Hydra (18 page)

Zilpha clarifies, “So, Xalil made it sound like he wasn’t welcome here anymore, in order to make Ion think he wouldn’t report back any news?”

“Yes.” My father nods. “It seems to have worked. However, Xalil is now also starting to get old. Since he’s not sure how much longer he’ll be up to working, his granddaughter, Jala, has joined him as an understudy of sorts, working alongside him for now, learning to take over his job when the time comes.”

“Jala,” Zilpha repeats the name, which I also recognize. “Was she our friend, the daughter of mom’s friend Anika?”

“That’s right.” My mom looks surprised that we remember. “When you were very little, I used to go to your grandfather’s village to see my friend. You played with her kids. Jala was one of them. But as we grew older and busier with our children, and I made more friends in this village, it was harder for me to justify making the trip, so you haven’t seen Jala in over a decade.”

I’m listening with only half an ear, mostly feeling impatient with Zilpha’s line of questioning, because even though I vaguely remember Jala and we’re going to see her again once we get there, what I mostly care about is figuring out how we’re going to defeat the water yagi. As one of only two dragons present who’s fought them, I rather wonder if the others perhaps underestimate the fearsomeness of the creatures.

“So,” I cut in, “what’s the
plan
?”

My father gives me that same patient look he gave Felix. “We’ll travel to the spy house and I’ll make contact with Xalil and Jala. How we proceed from there will depend largely on what we learn from them. I think we should leave as soon as we can. The sooner we put a stop to Eudora’s water yagi production, the fewer water yagi we’ll have to contend with. And it would be wise to travel now, while the proportions of night and day are favorable. Eudora lives at a latitude that’s further north than all of Scotland. In another month, we won’t get much darkness at night. We need darkness to hide us as we travel there.”

“But don’t we need a more specific strategy?” I ask. “How are we going to defeat the water yagi and destroy the breeding operation?”

“I don’t know,” my father admits. “We’ll make those decisions once we get there.”

Felix comes to my defense, making me glad I didn’t pick a fight with him earlier, “I think what Wren may be asking, is how are we going to prepare for this? What weapons are we going to bring?”

“Weapons?” My father’s been leaning over the maps on the table, and now stands upright, turning toward the door. “Follow me.”

While my father’s lack of strategy is less than reassuring, nonetheless, the promise of weapons makes me grin. We turn to follow him, and I fall into step next to Ed. He sees my big smile and raises an eyebrow.

“Weapons, eh?” he whispers.

“Yes.” I’m still smiling at the thought of them, and relieved that Ed’s still speaking to me. “We don’t just hoard treasure. We’ve got an armory, as well.”

My dad leads the way to the study, which is tucked back from the central corridor, deeper in the mountain than most of the other rooms of the house. But deeper still, behind the study’s fireplace, which my father swings wide with a practiced twist of a not-solely-ornamental griffin figure on the mantel, is a tunnel that leads back, through another security door, to our armory, a cavern whose natural ceiling curves fifty feet above us.

Don’t picture modern weapons. Granted, we’ve got a few guns, but they’re mostly useless against the kinds of enemies we fight. The majority of the weapons in the armory are swords of various lengths and curvatures, along with their sheaths and scabbards. We also have a fantastic selection of daggers, and enough bows, longbows, compound bows, and crossbows, to outfit the entire family four times over.

Beyond that, it’s just the usual odd assortment of spears and javelins, battle axes, slingshots, catapults, and canon housed behind locked glass doors in a cavernous chamber carved from the rock. Long before my father’s village was built or our fortress home even imagined, my dad’s ancestors holed up in this cave in the mountain with their treasure hoard and their weapons. Some of each of those are with us still. Fluorescent lights fill the sconces where long ago, torches would have burned to light the room.

We spend the rest of the morning suiting ourselves up, strapping daggers to our thighs, fitting double baldrics across our backs and adjusting the straps until we can pull swords simultaneously from both shoulders. My mom taught us the move years ago when she trained us to fight, but we’ve rarely had to use it on real yagi. On those rare occasions when our mutant enemies attacked us during our travels, my parents handled the bulk of the fighting, protecting us kids, who only had to decapitate a stray yagi or two. We’ve never had to defend ourselves against possible hordes of them.

