Dragon Raider

by Ava Richardson

  Only the Ariel was left. My father’s ship waited just in front of the inlet, all flags raised high and daring those that swept after us.

  “Ready!” I shouted, although I knew that my father couldn’t hear me. I unfurled the red scarf and waved it high above my head, and my father’s plan rolled into motion. The smaller sailing yachts and schooners tacked away, leaving an undisputed challenge from the Ariel.

  “Easy now, slow…” I purred at Crux, who slowed his flight a little to allow Havick and his ships to catch up just a little.

  THOOM! The Ariel didn’t wait for negotiations or a declaration of war, but fired its cannon straight at us.

  “Dive!” I shouted, and Crux tipped on his side to swoop down, down, down, his claws skimming the surface of the water as my father’s cannonade flew over us to meet the first brigantines and fast patrol boats of Havick.

  THOOM! THOOM! My father’s flagship fired all that it had as we curved around the battle, Crux lifting his belly and his legs as we swooped over the Bone Reef. I saw the almost mechanical, well-ordered way that my father’s crew moved, setting firing torches to cannons as the metal guns rocked back and the next Raiders moved in, heavy canvas gloves carrying the iron shot and stuffing it down the still hot gun barrels as the next packed the black powder, and off again it was fired.

  But the barrage was like a toddler skipping stones against a galleon when I saw the enormity of Havick’s fleet bearing down on my father’s boat. There were plumes and sprays of water as some of my father’s shot missed, as well as the screams and crashes as some found their homes in the faster and smaller ships that outpaced the main body of the Roskildean fleet.

  “Yes!” I punched the air in fierce celebration as we swung around the rear of the Ariel, with the entire might of Havick’s fleet bearing down towards us.

  But none of the galleons were damaged, I saw. Not from the Ariel’s attacks at least, although a couple limped from the attacks that Crux had performed – and now they answered the singular ship with all the thunder of their own guns.

  THABBA-BOOM! At first there were little movements as shutters opened along the galleon’s high walls, and then small puffs and plumes of smoke rose, just before the wave of sound hit us. A clash of a hundred thunderstorms sounded all at once as the galleons returned fire.

  My mind raced. How much shot was in the air? Fifteen galleons’ worth, with how many guns on the foredecks of each one? Any boat’s true firepower lay in its broadside, as most of the guns sat along the sides of the boat, but there would still be anywhere between four and eight cannons at the front of each vessel as well.

  At least forty cannon, all heading for my father… I growled in useless frustration as I watched the Ariel turn a tight circle. She was the fastest of our larger ships, and the flagship. She leaned out into the winds as she spun, cutting a wide plume of white water as she turned back, seeking the relative safety of the harbor behind.

  THOOM! THOOM! Like murderous rain, the cannon shot fell all around her.

  “No!” One of the deadly missiles tore straight through her main sail and plunged deep into the top-deck. We could only hope that it didn’t puncture a hole all the way through or she would start taking on water.

  White plumes of water were thrown up on either side and behind the Ariel as it fled, and bits of the reef exploded as the shot fell amongst them.

  CRACK! Another cannon hit the deck of the Ariel, and another crashed through her aft gunwale. I heard screams.

  “Father – no!” I felt the answering surge of fury from the dragon. “Now Crux – now!” I called, as we swept towards the old hulk of the galleon on the reef. We couldn’t fight the entire armada of Roskilde, but we could do this….

  “Skreyar!” Crux hit the edge of the galleon with all four legs, grappling it and his weight shoving it off of the Bone Reef and into the deeper waters towards the fleet. The smell of pitch and lamp oil filled our nostrils as Crux kicked out at the old, festering hulk that had been my father’s trophy for years.

  The Raiders had followed my plan to the letter. They had doused the old hulk in whatever spare oils and gunpowder that we could spare, and, as Crux pushed himself back, he let out a mighty roar and hit the side of the boat with his dragon flame.

