Dragonfriend (26 page)

A short swing and a quarter-hour scramble later, Flicker introduced her to a hole that Hualiama would never have guessed led beneath the Island.
My friends widened the tunnel to accommodate you,
he said.

She said,
This is near the avalanche site, isn’t it?

Beneath it on the southern aspect.

And the Tourmaline Dragon’s alive?

Lia … he doesn’t sound friendly. He might be feral.

You didn’t go in, did you?
Lia hissed.
Fine, I’ll go talk to him. Look, the poor thing’s probably starving. Would you hunt and bring the Dragon a kill or two?

Flicker seemed all too eager to leave the dangerous work to her. Fine. Lia grumbled a little as she slithered beneath a large, flat boulder and dropped gingerly into the space beyond. A whiff of cool, stale air greeted her questing nostrils. Pausing to allow her eyes to adjust to the dimness, Lia took in a narrow tunnel–more a crack or shear between two rock faces–which at some point had been half-filled with a jumble of rocks and dirt fallen from above. The footing was treacherous. All too easy to snap an ankle, she thought, feeling her way forward with care.

A little light filtered down ahead, and beyond that, she saw another brighter patch. Encouraging. Slowly, sliding along on her haunches or creeping crablike over the rocks, listening intently, Lia moved deeper beneath Ha’athior Island.

The crack narrowed, eventually forcing her to turn her shoulders sideways to squeeze through the narrowest parts. She heard water dripping somewhere nearby. The roof lowered. Odd. The tunnel seemed to end a short ways ahead. Lia paused again, peering about at the oblong boulder she stood upon. If she was not mistaken, she stood above a yawning space, and the cleft ended just ten feet or so ahead in a pit of impenetrable darkness. Picking up a pebble, she tossed it ahead.

Clink. Clink.
Nothing.

Whatever she stood above, it was deep. Only the boulder lay between her feet and an unknowable drop. Lia hoped it was wedged tight.

Force the lungs to draw in a breath. “Dragon?”

Silence. A silence in which menace lurked, listening.

“Dragon, are you there?”

Claws, scraping upon rock. A leathery rustle came to her ears, perhaps wings dragging across stone. Hualiama wondered briefly if this had been a mistake, if Amaryllion could somehow have been wrong about the Tourmaline Dragon. A low, throbbing sound echoed up from the depths now, accompanied by a
thump-thump
that shook dirt onto her head and shoulders. The creature was on the move. Lia’s heart made a bid to leap out of her throat as she realised the Dragon was rushing closer, up beneath where she stood.

GRRAAAAAGGGHHH!

Dragon-thunder paralysed the Human girl. With a rushing, whooshing sound, as though a storm had unexpectedly entered the tunnel and gusted toward her, a bright orange light raged upward.

Dragon fire!

H
uAliama Threw herself
into a headlong dive. Scramble! Claw with the fingers! There was no time. Instinct alone wedged her body between two boulders, head tucked into a foetal position, as fire stormed along the narrow passageway, first blasting upward, then following the curvature of the tunnel to wash over the exposed parts of her body.

She remembered screaming. There was pain riven through her right arm and thigh, her buttocks and feet. Lia swam up from the blackness whimpering, the sickly-sweet odour of burned flesh making her gag. She had to escape.

Below, the Dragon purred like a hundred-times-larger dragonet. Satisfied.

Stretching her wounds was agony.
What now, Great Dragon?
she moaned in distress.
I obey, I hurt … I die?

What a fool she had been, sashaying gaily into a Dragon’s lair. Let this be a lesson. Those who did not want to be rescued could never be, even if they regained the freedom of the skies. She had only wanted to help. She had only obeyed a heart laid desolate by a Dragon’s fate.

Lia hauled her body back down the tunnel as if she were a blind worm scraping inside its burrow. At the sound of her movement, the Dragon’s engine-like purr rose to a crescendo.
GRRR-RRR-RRR
.

“Stupid, unthinking beast.” Lia used the sound of her anger as a counterpoint against the pain. “You have to …
unnh
–” the world faded through black “–escape. Come with me.”

Heave herself onto a boulder. Slide back in a tangle of limbs, soaked with sweat. She had survived bad wounds before. She must not give up. Never give in.

