Dragon Raider

by Ava Richardson

  Chapter 21

  Danu and the crippled ship

  The princess really didn’t want to speak to me as we flew in the airs high above the archipelago. We flew steadily eastward until the early afternoon, before Lila asked Crux to start veering north. We were travelling in a wider and wider spiraling loop across the Western Isles, looking for something.

  But looking for what? I wondered as my stomach grumbled. I hadn’t had time to bring provisions, weapons, or even warmer clothes—I had heard the distant buzzing at the back of my head of dragon tongue and had known, instinctively, that it was Crux’s voice. It had been like half-hearing a conversation on the other side of a wall; it had not been intended for me, but I could hear it anyway. I dropped everything, seizing my cloak and running for where I could feel the dragon was, to find Lila already urging him to leave the island!

  I have to admit, that hurt me a little. Why hadn’t she asked me to come along with her? I thought that we were the Dragon Riders of Malata, together, but she had said she wanted to prove herself to the Raiders.

  “She is hunting prey. She is upset and will need your friendship, dragon mage,” Crux suddenly broke into my mind to speak. I glanced up at Lila ahead of me, leaning over the neck of Crux – she didn’t appear to notice the words. Did that mean a dragon could share minds just with whomever it wanted to? Had Crux allowed me to hear the plans Lila had been making without me?

  “Ah, little magician – you have so much to learn!” Crux laughed, chittering into the sky. At this, Lila did look up.

  “Have you seen anything, Crux?” she called.

  “Yes!” This time, the voice of the male dragon was louder and resonant, and from the look of glee on Lila’s face, I knew that the dragon had shared that thought with both of us.

  “There is life. To the east and south. Life and blood!” He raised his wings slowly in the air, slowly spinning us toward it. We had already flown over many smaller islands on this side of the Barrens – and, although there had been smoke rising from hamlets and near flocks on the hills, they were not what Lila seemed to be looking for. Crux was carrying us towards the eastern edge of the archipelago, almost toward the Storm Seas and the Broken Coast itself. Here, battered by storm winds, the islands were little more than spires and splinters of rock, and sparsely inhabited.

  “Lila? What did you have planned?” I said, more than a little nervous. Should I summon a storm again, like I had aboard the Ariel? How could I convince her that killing was not the way to free her people?

  “She is a hunter, little magician. It is in her blood, as it is in mine and even yours,” Crux said again, and Lila whooped loudly. He hadn’t bothered to direct that thought solely to me, either.

  But I was no hunter–what was the dragon talking about? Unless he thought fishing was hunting–no, that was more sort of waiting around and being patient, not the same as what the Raiders and dragons did. If I am a hunter, then it is a hunter after words and truth, I thought, and wondered at the thrill of savage satisfaction I felt. Were some of the dragon’s emotions mingling with mine? It was hard to not be aware of the large fierce beast in my mind, so much so that I almost thought that I could breathe fire and fly…

  “Not yet, little magician. But some of your ilk have taken on the powers of my kind…” Crux told me cryptically, but before I could question him further, Lila was shouting and pointing. “There! There she is!”

  On the horizon, leaning crazily against a ridge of sharp Bonerock, was a fat-bellied carrack with tattered sails. This high up, I could see the shadow of the reef just below the surface that had caught her awry; it stretched like an ugly scar beneath the waters towards the headland of one of the wild islands.

  “What colors is she flying?” Lila peered down at it.

  I too squinted at the tattered flags and sails. Two of her three masts were broken, and there was a burn mark all along one side of her. She had been in a fight. I saw a flutter of red, a suggestion of a shape on a purple background. Red on purple? Isn’t that…

  “That’s Torvald colors, isn’t it?” I shouted.

  “Even better,” Lila grinned fiercely. “We lost that other Torvald ship in the storm, and I don’t want to let one get away again!”

  Crux matched her enthusiasm, diving down towards the wreck as I panicked. “But Lila – you can’t attack a Torvald ship! Torvald are our allies.”