Until now.

Of course, even as we’re outfitting ourselves for battle, I can’t help thinking, time and again, that few of these weapons will do us any good. And I try to warn my family members.

“It’s going to be difficult to use swords underwater,” I remind them. “The weight of all these weapons would pull us down. We’ll drown ourselves without any help from the water yagi.”

“I’m not going in the water with all my swords on,” Felix assures me. “But I want them with me if I need them. We’ll be close to Eudora’s fortress, you know. There will be land yagi afoot, besides just water yagi.”

I know he’s not refuting my warning to be mean, and he makes a valid point, but on top of everything else today—angering my mother without meaning to, and the distance Ed has been keeping from me—I feel like I’ve been pushed down, tugged under some invisible lake by yet another grasping hand. My lungs squeeze in response, even while I try to convince myself it’s nothing.

But then a familiar Scottish brogue joins the conversation. “What yer sister’s tryin’ to tell ye, is that fightin’ water yagi is different from fightin’ the land beasties. The tricks ye know and the skills yer mother’s given ye are as likely to cause ye trouble as save ye from it. Might be Wren could show ye how she killed ‘em, seein’ that she and I are the only ones here who’ve ever met the devils, and she slew a far cry more than I did.”

Appreciation wells inside me as my siblings turn to me for instruction. I glance toward Ed, intending to give him a look of gratitude, but he turns his head away before I can even meet his eyes.

He still feels rejected by me.

And yet, he’s taken my side in front of my siblings.

There’s no time to worry about it or even feel guilty. I grab one of the patched and tattered yagi dummies from a bin, the straw-stuffed targets we used to practice with in years past, and I explain my technique.

“It’s mighty hard to strike with accuracy underwater, and the resistance against your blade will exhaust your muscles in a fraction of the time of fighting in air. Instead, what I found worked best was to fly low, pluck a yagi or two from the seething swarm, and toss them high in the sky.”

To demonstrate, I throw the dummy toward the distant ceiling of the cave. My siblings stand far back from me as I leap into the air in human form to simulate flight, and swing at the dummy as it falls.

“You can decapitate them in the air far easier than underwater, without getting close enough for them to mob you.” I survey my siblings, awaiting their response.

Ram crosses to the bin of dummies and tosses one in the air, sending straw showering down on us as he leaps and slices off its head.

Within minutes, all of my siblings are doing the same.

I duck away toward the hall that leads to the study. In the midst of the flying straw, I don’t notice Ed headed the same direction until he joins me in the shelter of the doorway.

“Thank you,” I tell him sincerely, trying to meet his eyes.

“I did nothin’.” Ed watches my siblings instead of looking at me.

“You did,” I insist. “And I appreciate it.”

Ed’s still facing the others, but with his sharp goatee, I can see so much more of his face than ever before, and like all dragons, he can communicate effectively with his features, even if he doesn’t intend to. Right now, the way he swallows, pinches his lips, and blinks rapidly, the message is a complicated one, but still reasonably clear.

He feels hurt by what I said last night. He doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t even believe that my thanks are sincere, since he doesn’t think I respect him.

There might be more than that there, but I can’t look any longer. I stare at the natural stone cave floor, which is quickly becoming covered by straw from the beheaded yagi dummies.

Later, once everyone has grown tired of the exercise and feels secure with their weapons and left the room to find lunch, I sweep up the straw and shove it back inside the bodies, and grab the mending kit to patch the heads back on. We never bother with very many stitches, since the dummies are only going to get beheaded again.

I’ve got half the pile finished when I hear footsteps approaching from down the hall.

I feel a twinge of disappointment when I see who it is, even though I should have known by the rhythm of the footsteps. It’s my mom. She’s brought me lunch.

“Thanks. My hands are full. You can just set it there.”

“Thank you for cleaning up the armory. Usually I have to do it.” She sighs.

I stab the needle through the rough fabric. Maybe I should say something, but when I try out the words in my head, no matter how I intend them, I still hear her taking them in a defensive way. And what was it she always told us? If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

So after a few moments of silence, I simply say, “Thanks again for bringing me lunch.”

And she leaves.

Maybe I didn’t make it better, but at least I didn’t make it worse.

Not much worse, anyway.

