Dragonfriend (30 page)

“Aye.”

“Then why’s your little heart beating so fast?”

From her reading about Dragons, Lia knew their senses were many times acuter than those of Humans. It beggared belief–he could hear her heartbeat from down there? “It’s irritation–with you,” she retorted, bending low to blow on her little stove. The heat felt about right. Now to add the meriatite …

“Hualiama, why did the monk call your father a brute?”

Flip that Dragon over an Island, now he was suddenly full of questions–and none of them easy ones.

Hualiama went very still, transported to another time and place. Her sister Fyria, sneering, ‘Father never wanted you, little Lia. That’s why he hates you. It was Mother who insisted on adopting you. None of us wanted you, but she made us.’

“Father has a punishment board in his office,” she said, in a dull, lifeless voice. She tested the release valve cautiously. Not enough pressure, yet, although the meriatite was bubbling merrily. “It’s a square of wood covered in sharpened dowels. When I have done wrong, which is often, the punishment is to kneel on that board, for hours. Or he beats me, and my mother. When he’s drunk–”

“You stand between him and your mother, wishing he would beat you, rather.”

At first, Hualiama thought he had read her deepest feelings, but then she realised Grandion must be talking about himself. Could it be that they shared this secret shame of a father both loved and feared, who demanded respect but often did not deserve it, who lashed out at the most unexpected moments to tear a family apart? Suddenly, he seemed not a vast, serpentine predator, but a friend with whom she could share confidences.

“I should’ve stood on him,” said Grandion.

“Aye? Yet I love him, Grandion. Isn’t that the strangest thing?”

“No,” returned the Dragon, his voice now as mellifluous as the tones of a Fra’aniorian pan-flute. “No, for love transcends woe. Sometimes it is pure, like the stars of a moonless night, and sometimes it is as clouded as a storm, but it is still love.”

Such were the storms that lashed her heart.

After a time, he added, “I’m sorry I made you cry.”

And now he heard the drip of her tears above the chuckle of the bubbling still? Hualiama sniffed hugely. Pestiferous, perceptive Dragon!

“How many hours until your bomb is ready?” asked Grandion.

“Too many.”

Below, talons clicked on stone as Grandion shifted restlessly. “You have told me stories, and sung me songs, Hualiama, but I regret I was a feral beast for much of that time, unthinking and unheeding. I would know the tale of your life. Would you tell me of the heart of a girl who scorns death to comfort a lost Dragon?”

Hope lodged in her breast, yet it was hope bound to a disconcerting knowledge. This Dragon would not kill her. Whatever magic had emerged to ensnare them, it was far more dangerous than that.

O
N Her THIRD
strike of the spark-stone, the fuse caught. “Take cover!” Lia yelled, even though she had already warned Grandion four times. His muffled laughter chased her into the depthless night.

Although only the tiny pinpoint of the White moon was visible in the sky and enormous Iridith was hidden behind Ha’athior’s looming bulk, there was plenty of ambient light to help Lia traverse the cliff. She hurried with the zest of someone who knew a large volume of highly explosive hydrogen gas was about to ignite. Scrabble for bushes and handholds. Keep the feet moving, but take each step with care. Wish for wings that could bear her aloft if she took just one misstep …

How long was that fuse? Was Master Jo’el correct about the five minutes? She waited.

When it came, the detonation was disappointing.

Thump.
Just a dull concussion conducted through the ground to her feet, although Lia did see a flash of light briefly illuminate the volcanic cone to her right hand. Dragonets? Lia paused in surprise. Hundreds of dragonets lined the volcano’s rim to watch proceedings. How did they know?

She turned. Nothing.

“Oh, Islands’ sakes …” Lia’s voice trailed off.

First, there came a sharp cracking sound as though lightning had struck from within the Island. Then, a deep groan, as if a mile-high door had been forced open for the first time in millennia. And now, a roar as a piece of Ha’athior Island slipped away from the mainland, sluggishly at first, but the noise rapidly escalated into a thunder that rolled away over the Cloudlands until it was lost in that immensity.

Flying ralti sheep! Lia dived beneath an overhang as a cascade of pebbles pinged her head and shoulders, followed by a few larger boulders which narrowly missed her feet as they tumbled past.

