Dragon Raider

by Ava Richardson

  “No. Wait. Hold on!” The boy turned his little skiff around, catching the wind as he did so. “I don’t particularly want to go out of my way anyway. I have important business to the north-east,” he said in that high and mighty tone.

  Important business catching fish, I thought, but nodded to him all of the same. “Thank you.” I nodded. “And I suppose thank you for helping me out of the sea, as well,” I said through pursed lips. I didn’t say thank you very often to someone who wasn’t a Raider. My father had told me that many of the fishermen throughout the Western Isles were loyal to the Roskildeans and their brutish king, Lord Havick.

  But a debt owed is a debt owed, I thought. I could at least say thank you for his act of kindness. Just so long as I didn’t tell him where I really lived. It turned out, however, that I didn’t really need to tell him anything, as the very next words out of his mouth were, “You’re a Raider, aren’t you?”

  Was that a mixture of fear and awe that I heard in his voice?

  “No,” I said stubbornly, although my light garb, my heavy leather belt with its numerous hooks and hoops (for the many weapons and climbing lines we used on our ships), and my brightly colored headscarf probably made it obvious.

  “You are. I can see it.” Danu’s eyes widened. “What would a Raider girl want with a dragon’s nest?”

  “None of your business, fish boy,” I said, wondering if I really should have jumped into the drink instead.

  “What? I’m no fish boy, I’m a mage!” he had the audacity to say. I turned to frown at him, as his lie seemed so obvious as to make even the water laugh. Looking at him again, I saw he had that stocky build and the weather-worn hands of someone who had spent a life on and off the waves. He looked like a fisherman’s son, but if so, then he was a long way out of the normal fishing lanes and he looked barely old enough to be out here on the open oceans alone – and besides, there hadn’t been a mage since the times of the mad old tyrant Hacon Maddox!

  “Are you now, fish boy?” I laughed. The boy was mad, clearly a maddened youth who had stolen his father’s boat and probably drunk too much salt water out here on the ocean. Strange how he didn’t look dehydrated or sun-seared, but either way – he was either mad or he was a liar.

  “I am! I’m training under Afar Nguoa of the West Witches!” He burst out, as if that name meant anything to me, or hadn’t just been made up. “Okay, so I may not be an entire mage yet, I’m only an Adept – but I’m training to be one…” he said. “Danu Geidt, Adept of the West Witches,” he said his name proudly once more.

  “Whatever you say, Danu Geidt.” I rolled my eyes. “And I am Lila. Lila of the Dragon Riders of Torvald.”

  The boy flushed a deeper color. “You are not a Dragon Rider,” he said in clipped tones. “If I were going to guess, I would say that your people are much more comfortable sailing the waves than riding dragons...”

  “What do you mean by that?” I returned.

  “You dress like a pirate. A Raider,” the boy said, and I felt a stab of anxiety. What was he going to do now? Try to threaten me? Me – a dangerous pirate-Sea Raider? No, he might be right that I wasn’t a Dragon Rider, I thought with a flash of annoyance. But I will be one day. I will tame and train my own dragon, just as the queen herself did!

  It must have been the boy’s words that made me say, “Go on then, do some magic if you are some great mage-in-training, fish boy.” I crossed my hands over my chest. The island was a lot closer now, and luckily, I wouldn’t have to spend too much longer in this braggart’s company.

  I watched Danu squint his eyes, frowning. “It takes years to learn how to perform just one simple spell, Lila-the-Raider. Magic isn’t as simple as steering a boat, or using your sword to get what you want,” he said sarcastically. “All magic comes with a great price. It could shorten your life, or it could take away your very life force if you are not careful…”

  “Okay, right, I thought as much.” I nodded, turning back to look at the fast-approaching golden beach. No sign of the mother dragon above us, and pretty soon I would be able to jump overboard and swim through the shallows to the shoreline beyond.

  “Alyana, alnana, alyana-Mer…” The boy was making strange chanting words behind me, and I turned to see his eyes were half-closed.

