Dragonslayer

by Tui T. Sutherland

  But she had to try, or her father would be too far out of sight in a minute.

  Ivy jumped up from behind the bench and ran over to Foxglove. A wonderful moment of surprise flashed across the Wingwatcher’s face before she went back to her very cool “nothing here is interesting” expression.

  “I have to catch up with my dad!” Ivy said breathlessly. “Please let me go after him? I promised I’d give him something before he left and then I forgot and he’ll be so mad if I don’t give it to him! I promise I’ll come right back.” She smiled her “I love you the best of all my teachers” smile, which also usually worked.

  “No way, kid,” Foxglove said, not unkindly. “I can’t let you out there alone.”

  “I won’t be alone! I’ll catch up to my dad. I’m really quick, I promise.”

  “What do you have to give him?” Foxglove asked.

  “Um.” Ivy panicked. She reached into her pockets, fumbling to see whether she had anything at all. “Just a … this … super important … um … potato.” She held it out, utterly betrayed by pockets that were usually full of interesting rocks and scraps of nonsense. But two days ago, Mother had taken her pants to wash them and must have emptied out everything, so all she had was the potato she’d dug up in gardening class that morning.

  Foxglove slowly raised one incredibly elegant eyebrow at her.

  “It’s really important,” Ivy said. “This potato could change everything. I can’t tell you anything else. It’s top secret potato business.”

  “I see,” said Foxglove. “Let me guess. We’re going to take down the dragons with potatoes.”

  “Oh,” Ivy said, startled. She had never thought of “taking down” dragons before, even though her dad was the Dragonslayer. She kind of thought of that as Dad’s thing, but not something she’d ever want to do. “M-maybe we can use the potatoes to make friends with them instead.”

  Now there was a definite shift in Foxglove’s face. Maybe something even a little bit like a smile.

  “Have you ever been outside?” Foxglove asked. Ivy shook her head, and Foxglove crouched beside her. “Are you good at keeping secrets?”

  Ivy thought about that for a moment. “Yes from Mother and Father,” she said finally. “No from Violet.”

  “Hmmm,” said Foxglove. “Is Violet good at keeping secrets?”

  “The BEST,” said Ivy. “It’s VERY ANNOYING.”

  Foxglove laughed. She glanced around at the empty tunnels, then up at the sky-scented hole above them. “What if we just go … see what he’s doing? Together? And if he looks busy, we won’t even bother him.”

  “Yes,” Ivy breathed, her eyes wide. “That would be perfect.”

  “All right. Let’s go,” Foxglove said, pointing up. She lifted Ivy onto the ladder, then climbed up right behind her, her strong arms ready to catch Ivy if she slipped, although of course she didn’t because she was good at climbing.

  Ivy crawled out of the hillside into an indescribably vast forest of trees, all of them something like eighty times her size (she guessed). The air smelled like apples and grass and it kept flying into her face and up her nose instead of staying still like the air in the underground city. It was also noisy; the whole outside was whooshy and sh-sh-shhhhmmy and crickle-crackly and a little buzzy, too, and SUPER BRIGHT, like, WHY WAS THERE SO MUCH LIGHT EVERYWHERE. Ivy sat down in the dirt and closed her eyes for a moment, listening to the whooshing and feeling the light try to burn off her face while the air tried to blow it out. It was a lot; there was a LOT HAPPENING.

  “Foxglove, what are you doing?” said a young male voice nearby.

  “Just taking Ivy to find her dad,” Foxglove said, in one of those grown-up voices that was secretly saying something else. Ivy cracked an eye open and squinted up at her. The other Wingwatcher had his arms crossed, looking down at Ivy, but he didn’t look mad. He had a “planning something” face that looked a lot like Violet’s.

  Hey, Ivy realized. Foxglove knows my name! A very cool teenager knows my name!

  “But we might not find him,” Foxglove said significantly. “So if he comes back without seeing us, no need to mention this.”

  “Right,” said the other Wingwatcher. “I was looking for dragons in that direction anyway.” He pointed at a spot of blue sky beyond the trees.

