by Liz Flanagan
‘Speak for yourself, Milla,’ Isak muttered. ‘You usually do. We are still here, me and Belara. And in case you hadn’t noticed: no, Milla, she didn’t love it. No, Vigo, my dragon didn’t meet people today. And no, Tarya, it went worse than I expected. Haven’t you seen her?’
They all looked over. Belara’s scales looked greyish yellow. She was curled up tightly, her back to Isak, ignoring all his attempts to communicate with her.
‘It should be quieter tomorrow,’ Vigo said placatingly. ‘I reckon we had most of the city through those doors today, maybe she’ll feel better then? I think the dragons will like exploring the city. We could start that tomorrow, when they’ve met everyone.’
He was wrong. Next day there were more new people. The day after that, even more.
On the fourth day Milla and Iggie went for another early-morning flight. It was a special time of day for Milla. The only time she had her dragon to herself; the only time she felt completely free, just like in the dreams she had before Iggie hatched.
This time, when the mist started to burn off, Milla saw something below her. She gripped her dragon’s neck more tightly.
‘Iggie, look! What’s that?’ She stared at the dark shapes in the water below: dozens of them. ‘Is it fishing boats?’
Iggie flew lower.
Milla nearly fell from his back in shock. It was a flotilla. Boatloads and boatloads of people, all heading towards Arcosi.
Was this an attack?
They flew back to the palace at top speed. They landed right outside the dragonhall. Milla was better at landing already. She threw herself off and into a run, then slammed straight into Tarya tearing the other way.
They gripped each other’s arms tightly, both breathless and bursting with news.
‘They’re coming! Boats and boats, all coming here!’ Milla said. ‘Raise the alarm!’
‘No, it’s not an attack,’ Tarya cried. ‘They sent word. It’s the old islanders, coming home. Just like Kara said.’
Milla just stared at her.
‘There’s something else. It’s Belara!’ Tarya told her: ‘She’s laid eggs!’
‘No!’ Milla knew she should feel pleased. She wanted the dragons to breed, one day, and secure their future here on Arcosi. She just hadn’t expected it so soon.
Who would the new dragons belong to? To these people on the boats – is that why they’d come? It couldn’t be a coincidence.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Later that day, Milla was gathering herbs in Serina’s garden, to make Belara a draught that was good for brooding dragons. Isak might barely speak to her any more, but she could still be useful to him – she had searched out the recipe in one of the library books.
Just then a messenger came to the garden gate and coughed loudly.
‘My lady.’ The young man looked terrified as he conveyed his message. ‘All the dragonbonded are informed that the duke has an announcement. Since the eggs must not be left alone, Duke Olvar will honour you with his presence. In the dragonhall. Er, now.’
Milla jumped up, scattering stems of fennel and sped through the palace grounds.
She hurried into the dragonhall, her chest tight with dread.
Tarya, Isak and Vigo were already there, with the duke and duchess.
‘My decision is made. I said my people could meet the dragons,’ Olvar began. ‘I didn’t issue an open invitation to boatloads of strangers.’
‘But they are the original people of Arcosi. I’ve been down there, speaking to them. They come in peace. They’re just coming home!’ Serina cried. ‘Don’t we owe them something? After all, the dragons used to belong to them.’
This was what Kara had foretold, back at the duke’s ball. What else had she said? Milla tried to remember her exact words.
‘I don’t care who they are: they are not welcome here.’
The other day, Olvar had opened up, just a crack, Milla was sure of it. He’d trusted them and let his people into the palace. But that door was slammed shut once more.
‘If we talk to them, we can find out,’ Serina reasoned. ‘They might know about the dragons. They could help …’
‘No. It’s already done.’ Olvar put his hand up when Vigo tried to speak. ‘I’ve issued a new curfew: no one on the streets after dark. We must restore order. This has gone far enough. We have the eggs to think of. I’m tripling the guard round the dragonhall.’
The eggs. Of course. Milla should have seen it coming. Of course the duke was thinking of the eggs above all else. She’d seen what happened when the duke ‘protected’ his people. How bad would it be when he was protecting a dragon he thought would belong to him? Her stomach started tying itself in new knots.
