Dragonstar (Dragonfriend Book 4)

by Marc Secchia

  Beautiful Humansoul, interrupted that warm voice, with a crackle of inner bonfires, I am hardly the feral-head you take me for. And I do listen to us – mostly. Ahem. Stop laughing this instant, you scabby-kneed miscreant. So I lied; what of it? Here’s what I’m thinking …

  Hualiama rose from her seat, which a purple-clad valet instantly adjusted for her. “Queen Imaytha, I would like to reveal a secret of my nature. We have fought and died for your people of Immadia – but apparently, this is not enough. I know we brought a scourge to your shores, but if you had seen the suffering and dying of the war in the East, you would know that not even the farthest Islands would have survived Numistar’s rule. Worse is to come, is my assurance to you. Now …” Reaching up, she began to unpin her braids. “Did you notice anything unusual about my hair?”

  The three Immadian Commanders and the Princess made strangled noises of astonishment and affront, but the Queen was diplomacy personified. Quelling them with a glance, she rose in her turn. “We Immadians also have this blonde colouration, which is common in the North, but not the striking sapphire blue. I cannot imagine how you produced that colour.”

  “It’s natural.”

  “Intriguing,” Imaytha offered smoothly. Her sister’s scowl threatened to ignite kindling soaked in a rainstorm.

  With a brittle smile, Lia added, “O Queen, will you smell my hair?”

  Not even those dainty, ethereally beautiful features could disguise her surprise now. The Immadian Queen glided forward, faltered, and then took a double-handful of multi-coloured hair in her hands and bent to inhale deeply. She said nothing, but her alert Dragon senses clued Lia in to the slight quivering of the pulse in her neck. Aye, this Enchantress was more than intrigued. She was bursting like the proverbial curious dragonet.

  “Now, feel my brow.”

  The cool fingers touched, then leaped back. The Queen bit her lip. “Oh. What is – Princess?” Close to her ear, the Immadian Enchantress whispered, “You should be in your sickbed. Are you feeling quite well?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Hualiama could sense the calculations fizzing through the woman’s mind. All she had seen in the battle’s aftermath. The way Lia had been forced to handle Grandion’s battle-charged madness. She knew Lia possessed magic, but could the Queen imagine the truth? The cinnamon-vanilla scent of a Dragoness that had come to inhabit her hair? The inner fires?

  Lia beckoned to one of the servants. “Could you kindly fetch us a spare tablecloth?”

  Now, the silence pooled as if one of Grandion’s auditory shields had extended around the gathering. Hands froze on goblets. Expressions turned wooden.

  Imaytha touched Hualiama’s forehead a second time, and then closed her eyes as if hearkening to a song only she could hear, a waking daydream that consumed her utterly. The Commanders waited. Slippers scuffed slightly as the servant returned as bid, but the Queen remained motionless. Breathing. Sensing. Imbibing and willing forth what was to be known.

  O IMAYTHA, BEAUTEOUS AURORA OF THE NORTH, WILT THOU BE MINE CHILD’S SHIELD-MAIDEN?

  Both women almost fell over as a mighty draconic voice spoke in an exquisite blink of brevity, yet with the power to shake souls. The amethyst eyes flicked open, lambent with wonder. She gazed upon and into Hualiama with all the gifts of her perception, daring the inmost portals of her being, and knew the unfolding of truth – belief was slower, chasing upon the heels of shock and doubt. A treacherous whiff of laughter tingled upon the tip of her tongue. Oh, Fra’anior! Even he would protect his shell-daughter, for the overtones of his outrage mimicked the tramping of his Island-sized paws.

  She had seen the shroud-like play of the Northern aurora for the first time just last night – but what did the reference to a shield-maiden mean?

  Imaytha whispered, “You are –”

  “You should answer Fra’anior,” she breathed back.

  The Queen made a scandalised hiss.

  She arranged her stage. A tablecloth for her curtain. All male servants to the far side of the room. Any women who wished to observe, to this side. The Commanders elected to stay put, but the Princess was a woman of action and also protective of her sister. Her fists clenched by her sides as she loomed over the Queen’s left shoulder, and her fine blonde eyebrows danced an appalled jig as Hualiama efficiently divested her person of the warm woollen clothes so necessary for every person in this northern climate – every person save a Shapeshifter Dragoness. Clearly, Shayitha thought Lia quite mad.