  Blue sky! Ivy thought. She’d seen it through holes in the ceilings of a few caves, but it was so much bigger and bluer out here. Try to remember it better than that. Daffodil isn’t going to settle for “bigger and bluer.”

  “Ready to walk?” Foxglove asked Ivy. Ivy scrambled to her feet and took Foxglove’s hand. They edged down the sloping hill, between towering craggy trees on a carpet of pine needles.

  At the bottom of the hill, Ivy started seeing more and more fruit trees — apple and pear and peach, with berry bushes tangled between them. She slowed to match Foxglove’s cautious, quiet pace, and then stopped completely when Foxglove froze and squeezed her hand.

  Up ahead, Heath was sauntering through the trees, holding a half-eaten apple nearly the size of his head in his hand. He glanced right and left as he went, on higher alert than he had been in the caves.

  Foxglove tugged Ivy behind a tree. “Where is he going?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Ivy answered. He’d had a bag, but he wasn’t using it to carry apples. What else could he be going to get? “He just said ‘outside.’”

  The Wingwatcher peeked around the tree at him. “The old village is in that direction,” she whispered.

  “But — the law,” Ivy said. “I mean, didn’t Pine … he can’t …” She trailed off, surprised by the suddenly grim expression on Foxglove’s face. Foxglove was staring after Heath, looking very much like maybe he was her least favorite person.

  “That’s right, Ivy,” she said. “He can’t go there. At least, if the law is fair and applies to everyone.” Foxglove’s fingers twitched on the hilt of her dagger.

  “So he probably isn’t,” Ivy said. “Maybe he’s going to get pears for Mother. He’ll be back soon, right?”

  Foxglove looked down at her, and the frown slowly cleared from her forehead. She opened her mouth, maybe to say something reassuring, but she was interrupted by an unearthly sound from the sky.

  It was like an avalanche, or a thousand giant tigers roaring at once, or thunder in a hurricane the size of the continent, or like something else enormous and terrifying that Ivy had never heard before. It gave her instant goose bumps and made her want to curl up like a hedgehog somewhere safe, preferably with Violet and Daffodil and a bunch of pointy swords.

  Foxglove hissed an unfamiliar word (“that was CURSING,” Violet informed her with a scandalized expression when Ivy asked about it later) and grabbed Ivy. Before the sound had finished echoing off the mountains, Foxglove had thrown Ivy halfway up the trunk of the nearest evergreen and was scrambling up behind her.

  Move, legs, Ivy thought frantically. She forced herself to reach up and grab another branch, sticky with sap, and haul herself higher. A few moments later, she was about halfway up the tree when she felt Foxglove’s hand on her ankle.

  “Stop there,” Foxglove whispered. “Stay completely still.”

  Ivy didn’t have to be told twice. She clung to the trunk, tucking her legs in and imagining herself as a knot in the bark. Small, brown, indistinguishable. Definitely inedible. She was glad she was wearing her old gray tunic and pants instead of the new dark purple ones her mother had made for her.

  The dragon roared again, and now she heard a new sound — this one coming from below her. She squinted down without moving a muscle and saw her father racing through the trees. His eyes were wild and he’d dropped his apple. Ivy had never seen him move so fast. He ran as though the dragon were right behind him, breathing fire on his heels. She could hear his heavy, panicked breaths as he tore past.

  But the dragon wasn’t down there. It was up in the sky. Ivy could hear the wingbeats.

  She couldn’t resist. Carefully,
slowly, she inched her head up and back until she could see the blue expanse beyond the thicket of branches.

  A flash of black scales soared overhead — wings tilting, flickering tail, breath of flame on the air.

  A dragon, a dragon, a dragon.

  It swooped around again. This time she caught a glimpse of its face — not horsey at all, but perfect, long and elegant, with the most intelligent eyes. And the scales were more than black; they caught the sunlight in shimmers of dark purple and blue and green, and small diamond-white scales flashed under its wings.

  The dragon roared once more, and then it lashed its tail and swept away west, toward the desert.

  Another long moment passed before Ivy realized she’d been holding her breath, and she slowly let it out.

