A Sending of Dragons

by Jane Yolen

  Jakkin sent a quick burst of color toward Sssasha, which she returned with a rainbow.

  “Likkarn seemed to manage some kind of connection with them,” Golden continued. “Even claimed he could understand them. I said he was a good guesser.”

  “Very good guesser,” Akki said, laughing.

  Golden rubbed his nose with his forefinger. “Of course, maybe there’s more to it than I know.” He said it carefully.

  Akki looked at Jakkin, her eyes widening.

  “Maybe,” said Jakkin. “And maybe not. As your wards we won’t be answering questions, or so you said.”

  “That’s right,” Golden answered. “That’s what I said.”

  “Then what comes next?” Jakkin asked.

  “I’ll take you back to the nursery farm now,” said Golden. “If you’re ready to come.”

  “We’re ready,” Jakkin said.

  Akki nodded her agreement and reached down to pick up the hatchling, who had been lying against her ankles. The hatchling snuggled into her arms, its tail looped around her wrist.

  Jakkin watched Golden and Akki climb into the copter. He walked over to Auricle and placed his hands on either side of her broad head.

  “Thou beauty,” he sent. “Try thy wings once more and, if thee will, follow the others to the place where we live, the nursery. It will be a safe place for thee and thy eggs.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Whether she came to the farm or stayed in the world, she was free of the tyranny of the caves. That was all that mattered now.

  Climbing into the copter, Jakkin sat behind Akki in a seat that seemed much too soft for comfort. Golden turned and showed him how to buckle his seat belt across his lap. Then he turned back to the copter console. As the great machine engine started up the noise was deafening.

  Golden shouted, his voice barely rising above the churring of the rotors, “We won’t be able to talk much until we’re down again. Too loud.” He pointed to the ceiling, then bent to fiddle with the controls, a panel of winking, blinking lights that reminded Jakkin of fighting dragons’ eyes.

  Jakkin put his hand on Akki’s shoulder and their minds touched, a clear, clean, silent meeting. Then he looked out the window as the copter rose into the air. Austar stretched out below him in great swatches of color. He could see the dark mountain with its sharp, jagged peaks and the massive gray cliff faces pocked with caves. He could see tan patches of desert where five ribbons of blue water fanned out from the darker blue of a pool, and the white froth of the waterfall. Running into the waterfall was a blue-black river that gushed from the mountainside like blood from a wound.

  He sent a message to Akki full of wonder and light. “This. . . this is true dragon sight, Akki. We’re like dragons in flight above our world.”

  Mind-to-mind they talked of it all the way back to the nursery and home.

  Turn the page for an exciting early look at the fourth Pit Dragon novel

  DRAGON’S HEART

  Excerpt from Dragon’s Heart copyright © by Jane Yolen

  All rights reserved.

  1

  NIGHT.

  Soon it would be Dark-After, when nobody could go outside without dying of the cold. Dark-After, nothing after. Everyone on Austar IV knew that. Only crazy people, no-hopers, or weeders went out once the bone-chill settled in. And they all died.

  Jakkin left the cozy bondhouse and its sleeping inhabitants, tiptoeing down the gravelly path to the dragons’ incubarn. He was neither crazy nor suicidal. He knew that the deadly cold of Dark-After wouldn’t bother him. Not anymore. He’d been protected from its effects since the awful day he’d had to shelter in his dying dragon’s egg chamber. That experience had changed him forever. He didn’t know why. It had been something in the blood of the chamber, Akki said. Something in the dragon’s blood.

  Jakkin knew that once he got away from the bondhouse, no one could follow him at night. Except Akki, of course, for she’d sheltered with him that day inside the dragon. She was now as impervious to the cold as he.

  He felt the chill on his cheeks, on his hands, but it was more of a tickle, a tingle, than a searing cold. Above him, in their red phase, the twin moons of Austar sailed across the sky, leaving a trail of crimson behind.

  Almost, Jakkin thought, as if they were scribbling a coded warning. Staring up at the luminescent sky, he added, A warning written in blood.

  Suddenly, he wished he could read that warning. But he could only guess what it meant. If he and Akki didn’t keep the secret of the dragon’s egg-chamber blood from the rest of the people, there was certain to be a holocaust. He could easily imagine all of the female dragons on the planet being slaughtered just so people could have the gifts of the chamber. One slip of his tongue—or of Akki’s—and dragons’ blood would be on their hands. The blood of all the dragons of Austar IV.

  He reached the round incubarn. The door squawled as he opened it and the heat—a constant thirty-four degrees Celsius—smacked him in the face. He might be impervious to the Dark-After cold, but his body still knew the difference.

  An answering squeal came from the stalls where hen dragons were bedded down with their new dragonlings, the babies peeping and piping their distress at being awakened.

  Quickly, Jakkin went past them, careful to keep his thoughts quiet. No need to disturb them any more than this, for the hens might stand and stomp their feet, challenging him, and inadver tently hurt some of their broods. He wasn’t interested in any of them, anyway. Instead, he was heading to one of the back stalls, where a single dragon lay, quarantined, a wild female, or so everyone at the nursery thought. He and Akki had returned with her, but she was very much a part of the secret. As a hen who’d lost a brood, she would be kept another week to ten days in the incubarn.

  He reached the stall and peered in through the bars.

  “Auricle,” he whispered to the pale red dragon inside.

  Lifting her head in recognition, Auricle sent him a rainbow image, tentative, in shades of gray.