Weakness washed over her. The world turned white with magic, while Lia’s awestruck thoughts seemed to flow through prekki-fruit mush. Always in extremity. Why could she not see the Island-World like this, where she knew each stone and boulder had come from a unique place in the earth’s fiery heart, and had been shaped by the unimaginable forces of creative Dragon fire … she saw vast, coiling Dragons themselves the size of Islands, speaking words of power in a language long passed from living memory, raising mighty towers of stone from the seething magma pits inside which she glimpsed the fiery heart of her world.

Hualiama saw ant-like Humans labouring beside the Ancient Dragons. Never again would Humans be slaves, King Chalcion liked to declare. But there was more. Surely, this was not the only way? Surely, there was a pattern of being together as Dragon and Human that would bring honour to that mighty, many-headed one, whose gaze burned darkly over all, all-seeing and all-powerful, who knew the fate of a Human girl ere she plummeted from a Dragonship bound for the Cloudlands?

Lia collapsed and recovered many times before reaching the gap beneath the boulder. She heard a flutter of wings.

Flicker.

The dragonet squeaked in horror,
Lia, what have you done?

* * * *

There were rents in her clothes through which Flicker saw raw, charred flesh, weeping with her red blood and another clear fluid, the stench of meat cooked as she liked it–yet, this was her flesh. His Lia, burned.

Stupid, stupid straw-head! No word of warning would she hear. Her green eyes locked on his, occluded with suffering, as if a dark, lashing storm had broken within her soul, dampening her fires; as though even the hope of life itself had succumbed to the pain.

Flicker, darling. Bring Ja’al.

Be strong, Lia,
he cried.
I’ll be back before you know it.

The dragonet’s flight-muscles burned as he shot over the volcanic rim. He crashed into the monks’ meeting, shrieking his need. Ja’al hurtled out as fast as Flicker had arrived. The monk charged down the stairs, three at a time, taking the rope swing Flicker fetched for him and flinging himself over the divide … his blue eyes overflowing as he saw the blackened, battered form of Hualiama pulling herself hand over hand across the rocks, along the dangerously narrow mouse trail on the cliff side.

“I’m here, Lia.” He choked down a sob. “Come, climb onto my back.”

“Oh, Ja’al …”

They struggled to raise her. Lia had no strength left in her arms, so Ja’al bound her wrists with his belt and pulled them around his neck. Lifting her body, he used his loincloth to create a sling that kept her in place, leaving his hands free to grasp bushes and roots as he negotiated the steep descent back to the tree.

By then, Master Jo’el was at the prekki tree with five more monks. Hallon and Rallon rigged a rope bridge to Ha’athior Island, and moved Hualiama across the gorge in an improvised sling.

Ja’al said, “Sapphurion will be here in a matter of hours.”

“We can’t tell the Dragons,” said Master Jo’el. “They’ll burn this place down if they hear we trespassed on their holy Isle.”

The young monk cradled Lia in his arms. “Careful with her,” Flicker growled at Ja’al. She was tiny compared to him, like a wren tucked into its nest.

“What about the Tourmaline Dragon?” asked Ja’al.

“Hualiama must decide,” said Master Jo’el. “He was feral?”

“Feral,” whispered Lia, groaning through gritted teeth. “Can you heal a feral Dragon?”

Ja’al cut in, “Toss that despicable Dragon in a Cloudlands volcano! Sapphurion’s mate is meant to have healing powers. Can we ask her to treat Lia?”

“It’d be dangerous,” his uncle pointed out. “What if Lia speaks Dragonish in her presence?”

“What if she dies? Look at these wounds, Master.”

Flicker nodded quietly as he followed the men back up the tunnel. If a Dragon had injured her, a Dragon should heal her, his seventh sense insisted. There was a certain rightness about the notion, a completion of a necessary fragment in the impossibly complex song of the Island-World, the great balance alluded to in Dragon lore. Land Dragons were masters of the balance. But they dwelled in the vastness of the cloud-oceans between the Islands, between Kaolili and the Lost Islands, he had read, that hotbed of Dragon-hating Human magicians who were said to possess a power called Dragons’ Bane, the ability to bind a Dragon to their purposes and fling them to their death in the Cloudlands.

* * * *

Tiny Lia squealed happily, running into a Red Dragoness’ paw.
She’s such a darling thing,
said a voice.

We can’t keep her, my third heart.
This was the great one, whose voice thundered with mellow, ageless wisdom.
Humans are not our pets, not any longer. If their King discovers we’re secretly raising a Human on Gi’ishior Island, there would be terrible consequences–their adraconistic advisors would have all the excuse they needed for war, not to speak of our own enemies in the Council of Dragon Elders.