  “Wow,” she whispered.

  She wanted to stay in the tree longer, remembering the dragon — maybe waiting to see if it came back — but before long she felt Foxglove tug gently on her ankle.

  They descended quietly, and Foxglove reached up to help Ivy down from the last branch, which was way higher than Ivy would have been able to reach on her own.

  “I guess that was your first Wingwatcher lesson, kid,” Foxglove said. “If you hear a dragon, hide. Do not run. Dragons are much faster than you, but they won’t usually bother with prey if it’s in a sharp, sticky tree like this one, and if the branches are thick enough and you’re motionless enough, it hopefully won’t even see you.” She glanced in the direction Heath had been running. “Only a coward or an idiot would run from a dragon.”

  Ivy was nearly startled out of her dragon daze. Was Foxglove talking about her father? The Dragonslayer wasn’t a coward. That wasn’t even possible.

  He had been running awfully fast, though.

  “You’re so lucky,” Foxglove said. “The black ones are the rarest. I can’t believe you got to see one on your first time out! What did you think? Were you beyond scared?”

  Ivy smiled at her. “It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I loved it.”

  “Loved it!” Foxglove echoed. “The dragon? Or the exciting-terrifying running-and-hiding part?”

  “The dragon,” Ivy said promptly. “I loved the dragon.”

  Foxglove raised her eyebrows again. “Well, I haven’t heard that before,” she said. “I thought I was the only one who secretly thinks dragons are kind of great.”

  “You do?” Ivy breathed. “Do you get to see dragons every day?”

  “Not every day, but that’s basically our job,” Foxglove said with a grin. “Watching the skies so everyone is safe. Studying the dragons so we can understand them as much as possible. We lost a lot of books and a few of the older watchers when the village burned, but we’re trying to bring back everything we knew.”

  “I want to be a Wingwatcher so much,” Ivy said passionately.

  “I’ll put in a good word for you,” Foxglove said. “That is, if I’m not banished before then. Come on, let’s get you home. We didn’t learn much today, did we?”

  Ivy disagreed, although she didn’t say so out loud. She’d learned to hide, not run, from dragons. She’d learned that dragons were even more amazing than she’d thought. She’d learned that her dad acted like a cat with its tail on fire when he heard one. And she’d met Foxglove, a Wingwatcher who understood her.

  They started back toward Valor, but Ivy kept tripping over tree roots because she couldn’t keep her eyes off the sky. She wished the dragon would come back. Or that another one would fly overhead.

  Foxglove stopped her near the entrance and went ahead to make sure Heath wasn’t around to catch them going back in. Ivy took a deep breath, trying to fill her lungs with all the outside air they could hold.

  “I don’t want to go back underground,” she said when Foxglove returned. “I want to see more dragons. I want to stay out here. Why can’t I be a Wingwatcher now?”

  “I don’t think the old folks are quite ready for eight-year-old guardians yet,” Foxglove said, crouching to meet Ivy’s eyes. “But tell you what, come back whenever Squirrel and I are on duty, and I’ll give you a little early training, if you don’t tell anyone but Violet.”

  “Really?” Ivy breathed.

  “Really, Ivy Who Loves Dragons,” Foxglove said. “Just promise me you’ll never ever ever go outside without a Wingwatcher.”

  “I promise,” Ivy said.

  She went home, covered five small scrolls (which were supposed to be for math homework) with sketches of the dragon in flight, and fell asleep to dreams of wings and scales.

  Not far from the Indestructible City, Wren and Sky found a sheltered valley that was full of hiding spots and hard enough to get to that Wren was pretty sure they’d be safe there for a while.

  Or, more specifically, that Sky would be safe hiding there while she went into the city.

  “No!” Sky yelped when she explained this plan. “No leaving me!” He threw himself across her lap and looked as pitiful as a small dragon with lots of sharp teeth could look.

  “I don’t want to! But it’s very dangerous for you,” she insisted in Dragon. “No dragons there.” She didn’t know much about any villages besides her own, but she was quite sure none of them would be pleased about a girl strolling in with a man-eating predator by her side. They wouldn’t give her a chance to explain that he was a cuddly vegetarian — especially in the Indestructible City, the one place in the world that fought back against the dragons.

