“Humans! Humans marching! They’ve come here! A human army on the plain below us!”
“I knew it!” Chiath bellowed, swinging his head toward Roger and Mella. “They have led an army here!”
The air around Mella seethed with growls and hisses and roars and angry words. Chiath’s neck arched, his crest bristling, and his mouth opened. Roger grabbed Mella’s arm. But there was nothing he could do, nowhere to run, no words they could speak that would be heard above the clamor. She looked around wildly and saw that Alyas had retreated several paces and was trying to look as if the two human children had nothing to do with him.
In a moment they would be dead, Mella thought, burned to ash, and all because of an army they knew nothing about. And what was an army doing here, of all places? Then a quick flash of memory came to her, of sunlight on polished metal, something red and yellow shaken like a curtain in the wind—a banner? But it made no sense, no sense at all, and now she was going to die for it. And Roger too. Poor Roger. She was sorry she’d dragged him to see the Hatching, sorry she’d brought him on this quest at all, sorry she’d made him fetch the Egg from under her bed so long ago.
Chiath’s mouth opened wider, the dark tongue flexing, the long fangs bright white in the sun.
And then a streak of gold dashed across the dark sand of the Hatching Ground. The little dragon chick had wriggled her head out from under the queen’s wing and squirmed loose to run to her human keeper. Mella knelt and held out her arms, and the chick leapt onto her lap. Turning to face the other dragons, the chick braced her front claws on Mella’s knees and chattered high-pitched defiance at her kin.
Chiath’s mouth snapped shut.
“Peace!” the queen roared, her voice rising above the rest. Her lashing tail smacked into a boulder and cracked it in two. No dragon made a sound except the chick. Tiny crest up, tail thumping against Mella’s ribs, she hissed and even puffed out a tiny cloud of steam.
“Shhh,” Mella whispered, lifting a hand that trembled slightly to stroke the dragon’s neck and scratch behind her ears. Shakily she got to her feet, hugging the chick to her. The little animal felt as warm and light as a loaf of bread fresh from the oven. Mella hoped Roger would have the sense to stay close to the two of them.
“We didn’t bring anyone here,” Mella said, trying to keep her voice steady. “If there’s really an army down there, it’s got nothing to do with us.”
Beside her, Roger cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said hoarsely.
Every pair of eyes, dragon and human, turned to him.
“I think,” he said, and paused. “I think they’re probably looking for me.”
Chapter Seventeen
“An army?” Mella demanded. “Looking for you?”
They were by themselves in front of the queen, beside the great dark lake. “I would speak to these humans alone,” the huge dragon had said, and the others had promptly and obediently moved away, Chiath with an angry snarl and Alyas with several backward glances.
“It’s not really an army,” Roger said awkwardly. “I mean, it can’t be. There wouldn’t have been time to muster the whole army. One company at most. I supposed they followed us. Damien must have sent a message to my…” To Mella’s astonishment, Roger turned bright red. He finished his sentence with a mumbled word too low for her to hear.
Dragons, however, had very keen ears. “Your father?” the queen growled.
“Your—” Mella had to try twice to get the word out. “Your father? Has an army?”
But of course he did. Roger had told her so himself not three minutes ago. “Roger Astorson,” he’d said. The youngest son of King Astor.
Mella was outraged. “You never said!”
Roger looked ready to melt with embarrassment. “I didn’t think he’d come,” he mumbled. “He’s busy. There’s so much to do.”
“You didn’t think he’d come when his son disappeared?”
Roger shrugged miserably. Mella shook her head. “So that’s why Alain…”
“He must have spent some time in the capital,” Roger said glumly. “He probably saw me there.”
“You could have said!”
“I didn’t want…”
“And what’s he doing?”
The queen had been listening attentively. But now she spoke, and her crest bristled ominously. “What he is doing,” she said, low and fierce, “is fairly obvious. He is going to war.”
“Against the dragons,” Mella said, understanding at last. “Because he thinks they…took his son? The prince,” Mella added pointedly. “You.”
The queen and Roger both nodded. They had grasped what was happening, Mella realized, much more quickly than she had.
Roger lifted his head to look the dragon queen in the eye. “You must let us go down,” he said quickly. “It’s the only thing to do.”
“Must I?” The deep black eye of the dragon opened a little wider, and her voice was soft. Mella nearly shivered, and without meaning to she clutched the dragon chick a little closer. That soft voice and that thoughtful eye were much more frightening than Chiath’s roar.
“You are no prince here,” the queen said quietly to Roger. “Do not presume.”
“I do not.”
This was Roger? Mella blinked in surprise at his sharp tone. She’d heard him sound like this only once before, when he’d confronted Alain. When had he learned to sound this sure of himself?
“I do not presume,” Roger said, more softly this time. “They are looking for me. If they see I’m safe, they won’t attack. It’s best for all of us if we both go down.”
The queen closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again. Slowly she shook her great golden head from side to side. “You know the way to the Hatching Ground,” she said, her deep voice rumbling in Mella’s bones. “That is something the human army must not know.”
“We wouldn’t tell!” Mella said indignantly.
