Dragon Champion

by E. E. Knight

  “No one is going to use anyone, Starlight!” AuRon said.

  “I remember you from the ship,” Starlight said. “I’d just lost my egg tooth. I saw you still had yours, so I remembered you. That elf let you go. This is some plot of theirs, isn’t it? To get dragons to fight for elves?”

  “If the hominids want to destroy each other in wars, that’s their affair. I want the dragons out of it,” AuRon said.

  “Whoever wins in their war will be the stronger for it,” Starlight said. “Then they’ll put an end to us.”

  The dragons flew in concentric circles, Natasatch inside, AuRon around her, protecting her from another strike, and Starlight around the mated pair.

  “We’ll see,” AuRon said. “Consider this, Starlight. Once the Wyrmmaster’s people did away with elves and dwarves, and probably the blighters as well, what would they need of us? The dragons under their control would be slaughtered like old warhorses for their flesh and hides.”

  “I’d have moved long before that,” Starlight said.

  “You’re too slow. Slower than I,” AuRon said, wondering if he had the strength left.

  “Ha!”

  AuRon flew at Starlight, mouth open and claws out. Starlight sideslipped away, but AuRon still got a mouthful of wing. He tore away the thin skin and banked as he climbed, making sure Starlight didn’t attack Natasatch.

  Starlight screamed in fury and spat fire in AuRon’s wake. It flapped its oversize wings, climbing after AuRon. Starlight rose fast. AuRon summoned what reserves he had, rising up and up, but it seemed every time he looked behind, Starlight’s fangs were closer. Starlight was small, but it was strong and knew how to use its wings.

  They climbed higher into the thin air. The old injury to his lung throbbed. AuRon tasted his own blood with each exhalation, but Starlight was just behind. AuRon looped, thinking his flexibility could allow him to turn over in a tighter circle than his pursuer.

  He was wrong.

  Starlight’s fangs closed on his tail. Liquid fire flowed into his veins. AuRon slammed his rear feet together on his tail, digging his claws into his own flesh, battling pain with more pain. He struck back, snapping at Starlight’s wing joint. Each dragon held the other’s flesh in a death grip, and both began to fall to earth.

  AuRon kicked out with his legs, pulling his own tail off near his haunch. Flesh separated from flesh in a spray of blood. The agony caused him to pull his head up and away from Starlight, taking the wing joint with him.

  He flapped free of Starlight.

  “You die, you die!” the silver screamed as it let go the tail-meat. AuRon had torn the tip from one wing and destroyed the other. Starlight spun on his one wing, in tight circles, unable to balance in flight. AuRon drifted until he saw Starlight break against a mountainside, tumbling along with the stones he loosened to the rocks below.

  “I’m sorry, my brother,” AuRon said. He felt ill with pain and exhaustion, but his legs worked. The poison hadn’t made it into his system before he pulled his tail off. He still feared for himself, he was almost as unbalanced in flight as Starlight, and he began to dive. He shifted his neck this way and that, trying to right himself.

  Natasatch was beside him in a flash. “Hold on to my tail! I’ll pull you.”

  He bit into her tail, and they flew like joined dragonflies. AuRon worked on shaping his wings so he could get along better without the counterweight of his tail. They landed at a glacial pool, and drank.

  “I saw Starlight fall. What happened to your tail?” she said, sniffing at the stump. What was left was no longer than AuRon’s foreleg.

  “It seems fate is determined to see me tailless. Better it than my neck, I suppose. Pulling my own head off wouldn’t have worked as well.”

  Natasatch licked at the thick sludge coating the wound, prruming to comfort her bleeding mate. “Poor Starlight. I tried to be his friend, once, but he was taken before he hatched. The oafs that raised him made him into a blighter, or worse. The Wyrmmaster channeled his viciousness, but couldn’t subdue it.”

  AuRon spat blood and phlegm. “We need food and rest. But I have to see to something first.”

  They flew—awkwardly, in AuRon’s case—to the ruins of the Wyrmmaster’s lodge. The piled stones of the foundation still stood, but both stories and part of the roof were gone. The lodge had collapsed in on itself. The smoke of the fire could be smelled from high in the sky above.

  A few drakes lurked in the woods, watching the fire. They scuttled for cover when AuRon and Natasatch circled the ruin, the strange sight of a tailless dragon frightened them off at the end of this wild day. AuRon spied Wrimere, sitting in his carven chair, staring out at the fjord. A dragon boat, crammed with people and possession, was pulling away from the isle as a dragon circled above.

  “You were the cause of this, they tell me,” the Wyrmmaster said as AuRon landed. Natasatch circled once more overhead, then dropped down beside him.

  “I wasn’t the cause of it. I’m the end of it.”

  The Wyrmmaster looked as though some cavern inside him had collapsed. His hair streamed in the wind, his thick-featured face even more masklike. He looked at AuRon out of the corners of his eyes.

  “I liked you. I liked you from the first. You were a dragon of rare quality. I spoke for you when others warned me against you. I should have known the elves sent you. What will the payoff from the dwarves be, I wonder?”

  “An elf bade me come here. You’re right about that. You’re wrong about everything else, though.”

  “They’ll kill your kind, if they can. The elves and the dwarves. One by one, you’ll dwindle and die. An alliance with men against them was your last chance.”

  “The things you were raising here weren’t real dragons. It was no solution to the dilemma of dragons. Just another problem. If dragons, with all their gifts, are to die, it’ll be the fault of dragons. Not their assassins,” AuRon said.

