Above him, the Emerald Shifter vanished with a flash.
Niketa clung to her Deuschalin Cragger as it bucked, trying to look around. Part of her wanted to believe that her eyes had deceived her—her husband hadn’t actually disappeared, she’d just lost sight of him in the chaos. But she knew better. Somehow, impossibly, Creyne had landed on an Emerald Shifter. He was in the Aethereal Lands.
Her dragon spun. She clenched her teeth, fighting nausea, but refused to close her eyes. If the Shifter reappeared, she needed to see it. Creyne could ride it out. He could make it back. As long as he knew to hold his breath—the air in the Aethereal Lands was poison to mortals. Mentally, she cursed. She’d grown up there, among the elfin people; she knew the dangers of those lands. But she didn’t speak of those times often. Did Creyne know what he faced?
The Deuschalin Cragger suddenly swerved, slamming her hard against its side. She cursed, gritting her teeth, and then reached for her dragon prod. Using it would disqualify her from a prize; but if Creyne didn’t come back, no prize would matter anyway.
She jammed the prod against the Cragger’s back and felt a hum as the magic began to flow. Be calm, she willed the beast. The dragon’s flight immediately leveled out. With another thought, she sent the dragon climbing up out of the canyon for a better view.
The rest of the swarm barreled past them, with a few dragons thrashing about with riders still clinging to their backs. She could see a few flashes of green passing through, but none with a rider.
Then a brilliant green flash caught the corner of her eye. She swerved her mount around to find the Emerald Shifter had returned and rejoined the flow of dragons down the canyon—and it was riderless. She clenched her teeth, blinking back sudden tears.
No. No, she would not lose her husband. Not today. Not when they’d just been fighting.
She willed the Cragger to pursue the green dragon. When they were just above the Shifter, she took a deep breath and jumped.
She landed higher than she normally would, on the Shifter’s neck just behind the head. The spines there caught her in the stomach, knocking the wind from her lungs. As the dragon began to rear, she thrust the prod against its scales, just at the joint of the neck and head.
The dragon calmed as she willed it. She took a moment to find better seating—she couldn’t use the rigging gloves with the prod in her hand—and then closed her eyes, preparing herself.
Shift us over, she thought. To the Aethereal Lands.
The green light flashed through her eyelids, and the air was suddenly cool. The scent of it was achingly familiar; she hated it. She opened her eyes to find the rolling teal clouds of the Aether below her, and golden stars above her.
Find him, she willed, picturing Creyne in her mind’s eye. Take me to my husband.
The dragon snorted and then swerved around. She held her breath as it dove toward the clouds; she’d been to these lands before, and the air wouldn’t affect her like it would Creyne . . . but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t have any effect.
They pierced the clouds, sinking deeper and deeper. As her lungs began to burn, a shadow appeared ahead. She almost gasped in relief as it resolved into her husband, drifting gently with his eyes closed and a peaceful little smile on his face.
She stretched forward as the dragon approached, grabbing Creyne by the front of the coat. She pulled him across the Shifter’s neck, just in front of her, and then willed the dragon to take them away from this wretched place.
With an emerald burst, they appeared beneath pale blue sky once again, the sun mercilessly bright. The bitingly cold wind hit them like a wall, sending Creyne tumbling away. She lunged to the side and caught him by the sleeve, barely managing to keep her legs wrapped around the dragon’s neck.
She panted, gasping for air as she strained to keep hold of her husband and still keep the dragon prod in place. There didn’t seem to be enough air. They were up too high, she realized. Thin ribbons of cloud whipped past them. The canyon was a narrow crack far, far below.
Creyne was blinking, beginning to wake. She willed the Shifter to pull around so that she could get her seat back. And then a sudden cross breeze pulled Niketa farther than her arms could stretch, and the dragon prod lifted off of the Shifter’s neck.
The dragon immediately bucked, smashing Niketa’s arm against her side. She felt her arm crack, and her vision flashed white. The prod went spinning from her suddenly numb fingers, and she and her husband went tumbling away into the open sky.
