Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons) (46 page)

“You’re lacking the most basic education, you poor, deprived monk.”

Aranya tried not to laugh at Ri’arion’s expression. It hurt her belly.

“I fought my way into the Dragonship,” said Ri’arion, in a somewhat unsteady voice. “I sensed all was not right. He had many guards about him, all experienced Crimson Hammers. It took time to kill them. Throughout, Garthion was simply watching me with this queer expression on his face–I don’t even know how to describe it. There I was, slaughtering his best warriors one by one, and he seemed utterly unconcerned. When I killed the last man defending him, Garthion laughed at me. Then he transformed. Were it not for my Nameless Man powers, he would have eaten me there and then. As it was, I escaped his fangs by a rajal’s whisker … and you know the rest.”

Aranya considered all of this, trying to ignore Shirmar’s grunts as he sawed
manfully into her belly-hide. “This is a deep mystery, Ri’arion. How could he have concealed his Dragon-form? Why did he not transform when I burned him back in the Tower of Sylakia? He must have sensed the magic. Earlier, when he appeared, he said, ‘I am alive’. He can’t have been
dead
before, can he? Why alive?”

“We’ll work it out,” said Zip, standing on her tiptoes to give Ri’arion a kiss on
his cheek. “Worrying about Dragon Shapeshifters is a problem for tomorrow. Ri’arion, will you fly with me when we scout the Island?”

“You should stay
right here, Zip,” he replied. “You’re injured.”

“She’s
my
Dragon,” Zuziana exploded in a fury. She clapped her hand over her mouth, mumbling around it, “I … what’s happening to me? That’s not me speaking. Aranya?”

“It’s Dragon-Zip, my friend. There’s two of you in there.”

“Ooh. This Dragon thing is creepy.”

Aranya looked
meaningfully at Garthion’s body. “Really? You think so?”

A
t the back
of the royal gardens was a low cliff-face riddled with caves. All of the royals of Immadia were interred within the caves. Slowly, over centuries, their remains calcified in those pure, undisturbed halls, as mineral-bearing water dripped through the rocks above.

Aranya remembered when they had buried her mother here.

It was the day after the battle. One sleep had made the Island-World seem a new place.

Her slow, dragging footsteps halted in front of the large, round stone that blocked the cave’s entrance. She looked gratefully at Yolathion
, who had helped her limp along despite the restriction of a bulky cast on her right knee. “Thank you.”

Zuziana had a cast covering her
left arm, too, broken just above the elbow when Garthion struck her and broken her wing. Aranya had woken from a nightmare about Zip falling onto the flagpole. She shuddered at the memory. Rather than think about that, she scratched her bandages instead. Too many wounds; too many itches. She had exhausted her healing power on herself and Zip, never mind Ri’arion, who was acting the stoic monk. She sensed his pain, too.

“Are you quite certain about this, Sparky?” King Beran asked.

She nodded. “Just a look, Dad. I can’t shake the feeling. I dreamed about it last night–this, and the Black Dragon roaring at me, again. All night long.”

She stroked Sapphire, seated on her shoulder.

Zuziana and Ri’arion stood to one side, looking pensive. She knew they thought her idea was strange. Alright, completely off-the-Island bizarre. They probably assumed it was unresolved grief stemming from her mother’s death. That was part of the puzzle, for certain. But it was not all. A four summers-old child could not be expected to remember much of the detail. Mostly, she remembered the trauma of that day, of seeing her mother lying so cold and still. Partially changed. Dead.

But what if there was something … more?

Now that she had arrived at her mother’s tomb, Aranya lacked the courage to go through with her plan. She hesitated.

Leaving Queen Silha’s side, King Beran came to stand alongside his daughter. He raised the lantern he was holding. “Why don’t we do this together?”

“Alright.”

A Dragon could fling herself headlong at a fleet of
enemy Dragonships. This was harder.

Yolathion helped a quartet of Immadian warriors roll aside the
gravestone. Her father’s hand found hers. Aranya had never been more grateful for that Human touch. Beran ducked into the low entrance. A few steps inside, he was able to straighten up. Aranya did the same but much less elegantly. She bumped her head on the roof.

“Down here, Sparky.”

Each of the graves, horizontal slots hollowed into the sides of the tunnels, had a small plaque set above it. Those nearest the entrance were almost a thousand summers old. But the bones within had not crumbled. They were preserved in stark, crystalline casements. As they walked carefully along the slippery, sloped floor, Aranya silently rued her knee, struck by a crossbow quarrel and then chewed by Garthion. Here, she was surrounded by all those who had gone before. She ran her eyes over newer dates, bones less thickly cased in ageless calcites. How many of these had been Dragon Riders, or Dragon Shapeshifters, she wondered? Or was it an unknown woman from Ha’athior who had changed everything?