  “Are you quite all right back there, fish boy?” I said, before suddenly, every hair on the back of my neck went up.

  It was like the first time I had climbed way up high in the crow’s nest with my father, and looked out across the sea as the wind rocked the boat from the west, and then from the east. It was a feeling unlike any other that I had ever had before – one of sheer, unadulterated terror.

  I had never been good with heights. It was a fact that my father despaired of, and he blamed whomever my real, land-lubbing parents must have been. But that day in the crow’s nest, I had felt entirely small, and at the mercy of the entire world. Any meager gust of wind could pick me up and dash me to the deck below. I was helpless before vast and cosmic forces.

  Well, now, my skin itched and a prickling creeped all over my body as the boy chanted, over and over. Suddenly the boat beneath our feet shifted. We were racing toward the island now, moving faster than we had before, as if the mage-in-training had summoned up our own, personal current. We flew at the beach for a long moment, before the boy’s chanting slowed, paused, and finally stopped, and as he did so, the boat also slowed, slowed, and went back to the gentle drifting of before.

  “That – that doesn’t prove anything…” I said quickly. The boy staggered to one side and sat down, apparently exhausted. “That could have been a freak wind, a strange eddy in the water…” That kind of stuff happened at sea. Lots of people thought that the ocean was simple matter of wind and waves, but it wasn’t – there were tides and counter-currents, backwashes, storm surges, and eddies. A lot of very strange things happened at sea.

  The boy was too tired to answer straight away, merely shaking his head as he shakily took up a bottle of water.

  But still. It had been eerie. Too eerie. I didn’t like it.

  “You’re a long way from home, Raider-Lila,” Danu said weakly. “You’re closer to the Island of Roskilde than you are to the far islands and the shipping routes that the Raiders usually harass.”

  I bared my teeth at him. The boy – as strange as he was – already knew too much. Was he going to sell me out?

  “And you’re young to be out here on your own. No raiding boat nearby….” The boy was frowning as if something had just occurred to him. “In fact, how old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” I said defiantly. “Older than you.”

  The boy’s face grimaced. “Actually, no. I’m eighteen, but the magic has a way of making you look younger. It’s why magicians and witches lead such long lives.”

  Oh really? I’d heard enough. We were still a bit out from the shelf of land where the sea washed into the golden beach, but that didn’t mean that I had to listen to him. I turned and readied myself to jump over the edge.

  “Seventeen years ago…” the boy said out loud. “By the stars!” He hissed, and I looked up, fearful that the mother dragon had come back, and decided that it was now dinner time. But there were no dragons in the sky.

  “Seventeen years ago,” the fish-boy repeated. “Don’t you see? In the north-east, under a dragon’s call, rising out of the water with a crown of water around you!” He kept on saying, over and over, his previous exhaustion forgotten as he wobbled to his feet and started laughing and clapping. “I’ve done it! I’ve done it!”

  “Excuse me?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “The prophecy! There’s a prophecy you see, and it’s why I am here. And I think that it led me to you, Lila-of-the-Raiders. You are the reason why I am here!” Danu was saying excitedly. “Now, we must get you back to Sebol and…”

  “What prophecy?” I said heavily.

  “Roskilde!” He clapped again. “You, Lila, must be the one meant to wear the Sea Crown of Rosk
ilde!” He looked so happy and elated – and insane – that I was only too happy to notice the skiff was now skipping over the clear waters of the shoreline, and underneath the gold-white of the sands.

  “I’m nobody’s queen, fish-boy,” I said, diving out of the boat and into the water. Instantly the sounds of the world were muted as I skimmed under the surface, sharing my world with tiny darting fish and the occasional strand of seaweed. When I bobbed up to the surface one more time, it was to still hear the mad fisherman’s child shouting.

  “You’re it, Lila-of-the-Raiders! I’ve done it!” he was saying, only now realizing that the person he thought was meant to wear the throne of the islands – me, in other words – was swimming away. “Come back! We have to talk!”