  “The Raiders have no allies,” she returned as the ship grew larger ahead of us and the wind howled in our ears.

  “Torvald are allies to all dragon friends!” I shouted. “That is where King Bower holds court! King Bower who restarted the Dragon Academy!” I still had one card to play, and, given the savage grin coming from my friend at the prospect of murder, I played it. “And Queen Saffron, the dragon-sister!”

  Lila twitched as if struck. She frowned, and beneath us, her unease translated into a wobble for Crux. “Saffron, dragon-sister? I have heard of that one. A great dragon-lady,” Crux said, easing his decent into a swoop rather than a charge.

  “This is nothing to do with her…” Lila said through gritted teeth, but I could see that she was troubled. Had she never realized that her raiding would directly impact on the people she thought of as her heroes?

  “But still, Lila – that is how murder by the Raiders will be viewed,” I pointed out. Crux circled the burned boat in a wide loop, spiraling closer. I couldn’t see anyone on board, and I only hoped that the ship’s boat had been undamaged, and had carried what survivors there had been to the wild islands.

  “The Raiders have always raided. And here we will just be picking what the seas have already discarded,” Lila said, her face stern as she directed Crux to land aboard the deck of the ship with a rush of wings and scraping claws.

  The deck was a mess. There were broken and smashed ship’s lockers everywhere, and the bolts of arrows half stuck in the broken mast, the deck. The burn mark on the side of the ship extended through a cracked and broken gunwale and across the deck.

  “There was a battle here,” I said, feeling dazed at the sight of it.

  “You don’t say.” Lila already had her sabre bared, and was stalking across the deck to the captain’s quarters under the sterncastle. The door was broken open and looked to be the work of hatchets.

  “Dragon fire.” Crux sniffed at the burnt wood. “This is the work of dragons.”

  “But wild dragons don’t usually have archers on them,” Lila stated.

  “And why would Torvald Riders attack their own ship?” I added, as Lila frowned, looking at the tattered remnants of the red and purple flag.

  “Unless…” she said, stepping up to rip it from the edge of the railing. It was a large flag, but it was light. “Riddle me this – why isn’t that flag painted or stitched onto the main sail?” She pointed to the tattered white above. I looked. She was right.

  “They were sailing incognito?” I said. “Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves?”

  “What, and then some Dragon Riders thought they were an enemy and attacked them anyway?” Lila shook her head. “No. This is too strange. In fact, it reminds me of precisely the sort of tactic that we Raiders use…”

  “You don’t think that Kasian…” I gasped.

  “No, the Ariel came back, remember, and went in the other direction. But he did say that he was chased by two Roskildean ships, and we saw three on our journey back to Malata, remember?” Lila said. “What if the third Roskildean ship decided to pretend to be a Torvald ship?”

  “But why would they?” I asked. It made no sense. None at all. Havick already controlled the Barren Seas. He would have no reason to masquerade as the Empire of Torvald, would he?

  “Lila! Danu–in the little room!” Crux suddenly snorted, turning his massive head to snarl at the shattered door of the captain’s rooms. Lila went first, crouching with sword held out in front of her. I put a hand to the center of my chest, feeling the heartbeat and the warmth, and willing the magic inside me t
o work. I didn’t know what I would do or what spell I even could cast for this situation, but I would try…

  “Yagh!” Lila jumped into the room with a swipe of her sword, and I followed, feeling something kindling in my heart. A fire. A sense of anger.

  Someone cowered in the corner.

  “Don’t kill me! Please!” The man was thin and wearing the sort of finery that didn’t belong on a sailing ship. Pale, fluttery blond hair and a small mustache pronounced him a northerner of some description, and that made him most likely to be Roskildean.

  Around him, the captain’s room was in tatters. The table was half smashed, papers and charts thrown about the room, heavy ax marks on the walls. I prodded one of the charts with my foot. The waters around the Broken Coast and the mainland.