‘Restore order?’ Vigo scoffed. ‘You wait and see if it brings order. I don’t believe you!’
‘Thank you, Your Grace.’ Isak glanced nervously at his bunk.
Belara had pushed her way in there at first light, as soon as they’d got up, and laid two eggs on his bed, in the darkness and privacy behind the curtain.
If anyone looked in, she growled and bared her teeth. If they didn’t leave, she started kindling and spitting sparks till they did.
‘B-B-but, I don’t understand,’ the duchess said. ‘What about these people returning home?’ She sounded incredulous. ‘There are hundreds of returning Arcosi just arrived on the island. They’ll need food, water, somewhere to stay. The inns don’t have space for them all. How do you expect them to obey the curfew if they’ve nowhere to sleep?’
‘Not our problem. We didn’t ask them here.’ Duke Olvar’s tone was flat and final. ‘The eggs come first.’
Serina flinched. ‘And what about your own people?’ she asked quietly. ‘The ones who are still queuing to see the dragons?’
‘They can choose: obey the curfew, or stay and be arrested. They have enjoyed my hospitality long enough.’
Milla had been nurturing a fragile hope that this could continue: that she and Iggie could spend their days with the people of Arcosi, seeing Thom and Rosa whenever they liked. Now it withered like a seedling in a late frost.
‘His hospitality!’ Tarya tutted quietly, next to Milla. It was Serina who’d set up the rest tents, organising food and water for all the visitors.
‘What about what the other dragons need?’ Vigo asked. ‘Petra loved meeting people.’
‘It’s time we all got back to normal,’ Duke Olvar said loudly. ‘The people can go back to their homes. Go back to work. Get out of my palace.’
Milla had heard people say everyone had a breaking point. Now she watched the duchess reach hers. Serina sprang to her feet, holding herself tall. ‘Oh, it’s just yours now, is it?’ she demanded.
Milla braced herself for the duke’s response.
Vigo stared at his mother, as if he’d never heard her yell before. Maybe he hadn’t. Milla found that hard to imagine, having lived with Josi, who yelled much of the time.
‘Your palace?’ Serina’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright with anger. ‘When it has also been my home for twenty years? When it was my dowry that allowed you to build this cursed army in the first place?’
Iggie leant on Milla, whining softly. She stroked his neck, and down his broad back, trying to take comfort from this contact with her beloved dragon.
‘Calm down, my dear,’ the duke said coldly. ‘You’re not thinking straight. We just need to set an example and everything will soon be back to normal.’
A new normal, one that involved the duke bonding with one of these dragons, Milla guessed.
‘Have you looked outside today?’ the duchess asked. ‘Thirty boats, I counted! And that won’t be the end of it. Well, if you won’t let the returning Arcosi in here, I’ll just have to take food and shelter to them.’
‘Mami, just wait a little,’ Vigo said, squeezing her hand. ‘He doesn’t mean it. We won’t close our doors to them. Will we?’
Milla looked at the duke, at the set of his jaw. She was fairly su
re he meant exactly what he said; a challenge only made him more resolute.
‘The curfew has already been issued,’ Olvar said curtly. ‘The troops are clearing the streets right now. And we will close the city gates. They can find shelter down at the docks, or they can leave.’
‘What?’ the duchess cried. ‘You mean to keep them out of their city? This is madness.’
‘I tell you what is madness: letting our city be overrun by strangers who think that it belongs to them! Didn’t you hear? There are dragon eggs to protect in here.’
‘And there are people to protect out there!’ Serina spat back. ‘I can’t stay here when people need me.’ With that, she picked up her skirts and marched from the dragonhall.
Milla made a move as if to follow her, but jumped back when the duke snapped, ‘Well? Who else wants to risk their dragon’s life out there? Go on! You’re free to go! Nobody is making you stay here.’
‘Well, I’m not leaving Belara,’ Isak said immediately. ‘And she can’t leave her eggs.’
