Dragon Flight (16 page)

To my surprise I saw that her wings were almost healed. Where Shardas’s still had holes throughout, she had only patches of rose-pink membrane that looked to be tender but still serviceable.

She hovered above the wreckage for a heartbeat before circling down to land beside Krashath. His cries had been growing fainter, and his writhing less frantic, and when she lighted beside him, he ceased altogether. He was still alive – the sudden silence was filled with his
ragged breaths – but he lay in a relatively calm state and looked at her with his flat black eyes.

“Krashath,” she said in her rough-soft voice. “Krashath, it should not have come to this.”

“Velika,” he gasped. “Velika, I … wanted …”

“You wanted power, more power than any dragon should have,” she chided gently. “And you have paid the price for it.”

“No!” The word was wrenched from his soul.

“Yes.” She laid her foreclaws gently on his. “Rest now, Krashath. Go into the Eternal Sun.”

His eyes closed, and I thought he had passed into death at last. There were tears coursing down my cheeks, and Marta’s too, I saw. He seemed a pitiful thing now, desperate and broken. His eyes opened again, and I gave a little gasp.

“Velika? Did you ever … love … me?”

She leaned in close and whispered to him so that none of us could hear. Then his eyes closed a final time, and his body sagged as the powerful spirit within it at last fled.

Somehow I expected that it would all be over once Krashath was dead. The Citatian army would return, the dragons would rip off their collars, and we would all dance in the moonlit streets of Pelletie.

But nothing happened after Krashath died, save that Shardas went to Velika. She raised her head to keen the dragon mourning song, and Shardas looked at her for a moment or so.

“I am not sure that he deserves this,” Shardas said. But a moment later he joined her.

The dragon patrol flew down to land in the rubble-strewn courtyard, and the soldiers dismounted and began shouting at Shardas and Velika. The human voices were too thin to carry up to our turret, and at last I persuaded Darrym to fly down.

He bowed in the dragon fashion to Shardas and Velika – head down, forelegs primly together – then looked away as though Krashath’s body was not there. He did not join the mourning rites, and I could hardly blame him.

Marta and I slipped off his back and went over to the commander of the dragon patrol, who was shouting at all of us in Citatian. I waved my arms until I got his attention and he realised that I couldn’t understand him.

“What … happening?” His Feravelan was laboured. “Why … no collar?” He pointed at Shardas and Velika.

“That,” I said majestically, pointing to Shardas, “is the
king
of the
dragons
.” I waited until I saw confusion give way to shock. “Yes, the
king
. Very angry king. No more collars!”

The patrol commander was aghast. He looked from me to his dragon to Shardas and Velika. They were both very large, and gleamed beautifully in the afternoon sun. Additionally, Shardas’s unfiled spine ridges gave him a war-like appearance, and though he sang the mourning song with fervour, he was watching the commander out of the corner of his eye.

“No collar?” The man swallowed hard.

“No. No collar.”

Marta shook her head adamantly and then drew a finger across her throat for emphasis. “No collars ever!”

The commander shifted from foot to foot for a moment, but then he gathered his resolve. “No! King Nason say collars.” He pointed up at the throne room, some three storeys above us. The wall overlooking the courtyard was missing, courtesy of Krashath’s hasty exit
with me and Marta in tow just three days previously. A board had been nailed across the hole.

“We’ll see about that.” I went to Darrym. “Lift me up into the throne room,” I ordered.

“Me, too,” Marta insisted.

Just then the mourning song for Krashath faded away into silence. Velika and Shardas rounded on us immediately.

“What are you doing?” Shardas’s eyes flashed: Darrym had a foreclaw around my waist and was reaching for Marta.

“They said to lift them …” Darrym trailed off.

“Creel,” Shardas said. “This is too dangerous.”

“We need Nason and Arjas to help us stop this war,” I said reasonably.

“I’ll get them.”

“How? You’re too big.”

“There must be a way to –”

Tense with anxiety, I said, “Shardas, we have to get Arjas and Nason to Roulain to call a stop to this war. The Citatian army doesn’t know that Krashath is dead, and they didn’t know that he was controlling the king. We’re going to need solid proof to persuade them to stop their advance on Feravel.”