  “Who are you? What happened here?” Lila demanded, advancing with her sabre point until it almost touched the man’s throat. He squealed and tried to look away, but Lila stayed glaring and silent until the man’s terrified eyes turned back.

  And then something very strange happened. As soon as he looked at Lila, really looked at her that is, his eyes grew wide and he almost choked. “By the stars. It’s true. All these years, and it’s true – the heir has been found!”

  Chapter 22

  Lila, the true heir

  What did he just call me? I looked from the man to Danu, to see that my accomplice looked, if anything, excited.

  “Don’t say it,” I hissed quickly at him, turning back to the man who swallowed hard. “As for you… Care to repeat what you just said?”

  The man’s eyes were wide, terrified as he made small pawing motions in the air with his hands. “It’s you. We’ve found you!” A ghost of a nervous smile briefly lit his face. “You’re the long-lost Princess of Roskilde.”

  “I think you must be mistaken—” I started, but the man continued.

  “Please – if I may—I know that it is you. The poor people still have the pictures of your parents–though Havick punishes them if he finds them. You are the image of your mother, the old queen!” the man said, and, much to my embarrassment, sunk to his knees in front of me.

  “Can I say it now?” Danu beamed at me. “I told you so.”

  “Shut up.” I gestured for the man to stand. “Maybe he’s wrong…”

  “No, your highness – I cannot be, not only is there your looks, the cut of your jaw, the shape of your brow, but one of the West Witches themselves told Havick that the true heir had been found. I was there! In the throne room when she did it – striding in without any heed to the guards who tried to stop her, and calmly telling the Lord Havick that he was in danger!”

  “What?” I glared at Danu. “The West Witches did this?”

  Danu’s look was one of fierce determination. “Who was it? Afar? Ohotto? What did she look like?”

  “Golden hair, white robes…” the man said quickly under Danu’s fierce gaze.

  “Ohotto Zanna.” I watched as my friend pulled a face. “This is strange tidings indeed…”

  “Why? What does it mean?” I said, my confusion matched only by my anger. It would have been so much simpler if no one had been alive on the wreck. Or if this man had tried to attack us. But no – he had to start talking about the prophecy…

  The fact that I was a princess.

  The thought hit me. Danu had been right all along. It confirmed what my foster-mother had suspected with my name-cloth and what most of my heart had been unwilling to accept.

  “So, I am this long-lost princess of the Roskildeans. Fine. What difference does that make?” I argued bitterly as I stepped back. “You want me to give up my life? Start wearing skirts, for goodness sake?”

  “But, but Lila…” Danu was insistent. “This is your destiny. It’s who you were meant to be.”

  “Who I was meant to be?” I pulled a face, ignoring the tremor of fear in my heart. “Give me a break.”

  The Raiding life was all I knew. I had grown up here, on the sea, in the islands, not in some distant court. The very thought of being simpered at by weak-kneed men like this one here in front of me only made me angrier. I could pretend that this never happened, I thought desperately. I could go back to Malata and be a good chief’s daughter…

  “No,” Crux breathed into my heart, his mind felt steady and firm. “We are what we are. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.”

  He was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. I couldn’t go back and expect life in Malata to be just the same as before. Even the memories of my home with Pela and Kasian felt different now, thanks to everything that had happened. Like it was a dream, and I had woken up to a world for which I wasn’t prepared.

  But what do I do, Crux! My silent words were anguished.

  “That is for you to decide. I am a dragon, so I fly. I hunt. I kill.”

  Life was a lot simpler if you were a gigantic fire-breathing lizard, I thought. I needed time to think this through. To work out who I thought I was. I am Lila of Malata, I tried the words in my head – but now they felt wrong somehow. Because the people I had always looked up to were not my parents who wanted me on a boat, not on a dragon as I wanted to be. Lila the Dragon Raider. That felt better... but who is that Lila? Where does she come from? And then, of course, there was Lila of Roskilde – the long-lost princess in the flouncy dresses. No. Definitely not.