Milla looked around the dragonhall’s warm, airy interior. At the well-stocked food bins. At the troughs of Arcosi springwater. At the polished wooden bunks with their coloured silk curtains, the comfortable dragonperch and the ever-burning stove. She saw Tarya and Vigo’s miserable faces, and Isak’s stubborn one. And she began to understand how firmly they were caught in the jaws of the duke’s trap.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Three months later: Midsummer
It was the hottest summer in years. As the sun rose over Arcosi, its rays fell on a city transformed beyond recognition.
Sunlight illuminated the harbour, the dozens of ships moored so closely that hungry rats crossed between them, scavenging for food.
The sunshine travelled slowly across the city gates above the docks, locked and guarded by dozens of blackclad soldiers.
It fell on the people sleeping in the new encampment outside the city walls, between the wharves and the marketplace, now filled with rows of tents and makeshift shelters rigged up from blankets, scraps of rope and broken crates. A little boy snuggled into the curve of his mother’s body, her long black hair pillowing his cheek on the cool cobblestones.
The early shafts of sunlight crept into the largest tent. Duchess Serina was up before dawn to check what was left in her stores and how best to stretch it to feed five hundred mouths that day.
And at the crown of the island, the sun striped the floor of the dragonhall, where screams shattered the calm golden morning.
‘Milla! Wake up! Wake up!’ Vigo’s voice cut through the tentacles of her nightmare.
Milla woke, shivering, on the floor of the dragonhall – she’d rolled right out of her bunk.
Aark! Iggie was there too, nudging her gently, but his warm smoky breath only revived the terror of her dream: plumes of smoke rising. A ship alight, ropes burning.
Reaching out for her dragon, she blinked away the horrible images. ‘Did I scream again?’ she asked Vigo quietly. ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’
Isak was curled in a ball on the floor by his bunk, fast asleep under a blanket, and there was no sign of Tarya yet.
Milla stumbled to her feet and went to pour herself a cup of water. Iggie shadowed her anxiously. Water was rationed now, but there never seemed to be a shortage in the dragonhall, and she drank it down gratefully.
‘It’s fine. Tarya’s still asleep. She’s exhausted from all the hunting,’ Vigo whispered, coming to join her with a quick glance to check Petra and Heral were still fast asleep, curled together on the dragonperch. ‘Tarya blames herself for all this – the overcrowding, the encampment – just because Heral showed up on our betrothal day.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ Milla hissed back, ‘She didn’t know all these people would come home to Arcosi. And she didn’t make the rules—’ she stopped short of criticising Vigo’s father directly.
‘No, but we could. We could make different ones.’ Vigo paused. ‘We need to take a stand,’ he said, urgent now. ‘If we don’t, who will? The dragons are fully grown now. They give us power. We can use it to stop this.’
‘What are you saying?’ Milla wanted to hear him say it. ‘That we fight back with the dragons?’ she whispered warily, knowing that the whole island felt like a tinderbox in the heat. It would only take a spark to set it all alight.
What did Iggie think? He was listening intently to them both, his eyes huge pools of green fire.
‘Yes! Why not? There’s got to be another way, if we’re just brave enough to take it. The dragons are stronger now. Don’t you think it’s time? Soon. Before the eggs hatch, and my father …’
He didn’t finish the sentence, and he didn’t have to. The duke was a man obsessed. Olvar would have sat on the eggs himself, if Belara let him anywhere near them.
‘Kara said they should hatch in the marketplace,’ Milla remembered, stroking Iggie’s flank.
‘Like that’s going to happen, with a triple guard round the dragonhall and the city under curfew,’ Vigo spat. ‘That’s what I’m talking about: this is so wrong.’
‘What?’ Tarya emerged, yawning, from her bunk. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nightmares,’ Milla said, ‘in my dreams and right here.’
‘We were talking about my father’s new rules,’ Vigo told Tarya, kissing the top of her head.
‘It’s everything you ever warned us about, Milla, but worse …’ Tarya tugged at her red shirt, with its little dragon badge sewn on the front. ‘This? It’s a badge of shame, not pride.’