“We spoke to Ria before we came here,” Marta chimed in. “They cannot win without our help.”

“Then we must go at once,” Velika said. She extended her wings, one at a time, to look at the healed patches. Up
close the pink patches did look somewhat raw, but far better than Shardas’s wings. She clucked over them, concerned.

“We don’t have time to fit you with silk wings like Shardas’s, I’m afraid,” I told her. Gala had cut out the pieces of silk, but that was as far as we’d got with the blue wings. There had not been enough time to sew them, and I saw now that there were no holes in her wings to pass the ties through anyway.

“There is some discomfort, but the flight will not be unbearable,” she decided.

At last Shardas nodded to Darrym, who lifted us up and over the rail and on to the marble floor of the throne room. Then he gripped the edge of the floor with his forelegs so that he could see us clearly, and I saw Shardas and Velika stretch up to watch on either side. Drawing my belt knife, I looked around the room.

It was empty, as I had expected. I started towards the large double doors that led into the rest of the palace, but Marta stopped me with a hand on my arm.

“Listen,” she whispered.

Freezing, we listened until I felt my ears straining away from my head. Then we heard it: a low sobbing sound that was quickly muffled. It was coming from a small door, half hidden by a silk hanging behind the throne, where Krashath used to lie.

We crept towards the door, followed by a barely audible rumble from Shardas, warning us to be careful. I
went first, opening the door a crack and peeping into the room beyond, Marta breathing down my neck, and my knuckles white on the handle of my knife.

The room was a retiring chamber with a couple of low couches and a round table. On one of the couches lay a figure I thought was the king. It was hard to tell because his head was covered with a pillow that was being firmly held in place by Lord Arjas. The king’s legs kicked feebly, and I threw the door open and leaped into the room.

“Stop that!”

Arjas looked up in surprise, but didn’t remove the pillow.

“I said stop!” I shouted, and lunged at him.

Marta and I both attacked him, stabbing him with our little belt knives and screaming like vengeful ghosts. I could hear Shardas bellowing, demanding to know what was happening, but there was no time to respond. While Marta, who I had to admit was a better fighter than me, gave the vizier a long gash down one arm, I wrestled the pillow from his hands and freed the king. Nason slid on to the floor and lay there gasping like a landed fish.

Furious at not being able to see, Shardas finally tore the entire inner wall of the throne room down, exposing us like actors on a stage to the gaze of the three dragons. The king screamed as the light streamed in, and crawled under a couch. Shardas reached in and grabbed Arjas, who was struggling to draw his own knife, and pulled him out of the room to dangle above the courtyard.

“Who are you?”

Arjas could only gabble and kick, robbed of speech by this cavalier treatment by an angry dragon.

“That’s the vizier, Lord Arjas,” I told Shardas. “This one is the king.” I grabbed his ankles and dragged him out from under the couch.

“I’ll get him,” Darrym said cheerfully. He plucked King Nason from the room and held him up to his face. “Good afternoon, Your Majesty,” he sneered.

“Don’t taunt him,” Velika ordered. “He’s clearly near breaking down.”

“Also, he was already a bit simple,” I said. Marta and I went to the edge of the room and Shardas moved around so that we could climb on to his shoulders.

“This explains how Krashath got a hold on him,” Shardas said.

There was anger and pain in his voice, and I realised that, as much as we had all wanted – needed – Krashath to be eliminated, it had caused great turmoil for Shardas. I thought about how I would feel if I had to kill my own brother – Hagen would never hurt a soul, of course – but if I
had
to or thousands of people would die. It wasn’t something I wanted to contemplate for long.

“We must go quickly,” Velika said. “I flew wide around the battle, but even from a distance it was a terrible sight.”

Marta and I settled ourselves on Shardas’s back, and he launched himself into the air. Velika, with Arjas
in her claws, and Darrym with Nason, followed soon after.

“How is it that your wings are not as badly damaged from the flight as Shardas’s?” Marta called the question to the queen dragon before I could.

“I left not long after he did, but flew slower and with more rest,” she explained. “Also, I am not averse to the use of alchemy.”

Giving her a sharp look, Shardas said, “Leontes?”

“Indeed.”

