Dragonstar (Dragonfriend Book 4)

by Marc Secchia

  The Tourmaline glanced about rapidly. “Reports?”

  “All fingers and toes intact,” said Elki. “Makani is wounded. Mizuki took some damage back there.”

  “Bruised, mostly my ego,” said Mizuki, chortling up a cloud of smoke.

  “Minor wounds,” said Makani, but the Tourmaline was already winging to her, assessing the stiffness in her left wing. Wrenched primary joint, most likely.

  Sumio rumbled, “My right foot hurts. Took a glancing ice strike on the ankle. Feels frozen.”

  “Get it warm. Now,” ordered Imaytha. She smoothed down her fiery hair, still crackling with the electrical charge which had built up in her body. “Let’s make for that third Island. I think I see the smoke of a settlement there.”

  Noting how the Queen cradled her hands, Grandion called, Hualiama –

  Aye, my Dragon.

  Hualiama peered over Shayitha’s head to Imaytha, seated in the third position ahead of Sumio. “Injuries?”

  Imaytha began, “I don’t –”

  “Never a more beautiful liar,” Prince Qilong put in, drawing a flash of anger from the Queen.

  Unstrapping her legs efficiently, Hualiama stepped down the single row of spine spikes above Grandion’s shoulders and upper torso, summoning up Dragonsoul’s budding knowledge of healing, even though she knew she shared abilities with her Shapeshifter Dragoness. Or, did she? Pushing speculation aside, she knelt beside the Queen, clasping her forearm with one hand while resting the other upon Sumio’s knee.

  “Grandion, please form a localised thermal shield for me, encasing his leg,” she said. “Sumio, that’s going to hurt, but I think you’ll be fine. I’ll soothe your pain once the blood flow picks up. Queen Imaytha, we need to work on –” Crack! She laughed over the woman’s mumbled apology as electricity sparked between them. The Queen’s wealth of red hair settled upon her shoulders like a river of fire. “Alright. We need to work on focal points for the safe emission of magic. Speak to any of the Dragons. It’s a technique that’ll save your poor hands next time.”

  Imaytha whispered, “There’s a cure –”

  “Aye. No. Learn to use your powers properly,” Lia ordered. Then, she saw the amusing side of her peremptory tone. “And I’ll have none of your backchat, o Queen!”

  The Immadian’s eyes sparkled. “Practising being a despotic Dragoness, are we?”

  “Best form of government,” Lia averred, over her companions’ snorts of laughter and general ribbing.

  Meantime, the Tourmaline scanned his environs, dividing his attention between the pleasant tingling of his scales caused by the outpouring of Hualiama’s healing power, which she still struggled to control, and the lay of the Isles and the location of any potential enemies. How could a hatchling possess such power? That was the conundrum she represented. Imaytha was wrong about the settlement; she had only seen the thin grey plume of an active fumarole. There was, however, a village on the second Island over, admirably disguised amongst the snows. His Dragon sight picked out the steep pitch of roofs covered in snow, and walls of ice surrounding a roughly oval enclosure of perhaps thirty buildings.

  For the benefit of the Humans, Grandion pointed with his right fore-talon. “There’s the village. Try not to scare them, Dragons.”

  “Is he serious?” Shayitha yelled.

  “I thought you enjoyed Immadian understatement?” Lia threw back over her shoulder, concentrating on Sumio’s leg. “I really don’t understand your concerns. After all, Grandion’s only twice the height of any of their houses.”

  The Princess chortled gruffly. “He’s a fluffy terhal chick.”

  Grrrrrr.

  Then, with a mental alert to the Tourmaline, Hualiama ran down to his tail and took a planned slingshot over to Makani’s back – complete with a triple somersault that reminded him poignantly of Flicker; the grown-up Flicker who had given his life for the Dragonfriend. Grandion’s left forepaw clenched in a draconic bravery-salute. May he never forget.