  “You are all these things, and more…” Again, Crux spoke in my mind.

  But how could that be? Was it even possible to be more than one thing?

  “You humans. Always putting names on things and saying this is all that they are.” Crux was amused, despite my distress. “Just because I am a dragon, it doesn’t mean that I am not also a human-friend.”

  That was true, I granted. Meanwhile, however, Danu appeared to be busy interrogating the man in front of me. “When did Ohotto Zanna come to you? Did anyone else travel with her? What else did she talk about?”

  But the man was waving his hands in an anxious plea. “I don’t know, sir!” he kept on repeating. “She has been visiting the Lord Havick for a while, I have seen her in the keep many times over the years, but always the lord and her rushes off to some private audience chamber. This time, however, the witch seemed angry enough to not care for such precautions.”

  “Well, that certainly sounds like Ohotto,” Danu grumbled to himself. “You say that she’s been to Lord Havick before? Many times?”

  “Yes, certainly.” The man nodded.

  “Lila?” Danu turned quickly to hiss at me. “The West Witches are never meant to take sides. Never. We are guardians of the old lore, and we seek to do what we can to make that lore useful, but we shouldn’t start advising lords… Chabon would never agree to it.”

  “But aren’t you taking sides? Seeing as you’re the guy who took it upon himself to ‘find the lost Princess’!”

  “Well, that’s different….” Danu looked suddenly ashamed. “You had a right to know. The prophesy is your heritage. Your life.”

  “And what of this prophesy then, huh?” I directed my frustration at him. “What does it say?”

  Between us in the cabin, the captured man’s eyes were wide as he glanced from one of us to the other.

  “Uh… It would be unwise to go into the details,” Danu said carefully. “It is very important, and I need to be sure that I am not influencing the future if I…”

  “Influencing the future?” I burst out. “What by the names of the holy waters do you think that you’ve been doing ever since I set eyes on you?” I felt angry at this young man who had sailed into my life, bringing with him his tide of problems. I wish that I had never accepted his offer of help at all!

  “I, uh, you’re right, I know, Lila… But…” He looked ashamed, his eyes sliding away from me to the sides of the room.

  ‘Never trust a man who cannot hold your gaze’ was one of my foster-father’s small pieces of advice, born from many long seasons demanding goods from captured merchants. ‘They will always be hiding someth
ing,’ he had said.

  With a sudden, sinking realization, I understood just what it was that this fish-boy himself was hiding from me. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “What?” Danu looked up at me with worried eyes. My guess had hit true.

  “You don’t know what the prophecy says do you? Not all of it anyway.” I made the mental leap, following my instincts. “Maybe you know a bit, or your mentors let you in on some of the secret – but that is why you are so shocked that one of your own witches is involved with Havick. You’re just in the dark about all of this as me!”

  “I, uh…” Danu’s face blossomed with embarrassment.

  “Whatever.” I clicked my tongue in annoyance. “For now, we need to work out what he was doing here, flying under Torvald colors.” I raised an eyebrow at the man, along with my sabre. “Explain.”

  “Ah, you see…” It was his turn to look embarrassed. “I was a courtier for the old king, your father, before Havick came. We had always been fighting the Sea Raiders, of course. They were a constant nuisance, but in that last year and that winter, their attacks had become devastating,” the man said.

  ‘They were brilliant. They seemed to know where all of our best and largest ships were going before they had even left port! Wave after wave of attacks every moon, and the Sea Raiders didn’t seem happy with just plundering what they could and leaving. They scuttled our boats, they killed so many.”

  I felt uncomfortable at this tale of the courtiers. It wasn’t like my foster-father to do that, was it? He had always had such a healthy respect for the ways of the sea, of taking what you needed, then a little bit extra, but at least leaving those you raided alive. Otherwise – who would there be to raid the next season? The one after that? He was paid to attack the king’s ship, hadn’t Pela told me that?

  The courtier continued. “We were on the verge of entirely losing our navy and our fishing fleet!”