  “More dangerous alone!” he cried. “Sad Sky, very very very sad Sky.” He snuffled tragically.

  “I won’t be gone long,” she said in her own language, hoping he’d understand. “Trust me, I don’t want to talk to people or have anything to do with people. But I don’t have scales to protect me, and I need something new to wear.” The blue dress had been big on her that day, a year and a half ago, but now it was painfully tight, short in the arms, and ragged along the hems. She knew a lot about finding food and shelter in the forest, starting fires, and hiding from dragons, but she didn’t know anything about making new clothes, especially without a flock of sheep handy. “Also a map if I can find one, and maybe something to read.”

  His answer was garbled by his sniffles, but from the words she caught, she guessed he’d asked, “What if you don’t come back?”

  “I’ll always find my way back to you,” she said as fiercely as she could, which was pretty fierce given how much of the Dragon language was growling and rawring. “No matter what happens to either of us. And look, while I’m gone, you can learn to fly.” She zoomed her hand over the meadow flowers, scattering dandelion seeds into the air.

  It worried her a little that Sky couldn’t fly yet. Not having fire was one thing, but he certainly had wings, and she had no idea how to teach him to use them. That seemed like a dragon parent’s job that she couldn’t fill.

  For a while he’d flapped his wings occasionally, especially when he saw birds overhead and got excited. But once he’d realized that Wren couldn’t fly, he’d stopped even trying. He seemed perfectly happy to walk beside her — or, if he could charm her into it, what he really preferred was for her to carry him. But that was now impossible, as much as Wren loved him. He seemed to be growing markedly bigger every time they fell asleep; by the time they reached the valley, his shoulders were level with Wren’s waist and his wingspan was wider than her outstretched arms.

  Sky grumbled and muttered and stomped around the valley for two days, but finally Wren convinced him that he could not follow her to the Indestructible City. It had apparently never occurred to him that most dragons ate humans, and most humans therefore found dragons terrifying. Apparently he’d thought Wren always hid from adult dragons in the sky because they might be looking for him, not because they’d find Wren a delicious snack. He was thoroughly outraged by the idea of someone snacking on his Wren.

  “I would BITE them!” he cried. “I would ROAR at them!”

  “I know you would,” Wren said, scratching behind
his ears. “Just like I would bite and roar at any human who tried to hurt you. But me against the entire Indestructible City is a fight that wouldn’t go well.”

  “Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine,” Sky grumbled, sounding so much like a dragon version of Wren’s older sisters that she burst out giggling, which offended him even more.

  The next morning she made sure Sky knew where all the best hiding places in the valley were and then hugged him good-bye. She climbed through the hidden passage and started down the mountain.

  Through the trees, she caught glimpses of the river glittering down below — a different river than the one she’d found Sky in. Leaves whisked around her bare feet, and she discovered that the birds sang at full volume when Wren wasn’t accompanied by a dragon.

  It was awfully strange to be without Sky. Wren hadn’t been away from him for more than a few moments since the day she’d found him. Right away she missed his humming, his weight leaning against her hip, his little yelps of glee when he spotted an animal.

  She wished she could make it to the city, get inside, get what she needed, and get back to the valley in one day. But she had a feeling it was all going to be more complicated than she hoped. Could a nine-(ten?)-year-old girl in a ragged dress just walk right into the Indestructible City?

  Is this a terrible idea?

  People can’t be trusted. What if they try to feed me to the dragons again?

  Maybe only my village is full of awful people.

  Or maybe this place is worse.

  She frowned, tugging at one of her sleeves. I’ll just look at it first. I don’t have to go in if it looks dangerous.

  Wren had heard that the Indestructible City was built halfway up a cliff overlooking the forest, but she was still startled when she reached the end of the trees and saw it, towering far overhead as though it were a city on one of the moons.

  She hadn’t known that the cliff would be so high or so steep. She hadn’t realized how hard it would be to get to the city — or how impossible to sneak inside.