Creyne blinked, trying to wake up. His head throbbed with the worst hangover he’d ever felt. What had happened?
He’d been falling, he remembered. He was still falling. Someone was shouting. He looked down to find his wife clutching his sleeve, her teeth clenched and her other arm curled tight against her chest. She was pulling him . . . he looked down, over his shoulder, and realized that she was trying to angle them toward the canyon below, which was growing larger with every second.
Slowly, his mind began to grind into gear. He knew that even the enchantments of the safety nets wouldn’t be enough to save them, falling from this height. How in the world had they gotten here?
A roar shattered through the wind, and Creyne looked up—past his feet—to find the Emerald Shifter bearing down on them with sapphire flames billowing from its maw. His mind finally snapped into full wakefulness. He grabbed his wife, twisting to shield her from the dragon’s fire. Then he blinked. There, whistling through the air just a few feet away, was a dragon prod. He snatched it and turned to face the dragon.
Fire enveloped them. Creyne felt his bandana wither away in the heat. Through the shimmering flames, he glimpsed a forked, lashing tongue. Vicious teeth surrounded them. He slammed the rod up into the roof of the dragon’s mouth and felt it touch flesh.
“Stop your flame!” he shouted. He’d never actually used a dragon prod before; it was supposed to communicate your commands to the dragon, though. Sure enough, the dragon’s fire bled away in an instant. He and his wife were halfway into the dragon’s mouth, but it didn’t bite down on them.
“Slow us down!” Niketa screamed in his ear, clinging to his back. He looked over his shoulder and saw the canyon walls almost within spitting reach.
“Pull up!” he shouted at the dragon. “Level out!”
The Shifter immediately complied, spreading its wings and straining against the wind. Creyne and Niketa slammed against its lower jaw and held onto its teeth as it streaked into the canyon; he kept the prod firmly against its gums the whole way. Rodeo imps scattered out of their way, screaming in otherworldly languages. The dragon slowly began to curve upward again, and Creyne felt himself slipping down toward its throat.
Niketa grabbed his arm with her good one and braced her feet against the dragon’s teeth. Then, with a heave, she threw them both free of its mouth. Creyne felt its teeth tug at his boot as he fell.
They slammed into the safety nets and each other. Once again, Creyne had the wind knocked out of him, this time by his wife’s hip connecting with his stomach. Above them the imps darted and teased the Emerald Shifter. Snarling and hissing, it vanished with a flash.
They lay there panting. Creyne worked his arms free of the net and wrapped them around his wife. She rested her head against his chest.
“How’s yer arm?” he mumbled.
“Prob’ly broken,” she replied. “Just a little crack, though. You injured?”
He stretched slightly. His face stung and his side was throbbing. “I’m a mite singed. A little bit, but I’ve had worse. Maybe a broken rib or two.”
“Nothin’ else?”
He shook his head. “I’m all right.”
“Good.” Niketa whispered. Then she thumped him on the head with her fist. “You don’t have to speak your commands with a dragon prod, idjit,” she growled, yanking off her goggles. “You just think ’em—it’s faster and easier.”
Creyne stared at her. Her leathers were singed black and there was a sooty outline fr
om her goggles around her gray eyes. Her cheeks were singed with a faint flush. He coughed up a brief laugh. “Give me my tusk back, woman.”
Niketa blinked at him. Then she smiled. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled his head against her chest while she fished the tooth out of the pouch at her waist.
“There you go, idjit,” she said, shoving it into his hand. “Now make my eyes pretty again.”
Creyne pulled the crystal sphere from his jacket and held it up before her eyes. The color faded from it and drifted in wisps back to her eyes until the irises gleamed violet again. She blinked, smiled, and then pulled him into a kiss.
The imps helped them onto a magic carpet. As they raised into sight of the galleries, the crowds began to cheer. Niketa smiled; every spectator was standing, and many were jumping up and down. She’d never heard a rodeo crowd cheer so loudly or so wildly. Creyne squeezed her shoulder, and she hugged him back.
“Well that’s nice, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yeah.” He looked down at the dragon prod in his hand. “Pretty sure they’re still gonna disqualify us ’cause of this thing, though.”