“We cannot take that risk,” answered the queen. “We will not harm you. But we cannot let you leave.”
“We—we saved the Egg for you!” Mella felt as if her anger were fizzing and spurting inside of her. “We brought it all the way here, and—” And it wasn’t easy! she wanted to shout. There’d been miles of walking, a river, a kidnapper, the darkness inside a mountain. But they’d done it. They’d made it. And this was the gratitude they got? “You said you were in our debt!” Mella shouted in outrage, and the dragon chick chattered like a frightened squirrel and fanned her delicate golden wings.
“Mella!” Roger snapped, and Mella realized belatedly that yelling at a queen might not be the wisest course when they stood in a valley surrounded by dragons. But the queen did not seem angry.
“And so we are,” she said, and dipped her head to Mella. “In debt to both of you. And if it were my danger and my choice only, I would carry you down myself. You have earned as much. But a queen has more to think of than her honor. I cannot risk the safety of us all.”
“But sending us down will only serve the safety of your people—dragons—subjects,” Roger argued, much more politely than Mella. “The army will have scouts in the forest. They might find the way up at any moment, and even if they don’t—” He swept a hand at the stony valley. “You cannot stay here forever. If you manage to fly off under cover of night, they’ll follow you. Now that they know you exist, they’ll hunt you. You won’t be able to hide anymore.”
“We do not hide from humans,” the queen growled.
“Forgive me for the word, then. But my father’s army will find you.”
“And if they do, do you think we cannot fight them?”
“Of course you can,” Roger agreed readily. “But he can afford to lose much more than you can. The wolf is stronger, but the dogs still bring it down. You don’t need a war. You need a treaty. And we can make one for you.”
The dragon chick squirmed in Mella’s arms, and she let the little creature down gently to the pebbly ground. The queen and Roger—the queen an
d the prince—seemed to have forgotten she was there.
“I will not say to you that humans have no honor,” the queen said, giving Roger a long, steady glance. “But we have been betrayed in the past. And your blood is—”
“Is what?”
“It is not easy for any dragon to trust one of Coel’s house. You came up by the old passageway. Did what you saw there tell you no tales?”
“What we saw there?” Roger’s brow furrowed. “We saw—we didn’t understand what we saw. Dragons and…bones…we don’t know…”
“Humans have short lives and short memories. You do not know what you ask, when you ask me for my trust.”
“Then keep me.”
Mella was surprised to hear the words coming out of her own mouth.
“What?” Roger stared at her. The queen did as well.
Mella cleared her throat. “You can keep me. As a hostage. If Roger—if the army doesn’t leave—then you can…” Maybe it would be best, she thought, not to finish that sentence.
Roger looked alarmed. “That’s—Mella, I don’t think that’s—”
The queen laughed. The ground trembled under Mella’s feet.
“Now we must both trust. Is that it? No one told me humans were such clever bargainers. Well done. One may stay and one may go. And you, prince, have told us time is short. You will go now.”
It would take too long, the queen had said, for Roger to return by the staircase, and she chose a young dragon with bronze-colored scales to carry him down instead.
“And Lynet will take you,” the queen had told Mella.
Take her? Mella had thought she was staying. She’d thought that was the whole point. “Take me where?”
“Somewhere safe,” was all the queen had answered.
Lynet turned out to be a gray dragon with the small crest of a female. With Mella on her back and Roger on the bronze, they stood at the very edge of the valley. Mella, peering down, saw a sheer wall plummeting to a valley hundreds of feet below, where a frothy white river churned and leaped through its bed. She turned her head to look at Roger. There had hardly been time to speak before the queen had ordered them on dragonback. She should have said good-bye, or good luck, or something. Roger’s mouth was moving, but the wind whipping past her ears snatched the sound away.
Then Lynet fell forward.
She did not leap, she simply toppled like a stone. It happened so quickly that Mella felt her body rise off the dragon’s back, and she threw herself forward to clamp both arms around the smooth gray neck. She thought she might have screamed, but they were falling too swiftly for her own voice to reach her ears.
Lynet did not even flap her wings. She simply held them out to each side, fully extended, as they fell.
And then they hit the updraft the dragon had been expecting. Mella was crushed down by the pressure as they suddenly soared upward.
The bronze dragon swooped down, hidden from the sight of the army by a long outcropping of stone. But Lynet didn’t follow. She swerved to the left and landed deftly on a wide stony ledge that jutted out from the mountain, beating her wings for balance and scattering pebbles widely.
The dragon twisted her head on her long, flexible neck so that she could look coldly at Mella, still seated on her back. “The queen has said you are to wait here,” she said shortly.
Here? This was somewhere safe? Mella climbed down very carefully, keeping the dragon’s body between herself and the sheer drop. The ledge was wide enough that there was no real danger of falling as long as she watched where she put her feet. All the same, she felt better after she’d sat down with her back firmly against the mountainside.
“How long?” she asked.
But Lynet didn’t seem inclined to waste words on her human passenger. She spread her wings and leaped off the ledge—Mella pressed herself harder against the rocky wall behind her and covered her face with her hands as the dragon’s wing beats stirred up a small whirlwind—and then swooped back up to the valley, leaving Mella alone.