  Meantime, Brazo and Isiki leaned out unnecessarily to steady her landing. Brazo’s throat worked as he evidently considered the wisdom of turning somersaults in the sky five miles above the Cloudlands. Grandion chuckled to himself as he led the small Dragonwing down toward a landing in the field of snow beside the village. They had so much to learn. The Dragonfriend knew Dragons. And here, Jin watched her with a different type of hunger to before, the Tourmaline noted. The hunger of a boy for the fires that raged daily within him, mounting higher and higher …

  The stockade was well built, sheltered in the lee of a long ridge that led down from the Island’s trio of peaks. Despite the Isle’s small size, perhaps two square miles, he noted some good ground cover, hardwood forests on the white slopes and a lake some five hundred feet in circumference where the fishermen had cut holes in the thick ice. A broken-down Dragonship lay on the ground beside a stand of dark-leafed coniferous evergreens, half-buried in snow. His sharp eyes detected animal tracks which had been brushed away near a crevasse in that ridge, which might give away the fact that these people were herders, and concerned about Dragonish appetites.

  Well. Amplifying his voice with a touch of his Storm power, Grandion shook the village with a cry, “WE COME IN PEACE!”

  Excellent. That started a small avalanche down the nearest peak. He swaggered into a landing in the snowfield, concealing a wince as his hindquarters twinged. That had been a heavy blow, but male Dragons wore their bruises and scars proudly.

  Within, Lia said quietly, Especially when a Star Dragoness is watching?

  Grandion raised his paw. “Queen Imaytha? Princess Shayitha?”

  They scrambled out of their saddles, groaning a little as they first stretched, and then stepped down into his proffered paw. Hualiama, naturally, ran lightly down Makani’s hindquarters and performed a gymnastic piked somersault into the snow. Why the showing off? Did he sense a slow pulse of fear through their oath-connection? Dark-fires regret? It must be because she had used a Dragon Hater power.

  Privately, he said to her, You did right in trying the Command-hold. We will keep searching for these elusive Dragon-kin.

  I fear I’ve warned them against us.

  He nodded. When you treat with the Human chief, offer the help of Dragons if that’ll be a boon. Perhaps they seek to see long-lost kin on other Islands, or to trade.

  Or perhaps they’ll be furious at the absence of Immadians from these territories for forty years, Hualiama rebutted lightly. Or they’ll fear invasion and a new royal hegemony over their lives. We’ll see.

  I shall be the shadow of your wings, Grandion averred.

  To his senses, she quivered slightly, experiencing an emotion he did not understand. I … thank you, Dragon.

  So chary; notes of melancholy. Why?

  After depositing the Immadian royals in their familiar snows, and helping the wounded warrior Sumio to dismount, Grandion lifted his narrowed eyes to the snowfields, the peaks and the skies, remembering the silvery laughter and the slight, molten-glass sheen Hualiama had shown him in her memories. Chrysolitic Dragons. Why were they being so cautious?

  What was that line of white on the northern horizon? He had not noticed before, but a slight break in the cold-haze out there, just beneath the lowering crescent of the Jade Moon and a talon’s-width wide of the rising bulk of Yellow, which allowed his eyes contrast enough to make the distinction, was a line of silvery-white. Not an Island, surely?

  To Hualiama, he said, I’ll fly high to scout.

  She thought, ‘Be careful, Dragonlove,’ but what she said was, Good. Keep us informed, Grandion. May you soar as the mightiest of Dragons to all the Islands of your life.

  What a benediction!

  * * * *

  Inside the village, the houses were two-thirds sunk into the ground, warmed and served by a system of subterranean pipes leading from a hot spring a quarter-mile east of the village. Positively civilised, Hualiama decided, glancing about the company gathered in the ‘long room
’, or the villagers’ meeting place. Body heat helped, too. She had attracted many a curious stare for her barefoot, lightly-clad appearance – that explanation had yet to come. Queen Imaytha had already described the purpose, and more importantly, certain purposes that were not intended by their visit, to the visible relief of many of the fur-clad villagers either sitting cross-legged on cushions placed on the floor, which was covered with thick animal hide over rushes, or on the low internal seats built against the walls. Now, the village Elder, Tanru, held court, seated cross-legged on a ceremonial couch at the head of their gathering. He methodically tamped astiki herb into his pipe. The smoke was healthy, apparently. Having made a song and a dance of lighting the pipe, he drew the smoke deeply and with visible pleasure into his lungs, before passing the pipe to Imaytha. The Queen puffed gravely, and passed it on to her sister.

