Dragon Flight (7 page)

“A dozen?!” Amacarin snorted in disdain, nearly setting my sewing alight. I pulled it out of harm’s way as he went on. “Over a hundred, at a rough count. And eggs everywhere! I counted fifty clutches, and that was only before the patrol over the grounds chased us away.”

“What news! What news!” Feniul was ecstatic. “Hundreds of hatchlings! More than fifty clutches! How wondrous!”

I cleared my throat loudly. “Excuse me, but what does this mean? Why are you so excited?”

Amacarin and Feniul both studied us, clearly shocked at our lack of enthusiasm. Finally, Feniul enlightened us.

“Have you ever seen a hatchling, Creel?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I hadn’t really thought about baby dragons until Niva said she had a … clutch.” I guessed that this was the word for a group of dragon eggs.

“Precisely. Niva’s clutch is the first to hatch in Feravel
in ten years.” Feniul bared his teeth in some draconic emotion I couldn’t fathom. “
Ten years
.”

“But why?”

“You try finding a mate when you’re hiding in a cave praying the humans don’t discover you,” Amacarin snapped.

“Oh.” I exchanged embarrassed looks with Luka and Marta. Tobin just nodded as though it made perfect sense, and one of the soldiers whispered something that sounded rather lewd to his fellow. “I’m so sorry,” I told the dragons, shooting a dirty look at the soldiers.

“It’s not your fault,” Feniul said kindly.

“Not directly anyway,” Amacarin added.

“So the dragons here don’t have that problem, I suppose. With finding mates.” I found myself blushing, and tried not to look at Luka. He was not, nor ever would be, my mate. He was a prince, I told myself firmly. A prince.

“I believe it’s more sinister than that,” Amacarin said. “I think these humans are forcing them to mate, breeding them like dogs.”

“I don’t force my dogs to breed,” Feniul protested.

“You aren’t a human,” Amacarin said. “You don’t share humans’ insistence on meddling with other creatures’ lives.”

Tobin gestured to his prince.

Luka nodded agreement and translated for our benefit: “We’ll free Niva tonight.”

“This time I’m going with you,” I said firmly. “But
until it gets dark, Marta, I need you to help me make this skirt and these mirrored bits into a coat.”

“A coat?” Luka looked confused at the change in topic. “Is that necessary? I thought you were too hot.”

“It’s not for me, it’s for King Nason,” I said. “Marta and I are going to be the new royal tailors.”

“Can you see anything?” I leaned as close to the edge as I dared, and the rock beneath my hand crumbled a little, sending sand and scree pattering down the edge of the ravine. “Oof!” I drew back.

Tapping me on the shoulder, Tobin pointed to his right, and Luka and I followed him, crawling on our bellies along the edge of the ravine where the hatching grounds of the Citatian dragons were located. Feniul and Amacarin were scouting overhead, each with a soldier on his back, but there was no way for them to contact us discreetly, so we were on our own. We would have to climb down, find Niva, and, we hoped, fly her away, all before the patrol dragons caught us. With any luck, I’d be back helping Marta sew trousers for King Nason by midnight.

What Tobin had spotted was a jagged set of natural steps in the side of the cliff. Some of them were less than a hand’s width, but it looked to be our best option. Again, I praised the sensibleness of the Citatian women’s garb: there would be no possibility of me making the
climb in skirts, even divided riding skirts. But a tunic and trousers wouldn’t impede my progress.

Tobin went first, and I slithered down after him. Then he suddenly released my ankles, and I heard a dull thud.

“Tobin!” I looked over my shoulder. Luka kept coming and trod on my hands, making me cry out briefly before I stopped myself. “Stop. Tobin fell,” I whispered as loudly as I dared. Again I tried to look over my shoulder to see Tobin, but couldn’t. Then I heard a scuffling sound. Feeling very daring, I leaned away from the rock wall, as much as I could, and looked straight down. Tobin was standing on a larger ledge below me, signalling frantically. I realised that he had jumped, since there were no footholds between my position and that ledge, and now he was gesturing for me to drop down to him.

Taking a deep breath, I let go of the wall. I had braced my feet for the impact on the rough ledge, but Tobin snatched me out of the air and set me down lightly beside him.

