“You will leave. Now. And never come within my sight again. ” Shardas’s voice was hard.
Darrym sneered back. “I will go when my elder tells me to. ”
“You will leave this place, as my consort says, or I will kill you myself. ” The hardness in Velika’s voice sent chills down my spine, and I took a little step farther away from her.
Darrym, too, looked chilled. And then he flew up and out of the cavern without looking back. It was a dragon we had never seen before who came to replace the missing spears above us with alchemically treated logs and to stand guard so that we knew there was no chance of escape.
Into the Jungle
We did have the benefit now of being able to speak without being heard. The catch was that there were only Shardas, Velika, and myself to plan what to do next.
Shardas hovered near the opening in the ceiling for a while, trying to catch sight of our friends. After a time he glided down to report that neither a familiar dragon nor a familiar human could be seen now, only the silent sentry.
“That doesn’t mean that they have been harmed,” Shardas said, trying to soothe both Velika and me.
“But it still isn’t good,” I replied, though not rudely. “We have to reckon how to get out of here. All of us. ”
“It’s clear that they don’t truly believe in my sovereignty,” Velika said. “They want a queen, but a queen that they can control. A figurehead to worship from a distance. ” She shook her head. “It makes one wonder what the last queen was like. ”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “All the dragons I’ve met here have been so . . . bossy. With their human slaves worshipping them, and the way they even order you about. ”
“Little more than a slave herself, is my guess,” said Shardas. “No doubt they kept her in fine style: food, human servants, every luxury their primitive land offers. Why should she argue?”
Shuddering, Velika began to stroke and turn the eggs. She had been carefully rotating them every few hours since they had been clutched, to ensure that there were no flat spots on them. If an egg was flat anywhere, I had learned, there was a chance that the hatchling would be malformed.
I wondered if lack of turning was also at fault for the mean stature and dull coloring of the local dragons. If they did have the brittle- egg sickness, they might be too delicate to turn over.
“We’re not leaving any of the eggs here,” I said resolutely. But this had been said many times since the clutching, so I went on. “We must either convince them to let Velika and all the eggs go free, or we must destroy them. ”
This last had not been said, at least not aloud, though I suspected that much of Shardas’s muttering had been to this effect. But now that it was out in the open, we all paused for a time to consider it.
“Kill them all?” Velika closed her eyes. “Could we do such a thing, and live with ourselves?”
Tail lashing, Shardas looked ready to insist that he could, but then he sagged. “I do not wish to harm anyone,” he admitted. “Unless forced. ”
“But perhaps,” Velika said softly, “perhaps if some were convinced to take our part. Those that oppose us could be captured. . . . ”
“We’ll need to know how many sympathize,” I said, trying to look at it sensibly, to imagine that it could be done.
“If we could talk to Niva,” Shardas said, and now his tail was lashing again, but with frustration, “she could get this all sorted out in a matter of days. ”
With my head thrown back until it made my neck hurt, I looked at the logs that covered the opening of the cavern above us. No dragon could get out of that, and it would be only too obvious if one did. But a small human, on the other hand . . .
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“I’ll do it,” I said, stopping Shardas in his tracks. “I’ll sneak out tonight, find the others, and send them to talk to the locals. Maybe some of the humans will join our cause as well. They can’t enjoy being cowed this way. ”
We waited until nightfall, and then Shardas flew me up to the entrance. There was a dragon standing guard, but I was dressed in dark clothes, and I don’t think she was watching for a single human to slip out. She didn’t even glance my way as I slithered through the barrier and crept across the clearing to the cover of the forest.
Finding the path that I had come to the underground temple on, I again followed it from within the trees, keeping out of sight. A trio of humans came up the path near dawn, carrying baskets of food, and I hesitated, wondering if I should approach them. But they looked eager to deliver breakfast to the sentry dragon, laughing and chatting, and so I waited until they were well away before I continued on.
I didn’t want to end up back at the home of my “dragon master,” though I was headed that way. But if I went beyond his house, I knew that I would be approaching the shore, and that was the best way I could think of to contact our friends. I was hoping beyond hope that Luka and Hagen had simply been dumped on the shore, and that they weren’t languishing in a dungeon somewhere . . . or worse.
It did occur to me that by stopping off at my old master’s house, I might see Darrym and manage to overhear some gossip about them, but I would also run the risk of getting caught.
So when I reckoned that I was near that dragon’s home, I veered away. I raced across the path, and began walking parallel to it on the other side. It was full light now, though very little really filtered down through the leafy canopy. In the green twilight I climbed over fallen logs and stumbled over moss- covered rocks. I was quickly losing my impetus, and wishing that I had eaten more before I had left.
I was quite caught up in imagining what I should have eaten, and so stumbling into the yard in front of a large dragon house came as something of a shock.
Even worse, the dragon was just coming outside, and saw me at once. We stared at each other for a long time.
The Arrangement
I started to back into the jungle, but the dragon halted me with a barked command. I turned it over in my head: I had improved my knowledge of their language in the past weeks after all. She was asking if I had a message for her, clearly believing me to be a servant for one of her neighbors.