  “When you’re older, when you have eggs of your own, you may think differently. One of the follies of youth is the belief that you shape events. It’s the other way around, and always has been. Now you, AuRon the all-knowing, AuRon the all-powerful, AuRon the ambitious, comes to close the book of my life. A creature as strong as you completes the victory by killing a wobbly old man in his chair.”

  “I had hoped—”

  “Well, I won’t let you,” the Wyrmmaster said. He pulled a dagger from between his legs, one of the wide-bladed kind used by the Dragonguard. He plunged it into his stomach and snapped off the hilt with a cry. The Wyrmmaster let out sort of a strangled rattle. His body convulsed in the chair, leaving a pair of open eyes sightless to the sun.

  Natasatch sniffed at him. “Men are such fools.”

  “He was a great man. He just poured his greatness into the wrong river. Let’s be done with this.”

  Natasatch spat out her foua. The carven wooden chair burst into flame along with the corpse. The cinders of both mingled as they rose into an annihilating blue sky. The Isle of Ice belonged to the dragons now.

  Epilogue

  Big as it was, the Isle of Ice and its archipelago surrounding it could not remain the home of all the dragons there when the Wyrmmaster’s men quit. AuRon and Natasatch stayed, as did the brooding trio of dragonelles and those who had hatchlings to care for.

  Some, like Shadowcatch, had their own aspirations and left gladly. The black dragon Shadowcatch of the breeding stock lumbered south, where he played no small part in the wars against the armies of the Men of the Golden Circle and their dragons.

  A few of the fighting stock stayed. They could not father clutches of their own, but Epinonia and Alhala each took one as mates, and they raised their hatchlings to breathe their first fire as if they were eggs of a mating. Others lived out their lives on smaller islands of the archipelago, which were rich in both fish and ores dear to the stomachs of dragons.

  AuRon and Natasatch took as a home a pleasant cave on a cliff on the Isle of Ice. Natasatch found it, that
is. AuRon explored it and pronounced it ideal. It was near enough to the sea so AuRon could count on a successful hunt in the waters of the Inland Ocean, and there were even a few blighters to remind him of his days in NooMoahk’s cave and make improvements to the egg cavern. He would move some of his library there in later years, that which did not go to the Hypatian archivists or the Longhalls of the Golden Dome in Dairuss.

  But in their first year together, they cracked stone, as the saying was, and whispered words of love and comfort to each other the night Natasatch laid their first clutch—five eggs on an egg shelf of her own choosing. AuRon showered her in beef, goat, sheep, and fish, until she begged him to stop out of fear that she’d grow too big to ever leave the cavern again.

  He thought to them, formed images in his mind as he watched over the eggs. His own parents in the cave, Wistala tasting rainfall, a wolf howling at the moon, a dwarf frying sausages, a berry-smeared girl, a great, gaunt black dragon, a mountaintop signal-flame on their Isle of Ice.

  A month later came the first stirrings within.

  “Did you hear a tap?” AuRon asked, woken from sleep. Sometimes they spoke; sometimes they used their minds. It made no difference.

  “I’ve been listening to them all night, my love,” Natasatch said. She rarely fell fully asleep, and never when AuRon was out hunting. “It’s a regular Blighter Summer Gathering, there’s so much noise.”

  “When will they come out?”

  “Oh, it won’t be for hours yet. Be calm.”

  “I am calm. I just can’t bear waiting. Five is what my parents had. Three males and two females.”

  “We should be so blessed.”

  “If we are, I’ll need your help,” AuRon said.

  “You know you have it. What is in your mind?”

  “I want to keep the males apart. Until we can make them learn not to kill each other.”

  “But dragons have always been that way, AuRon.”

  “Does that mean they always must be that way? The Wyrmmaster was wrong on many things, but he wasn’t wrong to keep all the males alive. Fewer dragonelles would wander the earth mateless if more males survived the first hour of their hatching.”

  “What would you teach them differently?”

  “It’d teach the stronger to protect the weaker. I’d teach the weaker to outsmart the stronger. And I’d have the dragonelles teach cooperation to both.”

  “Can dragons change the inheritance their nature gave them?”

  “They must. If they are to survive—if we are to survive, they must.”

  “My lord, my love, my AuRon . . . the things you expect of dragons.”

  One of the eggs wiggled as the hatchling within changed position. The mates turned to their clutch. Natasatch put her head close to the eggs and began to sing:

  Listen my hatchling, for now you shall hear

  Of the only seven slayers a dragon must fear . . .

  AuRon flicked out his tongue across their restless egg. He tasted the shell of their first clutch. Cool and dry compared with the dampness within the cavern, its strangeness set him aquiver.

  Glossary

  A FEW WORDS OF DRAKINE

  FOUA: A product of the fire bladder. When mixed with the liquid fats stored within and then exposed to oxygen, it ignites into oily flame.

  GRIFF: The armored fans descending from a male’s crest that cover his sensitive earholes and throat pulse points in battle.

  PRRUM: The low thrumming sound a dragon makes when it is pleased or particularly content.

  SII: The front legs of a dragon. The claws are shorter and the fighting spur on the rear leg is closer to the other digits and opposable. The digits are more elegantly formed for manipulation.

  SAA: The rear legs of a dragon. The three rear true-toes are able to grip, but the fighting spur is little more than decoration.

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