King Beran held out his hand. “
Just around this corner.”

The lantern light crept around the corner first. Aranya followed
, her father right behind her. She saw bones. Her eyes jumped off a semi-mummified corpse; a squeak escaped her throat. The light played off fresh drops of crystal, surrounding them with sparkles, dazzling their eyes until King Beran shifted the lantern.

His voice was strangely choked. “This one, Aranya.”

Perfect fingers. Aranya gasped. Perfect fingers covered in silvery Dragon scales, so like a dragonet’s hide that she glanced involuntarily at her little friend perched on her shoulder. Sapphire’s eyes whirled faster than she had ever seen them move before. Her eyes leaped back to the body. Hope choked her throat, quickly stilled. Izariela of Ha’athior seemed only to sleep. Beran’s reaction confirmed that impression. Nowhere on her flesh was there the slightest sign of decay. Her eyes were closed, serene. She was beautiful. She was more beautiful than the frozen crystal encasing her flesh.

T
hen she saw that her mother’s body had been arranged so as to conceal her partial transformation. She lay with her left side outward. The right foot sported a Dragon’s claws. The right side of her face had an unseemly bulge running from below the cheekbone up to where it was hidden by her hair. Multi-coloured hair, just like Aranya’s own locks. Izariela’s right arm and hand were hidden back in the shadows, but Aranya could make out enough to see the beginnings of wing struts jutting out of the length of her arm. Her right eye was twice as large as the left, half-hidden behind the perfect bridge of her nose.

Aranya wanted to reach out and touch her.
She breathed, “Partial transformation. Impossible …”

“Sparky?”

She did not realise she had spoken aloud until her father replied.

“Dad, she’s been dead twelve years. Thirteen
, come the autumn.” Aranya’s hand shook so hard she pulled it back to her side. “Mom’s dead … isn’t she? Don’t people–don’t they … I feel such an idiot even thinking it …”

“Decompose?” Uncharacteristically,
his voice cracked. “We’ve grown older and she’s still young, Aranya. How does that work? No heartbeat. No breath filling her chest. Oh, I miss her as though it were yesterday. Why didn’t you tell me, Izariela? Why?”

Tears
streaked down both of their cheeks.

Aranya mulled this
over for so long that a worried query came from without the cave.

“We’
re fine!” Beran called.

“She was protecting us. Protecting me,” Aranya
said, thinking aloud. “I don’t know why, but that’s what Mom was doing. Maybe from the Sylakians. Maybe from an even greater threat.”

A simultaneous shudder communicated through their linked hands.

“Our mission is to find out from what, and why, Sparky,” King Beran said, slowly. “That’s the least we owe Izariela.”

Aranya laughed hollowly. “Minor issues
first, Dad–such as rebuilding a kingdom and defeating an evil empire which probably has a Dragon Shapeshifter for its leader, never mind the rest of the Supreme Commander’s family. Would you be offended if the others–especially Ri’arion–took a look at this? At Mom, I mean.”

Her father squeezed her hand. Then he put his arms around her. “I love you, Aranya. Always have. It’s not just a Dad thing.
Izariela would have been proud, too.”

“Love you right back, Dad.”
She wiped her cheeks.

“Aye, your friends should come in. You’ve made wise choices,
there. Exceptional people. You should treasure them.”

“Even Yolathion?”

Beran’s expression told her he saw right through her question. With a gentle touch, just fingertips upon her arm, he said, “All that talk of honour hides the heart within. He reminds me of a young Immadian King before he grew a beard and a little more wisdom with it. I think he has learned that Dragons are hard to kill. Since that day, he has been chasing you across the Islands, Sparky. But I’m not so convinced my daughter
wants
to be caught.”

Aranya masked the deep impact of his words by joking, “Did I tell you I raided his Dragonship, Dad, and left a scroll on his pillow-roll?”

“He rebelled against Sylakia for you, Aranya. Only for you.”

“Dragons are hard to kidnap, too.”
She regarded Izariela tenderly. How she longed to speak to her as daughter to mother, not as the four summers-old child she remembered. “She loved you so much, she walked into your snare and willingly remained in it.”

“Aye? I was unworthy of her.”

