The Dragon's Price

  Some smoke still fills the cave, but most of it is in thin tendrils curling over the uneven rock ceiling. Once more Golmarr leads the way through the cavern, but with my shortened skirt making it easier for me to move, he doesn’t have to stop and wait as frequently. When he does stop, his gaze flashes to my legs, and I wish I could cover the scars.

  “He whipped my legs because he said no one would ever see them,” I explain. “They would always be covered by skirts. If he whipped my back, I couldn’t wear dresses that showed my shoulders because everybody would know my father is a monster. No one was ever supposed to see my legs.”

  “What about your future husband?” Golmarr snaps, voice angry. “He would see your legs.”

  “He said no one would ever want to marry me. I would be an untouched virgin until I killed myself at a young age.”

  His jaw clenches and releases. “With the way you were treated, I’m surprised you didn’t kill yourself.”

  “Only my father treated me that way.” I leap over a jagged stone—something I wouldn’t have been able to do wearing a long skirt. “Nona, the woman who raised me, loves me.” My chest aches at the thought of Nona finding out I have been given to the fire dragon. It will break her heart. I climb up a massive boulder spanning the entire cave floor and gasp. “Golmarr,” I whisper. He’s already jumped down.

  “What?” In one swift move he is standing beside me, head almost touching the ceiling, hand on his sword. I lift my arm and point.

  In the distance are dozens of glowing orange dots, like stars on the horizon, only these pinpricks of light are moving. Golmarr removes his hand from his sword and lifts the bow from his back. He strums the bowstring twice with his thumb, and then slides an arrow from his quiver. Putting the arrow to the string, he pulls it back and holds it up to his eye, then lets it fly. The moment the arrow is out of our small circle of light, it disappears. Three seconds later, two orange dots jolt and then disappear, and something shrieks. The other glowing orbs freeze for a moment, and then start rushing toward us.

  Golmarr grabs the dragon scale necklace and shoves it down the front of my shirt, plunging us into darkness. “Don’t move,” he whispers, and I can hear his bow groan a split second before the twang of a fired arrow echoes through the cave. Another set of orange pinpricks goes dark, and now I understand what is up ahead. Eyes. Glowing orange eyes. Lots of them.

  Golmarr starts shooting arrows almost as fast as my heart is pounding. The orange eyes are becoming fewer and fewer as his arrows find their targets, but they are not being extinguished fast enough. The remaining eyes are getting close. Too close. So close that I can hear the breathing of whatever they belong to. Without warning, Golmarr presses his bow into my hands and the swish of steel rings out. “When I say your name, light the way for me,” he says. The air stirs, and there is a quiet thud on the ground below the rock. I reach out for my new friend, but feel only air. An overpowering sense of isolation steals the breath from me.

  “Sorrowlynn!” I pull the necklace from my shirt, holding it above my head and filling the cave with a gentle glow. Five creatures run toward us. They are the size of big dogs, but are covered with a skin of glossy, dark scales. Five little dragons.

  “Mayanchi,” Golmarr growls and swings his sword into the closest creature. The thing hisses and lashes out at him with curved black claws, but Golmarr dances out of the way and lifts his sword in an arc over his head, slicing down into the dragon’s neck and killing it. Another beast leaps at him, growling, snapping its sharp teeth at Golmarr’s thigh. The horse lord staggers to the side and plunges his sword into the creature’s scaly hide; the scales screech against the metal. He tries to yank the weapon free, but it won’t come loose.

  Another dragon runs at him. I scream a warning just as Golmarr throws a knife, hitting it in the eye. He puts his foot on the beast with his sword stuck in it and pulls, but before he can slide it free, the last two dragons reach him, one closing its mouth over his sword arm, the other jumping onto his back. Everything seems to slow down. Golmarr opens his mouth and screams, and the pain of it turns my stomach. He is going to die, and it is because he took pity on me.

  Without a thought, I drop the bow, pull the hunting knife from my waistband, and leap to the ground beside Golmarr. Holding the knife in my right hand, I hack at the creature on Golmarr’s back. The weapon feels awkward, and my blows hardly damage the thick scales, but finally, after lots of hacking, the creature falls from Golmarr’s back and lands at my feet, hissing. I hold the knife over my head and swing with all of my strength, slamming the gleaming blade into flesh, and the dragon stops moving.