From the ledge, Mella could see the river they had toiled up so painfully, a silver chain curling across the gray and green land. She could even see the waterfall that had marked the entrance to the mysterious room and the stairway up the mountain. On the plain beside the pool where she had fallen in, she could see something else—rows and rows of dull white squares stretched across the grass. Tents, Mella realized. Bright streamers snapped in the wind. The largest tent, in the middle, was not white, but striped red and yellow.
So that was what an army looked like.
Mella watched tiny scurrying shapes, small and urgent as ants, hurrying among the patches of white. She watched clouds scroll and drift across the bright blue sky. An eagle flew past, so far below that she could look down on its strong brown wings. She supposed that never before had a prisoner had such a breathtaking view.
But the ledge was still a prison. No way up or down, nothing she dared to climb, nothing to do but wait.
Chapter Eighteen
Sitting on her ledge, Mella counted two more eagles and four hawks before something bigger than either came flying toward her, wings glimmering white in the sunlight. Alyas landed awkwardly on the ledge, scattering pebbles, flapping his wings wildly for balance. He was having trouble, Mella realized, because he was holding something in one clawed forefoot, something heavy and limp that dripped red onto the ground.
Mella stifled the screech that rose up in her throat. Whatever he was holding was definitely…dead.
“Venison. I thought you must be hungry,” Alyas explained politely, holding the haunch of meat out to her. “Some of us had been hunting before you arrived. I like cooked meat, myself. But do you prefer it raw?”
“Cooked is fine, thank you,” Mella said, her voice just the slightest bit quivery and wavering with relief.
Alyas turned his head aside, cleared his throat—a rumbling sound that started deep in his chest and traveled slowly up his long neck—opened his mouth, and directed a stream of flame at the raw meat, turning it carefully on one claw as it roasted. The rich smell made Mella’s stomach growl and for a moment it took her back to the Inn, with meat turning on the spit before the fire, ready to feed the hungry guests who would be arriving soon. She had to blink hard to keep from crying. How had she gotten from her home to this windswept ledge on a mountainside, sharing a meal with a dragon? And would she ever get back?
Since Mella had no knife—it had been taken from her at Gwyn’s village—Alyas used his claws to cut slices of the meat for her. It was roasted to a turn—crisp on the outside, pink inside, and dripping juices over Mella’s burnt fingers. Hunger won out over homesickness and worry, and Mella ate with single-minded devotion until her stomach was satisfied at last. She sighed and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
Alyas had settled down on his haunches and tucked his tail around himself, neat as a cat. He offered Mella something else, something she had not noticed before—a small skin of fresh water. “The queen has said you must be cared for,” he remarked as she drank thirstily. “She said that we must treat you as a friend until the worst is proved.”
Mella lowered the water skin. “Nothing’s going to be proved,” she said angrily. “Roger said.”
Roger had, after all, defeated Alain. He’d rescued the Egg when she’d dropped it. If he said he could turn an army around, she would believe him.
Alyas’s crest rippled up and down nervously. “I hope so. For both our sakes. No one will let me forget that I befriended humans.”
Mella frowned. “Well, the people I know are not likely to be very happy that I saved a dragon’s egg,” she pointed out. But I’m not keeping you trapped on a ledge because of it, she didn’t add. She felt that her pointed silence was eloquent enough.
Alyas sighed. The wind of it blew Mella’s hair into her eyes. She felt her face settling down into a sulky expression.
Far below, another eagle screamed. The sound died away.
Mella brushed a flat stretch of th
e ledge clean of pebbles and dirt and then selected ten small stones, five dark, five light. With a sharp-edged rock she scratched a grid on the rock with two lines one way, two the other.
“Here,” she said, pushing the dark pebbles over toward Alyas. “You try to get three in a row. I’ll go first.”
Mella won the first two games, Alyas the third. After that it became too easy. Mella made the grid wider, and they played at four in a row, then five. Alyas bent close over the game board. He tended to puff small clouds of steam from his nostrils when he was thinking.
Mella leaned over to place her third stone. “Why did you, then?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon? Why did I…?”
“Befriend humans.” There must have been some reason, after all, why Alyas had approached them, why he’d taken them to see the Hatching, why he alone of all the dragons seemed willing to talk to them.
The tip of Alyas’s tail twitched, brushing a few pebbles off the ledge. “Well, I…that is…” He picked up a pebble between two claws and put it neatly in place. “Perhaps you would not mind…”
“Mind what?” She’d win, Mella thought, if he left that there. He wasn’t paying attention to the game.
“Would you care to…to tell me…”
“Tell you what?”
“Your story!” Alyas exclaimed, as if it should have been obvious. “The rescue of the Egg! I am, you see, a song-maker.” His wings lifted off his back and flapped slightly, stirring a breeze that blew dust and grit into Mella’s face. “If it is true…I mean, well.” His crest drooped, and he looked a bit ashamed of himself. “If the other, the boy, does as he promised, if you are truly not spies—”
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