“Don’t say that.” Aranya held him as he had once held her, by the shoulders, as though the force of her gaze alone could change his thoughts. “I don’t believe that. This–lying here–is neither her choice, nor yours. Dad, while I remember it, you need to add returning to Fra’anior to your list of tasks. I’ve a cousin there called Lyriela. She and Prince Ta’armion of Fra’anior are mutually smitten with each other. I may need to abet in a proper royal kidnapping, quite soon. I promised the ice-dragonets I would take them to meet their kin on Fra’anior.”

He shook his head, chuckling. “Come on in, friends!” he called. “Aranya, you’re never one to do things by halves, are you?”

She laughed along with him. “Dad, I think it’s time Zuziana and I sat you down and told you a very long story about our travels. There’s Nak and Oyda, the two Dragon Riders who taught me to fly and patched up my wounds, and the King of Remoy–Ri’arion should meet him–and the fact that Ta’armion had me drugged and kidnapped by a slaver. Don’t you go starting any wars over that! Did you know there are monkey-men living halfway down the cliffs of Sylakia? And Pygmies–”

“Mercy,” said the King, squeezing her hand
. “One thing at a time. This old man needs time to catch up with his daughter.”

Her friends filed in reverently. Raising their lanterns, they gathered around
Izariela’s body. Zuziana gasped and began to cry softly. Queen Silha put her arms around the Remoyan. Yolathion bit his lip. Ri’arion leaned forward with an awed expression on his face.

“She’s a Silver Dragon? A Star Dragon?” whispered the monk. “
Look at the colour of these scales! There’s only one Star Dragon that I know of in fable–Istariela, the soul-mate of Fra’anior.”

“Istariela and Izariela,” said Zip. “How similar is that?”

A tingle crept up Aranya’s spine. Suddenly, she seemed to hear an echo of the Black Dragon’s voice in her mind.
Istariela,
he whispered. The name expanded in her mind, accompanied by memories not her own. Magic stole her away. She saw a Silver Dragon watching her from the corridors of her memory. She was glorious, glowing from within with a light all of her own, a star come to reside in the Island-World. Istariela? Or Izariela? Whichever it was, the Dragon smiled at her, causing an awareness of peace and love to blossom in her heart. The vision vanished.

Aranya looked uncertainly at her friends.

“That’d make her thousands of years old,” Ri’arion pointed out. “I’m not sure that could be. I obviously haven’t the faintest idea of what can be, given what I see here. This woman is dead, but does not appear dead. What sustains her flesh–magic? Poison? The crystal casement? Could her body be resting simply in anticipation of her spirit re-filling it and the breath of life wafting into her nostrils?”

“A tragedy lies frozen in time,” said Aranya. Six sets of eyes, including Sapphire’s,
jumped to fix on her. “Er, what did I say?”

“Not so much what, as who and how,” King Beran replied, his eyes
shadowed with wariness and grief. “I need to leave this place. The dead should slumber in peace.”

“Fra’anior spoke?” asked Aranya.

The monk nodded. “Perhaps an echo from the past, Aranya. It wasn’t you.”

Aranya’s mind reeled. What did all this mean? Yet, one thing was clear. She needed to find out what had happened to her mother. And if there was a chance … oh, just a breath of a chance she might yet live … silently, Aranya’s heart expressed a new vow. She would do her utmost to track down Izariela’s killer. She would find out how
and why her mother had been poisoned. And she would not rest until she knew whether or not her Mom could be rescued from this death-like sleep.

* * * *

Aranya observed the Kingdom of Immadia by the light of a perfect five-moon conjunction, a short hour or two of a night three times a year when all five moons were visible in the sky at once. She stood beneath a milky archway of light clad in a little but her sleeping-shift, such as Izariela might have worn, even though her breath fogged before her face.

The cold was nothing to her.

Her eyes ranged over the mountains to the north, their snowy peaks delineated as sharply as the points of Immadian forked daggers, to the roofs of the town spread out beneath her position on Izariela’s Tower, noting that the fires had finally all been extinguished. She gazed over the Cloudlands, a deceptively still and quiescent blanket that stretched unbroken to the horizon. Aranya asked the night the questions of her heart. She spoke for a very long time. But she heard no reply.

Not a sound broke the perfect silence. Her heart ached at the
night’s splendour, but felt bereft. Dragon-Aranya longed to fly out there, seeking answers to the questions of her past.

Her ears caught a soft tread on the flagstones behind her. “Dad?” she asked.

“Not he,” rumbled a low voice, so close behind her, it sent shivers up and down her spine.

“Yolathion. Couldn’t sleep?”

“I thought I might find you up here,” he said, drawing close. “The night is cold, Aranya.”

“I don’t feel cold.” His dark eyes consider
ed this. “I–uh, never realised your skin was so tan, Yolathion.”