“Niva’s mate?” I asked. “He’s an alchemist?” I was longing to meet the dragon who could stand to be mated – for life! – to stern Niva.

“He dabbles,” Velika said. “He offered to try a healing potion on both of us when he first arrived with the hatchlings, but Shardas refused on behalf of both of us.” She gave him a sidelong look. “As soon as your tailtip disappeared over the horizon, I drank the potion, then escorted the hatchlings and their father to the King’s Seat.”

“That was your choice,” Shardas said with equanimity.

“And I do not regret it.”

Twisting around, I exchanged amused looks with Marta. She had not spent as much time as I had with Shardas, and I would hardly dare to say that I knew Velika at all well, but I could see by her expression that this was refreshing to both of us. Shardas and Velika were bantering, in the wry, humourous way of the dragons,
precisely like an old married couple. It cheered my soul to hear them like this, after their many years of separation and pain.

“Shardas can use alchemy,” I called to Velika. “He made me invisible yesterday.”

“Did he?” She gave her mate an arch look. “A nice trick.”

Shardas simply hummed to himself in a vibrating rumble that tickled my legs and made Marta giggle.

“But you wouldn’t accept a healing potion from Leontes?” I would have taken the potion in a heartbeat, especially if I were facing a long flight followed by a long fight.

“I do not trust the alchemy of others,” Shardas said reluctantly, after a long silence. We all nodded, understanding perfectly.

Despite the panel of silk that had been ripped off his wings by Krashath, and many small injuries, Shardas flew like an arrow towards the strait. Velika and Darrym flanked him, and I was pleased to see that Darrym, though in better health, had trouble keeping up. Of course, he was carrying the Citatian king in his foreclaws, but Nason hardly moved during the entire flight.

Arjas, on the other hand, screamed and thrashed for all he was worth. Velika soared on, ignoring the screeching human in her claws. In this fashion we proceeded to the Strait of Mellelie.

The Battle of the Mellelie, as it came to be known, was a grievous thing. It extended into the air above the strait, and the hot dragon blood dripping down into the water sizzled and steamed. It reminded me uncomfortably of the last great battle I had seen, above the Boiling Sea, which had ended with the supposed deaths of Shardas and Velika. Nothing in the Dragon War or in last night’s skirmish on the beach had prepared me for this, though. A multitude of dragons were locked in combat, so many that I could not begin to count them. The roaring and screams were deafening, and too often there was a great splash as a dragon fell into the water and did not resurface.

Those dragons who fought over the shore risked taking an arrow or lance from the humans on the ground. The Roulaini forces were massed behind hastily piled sandbags, firing volleys of arrows in an attempt to hit either a soft place between dragon scales, or a Citatian soldier. This made me wince, however: the fighting dragons moved with such speed and violence that there was
no way to determine if an arrow, once shot, would hit a collared dragon or a free one.

There was a group of dragons clustered together on the ground behind the ranks of human soldiers that confused me. They did not appear injured, they were not collared, and yet they did not fight. They just huddled there, looking forlorn and rather useless.

“Who are they?” I pointed them out with an imperious finger. We needed every able-bodied dragon we could find.

“See the collars? They must have been uncollared, and now refuse to fight,” Darrym said, gesturing at a stack of the collars beside those dragons.

“Why wouldn’t they want to fight back against the people who collared them?”

“Those aren’t the people who collared them,” Velika said. “Those are other dragons, their friends and family. I cannot blame them for not turning around and clawing out the eyes of their fathers and brothers.”

“Some of them seem very young,” Darrym added. “It’s likely that they were born into the collar.” He pointed to one small green dragon. “He’s maybe two years old, probably just reached his full growth.”

“Hold tight, ladies,” Shardas said.

We were now close enough to the battle to have been noticed by the fighters. An uncollared dragon headed our way, claws extended in a threatening posture, and I realised that since we had come from the Citatian side,
and were humans aboard Shardas, he assumed us to be the enemy.

“Stop,” I shouted, just as Shardas did the same.

Shardas’s voice drowned mine out, though. He drowned out the sound of the battle, the screams of combatants, and the crash of scale meeting scale. His voice was so loud that I clapped my hands to my ears and worried that the vibration would cause me and Marta to fall right off his back.