by Finley Aaron
So the most effective way to end this fight is for one of us to get vulnerable, and since I’m the biggest and strongest, I can make the biggest difference by dropping my defenses.
All my defenses.
We roll to a stop against a tree and I spring back, out of reach of Nia’s claws, and turn human again. Yes, I’m vulnerable. Crazy vulnerable. Barefoot and almost naked kind of vulnerable. Nia could incinerate me in a breath, kill me with a single slash of her talons.
But she’s a dragon, and dragons are noble creatures. So I trust, not too insanely, that she won’t hurt me—not much, not on purpose. There’s something about vulnerability that elicits caution.
I’m panting from the effort of fighting her, and I’m staring at her face—my scarlet eyes locked on her flame-colored irises. Should she give any hint that she’s about to take a swipe at me or blow another blast of flames my way, I’ll be ready. I have quick reflexes, and can wrap my fireproof wings around myself more quickly that she can blow fire (fire-blowing takes a second—there’s a bit of prep work that goes on in the back of the throat, and you have to open your mouth wide before you actually blow, so the target always gets a brief warning).
I’m watching her.
Poised.
Prepared.
Her eyes narrow to slits watching me. She doesn’t nearly trust me. Of course not—she’s used to Eudora, who’s cunning and devious on top of being evil.
And I think Nia’s upset with me for foiling her escape, or suicide, or whatever you want to call it. But will she let that offense prompt her into reactionary behavior? Or will she rise above?
In some ways, this is my test. Will she respect that I am human, or will she take advantage of it? Eudora would have destroyed me by now. Nia has been working for Eudora, but I like to believe she’s a very different dragon.
Her gaze doesn’t leave mine as she slowly rises to standing. And then she turns into a human, too, and instantly begins lecturing me.
“You have no idea what you’re doing. Go back. Go back, now, while you still can.”
“Go back, where?”
“Anywhere,” she gestures widely as though to shoo me away. “Just get away from me. And hurry. Or let me go on my way, and you stay. I don’t care which.”
“I’m not letting you run.” I take a step closer to her. “It was working. Our escape plan was working. You just have to trust—”
“For how long will it work?” Nia cuts me off. “The mamluki will not stop hunting me. They will come in ever-greater numbers. We will have to run from them forever.”
“Not forever. There has to be a way to defeat them. We’re dragons. We’re stronger. We’re smarter.”
“You’re not smarter than the white witch who made them. She is consumed with her plans, always working, night and day—”
“We’ve defeated her before.”
“You have?” Nia looked sincerely surprised, then doubtful. But at least she’s willing to listen. For this moment, at least, she’s no longer running. “Then why is she still alive?”
“She used to be a dragon. Did she tell you that? My mother changed her into a human, only human.”
“How?”
“By turning her evil plan against her. We can do that, too—we can turn these mamluki against themselves—” Can I, the kid who usually breaks things, defeat the yagi? First things first, I have to keep Nia from handing herself over to them.
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. But we’ll think of something. We just have to stay ahead of them long enough to think of something.” I try to look confident, even if I have my own doubts. Can we really outrun the yagi and defeat Eudora? It might be nearly impossible, but Nia won’t have any shot at all if she doesn’t survive the night.
“Sorry, but that’s not enough.” Nia hardly has the words out when she leaps upward, changing into a dragon.
Instantly, I realize she let me get my guard down, let me think she was actually listening to me. She did that on purpose, didn’t she? I’d love her for her wiliness if it didn’t endanger her life.
Just as instantly, I leap into dragon form after her. We no more than clear the treetops when I tackle her again.
I simply cannot let her get any closer to the path on the oncoming yagi. They could be upon us any moment—we’ll encounter them even sooner if Nia rushes headlong into their midst.
This time, she’s expecting my tackle, anticipating the fight.
She’s ready and ruthless, and a lot harder to bring down.