*

We depart at nightfall. Maybe that seems soon, but over supper we all agreed there’s nothing to be gained by waiting. We need to know what we’re up against, which means checking out the lake and learning all we can about how Eudora’s churning out the water yagi. It could take us days or even weeks to gather the information we need once we get up there.

So there’s no sense waiting around.

My father and brothers take turns hauling Ed on their backs. Even with a bit of breeze more or less in their favor, each of them is eager to hand him off at the end of the two-hour shifts. And in the morning, as we’re making camp in a remote stretch of Russia north of Kazakhstan, my father shakes his head at me. “I don’t know how you hauled him all the way home from Scotland.”

I smile. “That’s why it took me so long to get home—that, and fighting the water yagi.”

To my relief, the day is uneventful. I sleep nearly fourteen hours straight. I may not have hauled a hydra on my back, but it’s still exhausting flying so far, and I’m not fully recovered from my previous journey. We flew fairly fast, too, more north than east, on account of the direction of the wind. It was a gamble, taking what we could get and using it to our best advantage, hoping we’d have a more easterly wind to push us to our destination the next night.

But we rise to a stiff breeze punching us back from the east, trying to push us west. We’re still less than halfway to our destination (we may have made it to Russia already, but it’s a very big country—the biggest on earth—especially west to east), so I know we won’t reach the spy cabin by morning. I checked the map on my tablet and the trip would take over eighty hours by car (and that’s just the driving, not even factoring in sleep), so I’m glad we’re flying and don’t have to follow the circuitous mountain roads.

In fact, we’re purposely avoiding roads, towns, and anywhere else where people might spot us flying overhead. To avoid drawing attention to ourselves, we keep our glow at its dimmest and spread out in the sky, to the point where each of us can only see the two or three dragons nearest them at any time. And we fly low, out of range of radar detection.

The closer we get to Eudora’s fortress, the less careful we have to be of humans, there being far fewer of them, and the more cautious we have to be about Eudora, the yagi, and any other potential spies she might have posted about.

We fly until dawn. The wind lets up a bit toward morning, but we’re still beat by the time we make camp, and we didn’t make near the progress we’d hoped for. The only good thing about being so exhausted, is that there’s little time for conversation (normally I enjoy chatting, but right now, with Ed and my mom both feeling sorely towards me, I’d rather avoid it).

My father, who led the way most of the night, except for the stretch of the trip when he carried Ed, lands first. After my mom joins him on the ground, he sets off in search of supper.

By the time the rest of us have landed and drunk our fill from a nearby stream, my dad’s back, arriving in dragon form with a whole elk dangling from each foot.

We eat, our mouths too busy tearing meat to speak. And then we shuffle about, each of us picking a spot to settle down to sleep. The woods are typical of northern latitudes—lots of trees, mostly evergreen, with little growing between them on account of the brutal winters that cover the ground with snow for so many months out of the year, and the pine needles that cloak the forest floor. There are some bushes and smaller plants, but it’s not a tangle like Azerbaijan’s subtropical forests.

I’m scoping out a spot for my bed when I realize Zilpha has slipped away. We’re on a high plateau-like ridge in the mountains, a flat-ish cleft overlooking a valley, with stunning peaks rising up around us. The view is magnificent, and sure enough, Zilpha’s perched on a jutting granite boulder, watching the sunrise streak the sky with glorious shades of magenta and crimson.

Hoping to gauge her feelings to learn if she’s growing fond of Ed, and also just to check on her and make sure she’s okay and not secretly mad at me, too, I head over and join her on the rock (it’s a very big rock).

I don’t say anything.

Zilpha glances at me, gives me a look of acknowledgement that’s not really a smile but is still welcoming, and turns back to watching the sky. After a while, she says, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Sure is. Kind of reminds me of Montana.” The school we go to in the states is in Montana, a place we picked for several reasons. The mountains remind us of home. The region isn’t densely populated, which means we can occasionally fly as dragons without so much risk of being seen. And unlike some of the more southerly regions of the Rocky Mountains, there isn’t nearly as much flyover traffic in Montana as there is in Utah (all those people going to Phoenix and LA, I guess). Minimal flyover traffic is important for the same reason as sparse population—if we want to come and go as dragons, we need to stay out of sight.