  Aye, that particular madness of girls who had grown up on the edge of the largest active volcano in the Island-World. Dancing on lava flows. Singing with dragonets. Dreaming with Ancient Dragons …

  “A little space, please.” Lia checked behind herself, swaying as a roaring swelled in her ears. “Ready?”

  Jumping on taboos. It was her favourite pastime, wasn’t it?

  Whomp.

  In an unsubtle explosion of air, she turned into a Dragoness and shouldered the cloth aside. Lia produced her toothiest Dragon smile, purring, “Islands’ greetings, Immadians.”

  The servants scattered with panicked howls; Commander Surzaya fell off her chair.

  I should think so! her Human cheered.

  * * * *

  Grandion stared at Jin, ruffling his wings for the fifth time in their brief conversation. He growled, “This time, the Dragonfriend has gone too far. She breathes fire with another Human, reincarnates a dragonet, wanders into town at night on her own hunting down recruits, flagrantly torments our allies and now … this Dragoness …” His fangs clenched a fireball into nothingness. It did not behove a Dragon of his stature to roast his apprentices, but the temptation was sorely felt. He could not withhold.

  Turning his muzzle to the eggshell-blue afternoon skies, he thundered: HUALIAMA, I BURN!

  Dragons and Humans alike, gathered at the site where they repaired the terrace lake, turned in startlement. Wings flared. A frisky breeze ripped the smoke away from his searing nostrils.

  Jin said, “She’s making Dragons.”

  “Shapeshifters?” asked the Tourmaline, surprised by the wariness in the boy’s manner.

  “We can’t know,” said the Nikuko warrior. “It hasn’t … worked, yet, apart from making the flame inside of me a great deal more insistent. I’m not sprouting wings or scales. And, Dragon –”

  “Aye?”

  “I’m sorry the Dragonfriend hurt you by breathing fire with me. I know you Dragons view this act –” the pitch of Grandion’s belly-fires almost drowned out his words “– very seriously.” Doggedly, he added, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think those were the same fires as your sacred fires.”

  Almost to himself, Grandion puzzled, “Different fires? Soul-fires are sacred, boy, and the creation of new souls – that’s beyond anything that the great and sulphurous Onyx Dragon ever attempted. Do you not understand the ramifications? Hualiama held a fire-soul in stasis within her person and reincarnated it. She breathes the fires of Amaryllion’s inmost draconic life into other lives, and herself manifests an impossible mystery of souls twinned so closely, the very Empress of Dragon Haters could not separate them. These are deep, delicate draconic mysteries. I cannot see how this will end well. At best, it will change the course of our Island-World forever. At worst –”

  “History will wobble like a Dragon hatchling learning to fly?”

  “Aye. What – huh?” snorted Grandion.

  Jinichi pointed with his chin to where night-blue scales flashed against the clouds, approaching from the direction of the mountains. “Can a Dragoness fly flirtatiously, noble Dragon?”

  His gaze seemed pinned to the sky by invisible hooks. Behold, the song of his fires! Grandion was quite aware his every muscle quivered and his jaw hung agape like the most feral-brained of Dragons, but fresh wonder gripped him every time he considered her transformation. Miracle! He must rise to greet this Hualiama clothed in scale and claw.

  “Before you go,” Jin interrupted. “Ca
n you talk to her about … um, Isiki?”

  Grandion paused with his wings held aloft, his thighs painfully bunched in preparation for take-off, thinking dazedly that where the Star Dragoness was concerned, even his body no longer seemed his own. He growled, “What about your beloved? Does she not fly to your compass alone?”

  The boy looked terribly discomfited. “Well, she’s technically still a slave and … uh, Dragon Rider … but, Makani the Grey … do you see?”

  He did see, and it was all that meddlesome Dragoness’ fault. Exactly the sort of love-snarl that was never meant to be, if Makani’s fires burned as he suspected. Grandion growled, “Do you mean that if you change into a Dragon, you must choose between Makani and Isiki? What does your culture say, boy? Are you monogamous?”

  “What? Oh.” Jin scratched his scraggly beard. “We … well, I’m the only Nikuko left, noble Dragon. But we used to have – I am not having this conversation! Makani is a Dragoness and Isiki is, well, Isiki. Slave of Fra’anior apparently, for the price of a rusty dral. What does that signify, Grandion? Am I to be insulted or should I admire the Dragonfriend’s boundless cunning? How do I purchase my Isiki from the Princess? Could you speak to her on a dishonoured warrior’s behalf?”