She’s so beautiful. So … bursting with the fires of life.

There was a silence of breaking hearts. That girl knew nothing of it, then, yet she remembered their voices.

You mourn our eggs, thou breath of my soul.
The great voice sounded leaden.
Just one hatchling when we dreamed of three.

That’s a truth born in fire, Sapphurion
, said the Dragoness.
Always, you know the flight of my wings, even when it must perforce dip into the Cloudlands with sorrow. What did Ianthine want with this one? Where did that ruzal-breathing witch find her? This is a great mystery, my third heart.

Giggling, the Human toddler ran unsteadily to the mighty Blue Dragon, holding out her arms.

When she fell, the Dragon scooped her up with great gentleness, for each of his talons were longer than her body.
Here, little mouse. You cannot stay in our clutch forever. We must give you to the Human King.

I sorrow,
said the Dragoness.

And I fly with thee in thy sorrow,
said her mate.

* * * *

They had done to her what the Nameless Man had done, Hualiama realised. She was trapped in her own mind, unable to speak or respond as a maternal draconic presence examined her wounds. Then, the Nameless Man had saved her from being destroyed by Ra’aba. Now, she raved inside the echoing hallways of her mind, slipping into and out of lucidity. How could it be that a Red Dragoness stood in her cavern, alongside Master Jo’el, Ja’al and Master Khoyal? How could the Dragoness confer with them in low tones, while Lia lay helplessly abed, beneath a light cloth covering meant both to preserve her modesty and to conceal her identity?

Magic. Oh, the sweet, unattainable song of icy fire playing over her body!

“What kind of fire did this?” inquired the Dragoness.

“Dragon fire,” said Master Jo’el. “A feral Dragon attacked the girl–my niece. We brought her here, for we hoped you might accompany the Dragon delegation, o mighty Qualiana. Your powers of healing are peerless, even among the Dragonkind.”

His smooth lie darkened the fire.

After a long silence, Qualiana said, “I will accept your story and treat your niece, Jo’el, but you will owe me a favour. A personal favour.”

Unable to respond, Hualiama lay unmoving, drenched in equal parts of pain and astonishment. Dragons spied lies so easily? At last, coolness bathed her burns, a healing magic which traversed the most intimate, delicate pathways of bone and muscle, and she knew by the Dragoness’ groan and the transfer of arcane energy between them that Qualiana worked a mighty labour within the very warp and weft of her being.

After a very long time, Qualiana spoke.
Do I know you, girl? Did I cradle you–
the Dragoness’ voice caught, thick with emotion
–in my paw?

Loving wings infolded her into a womblike space.

* * * *

From a prison of the mind, to a prison of the body.

Lia stared stupidly at her left wrist, tethered with a leather thong. Her neck twizzled. And the right. What was this? She lay on her stomach like a windroc soaring wide-winged upon the everlasting thermals of Fra’anior’s caldera, yet she was helplessly lashed to the frame of her pallet. Increasingly crazed thoughts avalanched through her mind. Pirates? Bandits? Torture from Captain Ra’aba? A draconic punishment for daring to set foot on Ha’athior Island?

“Er … help? Can somebody let me out?”

“She stirs at last from the royal pillow-roll,” said Inniora, moving into Lia’s line of sight. “Before you ask, this is for your own good. You kept thrashing about and scratching yourself so much that you were wrecking your chances of healing properly.”

“My own good?”

“Right. Red Dragoness say you no move. Heal good. Flicker say, you no move. Herbs stay put, heal good. Understand now? Inniora say–”

Lia fumed, “I understand I’m about to boot your backside so hard you’ll fly right over the caldera!”

Inniora folded her muscular arms with an infuriating smirk. “In which case, I’m leaving you right there. If you’ve the energy to squawk then you must be healing up.”

“Has anyone fed the Dragon? We must feed him. And–” Hualiama’s eyes flew wide “–how long have I been asleep? Will you untie me, you rotten tease … Inniora, laughing does not help. Please.”

Chuckling, “Slow down, grey falcon!” Inniora explained that Lia had been unconscious for four days after Qualiana exerted her healing magic. Flicker had delegated several dragonets to feed the feral Dragon assorted monkeys, lemurs and cave bats. Lia had dreamed repeatedly about being burned by the Dragon, she said, untying her friend’s ankles and wrists.