But …
She couldn’t run away. She couldn’t leave him alone with those draclings.
Plague him! Lyf kicked a tree, then recoiled from the pain in her toes. Why hadn’t he taken her hand? They could have been well away by now—not far away, but at least out of the draclings’ sight.
She had wanted to see a dracling, but this …There were eight or nine of them at least within that stump—perhaps a score. And Kaeldra gone …
They were perilous, Kaeldra had said. Even the babies— though winsome they could be. And yet they had never harmed Kaeldra, save for a few unintended scratches and burns.
Lyf looked up sharply. A dracling head poked over the edge of the stump, looking down at her. The head cocked to one side, as if curious. Another head popped above the rim— and then another. One snorted out a filmy smoke puff.
A flood of longing, stronger than spoken words, tugged at her.
They were babies, only babies. And they hadn’t harmed Owyn. And their mothers had been killed—surely these were the selfsame draclings Kaeldra had sought.
But she had no food; they would give her no peace.
“Lyf?” Owyn’s voice came from within the stump. “Will you come? It’s warm!”
It would be nice to be warm. The chill night air pierced through Lyf’s kirtle and cloak. Perhaps, she thought, the draclings would settle down when they found she had no food.
Lyf dangled the egg in its carrier down into the stump to Owyn, then gingerly climbed in herself. The draclings surged around her, prodding her with their snouts, nuzzling her for all the world like ponies looking for apples. She could not see them well in the darkness—only the gleamings of their eyes and the long, narrow shapes of their snouts. She held still, not wanting to affright them.
A ripping noise; one had nipped at her tunic. “No!” Lyf said. The dracling snorted out a wisp of smoke. Its breath felt warm and smelled … of what? Porridge, burnt to the pot?
Now they all pressed closer, hooking their needle-sharp talons into her cloak, pelting her mind with their pitiful hungries. They seemed to be going for her stomach. They all wanted to nuzzle her stomach.
Understanding hit with a jolt. They wanted milk! They thought she was a mother! “No!” Lyf cried, jerking back. “Get away! No!”
The draclings froze, startled. One breathed out a tiny lick of flame.
Gingerly, Lyf lay down, curled herself tightly about Owyn. They could not reach him now—nor her stomach. Behind her she heard shuffling noises. She felt their snouts poking at her back, felt their breath-warmth seeping in through her clothes.
But Lyf could not imagine it. She was so far beyond the ills that Mama feared for her—the petty bruises and scrapes, the short forays into the wood for kindling. Mama seemed far away, part of another life. She seemed not altogether real.
It was warm inside the stump. Lyf inhaled the rich commingled scents of damp wool and rotting wood, of rain-washed fir and draclings’ smoky breath. Owyn coughed once in her arms, then snuggled close against her. His breath came deep and slow.
Lyf slept—and woke but once, at false dawn, surrounded by a throbbing, liquid vibration. Like the purr of a byre cat, only louder. Kaeldra had spoken of this, Lyf mused sleepily. What had she called it?
Oh, yes.
Thrumming. She called it thrumming.
It was raining when Lyf awoke.
She knew it before she opened her eyes—by the prick of tiny droplets on leaves, by the fresh rain smell in the air. Yet she was warm, all-over warm. Her body melted into the curves of the ground, and a heavy, warm blanket enveloped her.
Lyf yawned, stretched. Something flopped off her arm; her eyes flew open.
Draclings. Sleeping draclings all around. They curled in the hollow of her back, draped across her hips, nestled into the space behind her knees.
And all the past day’s events came flooding back: Kaeldra and Jeorg taken, betrayed by Nysien; the long trek through the forest; the hunger …
She felt it now, the hard gnawing of hunger in her belly. Slowly she sat up, careful not to disturb the sleeping draclings.
A soft gray light filtered down. The rain was sparse; little made its way past the overhanging branches to splash inside the stump. Lyf glanced about for Owyn. Still sleeping. He lay snuggled between two draclings as if they were his own brothers and sisters. His back rose and fell in sleep breathing, as did the draclings’ backs. All throughout the stump they did so: massed together in a tangled heap that rose in some places as it fell in others, each to the rhythm of its own breath’s pulse. Smoke rose in filmy wisps from some of the draclings’ nostrils; others made faint, fluttery whistlings as they slept.