  Golmarr reaches his free hand over his shoulder and pulls an arrow from his quiver, stabbing it into the eye of the beast locked onto his wrist. The animal jolts and jerks and splatters him with blood, and then stops moving. I grab the thing by its scaly snout and pry its jaws open, watching as one long yellow fang lifts out of Golmarr’s skin, leaving a round puncture that instantly turns into a fountain of blood.

  Golmarr gasps and drops his sword. It clangs against the rocky ground. He wraps his hand around his wounded wrist, and blood pours out between his fingers. “Sorrowlynn, cut a piece of your skirt off and wrap it around my wrist. Quickly,” he says. I do as he asks, tearing my tattered skirt and pulling the scrap tight around his wrist. The dingy fabric turns red with blood in a matter of seconds. “Again,” he says. I tear off a longer strip and wrap it around his wrist three times, and then tie it into a tight knot. He groans, but holds still. When I am done tending his wound, he sits on the cave floor and leans his shoulders against the boulder. Holding his bleeding wrist to his chest, he closes his eyes. The breath moves rapidly in and out of him. A sheen of sweat shines on his skin, and his face is speckled with black blood. I tear another piece of fabric from my skirt. Without asking, I cradle the back of his head and wipe the blood from his skin.

  He grimaces and pulls away. “Is my face cut?” he asks, blinking bleary eyes.

  “No. It’s covered with dragon blood.”

  “Mayanchi blood. The little dragons are called Mayanchi,” he says. He lifts his uninjured hand and touches the skin. “It stings,” he says, looking at his fingers. There is a bit of inky blood on them. He touches one fingertip to his tongue and frowns, spitting. Squatting, he picks up his sword and balances it across his knees. The blade is glossy with blood. Taking the scrap of fabric from me, he wipes the weapon. Everywhere the blood is removed, the metal is as bright and shiny as newly forged and polished steel and pocked with shallow holes. “It eats through metal,” he whispers, wiping his face and neck with his sleeve. “Do you have any on you?” His eyes quickly scan me, and I shake my head. “Good. You need to clean that knife, quickly.”

  I tear another scrap from my skirt and wipe the hunting knife clean. The metal practically glows.

  Golmarr eyes the knife. “When you use that to fight, don’t do little chops. Either hold it with both of your hands and swing with all of your strength, or better yet, use the tip and stab, thrusting with all of your weight. Aim for an eye if you can. It is soft and vulnerable.” He pulls the arrow out of the eye of the beast lying dead at his feet and grunts. Where the dragon’s blood has touched it, the wood is corroded. “Nayadi once told me that dragons have acidic blood, but I never believed her, because how could a blind old woman know something like that?”

  I am hardly listening. My feet are throbbing. Burning. I look down. My white velvet slippers are oily black, and tendrils of steam are rising from them. I am standing in a shallow pool of dragon blood, from the beast I killed. I yank the slippers off as fast as I can and throw them, then tear more of my skirt off and plop down on the cave floor. Without a thought for manners or modesty, I spit on each foot and scrub at the blood coating them. The fabric removes the surface blood, but the creases in the soles are lined with black. “I need water,” I say, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. My feet are still burning.

  “I know, but we don’t
have any.” Golmarr stands and wobbles. “Let’s keep going. There is bound to be water somewhere in this cave. Dragons have to drink, right?” He holds his hand out and I take it. “You saved my life.” He pulls me close and looks right into my eyes. His hazel eyes, lit by the dim glow of the dragon scale, are beautiful. “Thank you.” He puts a finger to his forehead and then crosses it with his other finger. Honored friend.

  For once, Golmarr is slower than me. Even with my feet bare and stinging, and a body that has never done anything more physical than dance lessons and riding docile horses, I am the one waiting for him as he slowly makes his way up and down boulders.

  We pass the Mayanchi Golmarr shot. Some are still alive, so Golmarr holds his sword in his left hand and kills them, cleaning his blade each time. “I had hoped to salvage some of the arrows,” he mumbles. I look at his quiver. Three arrows with red fletching poke out above the leather lip.