  Tanru’s face seemed to burst with wrinkles as he smiled broadly, but far from appearing wizened, he had the cheerful, rosy-cheeked weathering of a man much used to the bitter outdoors, and his wrinkles proclaimed a mouth and eyes much accustomed to smiling. His ninety-three years of age made him one of the oldest persons she had ever met.

  “Royal occasion,” he chirped, in an accent even more chock-full of exotic vowels and mysteriously swallowed consonants than even the Queen managed. “Quite bowled us over, Queen Imaytha. I had the privilege of meeting your grandsire on a few occasions, back in my army days. Then, I met my love Tonarya and followed her here. Made our homes in this good village, we did. Married seventy-two years, we were, the summer she passed on. That was – now, I don’t rightly remember …”

  “Four years ago this summer,” one of the younger men put in, clearly Tanru’s relative. “My grandmother,” he added, although he was clearly in his late forties.

  “Aye, she were a woman of the axe!” Tanru said, patting his weapon fondly.

  “The axe!” said every Islander in the room, as if this were a ritual.

  “Now, by Immadior’s own scales, you bring us good news?” the old man inquired, querulously. “We’d given up all hope of the trade routes ever opening. Look, you explained it all nicely, girlie –”

  “Great-grandfather, that’s the Queen!” piped a child’s voice.

  “She’s a sprite. Hardly older than you, Aluki. Aluki’s going to be a mighty woman among the people,” he beamed. The girl could barely have been seven years of age, but she stood straight as eyes turned to her, and her eyes were the clear azure of the skies above the village. “She’s already a Scale-Summoner and a fine Story-Weaver.”

  Hualiama said, “What is a Scale-Summoner?”

  “Aluki?” Tanru prompted.

  The clear eyes turned to Hualiama. She was as blonde as Human-Lia, and even though she appeared to be a favourite, there seemed to be no conceit in her. She said, “Lady … ah, Princess – are your ears really pointy?”

  “Aluki!” Tanru reproved. “Mind on the conversation. She’s such a dreamer. Excuse her rudeness, Princess.”

  Hualiama said, “Your questions are welcome, Aluki. My father hailed from Fra’anior, which is a mighty volcano very far to the south from here. My mother came from the East. That’s a long story, but I suppose you could say I have my … my father’s ears.” Those ears burned as her voice hitched. If the ears, then what else of Ra’aba’s might she have inherited? “All of my people have pointy ears. Most are tall, like my brother Elki here, but I seem to have inherited my mother’s height.”

  “And, Princess Hua … Hualily?”

  “Call me Lia.”

  “How can you stand to walk barefoot in the snow, Princess Lia?”

  “I’m a warm-blooded person from a volcano,” she said. “I don’t feel the cold, because – it’s a bit complicated.”

  Aluki stamped her foot. “You adults always say that when you’re hiding something. Tell the truth!”

  Over the gasps that followed this pronouncement, Lia smiled tightly and said, “True. I was wondering how to tell you, but I see you’re a clever girl, so I’ll just tell you straight out. Just like Queen Imaytha told you that there’s a new kind of bond between Dragons and Humans, I am a new kind of Dragon. Imagine if you could grow wings and –”

  “Liar!”

  Hualiama gaped at the little girl, distressed. Would people always react like this? The prurient curiosity writ on the faces around the room, turning to shock and horror as what she had claimed began to sink in. Disbelief. Anger. Hands stealing to axes … what she saw as beautiful, they saw as a perversion. The sensation crystallised in her gut as a creeping malaise that twisted her like a Fra’aniorian python crushing its prey. Ghastly. Her salvation was her downfall; the exquisitely unthinkable beauty of her soul’s reincarnation was indeed unthinkable, a harbinger of the curses and superstitious hand signs against evil that surrounded her overheated person now. Grief-rage torched her being. All was a raging white-fires inferno, the awareness of a world scribed in newness … unbearable pressure clamping her temples …

  Elki said, “Let me explain –”

  Hatred! Expletives, bared like axe-blades against her person! Pain seared soul-deep.

  “There’s nothing to explain,” Hualiama said, clamping down on the hot, nauseating surge of emotions that threatened her sanity. “I’m not even ruddy Human anymore – how is that right, Elki? I’m a Shapeshifter Dragoness! How can you even claim to be my brother? We’re different – different freaking species!”