Smiling as disarmingly as I could, I shook my head and held out my hands in a helpless gesture.
The morning light betrayed me, though. My clothing, my skin and hair showing pale through the fading dye, my blue eyes—all stood out far too brightly in the sunlight, and I knew it.
She pounced on me like a cat and took me into her house, setting me down in the middle of the floor. This house was considerably larger and much cleaner than that of the dragon I had served. Along one wall were several piles of fresh bedding, leading me to think that she shared the home with a mate perhaps, and children.
This made me uneasy—how many dragons would I be facing when the others returned? I counted at least four beds. But it also gave me a rather wider audience than I had planned on, if I wanted to convert some of the locals to our cause.
“You are the girl with the others?” the dragon asked, studying me closely.
“Yes, with Queen Velika,” I replied simply in Feravelan.
She glared and ordered me in dragon: “Don’t say that name!”
I bit my lip, not wanting to antagonize her any more than I already had.
“Where is my son?”
The question startled me even more than stepping out of the trees into her yard had. Her son? Who was her son? I thought of Darrym visiting my one-time dragon master, not that far from here. Was one of them her son? But I hadn’t seen my master since I had fled his clearing, and Darrym should have been back by now, unless . . .
Then it hit me: the little dragon we had captured, Darrym’s younger brother. She must mean him! He was still being held out on the rocky islet where we had made camp. At least, I thought he was. I racked my brain, trying to think of his name, and remembered that he had none: he wasn?
??t old enough to have human servants.
I plucked at a bit of gray cloth that lay on one of the dragon couches, raising my eyebrows, and then roughly sketched Peder No-People’s dimensions in the air.
The mother dragon looked ready to roast me. “Take me to him. ”
I had to think this over for a moment. If I showed her where we were encamped, she could return with a war party and attack. On the other hand, she could fly me right to my friends without my having to tramp through miles of forest. And, with other dragons there to persuade her in her own language, it was possible that she would join our cause.
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Although her older son was the odious Darrym.
Instead, I came up with a compromise of sorts. I would have her take me to the shore near some other islets, but close enough to ours for me to signal to my friends with a bonfire or something.
Nodding, I let her scoop me up again. I tried to ask if I could ride on her back, but she only blew smoke derisively at me. Carrying me in her foreclaws, she flew to the shore where I directed her.
I quickly gathered some driftwood and lit it with the flint in my belt pouch. We had never seen a human on the shore, so my friends would want to investigate immediately, I was sure.
They must have been on edge—of course they were!—and keeping a careful watch. The fire had just gotten going when a large form glided toward us.
Darrym’s mother cowered: it was plain that she had never seen what I considered a normal- sized dragon before. And it was only Feniul, who was not extremely large when compared to Shardas and Niva.
But never had I been so glad to see Shardas’s dear green-clawed cousin. I leaped to hug him around the neck as soon as he hit the sand, so overjoyed that I didn’t even notice Luka until my betrothed slithered down from Feniul’s back to hug me just as fiercely.
“I’ve been so worried about you! I’ve been frantic with missing you!” He lifted me clear off the ground and I laid my cheek against his.
“You too!” It was a stupid thing to say, but it was all I could think of. “How did you get free?”
“They brought us here and dropped us,” Luka explained. “I guess they didn’t want to offend Velika by hurting her friends. ”
“Hagen? Leontes? Niva?”
“All well,” Luka assured me.
“Thank the Triunity,” I said.
“What happened to you?” Luka released me just enough to make certain that I wasn’t injured. “What did they do?”
“Nothing. Velika and the others are fine. I snuck away,” I said, glad that Darrym’s mother couldn’t understand us. “To see what had happened to you. ” I took a steadying breath. “And to tell you what we need to do. ”
“Before you go further, Creel, please tell me: what is this lady doing here?” Feniul darted a suspicious look at the female dragon.
Sudden exhaustion washed over me. How was I going to do this, really? How was I going to negotiate the release of the nameless young dragon, convince everyone to let Velika go free, and . . . I could have sworn there was something else I needed to do. I sagged against Luka, who picked me up and held me close to his chest.
“Just rest,” Luka murmured. “You can’t save the world all the time, you know. ”
Seeing that I was fading, Feniul turned to the dragon and addressed her directly in their language. He seemed alarmed at what she had to say, though, and turned back to us at once.
“She wants her child back, which is understandable,” he explained. “But as soon as he’s free, she’s threatening to tell everyone where we are and that we stole her son, which is worrisome, to say the least. ”
“She can’t do that,” I said, panicking a little.
“No, she can’t,” Luka agreed. “Tell her that if she wants to see her child, she has to promise not to reveal that we had captured him, or where we are camped. ”
“Even better,” I said, sitting up in Luka’s arms and causing him to quickly change his grip on my legs so that he didn’t drop me. “Even better: tell her that if she wants to get him back, she has to meet us tomorrow with ten other dragons. ”
Both Feniul and Luka stared at me. Disbelief warred with concern on their faces as they patently came to the conclusion that I was suffering from some sort of brain fever.