It was strange and marvelsome to watch.
Lyf tried to count them now while they slept, tried to sort out the welter of heads and backs and legs and tails. Eleven heads she found, though likely there were more, tucked beneath tails and backs and taloned feet. Most of the draclings were muted reds or greens—some mottle-hued, others of a single even tone. The reds were males and the greens females—Kaeldra had told her this. But the littlest draclings were covered with yellow-tan skins that fit them all wrinkly and loose.
Lyf reached out with a finger and gently stroked the back of one of the littler ones. It felt soft and almost powdery, like the wings of a moth. Beneath, Lyf thought she could see a tint of bluish green. The dracling, still sleeping, kneaded the air with its knobbly yellow talons—more like birds’ feet than animal claws.
The bigger draclings must have shed their skins, Lyf surmised. Their throats and underbellies were supple and leathery, but everywhere else they were covered with scales. Not hard and metallic, as Lyf had imagined them, but softer, translucent, like fingernails.
The smallest draclings looked to be the size of puppies; the largest, the size of full-grown foxes. All were long and lean, like stoats, with tapered, lizardy tails and narrow snouts that bulged out at the end near their nostrils. Down each dracling’s neck and back and tail ran a soft, leathery ridge.
And wings! All but the littlest ones had wings—flimsy, folded membranes, thinner than vellum. Lyf touched one; the dracling twitched its tail like a skittish cat. On the smallest draclings’ backs, where the others had wings, were two hard, bony knobs. Wing buds. Kaeldra had told her of these, as well.
A big, orangy-red dracling was staring at her now from the far side of the stump. His eyes were all-over green, save for a black slit at the center of them. Intelligent eyes.
Lyf put a finger to her lips. “Sh,” she said.
But the others were waking, raising their heads.
“No,” Lyf said, “I have no food. I can’t—” But they paid her no mind. They untangled themselves one by one, wriggling, trampling on one another, stumbling across the stump to Lyf. She tried to scoot away, but only roused another dracling behind her, who joined the others in nudging at her stomach with its snout.
A green dracling nipped at Lyf’s kirtle and tore it; when Lyf gently pushed her away, the dracling huffed out an indignant cloud of smoke.
Then Owyn was stretching, yawning. He regarded the draclings without surprise, then coughed and turned to Lyf. “I’m hungry!”he said.
“You’re not alone”she said crossly, shielding her stomach with one hand and shoving away the prodding snouts of draclings with the other But she was surrounded; they poked her unmercifully, pelted her ceaselessly with their hungries. One of the littlest ones started nibbling at her fingers. Lyf could bear it no longer. She jumped up, grabbed Owyn by the waist, and hoi
sted him to the top of the stump. She climbed up after. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Why?” Owyn did not budge.
“For food.”
“Oh.” Owyn slid down the boulders to the ground; Lyf followed. Chilly. It was chilly. She took Owyn’s hand and tried to run, but he stopped again. “Aren’t we waiting for the draclings?”
“No! We can’t feed them, too. We’d never find enough.”
“Why?”
“We just wouldn’t,Owyn. Now come!” A draclings head appeared at the top of the stump, and another and another. Then the whole horde of them appeared, surging over the top . …
“Stay!” Lyf cried.
They stilled, stared at her. Lyf gaped.
They had understood her. They had obeyed.
She shooed Owyn along the track, but she herself walked backward, facing the draclings. “Stay,” she told them. “I’ll bring food soon. Now, stay”
“But they’re hungry,” Owyn said.
As if she didn’t know. “They can find food for themselves. They can hunt.”
“What if they’re too little to hunt?”
“Yanil will have food. We’ll tell him where they are.”
“How will he find them?”
Lyf wasn’t even sure how she was going to find Yanil, but she didn’t tell Owyn. The track had forked some way back. But she had to leave the draclings, or they would poke her to death.
One dracling edged forward over the rim of the stump.
“Stay!” Lyf ordered.
It blew out a puff of blue smoke.
“Stay!”
“You forgot about the egg,” Owyn said.