Niketa looked at the prod, then at him, and snorted. She wasn’t getting into this again. “Don’t expect an apology from me.”
“Never crossed my mind.” He shook his head and pulled his hat back onto his head. “Just a shame to miss that prize.”
She rested her head on his arm. “Prizes at the Coasttown Rodeo next month are bigger, anyway.” But even as she said it, she wondered if another rodeo was the best idea.
Creyne nodded absentmindedly, and she wondered if he was thinking the same thing. Then he hefted the dragon prod. “How much, uh . . . how much does one of these cost? We should prob’ly get another’n before we move on.”
Niketa looked up at him. He didn’t meet her eyes, and was instead intensely studying the glowing prod. She smirked and nodded, leaning her head against his chest. “Damn straight.”
Rising Star
Michaelene Pendleton
I was plunging in a wind-shrieking dive, wings snicked in close to my back, riding the fine edge of control, claws spread, working my ribs like bellows to pump up my fire, anticipation dripping from both tips of my tongue, and dropping like fate on a frizzly-haired old mage robed in tatty blue velvet, when—BAM!—he slammed me with a bolt of magical dragonbane stronger than hammered lightning and twice as bright.
The blast fried all my senses, blinded and deafened me, flung me spinning down a long, dark tunnel, my wings flailing for lift and not finding any air to grab. Tumbling in a lightless void, sparked here and there with the tracks of stars. Freezing from a cold sharper than a Viking’s nightmare of Hel, damping my fire to faint tendrils of smoke oozing out of my nostrils, icing over both sets of eyelids and turning my wing membranes as brittle as rime frost on a still pond.
The battle was a mistake from the beginning, a defamation of character leading to inevitable confrontation. I’d been accused of taking a young virgin girl. That was a long-bearded lie. I will admit that when I was not long out of the shell I appreciated the delicate savor of virgin flesh, boy’s or girl’s, but after laying my first egg clutch, my taste turned to full-grown males. Their meat was richer, stronger-flavored—in truth, gamier—than the pale flesh of young women. Anyway, the local maidens keep themselves starved down to skin and bone until they attract a mate. After that, well, while it is grudgingly permitted to take breeding females, my line has always had more care for our honor. There’s not much sport in harvesting a woman too pregnant to run, or too concerned with protecting her young to have the sense to hide. And children aren’t worth the bother unless you round up a gaggle of them.
I hadn’t tormented and dined on anyone but full-grown males for two or three centuries, usually the ones who came proudly shouting what they thought was my true name, riding fat juicy horses and encased in metal shells which sizzled a nice crust on them.
Now there was true sport! Dodging their sharp, pointy little lances, huffing great gouts of dusky smoke, fending off swords with my claws, and finally broiling them medium-rare with one good blast of flame after enough tormenting to get their sap fully risen. Tasty, oh my, yes.
Unfair that I was banished from life and light for something I didn’t even do.
Time had no meaning in the void, only emptiness and a great, aching loneliness that gnawed and rended my soul with fangs more terrible than any beast magical or mundane. Abandoned, my life ripped out of time, I floated through the beginnings and endings of worlds unknowing, alone and unmade, reined back from the black rage of berserker despair only by the raw, desperate need to survive. I am Draconis Verdigris. We do not give up.
With a concussion that rattled my brain inside the wedge of my skull, I dropped from the void into a night sky overwhelming with sound and color and scent. The sudden transition shocked my senses. I plummeted like a hunk of granite, falling, not flying, terrorized by the rush of warm and sudden life. By the time I got my wits about me, I was too close to the ground to do more than flare my wings and brace for impact.
I hit the ground hard enough to knock my wind out and snap two spines at the end of my tail. But I was alive.
The scents were alien to my nostrils, revealing a hot, dry, barren place instead of the forested fjords of home. A slice of moon showed me a land of blasted, jagged rock, sand still warm from the day’s sun, strange twisted bushes and trees armored with thorns, powdered with dust. Unknown tracks patterned the sand and disappeared over rock, to reappear again in the next patch of sand. I recognized nothing.