  WOOOSH! The flames pushed the hulk toward the Roskilde fleet, chewing up the meters and yards as the flames caught and leapt from rotten timber to rotten timber. The hulk wobbled and shook as the flames suddenly blossomed through it in a ball of fiery light, as it ploughed into the nearest galleons of the enemy.

  “Yes! It’s working!” Danu called weakly as we flew around our floating missile, and Crux once again laid a sheet of dragon fire down on the smaller vessels that dared turn towards us. The burning hulk wedged into the heart of Havick’s fleet, crashing past one and entangling itself with another galleon as it broke apart and its burning timbers went everywhere. Enemy sailors leapt overboard, whilst others with more grit seized buckets to scoop up water to douse the flames….

  “Hyargh!” There was a dim and faint roar as two shapes emerged from the smokes of war – the Storm and the Fang, each one firing its own cannons at the muddle of Havick’s ships as they cut quickly across the battle site. The Raider ships were fast, firing their broadsides and continuing on to beat around the enemy. These two were followed by even faster schooners, darting like small arrow-fish to fire their arrows up onto the decks. It was like watching gulls or sharks attack a shoal of fish – quick, darting movements in before flying out of there.

  But, even with this harassment, I was aware that we were still facing an armada, and we only had a tenth of the ships that Havick did.

  THOOM! THA-BOOM! The galleons returned fire, the mighty fleet breaking apart into smaller battlegroups, three to five galleons a piece, with a cloud of smaller armored brigantines to give chase to the Raiders. My ears whined with the thunder of the guns, and the rattle of their reports reverberated deep in my belly.

  “Lila! Beneath us!” Crux roared, lashing his tail out at a mast as a small torrent of crossbow bolts peppered into the sky all around us. I screamed, shielding my face as Crux bellowed in hurt from the many cruel barbs.

  “Aurelis Lumin!” Danu yelled, as something flashed behind me. For a moment I thought that the stocky-little fisherman’s boy had caught a lightning bolt, until I saw that there were enemy sailors’ underneath us stumbling back, holding their eyes. He had used his magic to blind the nearest of them, but as he slumped against my back, I realized he had worn himself too thin.

  “Danu? Are you still with me!” I said, to hear a mumble behind me. The magic was taking its toll on him – and I didn’t know if we could afford to not have it in this fight! “Danu – breathe. Relax for a bit!” I said, as Crux lifted us high over the battle, high above the flights of the bolts and the cannons.

  As we spiraled higher, I could see the expanse of the battle in its entirety. Havick’s armada was separated into four distinct groups, with the largest being right here at the mouth of the harbor. The burning hulk had taken two of the enemy galleons with it, and an additional one had been seemingly disabled by Raider ships – but, aside from a host of smaller injuries and damage, the armada was still shipshape.

  “The Ariel?” I scanned Malata’s harbor, hoping beyond hope that my father had somehow managed to slip the trap and sail away – but no.

  There was my father’s flagship, half sunk in the harbor, and sinking fast. Men were leaping from the prows and the bowsprit into the water, as Havick’s cannons fell around them, and even, hit some of the harbor wall itself; splitting stone and making sharp, cracking noises.

  “Father!” I shouted into the murk, but it was no good. He might have made it safely ashore, or he might be fighting for his life even now in that wreckage. The thought that I couldn’t stop this from happening speared through me. There are too many of them. They have too many guns…

  “If we cannot win – we fight anyway,” Crux snarled in an anger that mirrored my
own. “I cannot save the young dragons – but we can take our vengeance!”

  Vengeance. I thought as I gripped my short bow, and searched for the largest and biggest of the armada. Its flagship. “Yes!” I shouted my own challenge as Crux roared out a long, ululating call that echoed strangely over the battlefield.

  “Skreeayayayar!”

  Chapter 35

  Lila’s Crown

  We swung around the burning seascape, and I felt like there was a red line of anger connecting me to the lead flagship. I could see the wreckage of the Raider ships all around. Where was the Fang? I couldn’t see it – did that mean Captain Lasarn had fled the battle? Or had the ship already gone under?