After that, the stillness shrieked against her ears. Hualiama listened for a final crashing lower down the Island, but perhaps the distance was too great. Silence. No Orange Dragons nosing about, investigating the landslide. Right. She scrambled to her feet. Time to see what trouble she had wrought.

Hopefully, a great deal. But when she reached the old avalanche site, it was to voice an involuntary wail of despair.

She had buried him!

Hualiama surveyed the destruction with mounting horror. A hundred feet away, she saw a darker smudge that she took for a sign of the blast-fire. Bushes still smouldered there, but below, the cliff-side had been carved away, leaving naked rock. But where was Grandion? Surely, he should emerge from the tunnel smiling and carolling his joy to the heavens? Then, she heard a muffled roar. Alive! He was somewhere beneath the rubble!

Before she knew it, Lia screamed across at the dragonets,
Help me! There’s a Dragon, buried here.
They looked on as, with trembling hands, she shinned down a vine to the level on the near-vertical slope where she thought she might find the Tourmaline Dragon, tracking the sound of his voice and the faraway scrape, scrape of his paws. Boulders, sand and other rubbish had collapsed into a crack here, she saw. The explosion had brought the cliff down on Grandion’s head–or not quite on his head, judging by the racket he was making.

Drawing one of her forked daggers, Lia hacked off the vine below the level of her feet and then tied the end firmly about her waist. Did she care about prowling Dragons? Nay. Living atop an active volcano meant that earth tremors and landslides could be bought a dozen for a brass dral.

Having freed both hands, she began to dig.

Immediately, two reds whizzed over to chatter at her in amazement.

Two-leg thing make dragonet warren?
inquired the first.

Crazy creature far from home,
snickered the second.
Crazy-no-brain. Play game?

Being accustomed to a particular dragonet’s name-calling, Hualiama only smiled at them, mindful to keep her teeth covered by her lips.
There’s a Dragon trapped beneath this rubble, little ones. Will you help me dig for him?

The reds chorused,
No dig warren?

No, I’m playing a game to find a Dragon. Can you hear him under there? Why don’t you bring your friends to play?

Chirping excitedly, the dragonets began to burrow into the side of the cliff with the alacrity and enthusiasm of a pair of rabid weasels. In seconds, another dozen dragonets joined them. Dirt began to spray about. Boulders shifted. The dragonets took turns to tease and castigate each other. A minute or two later, Hualiama estimated that she had to have five hundred eager little helpers, their paws blurring as they dug, covering each other in dirt and picking up bushes to drop them off the cliff, crying,
Beware! Beware!
in shrill little voices when they undermined a boulder and rolled it away.

You’re marvellous! What wonderful helpers!
Lia cried, ignoring at least ten pairs of paws pinching at her skin, trying to work out what manner of strange animal she might be.

Chaos. She considered the scene, laughing. The dragonets nearest her started laughing as well. Soon the entire cliff was covered in dragonets laughing for no other reason than the fact that the dragonet next to them was laughing. They sounded like a menagerie stuffed with giggling, squawking parakeets.

Lia dug with all of her strength, her heart suddenly pounding with a wild, uncontainable hope.

She must save the Dragon.

But ten or fifteen of the most tortuous minutes of her life passed by before suddenly, six feet from her right hand, a huge, scaly blue paw punched free of the dirt and stone. It withdrew underground.

“Oh, please, be alright … Grandion?”

Lia was yelling into the dark hole when the incline beneath her feet heaved, sending her into a helpless, bruising tumble down the steep slope before the vine snapped taut. She fetched up against a large granite boulder. Nearby, rock and stone buckled and cracked. Clinging to her vine, Hualiama caught her breath. With the resounding thunder of a Dragon’s challenge, Grandion burst free from his confinement, bellowing and bugling his joy until echoes cascaded from the opposing mountainsides, and the startled dragonets took off in a flock to begin a celebratory aerial dance.

From the tips of his talons to the massively spiked crown of his head, Grandion was what the scrolls failed so miserably to capture, an awesome living creature of fire and magic. It seemed inconceivable that a beast of his stature could possess a sleek, feline grace, but as the Dragon stretched his neck to gaze at the stars, and arched his spine with a deep groan that bespoke irrepressible delight at being freed from his bondage, he seemed wreathed in a mantle of stark and terrible splendour, far surpassing Lia’s wildest imaginings. Her chest hurt. Lia’s scalp crawled with a sensation of expansiveness.

Mercy! What had she loosed upon the Island-World?