  That was how she spoke—how all dragons spoke—with rainbow swirls and pictures, mind to mind. How Jakkin and Akki could speak now. The second gift of the egg chamber. He picked up Auricle’s sending, shot color through it, and sent it back: You are fine, little mother. Though she wasn’t fine. Not yet. She’d lost her first clutch of eggs a week ago, and had nearly lost her life as well. But he knew—because Akki had assured him—that someday Auricle would be able to breed again, have eggs again, and raise a brood of dragonlings.

  Opening the stall door, Jakkin went in. He knelt by her side and scratched behind her ears. All dragons loved that, and Auricle was no exception. She thrummed her pleasure, the throbbing pulse going through her and right up his arm and into his body.

  But even as the little pale dragon thrummed to him, Jakkin’s thoughts were elsewhere. In the short week since he and Akki had returned to the nursery with Auricle and her boisterous cousins, so much had happened, he could hardly deal with it all. It was why he’d been coming out every night at Dark-After, to get away from the bondhouse.

  To think.

  To remember.

  Jakkin put his back against the dragon’s broad shoulder, recalling the day when the copter had rescued them from the mountains and the murderous trogs.

  Auricle stirred uneasily when Jakkin thought about the trogs. She stretched out one pale wing, then snapped it shut again.

  Worm waste! Jakkin cursed himself. He didn’t mean to disturb her. Closing his eyes determinedly, he put all that out of his mind.

  Think of the first day back here, he told himself, remembering how the copter had set down in the front yard of the nursery. The wind from its twirling blades had raised such a dust storm in the yard, they’d all had to squint till the big machine was turned off and the whirling dust settled.

  Home . . . Akki had sent him that message as they landed, accompanying it with a soft swirl of color.

  He hadn’t dared send back anything to her, in case it made hi
m cry. Men didn’t cry. At least not in front of the bonders.

  As he and Akki had climbed down from the copter, the shock of the familiar gates, the wood and stones of the dragonry and incubarns, had been overwhelming. After all, it had been a year since he and Akki had been home. They’d been living as oudaws, exiles in the mountains—running, hiding. Jakkin often had dreamed of such a homecoming in that long year, but he never believed it would actually happen.

  Then, he remembered, the door of the bunkhouse had opened suddenly, and out had come.Kkarina, the fat cook, to see what brought the copter to their yard. Copters, being made of metal—an off-world construction, because Austar was metal-poor—rarely made an appearance at any rural nursery. Wiping her hands on her long apron, Kkarina left dark stains on the white cloth, stains that could have been either takk or blood. He remembered that he’d licked his lips, just thinking about the dark, hot takk, the taste of it a vivid recollection.

  “Golden!” Kkarina had cried, recognizing the pilot. “What are you doing—” And then—seeing Jakkin and Akki—she’d stopped, gasped, her face turning an alarming crimson. Without warning, she burst into tears. Then she gathered them up in her massive arms, which threatened to break bones and bring bruises.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” she said over and over. “Oh, oh, oh.” Without letting go of either of them, till Akki laughed.

  “You’re crushing me, Kkarina!”

  “Oh, oh, oh,” the dark-haired cook said, but let them go.

  Old Balakk, the plowman, was just coming in from the fields with his helper. He spotted them and began complaining even before he was close enough to be heard. “All those days of mourning . . .,” he started, “and me hardly able to work thinking about you dead out there in the mountains in the cold. Little Jakkin, Little Akki.” Though, of course, neither of them were little and hadn’t been for quite some time.

  “I know, and we apologize for being both alive and well,” Akki had said to him, but smiling to take away the sting of it.

  Jakkin chuckled, remembering how confused Balakk had looked. Jakkin must have sent some of this memory to Auricle, because she suddenly moved behind him and sent a stuttering bit of color into his mind, like a laugh.

  “It was funny,” he told her out loud, then with another sending.

  For a while, they occupied each other with the colorful laughs. Auricle settled down again, and Jakkin lay back against her broad flank, remembering more of their homecoming.

  Slakk and Erikkin—Jakkin’s closest friends—had seemed both surprised and delighted at first to see them. Slakk had even tried pumping Jakkin for information about where they’d stayed all the while they’d been hiding in the mountains, but Jakkin deftly sidestepped all of his questions. If Slakk guessed that Jakkin and Akki could remain outside in Dark-After, there’d be even more questions. Questions answered always led to more questions. Eventually, the secret of the dragon’s blood would be out.

  So Jakkin told Slakk about caves with doors, which was both true and not true. True that there’d been caves with doors, but not true that they had found those caves right away.

  “Always lucky,” Slakk said, in that jealous way he had. As if living apart for a year was, somehow, luckier than living in comfort in the nursery.

  “Luck—if you count it so,” Jakkin answered, and then had to define his terms and explain some more, and all the while being careful not to say too much. It was exhausting.

  In the end, Slakk seemed satisfied, if still jealous, but Erikkin had seemed to tire of their banter and had gone off, almost as if sulking, which was unlike him.

  Jakkin found him later on his bunk, his face turned toward the wall.

  “Erikkin,” he said, reaching a hand to his friend, searching Erikkin’s mind, which, of course, remained closed to any sending.

  Erikkin had shrugged him off, and Jakkin had left the bunkroom, puzzled. A year ago they’d been close. But now Erikkin seemed changed.

  In fact, everything at the nursery seemed changed—in the nursery and in the world around him. Some good changes, and some quite terrifying, with more—he was sure—to come. His year in the wild had taught him that: Never think things are going to stay the same.

  Sitting in the barn in the dark, Auricle sleeping peacefully behind him, Jakkin finally had to admit that he and Akki had been changed the most of all. He only hoped that they had the courage to do what must be done in the days ahead . . . for themselves and for the dragons of Austar IV.