“We need to convince these dragons that Velika cannot stay here and be their pet,” I said. “They have to let her go, and all her eggs. I snuck out for two reasons: I wanted to make sure that you were all right”—I gave Luka’s shoulders a squeeze—“and I wanted to see how many locals we could convert to our cause. ”
Feniul relayed our request to the female, but she violently disagreed. She wanted her son, she wanted him now, and she wanted to see us punished for our crime.
I could hardly blame her, so, with much arm waving and Feniul to translate, I told her that we had a special message from the queen, and needed to tell as many dragons as possible.
“Very well. ” She sniffed. “Bring my son to the southern temple,” she told Feniul. “You will return him to me, and then the humans may speak to us. Or I will bring every dragon and human in our land against you. ”
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A Wall of Scales
This is terrifying. ”
We were standing with Amacarin in the middle of the forest clearing where the southern temple of the dragons was located. The temple itself consisted mainly of pillars that marked a loose circle in the trees, and some stones set into the mossy ground in a pattern that looked as though it had a ritualistic purpose.
“Said the girl who once clung from Niva’s neck, trying to get a collar on her. Niva!” Luka rolled his eyes. But his face was white and he was clutching my hand. “And then you leaped off a roof onto a strange dragon’s back, shortly before jumping aboard several strange dragons in the middle of a battle. ”
“I spend a lot of time hanging too far off the ground,” I commented, trying to sound brash but coming out high-pitched. “I should stop that. ”
“True. As soon as you do this. ” With his free hand Luka gestured at the crowd in front of us.
Like a wall of scales, fourteen local dragons stood in the clearing. And gathered around the dragons were their people. Hard, dark eyes stared at us. The white markings on their faces stood out starkly against their tanned skin, giving them the appearance of even greater hostility.
Taking a young dragon was a serious crime here, since hatchlings were so rare, and it looked more like we were on trial than anything else. My heart sank further as I saw my original captor, Ullalal, and her daughters standing beside the dragon I had served for that disastrous day and a half.
“I don’t think I can do this. ” I tried to step back.
Luka let go of my hand, but only so he could push me gently forward. “You’re the heroine of the Dragon Wars,” he said. “I’m convinced that you can do anything. ”
This made me smile, and I was still smiling when Feniul landed beside us. He had the little, nameless dragon with him, and also Niva and the orange dragon Roginet.
“This is more than ten of them,” Feniul hissed to me.
“I noticed. ”
“Be prepared to leap onto my back if we have to get away quickly,” he said.
“Righto,” Luka said.
Now that our dragons were here, it was time to begin. I took yet another step forward, seeing every set of eyes—human and dragon—follow my movements.
“As you all know,” I began, “I am a friend of Queen Velika Azure-Wing, and I am authorized to speak for her today. ” I paused to let Feniul translate, and then waited a little longer to let my words sink in.
“Velika is very displeased. Her life and the lives of her mate and her eggs have been threatened. ” A number of the dragons looked shocked at this, and so did all of the humans. I took heart: perhaps they didn’t know what was going on down i
n that cavern and it was Mannyl alone who was corrupt, not the general population.
“She was stolen away from her mate and her friends only weeks before she had her clutch. The elder dragon who lives in the lesser temple has told her that she will not be allowed to leave, ever, unless she gives up one of her children. ”
More disbelief, shocked murmurs, head- shaking. Luka gave me a wink. We had their sympathy, I was sure of it.
Just as I was preparing to say more, Darrym’s mother called out from the front of the crowd. She was standing as close as she could get to her younger son, who was still tethered to Niva on one side and Roginet on the other.
“We are the true people,” she said. “We need the queen more than these vain, fancy dragons with you! She belongs to us!”
“Yes, she is your queen! Your queen: not your slave,” I countered. “A queen is not kept in a hole in the ground, forced to do your will. The queen of the dragons needs to be free to go to all her people who need her. She is to look after the sick, bless matings and hatchlings, and guide you to fertile lands. ”
Niva, to one side, nodded approvingly. She had undertaken my education in the duties of the king and queen of the dragons last year, when it was revealed how little I knew about my friends’ culture.
“But she is not the real queen,” Darrym’s mother shot right back. “As descendants of the First Mother’s line, we have certain privileges. ”
This raised Niva’s hackles too much for her to remain silent. “You have no right to keep the queen in a dungeon!” Then she blasted the air with flame, a serious offense in a peaceable gathering of dragons.
Darrym’s mother’s insistence got to me, too. It reminded me too much of Mannyl and Darrym, so smug about kidnapping Velika and holding her prisoner, completely convinced as they were that whatever they did was right and good.
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“If you are the chosen people,” I said, and Feniul had to scramble to translate, breathing steam as he was from outrage, “why is it that your numbers have dwindled? Why has this very land turned against you, poisoning you with noxious smoke?” I stared around, making eye contact with all of the dragons that I could, willing them to think about what I was saying.
“Is it that you have displeased the First Mother? Keeping the queen locked away like this can only offend the First Mother more,” I went on. “Velika is still descended from that first dragon, and is of royal blood. It is wrong of you to treat her this way. You must persuade your elders to set her free. Now that she knows about you, she will continue to aid you. But she must be free. ”