The duke had passed many new laws since the spring, but this was the most hated. Anyone of Norlander descent got to wear a black dragon badge on their clothes – the duke’s own symbol. Everyone else had to wear a badge in the shape of a ship, to show they were more newly arrived. The ship badge was given to anyone who wasn’t Norlander, whether they’d lived here for years, like Josi, or arrived on the lastest boat, and it guaranteed they’d always be last in line.
Milla’s fingers jumped straight to the new addition on her shirt, tracing the outline of the boat she’d sewn there, hating every stitch.
‘So, don’t wear it,’ Vigo said, going over to Tarya and putting his arms round her. ‘I’m not. Come on, let’s rip it off, right now!’
‘It’s different for you,’ Tarya said, resting her forehead on Vigo’s chest, as if she were very weary. ‘You won’t be arrested.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Vigo asked, stroking her hair. ‘When they stormed through the marketplace the other day, the guards weren’t checking who we were. They almost took my mother, till someone shouted that she was the duchess.’
‘It’s time for a change, don’t you think? Time for us to act?’ Milla said, sensing Tarya might be finally ready to hear this.
‘Wait.’
The three of them jumped at Isak’s interruption.
He sat hunched with worry, white as a ghost, and his hair stood in short greasy tufts. He’d lost weight, so his yellow dragonrider clothes hung from him, creased and dirty. His glasses were fogged with grime. ‘I think you’re forgetting about us, Belara and me,’ he said. ‘My dragon is nesting right there, raising the next generation of dragons, or don’t you care?’
‘Of course we care!’ Tarya went to him and tucked her arm through his unresisting one. ‘How are you feeling?’
Isak didn’t answer.
Milla went to fetch a fresh bread roll from a covered basket and offered it to him.
‘I’m not hungry.’ He spoke listlessly.
‘Oh, come on, Isak!’ Milla snapped. Catching herself, she let out a long breath. ‘I know it’s not easy, all this waiting. But how is it helping Belara if you don’t eat?’
‘You don’t get to tell me what to do,’ Isak said finally, looking at the three of them with open resentment. ‘You get to be with your dragons every day. You get to fly away and hunt with them. How do you think that feels?’
Milla had to look away from the suffering o
n his face.
‘Isak, you haven’t seen it out there,’ Vigo said. ‘The city gates are shut: no one gets in or out, apart from the duke’s soldiers, and our dragons. The tents are full. So’s the harbour. Water’s rationed. Even hunting double shifts, it’s not enough. Someone’s going to die out there. We need to do something.’
‘Oh, I see – it’s the same old story!’ Isak cried. ‘You think I don’t know what’s really happening in the city? That I don’t care?’ He was exaggerating, but Milla could see the panic in his eyes at the idea they might leave him. ‘Go on, then. You go off and start a revolution. Save the little people. Don’t worry about me and my dragon! Don’t worry about the eggs.’
‘I can’t leave my brother.’ Tarya looked from Vigo to Isak and back again. ‘Don’t make me choose. Let’s wait till the eggs have hatched, and Isak can join us?’
‘But it will be too late by then,’ Vigo paced on the spot, gesturing at the nest. ‘If we wait till the eggs hatch, my father will likely have bonded with a dragon.’
‘And what’s so wrong with that?’ Isak hit back. ‘Doesn’t he deserve the chance to bond with one of these new dragons? After all he’s done? He is the duke.’
‘You think you know him, Isak, but believe me, you don’t.’ Vigo stopped abruptly, biting down on his next words as the curtains of the yellow bunk were parted from inside.
‘Belara!’ Isak called.
Belara pushed her head through the curtain and hissed fiercely.
Isak’s expression changed from hope to heartbreak, like a candle being blown out.
‘Steady, Belara,’ Milla said, retreating with her hands outstretched to show they were empty.
Tarya was muttering, ‘Isak, get back!’ while Vigo tugged her backwards, out of the dragon’s reach.
Isak reluctantly backed away too, and they all watched anxiously as Belara emerged to eat for the first time in a whole day. Next she drank deeply of springwater, on and on, as if her thirst would never be quenched.
‘How can it be enough?’ Isak worried. ‘Look how much weight she’s lost. And she’s too pale. How long can it last?’