Which is probably why, after struggling futilely for several minutes, we’re still in the air, glowing brightly and spouting fire, when Ram barrels into us and joins the fray.
My relief at his arrival is quickly replaced by the realization that he’s not necessarily on my side. True, he’s trying to bring us both down to the ground. That much is helpful. But judging from his scraping claws and searing fire blasts that leave my delicate underbelly smarting, he’s mad at me for some reason.
Why? If I hadn’t gone after Nia, she’d be dead by now, or on her way back to Eudora’s prison.
Once it’s apparent Ram has a firm enough hold on Nia that she’s not going to get away, I drop to the ground, stand back from the range of their fire and Ram’s talons, and I turn into a human again.
Ram hauls Nia to the ground in a tussle, turning human only after she does.
I run to his side to assist him should Nia once again attempt to escape.
“What were you thinking?” He yells at me, his expression livid. “You thought you could sneak away while I was sleeping? You thought you could run away with her?”
“I wasn’t running away with her!” I’m about to point out that she’d have escaped us both if I hadn’t stayed awake and gone after her, but Ram is shouting, not listening.
“Kidnapping her, then? You thought you could steal the woman away from me?”
“I didn’t steal her!”
“Did you go with him willingly?” Ram asks Nia.
“No!” She looks appalled.
Ram drops her hand and tackles me, changing into a dragon as he pins me to the ground.
I’d like to stay in human form so I can explain what happened. There’s no explaining anything in dragon form, but Ram gives me no choice. Vulnerability is insufficient armor when my brother’s in a jealous rage, as now. He thinks I kidnapped Nia away from him? Does he not trust me at all? I know we’re competing for the same woman’s affections, but we were brothers first.
I use the momentum of my dragon change to shove him back, off of me. At the same time, I’m worried that Nia will use this as an opportunity to get away.
For one stunned instant she’s standing there, still human, looking torn and guilty (she’s got to know it’s her fault Ram turned on me, besides which she knows we’re only fighting at all because she sneaked away in the first place). But then she lifts her face to the sky in a mournful, tragic sort of way, and changes into a dragon again, leaping away in the direction of her previous escape.
Ram’s got his head down, horns pointed at my chest (our underbelly armor is slightly softer than the rest of our scales. It’s still bulletproof, but it can be pierced by dragon horns, talons, or tail spikes). I roll to the side, spring into the air, and take off past him, flying after Nia as quickly as I can.
And Ram is after me, nearly upon me, when he sees that Nia has escaped again.
Now we’re both flying after her, and she’s diving down the mountainside to the north but mostly west, where the sun is low in the sky, a blinding haze of gold that strikes her scales as though igniting them.
And beyond, filling the valley, streaming toward us in uncountable numbers, black like an oil spill and every bit as devastating, their stink rising up to choke us, the yagi.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Panic grips my heart. Nia is going to dive into their midst and I cannot let her. But she’s got so much of a head start! She’s twice as close to the yagi as she is to me,
and if I barrel into her with too much speed, low in the sky as she is now, I’ll only push us both into the swarm.
Nia is flying low, nearly to the head of the swarm, when her speed slows.
Is she hesitating?
Maybe my arguments have gotten to her. Maybe she wishes she could say goodbye, though I doubt I’m about to finally get a longing look like the one she gave Ram.
It doesn’t matter why she’s hesitating. Her slowing down gives me and Ram just enough of a split-second advantage to swoop alongside her, one on each side, and grasp her upraised arms by the wrists. We tug her up, high in the sky, circling wide, and away.
She doesn’t really fight us. If anything, she simply wilts between us, deflating like a noiseless, tearless sob. Her wings are extended but not moving, so that I’m not sure if she’s cooperating or if it’s simply the push of the wind keeping them open.
Either way, it helps us make it back to our campsite in a hurry. The fire is still going and a few of our things, including the bearskin, lie scattered about.