The egg. She had forgotten it. Well, she would tell Yanil about that as well. She would tell him everything, and leave all in his hands. I trust him completely, Kaeldra had said, and so must you.
Lyf stumbled backward, commanding the draclings to stay, until the track took a twist and the stump disappeared behind a clump of bushes. Then,”Quick, Owyn. Run!” she said and, flinging a last, desperate “Stay!” over her shoulder, grabbed Owyn’s hand and bolted.
Scratching sounds behind her. Rustlings.
“Run, Owyn. Faster! ” The draclings were babies; perhaps they were slow. Lyf looked back and saw the whole pack of them behind, rounding the bend in the track. They didn’t seem to be able to fly but… they were fast.
“Run!”
It was no use. One dracling brushed against her boots, and then another, and then they were surging all about her, thrumming, rubbing against her legs. She tripped, sprawled out in the dirt. There was a ripping sound; sharp pain pierced her knee.
Draclings swarmed over her, nuzzling at her back, her neck, her legs, beneath her arms. “Stop it!” Lyf said. “I don’t have any food! Not in me and not out of me.” The tears started at the backs of her eyes and just kept on coming. “And Kaeldra’s gone and she might be hurt and I miss my mama and the hunters are looking for us and my knee pains me and you ripped my kirtle and I’m hungry! I’m hungry too!” Now the sobs were coming; they engulfed her words and racked her chest. She gave herself up to them, pressed her face into the dirt, and wept.
Lyf wept until she was all wept out, until there were no tears left within her. Through her last, quavery sobs, she was dimly aware that she no longer heard the draclings. She no longer felt them. They weren’t poking at her now.
Lyf wiped her face on her sleeve, looked up.
A ring of draclings surrounded her, heads cocked quizzically to one side. Owyn moved toward her, patted her head as if she were a favorite dog. “There now, Auntie Lyf,” he said. “There now.”
Lyf snuffled, breathed in a ragged breath.
Well. They were together now—all of them—until they reached Yanil’s farm.
Then he would shoulder the load.
Harper’s Tale
They were not taken to the dungeon—Kaeldra and Jeorg and this most excellent of harpers. They were feted with meats and pastries, and put up in comfort. But iron bars barricaded the window, and guards stood outside the door.
They were led into the presence of the queen, who was soft with them until they refused to lead her to dragons, and then became hard. Angry, she returned them to the barred and guarded room.
And one of the bars was loose.
CHAPTER 8
Sign of The Dove
They were all day trekking through the forest. Lyf went back for the egg, then made her way east as well as she could. Rain squalls came and went, but often, between them, golden shafts of light pierced the canopy of needlecone trees, showing the direction of the sun. It was quiet, save for scattered birdcalls and the sounds of their own making. Lyf’s fears of bounty hunters and soldiers, of wolves and holt cats receded to an anxious niggling at the edges of her mind. She had enough to fret about with trying to find Yanil—and food. The craving in her belly was constant and, even if she could have forgotten her own hunger, Owyn and the draclings never let her forget theirs.
When they weren’t plaguing her for food, the draclings romped through the underbrush, flushing out birds and stripemonks and twitchmice. Their falconlike talons seemed too big for their bodies. Like puppies. They ran like puppies too, Lyf thought—stiffly, clumsily, and yet with an odd buoyant lightness to their gait. Though they often flapped their wings, never did she see them fly—or even attempt it. They thrashed in playful skirmishes, nipping, clouting with their tails, huffing out clouds of sparks and smoke. Once Lyf marked a tiny lick of blue flame out of the corner of her eye; she turned to see fire winking along a low grapebush branch. Quickly she stomped it out, scolding the draclings. Thank the heavens all was sodden, or they might set the forest ablaze! She worried too that some of them might get hurt in this rough play, might be burned or bitten or clawed. Yet none seemed to come to harm. They walked away from their battles swaggering like byre cats who’ve caught a mouse-tremendously pleased with themselves.
