could not open their mouths or fly away.
To my shame, my sense of self-preservation kicked in, and I leaped backward to crouch among the eggs, sure that they would not risk harm to them. Velika spread one wing over the eggs and, from its concealment, I peeped out, watching in horror as my betrothed, my brother, and two of my dragon friends were hauled off like baggage.
I tried to jump up, to follow them, but it was too late. Velika’s wing was like a roof of iron over my head, and the eggs hemmed me in on every side. I could only watch, and curse.
When they had gone, she released me, and I went to stand beside Shardas. He put a claw out, and I held on to it, tightly. Then he turned to Darrym.
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