I could hear the skritch of wind-shifted twigs against rock, the whisper of sand moving over itself, claw-scuttlings of tiny creatures, and once a wild wailing that could have issued from the stretched throat of a wolf. But no birdsong, no rill of water or the slow, cold conversations of salmon, no thrashing of brush as elks beat the velvet from their antlers.
My fire was almost out. I lay still, saving what energy remained to me. I can fast for a century or so if necessary but the lethargy in my long-sinewed muscles and the vast emptiness in my belly told me my time in the void had been much longer than two, three or even four hundred years.
I was too weak to hunt, too weak to even move. I lay with one wing crumpled under my body and couldn’t shift enough to free it. I pumped my ribs and exhaled. No fire, just a whisper of smoke, not enough heat to warm a leftover snack.
Something moved across the sand in front of my nose. A blunt-tailed lizard, beaded black and orange across its back, moving slowly, its tail in counterpoint to its torso as it waddled cautiously closer, drawn by the fading heat of my body.
A lizard. A relative. An ancestor, if you believe the legends of the beginnings of our race. Which made eating it uncomfortably close to cannibalism.
Damn ethics, I was starving. I scooped it off the sand with my tongue. One crunch and it was gone. Barely a tidbit to my hunger, but its brief taste gave me hope. I cast out my senses, pushing back the creeping cold of death.
There were sparks of warm life all around me. I lay still and let mammalian curiosity bring the creatures within range of my glance. Once under my basilisk stare, they marched obligingly into my jaws. Rabbits, a porcine creature much smaller than the wild boars of home, a thin, slab-sided wolflike thing with dirty gray-yellow fur, each one renewed my strength, stoked the coals in my fire-chamber.
I didn’t torment any of them. There is no honor in tormenting a creature too simple to fully realize what it has to fear. For tormenting to be honorable, as well as pleasurable, you need prey that can imagine its own demise, which leaves us with only humans, magpies, foxes, and two species of swine.
I couldn’t yet fly, but I could stand and shake out my cramped wings, flex my talons, and stretch hindlegs and forelegs, surveying my length for serious hurt, and finding none. Able to move, I could hunt.
Cattle are the same the world over. Brainless and toothsome. I stalked a herd and killed four while they were still
entranced, a quick slash of claw, eating two of them raw, choking down their uncooked flesh, feeling their meat and blood flood my muscles with life, fueling my fire. Three deep breaths. I raised my head, flexing my neck to clear the passage, and belched out a stream of fire that lit t he night sky and splashed liquid flame over rock and sand. I was alive! I shrieked my challenge to this world, a long ringing clarion that refuted death and said to all, “Beware. Hic est draconis!”
When the echoes of my cry died away, the night was utterly silent. Nothing moved, or hardly breathed. Life huddled close to the earth, frozen in terror, knowing with the memory of long-dead forebears that its only protection lay in invisibility.
I seared the other two dead cows and ate my first civilized meal by the graying light of dawn, relishing the hot, herbivore-scented meat, picking my teeth clean with splinters of leg bones.
As the sun tipped a horizon jagged with the backbones of mountains, I spread my wings, flexing the long vanes and stretching their prismed green-gold plates that lay flat along the reptilian curves of my body. The acid-washed bronze of spines, talons and the two spiraled horns that swept back from my wide triangular brow were gilded in the early light. From the egg, I knew that I was beautiful, but only now, after surviving the worst that magic could do, after eons in the void, rebirthed weak and helpless into a new world, only now did I know my own true strength. In this world or any other, I am fear. I am why men flinch and look up at the shadow of a crow.
With a strong downthrust of wing, I sprang into the air.
The ascending sun gave the air substance. I rose and soared, riding the warm currents with barely the flick of a wingtip for control, then diving, twisting, rollicking in the freedom of flight.
When I settled, I found myself looking down upon a very strange land. Not a forest in sight, no water, no villages or farmsteads, just sere, barren earth spiked with sharp upthrusts of gray and yellow rock as far as I could see.
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