Ram gives me a look that says he wants me to put the fire out (we dragons try to be ecologically responsible as much as we can—I, for one, have no desire to burn down Siberia, not even by accident). So I let go of Nia’s wrist (Ram still has secure hold on her other arm) and I swoop over to the stream, filling my large dragon mouth with water and spewing it onto the fire. Steam rises and fills the valley.
I spit a couple more mouthfuls of water on the fire before scattering the steaming coals with my taloned toes, stomping out every hint of red glow, making sure the embers are dead. We’re not going to play into the old cliché about dragons burning things down. Not today.
Ram bundles the last of our things in the bearskin, wraps it into a tight burrito, and grabs the improvised parcel with his talons as he rises into the air, tugging Nia along beside him.
Nia beats her wings this time.
As I rise to meet them, I watch Ram give Nia a warning look that says he’ll let go of her arm so long as she doesn’t try to escape. I can’t see the look Nia gives him in return, be he releases his hold on her wrist and we fly, with Nia unfettered between us, to the south.
We’ve got to stay ahead of the yagi, but I’m flying on the fumes of adrenaline now.
I was tired before.
I got very little sleep, and now I’ve had panic and exertion and I’m getting hungry. Also cranky, since Ram’s being a selfish jerk and Nia didn’t even care enough for me to give me a longing look before she flew off to sacrifice herself to the yagi, and she only made me think she was listening to me so she could get my guard down enough to make her escape.
She may be beautiful, but she’s really not all that nice, not unless she wants to be. And she obviously doesn’t care about being nice to me.
We’re soaring through the sky at top speed, since for all our watchfulness yesterday we saw almost no sign of human life, and now there are yagi close on our heels, and the fear of what they’ll do if they catch up to us outweighs our worries about being seen, especially since that risk is minimal in Siberia.
But truly, we don’t dare fly too far, because the coast is somewhere up ahead and there are bound to be some people there. Not many, but some.
And besides that, there’s the simple fact that I. Am. Exhausted.
I could probably sleep for three days straight at this point, if it wasn’t nearly guaranteed the yagi would kill us in our sleep within the first few hours of our slumber. They emit a bone-chilling wailing noise that can literally paralyze a person (or dragon) who stops moving long enough for their bones to lock up.
Which means, if they sneak up on us while we’re asleep, we could awaken, already paralyzed, with no way to defend ourselves as they close in and finish us off.
That’s not the way I want to die.
Although if I don’t sleep soon, I might fall right out of the sky, crash into a tree in my sleep, and be gone before the yagi catch up to me. Also not a great way to die, but preferable to yagi paralysis.
Ultimately, though, I’d prefer to live.
So I’m glad when Ram steers us toward a plateau near the top of a mountain. We land on a fairly-flat ridge, about thirty feet long by twenty feet wide, tapering to nothing at the sides, with a superb view of the western valley and more mountain at our backs.
We’re not completely safe from the yagi here. They’ll eventually catch up to us, but we’ll at least be able to see them coming long before they arrive.
Ram returns to human form and tells me to go catch us some supper. I bound away in search of food, goaded by my growling stomach, before I realize what he did.
First of all, he ordered me around like I’m his inferior—and right in front of Nia, too. But worse than that, he finagled it so that he’s alone with Nia for however long it takes me to hunt up a meal.
On top of everything else, the bear he caught last night was impressive and delicious, and Nia was so grateful for the bear skin, so I feel like I need to come back with an even bigger bear, or maybe two big bears, just to top him.
But when I see a herd of elk I remember I’m hungry. And anyway, isn’t there an old saying about losing a battle to win a war? Not that we’re at war. Not at all.
It’s just that, in this battle, I think the best possible current strategy is for me to eat elk right now.
I grab two of the biggest elk I can catch and bring them back to the plateau, only to find Ram and Nia wrapped up in the bearskin together.
Granted, she’s shivering. And it is insanely cold up here on the mountain, in Siberia, with the sun going down.