Then, the Dragon’s muzzle turned, seeking her out. A crystalline eye-jewel, blazing with Dragon fire, fixed upon the Human girl with a potency that struck her speechless. She had never felt so very small. Mighty as he was, not even Amaryllion had mesmerised her so profoundly. This was different, a tempestuous song of magic and elation and no small tremor of fear as she gazed back at the Island-World’s ultimate predator, and yet her heart sang unbridled.

Grandion. She knew him, and he knew her, and it was a connection so exquisite and unending, Lia thought she might explode in a puff of bliss.

“What magic is this?” he whispered.

“None I know,” Lia stammered. “Oh, my soul … I feel … strange.”

With great nobility, the Dragon bowed his neck until the tip of his muzzle almost brushed her stomach. “I thank thee for redeeming my life, Human girl.”

By rights, the Dragon should execute her on the spot for standing upon the holy Isle. Though terror reigned supreme in her being, Hualiama’s tiny hand rose to touch his muzzle, sparking a palpable frisson in the Dragon’s body. Grandion’s belly-fires roared into life as if she had applied the bellows to stoke a furnace, only the blaze melted her own soul. Lia laid her cheek against his; so warm, so alive. There was nothing cool or reptilian about him. The complex beat of his hearts defied her comprehension, bespeaking ebullient storms of emotion coursing through the Dragon. And Lia wept as she had never known a person could weep, for gladness and wonder and the strangeness of a mystery which cocooned their shared existence at this moment, for the white-golden fire which gilded his muddied bulk in tongues of living fire, and for the knowledge that all of what she knew of the world, should be cast upon the pyre.

Once, the Ancient Dragons had raised the Islands from volcanic ashes. Newness rose from those world-shaping fires, sculpting places where creatures could live and love and thrive. So she felt now, poised upon the rim-wall of the unknown, about to dive into her future.

“O Dragon,” she breathed at last, “I tremble at thy presence.”

Thou …
he gulped, and heaved such a great exhalation that it blasted particles of dirt off Hualiama’s body. Grandion’s muzzle withdrew; without warning, he then pressed forward eagerly, nostrils a-flare, to snuffle her scent deep into his lungs.

Terror and glory!

Acting on an impulse alien to anything she had experienced in her fifteen and a half summers of life, Lia copied the Dragon. She caught a whiff of rancid meat mingled with a far more redolent, intriguing spiciness of vanilla and cinnamon, and the sulphurous smoke of his fires. The odour made her head spin. Hualiama sighed wordlessly, and giggled as the Dragon sighed in concert with her. Hypnotic and inveigling, his eye-fires matched her soul’s febrile ardour blaze for blaze.

He blinked, breaking the connection.

Grandion growled, “This is impossible. I–I can’t fathom these fires.” Turning again to gaze at the starry heavens, he added, “It takes the absence of stars to truly appreciate their beauty. In the same way, I feel you have been absent from my life all these years, Hualiama.”

“Wow, you sound old.”

His laughter brought billows of smoke forth from his nostrils. “I’m a juvenile Dragon, like you, only I’m four years older–nineteen summers of age. And, sixty-five feet is no great size for a Dragon.”

“Big enough when you could probably swallow me sideways down your gullet.”

“Tempting?” He pretended to consider eating her, before chuckling, “Nay, Human girl. I have pondered your proposition, and I find in it a fatal flaw.”

Lia ventured, “You don’t know where Ianthine is, mighty Dragon?”

“The Maroon Dragoness lives in the northern Spits.”

“Ianthine would liquefy your brains and suck them out with a straw?”

“Possibly. That’s another problem. No,” his forepaw rose before he evidently thought the better of tapping her on the shoulder, “the fundamental issue is that no Dragon would deliver such information to a third party. You have to ask Ianthine in person. It’s an unwritten law in Dragon culture–we have many such unwritten codes, unfortunately.”

“So I must fly my non-existent Dragonship into the most dangerous airspace in the Island-World, bar the Rift storm, to inquire of a mad Dragoness who my father might be?”

Grandion’s jaw yawned open, giving the cringing girl a fine close-up of his gleaming white fangs. It was a Dragon smile, she realised belatedly. If only she could stop prattling away and calm her thoughts, which bubbled in her brain as though liquid lava pooled there. Was this Dragon fear? Or something even more visceral?