Lyf fretted more for Owyn, who had no fear of the draclings and would join in their play, despite Lyf’s scoldings and pleadings. The draclings seemed to tolerate him; never did they willfully nip or thrash him. Still, Owyn received his share of inadvertent thumpings, and more than once was knocked fiat. From time to time he found a stick and shook it at them, shouting. The draclings fled crashing into the bushes, then peered out between the leaves. Lyf wondered if they were humoring him. She wondered if they spoke to Owyn, too, but when she asked him about it, he only held his head and said,”It sparkles!” At least they seemed to have helped his throat-ill. He still coughed fitfully, but not nearly so often as before his night in the warm.
How the draclings had survived for so long without their mothers, Lyf did not know. Though often they bounded after small forest creatures, only twice, in Lyf’s seeing, did they catch one. And that was not near enough food. Of birds they took no notice; once a whitchil lit on a dracling’s back ridge, but never a move did he make to catch it.
They disdained the few half-ripe corberries Lyf found, and refused as well the stray milgrum cloves she dug up. But once, they nosed out a nest of chirp bugs and bounded after the hopping insects, crunching happily whenever they caught one. Another time, Lyf found a store of nuts in a tree bole—a hoard of some squirrel gone from its nest. She was sharing these with Owyn when the draclings came romping toward her. They knocked the nuts out of Lyf’s hands, captured them in their talons, devoured them shells and all. Their teeth were small and thickly set, sharper than needles at their tips. Lyf and Owyn could only watch helplessly, fearing for their fingers.
Lyf tried to count the draclings and came out with a different tally each time. At last she counted thirteen three times running—and deemed that close enough. They did not all look to be the same age. Jeorg had said, now Lyf remembered, that they came from different clutches. The three small, byre cat-sized draclings were covered in the soft skins Lyf had marked before.
In full daylight, she could see that the skins were split in places, and tiny scales showed through. She guessed that they would soon shed. Then there was a middle group of six, who seemed nearly of an age. They were mottle-hued, in sundry shades of red and green. The four fox-sized draclings seemed eldest. Their scales, more even in tone than those of the others, glittered in the shifting forest light. The hard, bony ridges above their eyes made them look comically fierce.
Lyf wearied as the day wore on. The egg hung heavy on her neck and made it ache. Often Owyn would stop, refusing to go on unless she carried him, and she would lug him as Car as she could. She still tried to take her bearings from the slanting of the sun shafts between showers and so wend their way to the east. But the branches wove an ever tighter fabric overhead, and the lower she came down the mountain, the thicker grew the new foliage. Spring had come earlier here than at home. Soon, the forest was filled with a watery green light that gave no hint as to direction.
And ever she was hungry.
She walked slowly now, uncertain of her course. East of the mountains, Kaeldra had said. But that covered a lot of land. Lyf set down the egg and climbed up into a tree, admonishing Owyn not, on pain of death, to budge. She pulled herself up onto a low bough, then climbed higher, branch to branch, until the boughs would no longer support her. She could see farther here; the branches webbed more thinly across the sky. Yet still, it was all trees. Only trees.
No—wait.
Something gray across the sky—a faint, twisting thread of woodsmoke. Lyf strained to see whence it arose and thought she made out a clearing in the distance. It must be a clearing, she thought. It must be Yanil’s farm. Had to be.
It was not terribly far, that smoke. And it arose from nearly due east.
It was twilight when they came to the clearing. Lyf was listless from hunger, bone-weary from the hard-slogging walk. A blister on her left heel smarted; a bruise on her right knee ached. Owyn had cried to be carried more and more often; the egg seemed to grow ever heavier until it hung like an anvil from her neck. The smallest draclings lagged far behind—all but a little one who had hooked her talons into the weave of Lyf’s cloak and climbed up onto her shoulders. A female it was—Lyf could tell by the greeny-blue scales that peeked out through the rents in its hide. The dracling was surprisingly light, and warmed Lyf’s neck. But when its long tail wasn’t whipping about, pummeling Lyf’s arms, the little dracling was nuzzling in close, breathing smoke in Lyf’s face. She’s going to set my hair afire, I know it, Lyf thought. She had tried gently to shrug the dracling off, but the litde one only dug in with her talons, piercing clear through cloak and kirtle to bare skin. At last Lyf had given up trying to dislodge her and had wound the dracling’s tail like a muffler about her neck.
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