I toss an elk at Ram in what might be slightly more of a fling than a toss, so that he has to jump out from the bearskin to catch the animal, and the elk’s haunches slap his face in an undignified manner, and when I glance at him next he’s probing his nose as though checking to make sure it’s not broken.
Well. Now I feel better. I switch into human form and draw my swords, swiftly butchering the other elk while casting a glance at Ram.
He’s skinning the carcass I tossed him, but he shoots me a look that says he’s not happy with me.
And why not? Because he wasn’t quick enough to neatly catch the supper I brought back for him? (His nose is not broken, by the way.) Or is his unhappy look because he thinks I ran away with Nia, or kidnapped her—neither of which I actually did.
Or is he angry with me because deep down, he knows he would have slept through Nia’s escape, that the yagi would have killed her by now if I hadn’t intervened?
But instead of being grateful for my help, he resents it.
Ram is a perfectionist. That means he always has to be perfect, or he gets grumpy.
Whatever. He can go right ahead and be imperfectly grumpy while I woo Nia away from him. I shall be charming and helpful and kind, and he can be the grouchy perfectionist who isn’t nearly as perfect as he likes to think he is, and when our journey is over our father will tell him he should be more like me, instead of the other way around, as always before.
I blow a blast of fire to roast a meaty leg for Nia before Ram even has his carcass skinned. I hand Nia the roast leg with a little bow, and she smiles and thanks me. Then I roast a leg for myself.
While I suppose it would be faster to eat in dragon form, we need to discuss our plans. I can’t see the yagi horde approaching, not even with my dragon vision, but I know they’re out there. Of course they are.
“What are we going to do to get away from the yagi?” I ask, being purposely pleasant, thus forcing Ram to either be pleasant back or look like a jerk. “We’ve got to sleep—soon—and for more than just a couple hours each. If we could make it to the ocean, we could sleep while floating.”
But Nia shakes her head vigorously, swallowing a bite of meat before explaining, “They’re in the sea. Not the same yagi you’re used to, but another kind.”
“The water yagi? Like the ones in the lake near the cave? We call them water yagi,” I explain, letting her
know we’re familiar with the creatures.
Nia nods. “I have been transporting them for the white witch.”
Ram inserts himself into the conversation with a glance my way that says he won’t be left out. “Are they in the ocean? We only ever encountered them in Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, besides Eudora’s little lake.”
Nia looks apologetic. “I’ve made many deliveries to the Sea of Okhotsk. It is the closest point of entry to the interconnected oceans of the world, so it was the most efficient point of delivery. The white witch feared her lake was becoming overwhelmed and she wanted her creatures delivered as swiftly as possible. She had me make many, many deliveries here. The water yagi will be plentiful in this area—even more plentiful than in the Black Sea or Caspian Sea.”
I wince at her prognosis. I can’t blame Nia—she was only doing what she had to do—but at the same time, I don’t know how we’re going to rest. We simply can’t take the risk of sleeping anywhere they might catch up to us, or we’ll wake up unable to move.
Maybe she was right. Maybe there is no escape from the yagi.
But even if there isn’t any escape, even if they’re bound to catch up to us eventually, I’m not going to give up and let Nia turn herself over to them. If they are going to bring me down, I intend to go down fighting. And if I’m going to fight, I need my sleep. “We’ve got to find somewhere to rest.” I study the skyline. No sign of the yagi yet, but we know they’re not far away.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Nia continues. “I can’t think how we’ll get any rest, more than an hour or two here and there, as we stay ahead of them. Eventually they’ll wear us down and catch up to us. There’s no real escape.”
“Isn’t there?” Ram questions. He got his elk butchered and a leg roasted, which he started eating while Nia explained about the water yagi. Now he has a glint in his eye that tells me he’s got a plan—and that he fully expects Nia to be impressed by it. He directs a question at me. “How did Mom and Dad stay ahead of the yagi that hunted them when Dad was bringing Mom home to Azerbaijan?”