  The screams of our own and the Roskilde forces rose to reach me. It was hard to even see any Raiders’ flags or colors, as the smoke of the guns and the burning ships cast a dreadful pall over the entire, grisly scene.

  But there was one galleon that drew me downward. The largest, the most well-defended with two smaller galleons on either side. “That has to be Havick’s ship – it has to be!” I shouted, and heard a mumble from Danu behind me. “Can you do this?” I asked, suddenly scared for my friend when he did not answer.

  Vengeance. We had to try. We had to try to stop him.

  “Skreyar!” Crux plummeted, from almost directly above them. Their flagship rose larger in my view as I took aim with my bow.

  Maybe if I could kill him, it would all be over…

  A storm of bolts soared from the decks below to meet us, heading straight for Crux’s face.

  “No!” Crux roared, turning in mid-flight at the last moment so that the bolts struck his side and legs, and not us. “I will not have you injured, Lila – I cannot!” He called out in my mind even as I felt the pain of many small bolts finding the small gaps in his hide.

  “No – Crux!” I called as he swept up and out of the danger, a cannon shot narrowly missing his wings. We swooped around the battlegroup, high over the waters that were now churned and murky with soot.

  Another cloud of bolts, this time peppered with the harpoons of the arbalest arced ahead of us, and Crux had to turn in his flight once again. The two accompanying galleons moved at pace with their larger parent, always circling in between us and the flagship.

  “Damn you, Havick!” I shouted out across the waters, lifting my head amidst the fire and shot. Was it a trick of the eyes, or did I see a man on the deck, and beside him a woman with golden hair? A shock of recognition ran through me as I saw, for just the briefest of moments, that the man wore a golden crown of leaping waves. I cannot explain it, but I knew then, in that instant, that all of the prophesies had been true, and the Witches of the Haunted Isle had been right. Havick wore the Sea Crown, and he had turned it to evil. “That crown has magic. I smell it,” Crux confirmed my suspicions as I gritted my teeth.

  The Sea Crown will be lost, and then it will be found once more, but the one who finds it will not come from the royal line. The prophecy was all true. Havick wore the Sea Crown, but he did not deserve to.

  If only there was a way to get to him! I raised my bow, but Crux had to veer again as a second of the battle groups – this time four galleons and a host of attending ships, came to intercept us, and protect their lord.

  I screamed in frustration. Malata would be destroyed. The Sea Raiders would all be destroyed – and for what? For nothing. For the power-hungry greed of that one man.

  “SKRECH!” A booming voice called as a shadow passed over the battle. Crux lifted his snout and chirruped, as another roar joined the first.

  “Skrear!” Another shadow darted across the water, and then another – dragons!

  “I summoned my brothers and sisters. They have come to deliver justice!” Crux was jubilant, flaring in his wings to take us out of that death trap and up towards the others. In moments, we were soaring amongst a flight of dragons – not as many as I had seen at Sym’s island, but still more than I had ever seen in the air, and all of them vengeful.

  With roars, they descended in ones and twos to strafe the edges of the fleet with great sheets of flame. One brigantine, caught in the crossfire between two dragons, exploded when its own powder rooms ignited.

  “Brothers! Sisters! Bring fire down on those who would hurt us!” Crux roared his excitement, but even I could tell that he was flagging in his assault, his wings dipping lower and the pain of his many crossbow bolt wounds starting to weaken him. He moved to join the next attacking flight, but I felt that I had to stop him.

  “Crux, my heart – please no more. The dragons are here, do not endanger yourself anymore.”

  “Lila wave-rider is right,” shouted a voice in my mind—Sym, the Sinuous Blue brood mother. She was flagged by other Blues as she rode high on the thermals. “You have fought bravely and well, little-brother. Now take care of your humans, and let us continue our work!”

  “Skreyar!” Crux snapped his disagreement, but still turned in a slow, protesting circle back around the battle, high above the seeking missiles.