“Oh, thank you,” I whispered, and moved to the side so that Luka would have room. He climbed down as far as he could and then jumped the rest of the way. Tobin put out a hand to steady him when he landed. From our now-crowded ledge, there was only a short climb down to the floor of the ravine, where our feet crunched oddly in some debris at the base of the cliff.

We all crouched down to feel what we were walking on. I recoiled as one of the sharp things sliced my index finger. Sucking on the wound, I held up the offending object to the moonlight.

“Eggshells,” I breathed, pulling my finger out of my mouth.

“Dragon eggshells,” Luka agreed, picking up another piece. “The place is littered with them.”

Tobin made a motion, and a face.

“It’s going to be cursed hard to go quietly,” Luka agreed, tossing the shard aside.

We were almost tiptoeing our way across the hatching grounds, holding our breath in the hopes that we wouldn’t step on a large piece of shell and give ourselves away. The grounds were filled with shallow craters holding clutches of eggs, and beside each crater was a sleeping female dragon. In the moonlight, I could only tell if they were dark or light coloured. All the dragons were quite large, as though they had been carefully bred for size, something which made me feel ill. I wondered what happened to the smaller dragons, like Feniul.

Realisation dawned on me and I grabbed Tobin and Luka’s arms. “Niva won’t have any eggs,” I said. They had started to creep around the hump of a sleeping dark coloured dragon to look at her face.

Tobin smacked his forehead and Luka covered his face and shook his head, embarrassed. We backed away
from that dragon, and headed towards a cluster of beasts that had no eggs. I frowned at this, too. Why were they sleeping outside? Dragons needed a roof over their heads just like everyone else. To see them sleeping without the protection of a cave was one more unnatural thing in a whole slew of unnatural dragon behaviours.

My indignation was interrupted when I tripped on something that turned out to be a dragon tail the length and width of my arm. Peering down, I saw that it belonged to a hatchling. I studied the creature in wonder. It was the size of a horse, and its scales looked soft and sort of crumpled. All over its head there were round little nubs that I assumed would one day be horns. It curled its tail up tight to its body, and snuggled closer to its mother.

I crept over to another dragon. “Niva? Niva?” I called for her in a loud whisper. “Niva?”

The dragon in front of me raised her head. It wasn’t Niva. Her horns were short and blunt, and I realised with horror that they had been sawn off. She was darker than Niva, and her muzzle was wider.

“Ma’am, I’m looking for my friend Niva,” I said politely. “She just came here today.”

With one foreclaw she plucked at the collar around her neck. She fidgeted for a moment, then sighed and lay her head back down, closing her eyes.

“Something’s wrong with her,” I said to Tobin, who was standing near me in a protective stance.

He tapped my arm and I looked at him. He touched his throat and mouth and then pointed around at all the dragons, shaking his head.

“The collars keep them from talking?”

He nodded.

At the sound of our whispered conversation, the dragon with the sawn-off horns opened her eyes again. At the mention of the collars, she stretched out her neck so that her head rested on the ground only a pace away from us, her eyes rolling in a piteous fashion.

Flinging my braids back over my shoulder, I stalked over to her collar in outrage. Fumbling, I tried to get the thing unbuckled but it wouldn’t budge. It was too dark to see properly, but it felt as if there was a strangely shaped keyhole at one side of the buckle.

“Fine,” I said aloud, and pulled the knife from my belt. I was busily sawing through the leather of the collar when I heard Luka call my name softly.

As I passed Tobin I jerked a thumb back at the dragon. “Would you?”

He gave me a grim smile and pulled a foot-long dagger out of a sheath strapped to one thigh. It was serrated like a saw.

“Why didn’t you show me that before?” I huffed, and went to find Luka.

Luka was on the far side of the cluster of sleeping dragons, standing by Niva. She was a little apart from the others, concealed from us by their bulk. She didn’t look
good. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was irregular. She looked as if she’d been rolling in dust, something I knew the fastidious Niva would never do.

“Niva!” I ran to her head and stroked her muzzle, not caring if she thought me forward. “Can you hear me?”

Her eyes opened a crack and her tail twitched, but she showed no other sign of recognition.

“Let’s get this collar off,” I said, again wielding my small dagger with determination.

“But we don’t have one of ours to replace it,” Luka protested, even as he drew his own blade to help.