  No amount of fire-eyes-slit, rumbling, menacing regard appeared to cow this boy’s spirit. He would make a fine Dragon, if and when he changed. Shapeshifter? That was hatchling-nonsense. That privilege was for his Hualiama alone – no, he must not wilfully misunderstand the prophecy, Grandion corrected his errant thoughts sternly. She would mother a whole new race!

  Only the talon-curling question of … how?

  A fiery thought ambushed his mind: If Hualiama shall become the shell-mother of many Shapeshifter Dragons, o Grandion, who will their shell-father be?

  His furnaces roared!

  Angrily, he considered Jin. Did this boy not realise what becoming a Dragon meant? The glory of living fires clothed in magical flesh, and the powers that coalesced in his Blue Dragon consciousness should he even think upon magic? The strength to rise upon the breeze and, as Hualiama had articulated so poignantly, the freedom to fly to every Island of his life?

  That he even entertained such blasphemous thoughts … “I will speak to the Princess,” he declared.

  “Thanks, o noble –”

  Jin ducked; Grandion rocketed into a vertical take-off that left the boy gasping in his dust. Right. Time to take that sassy hatchling in paw before she Dragonship-wrecked everything they had worked and suffered for.

  Silhouetted against a flotilla of puffy white cumulous clouds three miles above, Hualiama waited, flicking her near-transparent wings in a hatchling-swift cadence. Their colour would deepen with age. Grandion’s talons curled with pleasure. The matchless Blue-Star, magnified in his Dragon sight! He stretched his own wings ardently, powering upward with the natural strength of his birthright. He beat the air as if it were water frothed white by a raging waterfall and wrapped his body in aerodynamic magic, resplendent. Just a mite growing strongly into her thirteenth foot of length now, whose talons and spine spikes still exhibited an endearing hatchling-softness … aye, this tiny package of nascent fire-life regarded him coyly askance, her relatively tiny eyes shining a lustrous yellow-white articulated in gently twirling and pirouetting eye-fires. Her wings flutter-beat multiple times, betraying hesitancy as she perhaps considered that Grandion might not slow down – what draconic game might be afoot now?

  Always, that incongruity of a grown woman’s mind and soul inhabiting such a youthful frame. Ever with Hualiama, he reflected to the accompaniment of a disquieting sense of vertigo, appearances masked the most improbable inner truths … and even as he blinked to clear his vision, she was gone. The neat spike of her tail vanished behind a conical cloud-tower, lit from above by a rare fire rainbow touching a small cirrus cloudbank. Rainbows danced where she had fled, intersecting as if embroiled in spirited misbehaviour instigated by a tiny quartet of paws.

  Typical.

  Grandion’s throat constricted. She would keep her soul-shaping fire-gift from him for his protection? How could she claim to love a Dragon, yet reject and rebuke him in this manner?

  Dark-fires mingled with white-fires in his hearts; an intoxicating brew the Tourmaline had tasted all too often since this girl had sung him out of his feral state and into an oath-relationship that flouted every draconic law under the twin suns.

  Rebel to the very nucleus of her fires.

  Turbulent billows of white and apricot sheeted across his sight as he appreciated how it took one rebellious set of wings to know another. With a half-bellicose, half-crooning outpouring of thunderous laughter, Grandion chased the very best of his fires up into the clouds.

  Hualiama!

  Chapter 2: In Pursuit of Dragons

  EVEN SILENCE MIGHT speak grievous words. Thus it was with the silence that embroiled Hualiama and Grandion after their clouds-high conversation that evening, as the twin suns’ splendour burnished the mountains of Immadia to an unbearable pitch of glory. Beauty to defy their mutually felt desolation. The astringent, immedicable despair of three hearts’ burden of grief each.

  Grandion desired those fires for himself. He refused to articulate his desperation, but she knew the fire-pulse of a young, proud Dragon. Her denials, although acceptable by every measure of magic, Balance and logic either of them knew, still burned him like dark-fires. Filthy, unconscionable wounds. How could she breathe more fire, or different fire – or any kind of soul-fire whatsoever – into one who was already a fire-soul? It made no sense. Not for want of trying, which was what wearied her now. Pushed, goaded and argued into action by a Dragon who excelled at that most draconic of character-traits, stubbornness, Hualiama had searched with every scale and fibre of her magical Dragoness-being for that particular curl of Amaryllion’s flame for Grandion, and found nothing.