  “You only have three left?” I ask, panic apparent in my voice.

  He looks at me sidelong. “I wore my ceremonial clothing and weapons today. I only had three to begin with, but my brothers gave me their arrows before I came after you, so I had twenty-seven.” A hint of a smile touches his face, and I realize his skin is covered with sweat. “If I’d known I was going to be fighting dragons with you, Princess Sorrowlynn of Faodara, I would have most definitely packed a full quiver.” He stops walking. “Will you hold the dragon scale over my injury?” I do as he asks. The bandage is soaked through with blood. Around the crimson bandage, the skin is puffy. I touch his skin. It feels like meat fresh off the fire. Slowly, I pull my hand away.

  “I have never been taught healing of any kind,” I say, “but I don’t think that amount of swelling and heat is normal for a fresh wound.”

  He shakes his head and grimaces. “I’ve had my fair share of injuries, and none of them have ever hurt like this. I think I’ve been poisoned. The Mayanchi must have some sort of venom.”

  “Are you going to die?” I blurt before I think.

  “Possibly. I feel like I’m dying already.” He turns away from me and starts vomiting. I grab his thick hair in a handful at the nape of his neck and hold it out of the way. When he is done, he wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve and throws his arm over my shoulder. “That’s a little better,” he says, and we start walking.

  I slide my arm behind Golmarr’s back and hold him close. His body is firm beneath my hand, and every time he takes a step, I can feel his muscles move beneath his skin. He smells like leather and sweat and smoke and blood. His long hair falls over my shoulder, and his weight makes walking ten times more awkward. “So,” I say, pretending that having my arm around the lean waist of a horse lord is a totally normal thing. “How many horses do you have?”

  “Sorrowlynn?”

  “Yes?” I look at Golmarr’s ashen face.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel good enough to talk.”

  “That’s all right.” I pat his back and adjust his weight a little more evenly.

  The cave seems to go on for an eternity. My stomach feels like it hasn’t been filled in weeks, and my shoulder and back muscles burn with the burden of Golmarr. The ground starts to slope downward, and then we come to a dead end. My heart drops into my stomach. “What do we do now?” I look at Golmarr for the answer. His face is so close to mine that I could pucker my lips and they would be touching his cheek, and then I realize his eyes are closed. “Golmarr?” I jostle him a little bit.

  His eyelids flicker, and he slowly focuses on my face. “Princess Sorrowlynn?” he asks, furrowing his brow. His head falls forward so our foreheads are touching, and a goofy smile quirks his lips. “From the first moment I saw you standing on that dais in the evening sun, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. Your eyes are the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen,” he says, his words slurred. “Even prettier than Evay’s. Hers are brown. Yours are…green.” Despite the fact that he’s obviously delirious, pleasure fills me. He closes his eyes and sighs. “If I die will you do something for me?”

  “If I don’t die, too.”

  “If you don’t die, tell Evay I’m sorry. Tell her if things wouldn’t have turned out this way, I would have married her when I came home.”

  “Wait…who?” I lean away from him, and his head sags forward. His body turns boneless and the weight of him increases, tilting me sideways until I fall to the ground, and he lands on top of me. Our small sphere of light disappears as the dragon scale is sandwiched between us.

  Carefully, I wiggle my way out from under him and turn him onto his side. His breathing is deep, his mouth hanging open. I brush his tangled black hair from his face and make sure there are no rocks under his head. And then I summon all the energy I possess and stand.

  All I want to do is fall back down beside the horse lord and go to sleep. But I thrust my chin forward, tuck back the loose wisps of hair hanging out of my crown braid, and stand tall. Putting one burning foot in front of the other, I start following the cave wall, looking for a new passage. Maybe we already passed one. Maybe we already passed dozens. With the small space the scale lights up, we could have passed thousands and never known.

  I shimmy over rocks and hold the scale up to the cave walls as I go back the way we have come. And then, not five steps ahead, the air in front of me fills with light, a perfect tube of orange going from the floor all the way to the top of the cave, leaving a bright circle on the ceiling high above.