“I don’t care,” I told him. “No one’s around, and Niva is strong. If we can get this one off, we can get her away from here and then deal with the pull of the slippers or whatever it is.” I sawed for a while in silence, then added, “I really wish we could find out what it is they’ve got, and who controls the –”

I was cut off by the roar of a dragon nearby. The female with the sawn-off horns reared up on her hind legs, spreading her wings to their full extent. Blue and gold dragonfire lit the night sky and Luka and I instinctively huddled close to Niva, who still did not stir.

“By the First Fires,” the newly uncollared female roared. “Krashath will pay for this!” She crouched, preparing to spring into the sky.

“Help us,” I shouted at her. “Help us free our friend!”

She stopped, and her neck swivelled around to study Luka and me, crouched by Niva’s head. The freed dragon reached down and with a casual swipe ripped apart Niva’s collar with a claw. Then she launched herself upwards without looking back.

Niva screamed as though she had been speared, writhing in the dust and broken shells of the hatching grounds. We jumped clear of her thrashing, looking around wildly as other dragons now woke. Tobin came over to the cluster of eggless females, looking concerned as Niva continued to scream and flail.

Then more dragonfire flared across the sky, and we heard roars and shouts as the Citatian night patrol encountered the dragon Tobin had freed. She bellowed at them and burned one of the patrol dragons quite badly, forcing him to land on the hatching grounds. We would soon be discovered by the patrol, or one of the awakening females would raise the alarm.

My heart in my mouth, I dived at Niva’s head, wrapping my arms around it even as she tried to shake me off. “Niva! Niva! It’s me, it’s Creel,” I shouted, no longer worrying about someone hearing us. She whipped me around so that my head snapped back, and I knew that my neck would hurt for days. But I persevered. “It’s Creel, and Luka and Tobin! We’re here to rescue you!”

She stopped thrashing and began to shudder – long, rattling shudders that ran from her nose to the tip of
her tail. Her cries turned into a series of raw, deep dragon sobs.

“Can you hear me, Niva?” I used a more normal voice, just loud enough to be heard over her sobbing.

“Yes,” she gasped out.

“Is there any … do you feel any power working on you? Do you need to fly somewhere? Can you feel them controlling you?”

“No,” she said. “I just … it was so terrible.”

“You don’t feel any compulsion?”

“None. The collar is gone.” Her shudders abated and her breathing slowed. She raised her head and looked around. “Get on my back,” she said. “I want to be as far from here as possible, as fast as I can fly.”

I climbed on to her back, with Luka and Tobin immediately after. Niva lurched into flight, swatting at the cluster of silent, collared females with one of her wings. It made me sick and angry to think of leaving them behind, when only a little more time and some sharper daggers could have freed them all.

“Do you think there’s alchemy in each collar?” I tossed the question over my shoulder to Luka, although he hardly had any more experience with alchemy than I did. “The opposite of Milun the First’s slippers?”

“I don’t know,” Luka shouted back. “We’ll have to talk to Niva when we get to safety.” His arm snaked over my shoulder to point to our right and just ahead. “Look out, Niva!”

The other freed female was in a pitched battle with the patrol. In the bursts of dragonfire, we could see that she was injured, and so were the two dragons she fought. Their fight was taking them into our path, and one of the patrol dragons had seen us.

Niva cupped her wings to stop her forward motion and then shot straight up, going high above the battle before levelling out and flying in the direction of the caves at top speed. We could no longer speak, only hold on tightly and pray to the Triune Gods.

They smiled on us, and we left the patrol dragon, which had attempted pursuit, far behind. Nevertheless, Niva made wide circles around various hills, flying low to make use of tree cover, before coming in to land at the mouth of our cave. To my great relief, Amacarin, Feniul and Marta were there to meet us, as full of questions for Niva as we were ourselves.

But they would have to wait, for a little while. Still near hysteria, it was not until Feniul helped her to the speaking pool to contact her mate, Leontes, that she calmed down. Even after that she remained subdued, and prone to startling at the least sound. She nearly cried as she thanked us for rescuing her, which was the most unsettling thing of all.

At last Niva was ready to tell us about her ordeal.

She had been left in the net for hours, with other dragons standing watch over her. Scales were torn from her shoulder and pasted on to a blank page in a huge
book. An artist sketched a portrait on the page opposite the scales – a roster of the dragons belonging to the glorious army of Citatie.