  I started wading up the beach, around the rocks. I could pull my hidden boat out from where it was and down the small outlet stream to the south side of the island without him seeing me, and I knew that I was the better sailor than him. I could outrun the mad fish-boy, I thought irritably, wondering if this day was going to get any worse than it had already.

  “Go home, fish-boy!” I shouted. “I’m not interested! And if you come near me again, I’ll gut you – and that’s a Raider’s promise!” I snarled back at him, using my best pirate’s glare to show him I meant business.

  Chapter 5

  Lila, of Malata

  Just seeing the head of Malata island on the other side of the Spine Rocks made my heart feel a little lighter. A little, I thought wistfully, as I had still failed to do anything that I had set out to do on my quest to the far north of the Western Isles.

  Malata was the largest of our isles, and as such, was also the home to the largest of the Raider clans; the Malata clan I had been adopted into. But to get to Malata or any of the Raider isles beyond, you had to get past the Spine Rocks, small spears of Bonerock that stick out at odd places along the reef nearly encircling the Raider islands. Some scholars amongst the Raiders claimed they were actually the body of some great sea beast, come to finally rest here on the edge of the world, but my father is much more pragmatic.

  The reef and the rocks formed a complicated maze to which we have added by hauling out the odd wreck and junked ship, before scuttling them on the reef as further hazards. There sits the Fist of Flowers, a large merchant’s vessel that forms an excellent wave break, and, sitting farther out is the Queen Avari, listed to her side – and one of the Lord Havick’s very own galleons that my father captured not six years ago. We could have made a lot of money out of that particular galleon, shoring it up and selling it on further south.

  “But no!” my father had roared. “We Raiders have to send a message to Havick, to the Roskildeans, and to any other who dares to think that these waters don’t belong to us! The Sea Raiders!”

  I had been very young back then, wide-eyed and impressionable, I didn’t realize then as I did now, that the capture and sinking of the Roskildean ship had been one of the last big triumphs of the Sea Raiders. We had won the ship by chance when the crew had been sickened by bad water and it had been easy pickings for my father and his most trusted fighters to scull over to the galleon in the dead of night in longboats, and to climb up the rigging and seize control.

  Even so, having our enemy’s wrecked galleon was a very pleasing sight, and always gave my heart a savage leap of joy when I saw it. I picked the route through the reef and the rocks we were supposed to use this season, the route through the ropes, nets of driftwood, and other anchored “wrecks” my father moved around to protect the passage into the islands. Within just a few hours, my boat was lightly skipping over the waves towards Malata’s protected harbor.

  Stone walls protected the pier, and the collection of longboats sat in the wider waters beyond like giant, black-winged sea birds. The smaller shapes of people moved about in the background, fishing or swimming or practicing maneuvers as I changed over to the more tiring work of rowing myself in.

  “Hoi! Lila!” shouted one of the men on one of the longboats—Captain Lasarn of the Fang, who appeared to be teaching a younger complement of Raider boys and girls their basic seamanship lessons. He was a big man with dark hair and ruddy features, and only one eye, and at his side were Adair and Senga, two young sailors of an age with me who had become capable enough hands to now work as trainers alongside Lasarn. “You’re back!” he called out as I rowed past. “How long has it been this time, two days?”

  “Three,” I shouted back, allowing myself a grin. The captain was almost of an age with my father—my foster-father—but unlike my father, he was always exhorting me to ever greater ‘Raider Adventures.’ It had been Captain Lasarn who had first told me that my father was not really my father, though I had never yet let on that I knew the rumors I was not truly blood-kin, not truly a Raider to be true.

  “No dragons yet?”

  Thanks for reminding me. “No, not yet. But soon, I promise…” I said. Now that I knew where a nest was, I could go back. If Father allowed me to take a few men with me, I might even be able to bring back all three eggs and be gone before the mother knew…

  I was still dreaming of the dragons as I turned the corner of the stone harbor wall and saw the pride and joy of the Raider fleet; the Ariel, my foster-father Kasian’s flagship, and beside it the Fang, and beside that the Storm. All three were technically called caravels in what my foster-mother informed me was “proper sailing speak” which meant that they had three masts and only two upper decks, instead of the Roskilde galleons which had four masts and three upper decks. But these caravels were faster than the heavy galleons, and it was with pride that my father always said that his Ariel could outrun any vessel on the sea.