  My heart starts thumping and I wonder if the cave is going to fill with fire again. I limp over to the tube of light and get down onto my hands and knees. Crawling up to the very edge, I peer over a hole the circumference of a water well and shiver at the thought of walking right past it and not falling in. Far, far below, so far that I almost wonder if I am seeing things correctly, is something so shiny I have to squint to look at it, like looking at the sun after the clouds have parted. A gust of warm, dry air wafts up from the hole, followed by a shriek so loud and so terrible that the very ground I am lying on shudders.

  The light goes dark as a great, moving shadow blocks it, and I hear the snap of fabric catching air. A moment later, the shadow is gone, and the light shines up again.

  Too scared and too mesmerized to move, I lay with my body pressed against rock and pebbles, and stare down at the light shining deep below. It is golden, like sunlight on water. It is as bright as daylight. It might be the way out. Or it might be the fire dragon’s fabled treasure.

  My eyelids become heavy, and I imagine the rock below me is cradling my body and rocking it. I give in to my weighted eyelids and let them slip shut. The instant they close, I realize something is making a sound. I think of the clock in my bedchamber, which is always ticking, but I hear it only if I consciously listen for it. Somewhere in the cave there is a click, click, clicking. I keep my eyes closed and focus on it. The dark space around me slowly comes to life with noise, a myriad of clickings, some loud, some so quiet I almost wonder if I hear them at all.

  I climb to my feet and brush the grit from my skin, and start hobbling toward the sound. With the light coming from the well, I can see the cave better than I’ve ever seen it before. The walls sparkle and glitter like the night sky. The floor is strewn with thousands of blackened bones and rusted bits of armor and weapons. Above and to my right, the ceiling has two white lumps sticking out of it. Directly below are two matching white lumps, like teeth that have been rounded with time, jutting up from the cave floor. I limp over to the closest lump. It is as tall as my waist, and milky smooth. I put my hand on it and pull back. The stone is covered with a slippery liquid. I peer up at the twin ceiling lump. A single drop of water falls from it and clicks onto the lump beside me, bursting into a thousand minuscule droplets.

  If the clicking I am hearing is water dripping, and I can see only two lumps, that would mean only two clicks. But there are lots and lots of clicks echoing through the darkness, maybe even hundreds. Turning toward the sound, I step up to the cave wal
l. As far as I can see, it is a sheet of sleek black stone covered with sparkles. I run my fingers over the rough surface, and after I have gone three steps, my hand disappears. It looks like the rock has bitten it off at the wrist. I gasp and yank it toward my body, and it comes out of the wall completely normal.

  For a long moment, I stare at the rock, and then, summoning all of my courage, I lift both of my hands and ease them forward. When they are even with the glimmering stone, I push them a little further and feel…nothing but air. I take a tiny step forward and my arms disappear into the rock all the way to my elbows. Another step and my nose is a hair away from the wall, and my arms are gone. I squeeze my eyes shut and take one more giant step, and the clicking becomes so loud that I almost scream from the shock.

  Slowly, I open my eyes. I am standing in a room more beautiful than the cliffside palace I grew up in. Massive white columns are braced between the stone floor and ceiling. They look like giant, delicate icicles, and they seem to absorb the pearly light from the dragon scale and reflect it back twice as bright. Hundreds of smaller, half-formed columns hang from the ceiling, dripping water down onto their other halves, as if the two stones are alive and reaching out for each other. In the center of the room is a lake with white columns shooting up from its center.

  I clap my hands and squeal. I, Princess Sorrowlynn, have walked through a dark cave, passed through a stone wall that isn’t really there, and found the water needed to save my life and the horse lord’s, and I have done it all on my own. Tears sting my eyes as I stand a little higher, and then I stumble to the water’s edge and thrust my burning feet into it.

  The water is as cold as fresh-melted snow, and seems to wrap around my wounded skin. The burning is sucked away, and my entire body sags with relief. I plop down onto my bottom and scoot into the lake until the water is up to my neck, then lean my head back. The icy water suctions around my braided hair and onto my scalp, and my skin absorbs the chill. It penetrates my body and starts to make my bones ache. I stand, and a slew of water pours from me, making giant ripples that spread from my shins all the way to the edge of the light as I back out of the water.