  He said, “You are my sister!”

  Faces twisted behind him.

  “I’m leaving! I’m obviously not welcome in this village.” Pausing in the doorway, she turned to the little blonde girl, standing where Hualiama had left her, ambushed by the febrile emotions swilling about in the room. “I’m sorry, Aluki, but I spoke the truth and I applaud your courage in demanding it. You’ve done nothing wrong … only me. What’s wrong is … all … me.”

  She ran into the coolness of the afternoon, emerging beneath the low eaves. She tried to trigger a transformation, but her Dragonsoul refused. No!

  Take me. Curse it, Dragonsoul, why don’t you take what you’ve always wanted?

  Hualiama, what is this all about? Her Dragoness asked gently, but she resisted.

  Take me! Consume me!

  No, not like this. I don’t want … I never wanted … Humansoul, what are you doing? Her manifestation gripped the red Nuyallith blade in her fingers, pointing it inward with hands trembling so hard, she feared to miss her chest entirely. Dragonsoul panicked! No! No, no …

  I’m the freak no-one ever wanted! cried the girl, crazed with the forces ripping into her soul. So much suppressed, for so many years. Too much suffered. Too much death. The eruption, unleashed, could now only spill its load of searing lava. How can I be like her? Tell me that! Tell me! I’m like Azziala, aren’t I? How long before this ruzal captures my soul, and destroys all – I want to die!

  No, Lia. We don’t want this. We don’t want to die, the inner voice cried urgently. Don’t hurt us, please. This isn’t the right way. We’re more, together –

  Please? Look at what you’ve made me; you soul-assassin, you fire-bullying, ravaging spirit … I’ve linked Azziala with a Star Dragoness! I’ve corrupted starlight itself! This is so wrong. Perverse …

  As she raged, she suddenly turned the magic about, trying to prevent her second-soul’s emergence. Her fingers turned white-knuckled on the blade’s tang, and her muscles locked in readiness in her arms and back.

  The Dragoness screamed, BLUE-STAR, NO!

  The Shapeshifter Dragoness burst into being with a terrible shock, so hard and fast that her souls reverberated like gongs resounding within gongs. The blade pierced as a spear-point heated so that a blacksmith could hammer and shape it, but the cut it described was shallow, en route to falling into the hard-packed snow. Humansoul, you are loved!

  Her second-soul sobbed wildly, flinging herself upon that white bed in their soul space as she screamed into a pillow, over and over, Let me die! L
et me die!

  I love you! You are loved; you are my beloved! Don’t cry, dear heart. We’ll get through this together.

  I can’t bear to live with this burden – I can’t breathe!

  Shh, dear one.

  I just – I need … air …

  She pawed at her throat, heaving and choking even though the sensation was purely in the emotional-spiritual realm, but it manifested as a physical debility. Did she really become such a mess, such a broken thing, when the terrace lakes of her soul finally burst?

  Suddenly, Dragoness-Hualiama was aware of flying, but of being pulled into her soul space at the same time. She approached her abject Humansoul until she stood at the threshold of their colonnaded bedstead. How could she comfort her? How deeply, and how bravely she had bottled up these fears, yet they cut to the very pith of her living soul. The child her living mother had wished dead out of grief and sheer spite; a babe born in violation, one who by any natural and magical laws in the Island-World, ought to have died, but had not. Where had her soul spent those days between death and life?

  She became aware of a hovering white presence, but that was also the instant that blonde-Lia leaped off the bed and screamed, “And you? You abandoned your eggs! You’ve nothing, nothing at all to say to me, as far as I’m concerned!”

  Unholy windrocs! Fist-shaking, veins pulsing, Humansoul as enraged as she had ever seen herself.

  With a sound like an ethereal sob, Istariela vanished.

  After a pause of terrible duration, the girl, clad as always in deep blue, turned to her Dragonsoul, and hung her head. “I’m … I didn’t mean to chase our shell-mother off. Sorry.”

  Now, her control was a frightening prospect. Dragoness-Lia almost preferred the authenticity of that overwhelming grief-song, than to be faced with a soul sister who trembled as if the slightest breath of wind might knock her over, yet wrapped her core in adamantine strength. Delicately, she advanced, “What say you, we take turns at slapping our mothers?”