  I could not take my eyes from what was happening around and beneath me. The dragons were merciless, but they also attacked with all the intelligence and wile of a top predator. They singled out the stragglers, they assaulted those that were the easiest to kill, and they sought to drive wedges between the bigger groups. Many, many of the brigantines of Roskilde went down in fire and flames. I just hoped that the smaller Raider’s schooners had managed to get out of there as soon as they saw the dragons in the air.

  “What about Havick? Ohotto?” I heard a mumbling from behind me, as Danu’s cold hands gripped my shoulders as he peered around.

  “They are trying,” I said, nodding to where the fiercest and largest of the dragons – Sym and a host of stocky Greens—were attacking the largest knot of galleons. I heard a strangled roar of pain, as one of the Greens went down into the ocean in a plume of water that jumped higher even than the crow’s nest of the largest of the galleons.

  Danu’s hands suddenly pinched my shoulder and I heard a low groan of worry.

  “I know!” I called out in dismay. Several of the dragons were injured now, and still the armada was afloat.

  “It’s not just that…” Danu was saying, pointing to the north where the dark cloud that he had shredded apart was returning, faster than ever.

  “Cumulo…Cumulous Dracon…” Danu tried, but I could tell that his power was spent. The darkness enveloped the last remaining ships of the armada, and floated up to snatch at the dragons.

  “SSskreych!” The calls of the dragons were alarmed, their mind-talk filled with complaints of bad and evil magics.

  “Fly out of it, my brethren!” Sym shouted, breaking the head of the dark fog like a cormorant bursting through a storm-wave. One by one, the other dragons broke free from the clawing grasps of the evil magic, and then the cloud, and the ships, grew fainter as they sailed into the fog and away.

  “We can harry them! Follow them!” Crux was saying, but even I knew that was a false hope. Crux the Phoenix was at his last ebbs of strength, as was Danu, as were many other of the dragons ahead of us that day.

  “We have done enough, for now,” Sym screeched to the others, leading them back to us in the safety of the upper airs. Looking down, I could see (much to my dismay) that she was right. The Bone Reef around Malata was littered with the burning wreckage of ships from both sides, and the seas were a wasteland of floating debris.

  “But we didn’t finish Havick and Ohotto,” Danu gasped.

  “Not yet,” I said, my voice low and grim.

  Epilogue

  Lila’s Victory

  It was a strange victory – if that is indeed what I could call this feeling. The seas around Malata had become a graveyard, and not just for the ships that were both our own and our enemies’. There were at least two dragon bodies in the waters by the time we’d tallied the numbers and counted the losses.

  For days and weeks afterwards, the Bone Reef was picked through by Raiders on r
ow boats for salvage, although most of the burnt spars and bits of wood were left where they had snagged, so now we had a low wall of ruinous ships almost entirely encircling our island home. This salvage fleet had managed to haul a lot of useful things out of the wreckage as well – something that made the Raiders a little happier. Weapons and trinkets washed up daily on the reef from the shattered boats, and teams of swimmers dismantled anything they could find and sell to make the winter season easier. The Sea Raiders would survive until spring, just.

  “It will make defending it easier the next time,” my father said as we looked down from the boulders of the headland above Malata’s stone harbor. He had survived, but only just. He had used the Ariel, his pride and joy, as a decoy to draw Havick’s navy deeper toward the reef after I, Danu, and Crux had led them here. I would never forget the fact that, at the end of the day, my father had decided to sacrifice everything he had worked for to implement my plan.

  Not that it was only my father who had sacrificed his dreams for me. On the fourth day from the battle, I found Danu in the docks, greeting a strange new visitor to our shores. Not the dragons, no – but a messenger of the Western Witches. The messenger was a woman just a few years older than us, but shorter by a hand.

  The acolyte Sheng had arrived on the moonlit tide the previous night, and her boat was the color of deep green, about the size of our rowboats, with a crew of just three younger training witches (as she herself was).

  “Danu, what is it?” I asked him. He still wore his rough canvas work clothes, as he had been helping to reclaim the salvage with all able-bodied sailors like the rest of us.