  “Daughter!?” It was my father’s booming voice, coming from the walled pier as he strode up. “Throw her a rope, someone! Tie that off!” He barked commands at the Raiders who worked here and there over our three biggest ships. Within moments one of the hands had thrown me a rope and I was pulled into safe harbor, the little skiff already tied off alongside the other small two-person boats and yachts when my father jumped down to the dockside.

  My foster-father was a big, barrel-chested man with hair like brilliant silver. He wore the old-style canvas pantaloons under the large waistband leather belt, with its many fixings and hoops, as well as the crossed-over linen shirt. He squinted at me in displeasure—or maybe because he was starting to lose some of his sight.

  “Daughter! Three days!” He barked at me, his brow furrowing deeply, before helping me ashore and enfolding me into a tight and fierce bear hug.

  “I told you I would be okay,” I said as we broke apart.

  “Hn.” He snorted through his nose angrily. “But it was still a silly thing to do. Silly. When you are leader after me, you cannot be running off here and there and everywhere. You need to keep focused.” He slapped one great paw of a hand against his other. “Merchants.” Another heavy thud. “Food.” Thud. “Havick.” On the last word his lips curled in a sneer. My father hated the Roskildean lord more than he hated an unseasonable storm or an accident at sea.

  “We’re close, Father, so close…” I said, pausing before I launched into my tail of coming face-to-face with an angry dragon and mad sailors who may or may not be mages in training. “I know where some are. Some dragon eggs. I can take you to them!” I offered, hoping that at least would pique his interest.

  “Dragon eggs,” the man shook his great bear-like head. “Three days gone. When you are leader, you may not have three days in a row to spare for such things!” Another grumble. “No. No more. Not this season, anyway. I need you out on the Ariel with me, hunting down merchant ships.”

  “But Father…” I said, annoyed at how petulant and childish I always sounded before him. “These eggs will change everything…”

  “No, Lila. I’ve said it now and it’s done. Maybe next season. But your mother is worried sick about you, so go and see her. And get yourself washed as well, that leather will crack if you don’t clean off that salt wat
er.”

  Gee, thanks, Dad, I thought. Why was it he always ended our talks like this? ‘Maybe next season you’ll be old enough to chase after dragons’ was one phrase I remembered well. ‘Maybe next season we’ll have you captain of the Ariel!’ The problem was, that my father had just one way of doing things – his way. It was the same with how he ran the ships, the equipment, and all of the trappings that made up the Raider lifestyle, everything had to be done just how it had always been done, and not different.

  But how everything was always done hasn’t got us anywhere! I thought as I trudged back along the walled pier. We’ve had no decent raid this season, and now we’re down to just three good boats…

  I walked towards the cluster of wooden stilt-houses, huts, and the small fortified mansion with the white walls that was both my home and the seat of power here in the Raiders’ territories. As I walked I could feel the eyes of the other Raiders, the hands and the rowers, the sailors and the fighters on me, making me feel even smaller. Why were they so wary of me? Was it because they had seen the argument between me and my father? Was it because they, too, just like my father, thought I was a silly little girl dreaming of dragons?

  “He just has no idea how important this is!” I said to Pela, wife of Chief Kasian of Malata, and the only woman who had been mother to me. She was a small woman with dark hair that was always forced back into a warrior’s braid like mine was. I’d found her where she spent most of her time, in the small practice courts that she had insisted that my father put in to their walled garden.

  The house itself was some old merchant’s mansion we think, some private getaway in the bad old years of King Enric of Torvald, when all of those rebellious lords had sought to flee the Dark King’s reign, and one of them had set up here, building a small island realm replete with wells, walls on the harbor, and a walled garden for his mansion. The lord hadn’t lasted long, as the local island people saw to it that his boat sunk on the reef, and ever since this place had been owned by the Malata people, and finally, the Malata family.