  Now, she coiled up in her Dragon’s paw and wept soundlessly. She had even quarrelled with her Humansoul. Blonde-haired Lia had stormed off in a metaphorical huff of invisible tears but more than palpable misery.

  How could this be her fate? How?

  A garrotte of depression strangulated her throat. Alone. A failure. The war raged on and she lurked in a forgotten corner of the Island-World while her mother played Empress at Fra’anior, oppressing her people and fitting the noose of absolute domination about every Isle, Human and Dragon alike. How could she find the strength to continue? How could she drag yet more nations to their doom?

  Memories played through her mind. Oaths. Chary looks. That first time Grandion had seen her nude, oh-so Human body and a strange gleam had entered his eye – a gleam not so much avaricious, as desirous of a fruit rightly forbidden to either race. Prophetic weirdness? How squeamish Human-Lia felt remembering that moment, but then she had danced and played with this Dragon, and a completely different side of his character had surfaced. Aye.

  Aye, echoed from within, a place of her heart’s greatest intimacies. Come to me.

  In a flash, not even asleep this time, blue-haired Lia found herself approaching her soul space, where her blonde twin waited. Tapping her bare foot. Scowling. Uh-oh. All was not forgiven.

  The Dragoness hung her head. “Alright. I know I’m being a damp squib. Flirt, then fight. Such a perfectly stylish exemplar of wretchedly Dragonish null-fires behaviour – but I don’t know what to do. I even shouted at you, my precious second-soul, never mind our poor Tourmaline Dragon. I’m sorry. Forgive me?”

  She peered at her second-soul beneath her eyelashes. Phew. Humansoul was steaming like an active fumarole!

  Frustration edged her words as Dragoness-Lia added, “I do apologise in a most undraconic manner, but you know I’m neither the give-up-easily sort of Dragoness, nor do I intend to yield my wing-space to his demands. I’ll only regret it later. Besides, he was yours first. Maybe I should just go back into hibernation –”

  A soft exclamation of laughter startled her into silence. Human-Lia teased, “Are we feeling
sorry for ourselves? Poor baby-waby Dragoness. Come here for kissies and cuddlies?”

  She held out her arms, beckoning with her fingers.

  Too scandalised to allow her anger free reign, Dragoness-Lia huffed instead, “Alright. What are we up to, you rotten royal prankster? And, how is it possible for one aspect of a Shapeshifter’s soul to keep secrets from the other? Or to be so downright … infuriating?”

  “Prepare for my most inscrutably draconic non-response,” Humansoul chirped back.

  Wonder mingled with exasperation and delight framed the harmonious awareness of surprising herself. This was akin to having a friend closer than a twin, who despite their closeness still had her own mind and agendas, sometimes contrary to her own. Peculiar. Appropriate in ways she could not begin to understand. Could one remonstrate with an aspect of one’s own soul? They had certainly managed to dance together, and heal each other.

  Right. If that girl wanted to play with Dragon – all over again …

  Blue-haired Lia chortled, “Fine, go knock yourself out on that lump of gemstone granite-headedness. But I get him back later, alright? No way under any of the five moons, am I letting that chunky Dragon-beauty escape my fire-eye!” She stamped her foot impishly. “He’s mine, mine, mine!”

  “Deal,” said Humansoul, and swirled to the fore.

  * * * *

  “Grandion?” said the beauty ensconced in his paw.

  Gnnrrr-grrr-gnarrr, he grumbled.

  “Oh, Grandion?” she cooed, never more honeyed of tone.

  Gnrrr-rrr, let me mope in peace.

  “O most puissant Tourmaline, I wish to proposition thee,” she tormented him, with a tiny flash of her fangs.

  With a fine snort that celebrated what a beauteous ode to exasperation he found her to be, the Tourmaline growled, GNAARRRR-GNRRR!!

  Dragon-direct, the tiny Star Dragoness sat bolt upright and stated, “Do you recall how our oath-magic appears to follow its own vector and flight, denying even the rules of ordinary draconic magic to link us across time and space, say, between Fra’anior Cluster and the very ends of the East? Thousands of leagues in a heart’s thought?”