Dragonlove (26 page)

The Dragon concluded softly, “There was nothing between us at first, Lia. No spark. But as we journeyed and battled together, a friendship grew. I thought there was more. I considered speaking the first fire-promises with Cerissae, callow fledgling that I was, but the Amber-Red Dragoness had other plans. I was ignorant of the fact that the Lost Islands Dragons have developed entire branches of magic unknown or at least, lost to the Dragons of Gi’ishior. As we flew toward Shinzen’s fortress, Cerissae performed a healing reversal on me, seizing my energies and striking me down. I woke up in this cage, and the rest you know.”

Bitterness tinged Lia’s response, despite her best efforts to contain her feelings. “She played you–but to what purpose? I don’t see what Cerissae stood to gain, Grandion.”

“I believe her first purpose was to secure the Scroll for herself and her Dragon-kin,” he replied. “Its power is immense, Lia. They say the Dragon-Haters keep Dragonkind bound as defenceless thralls by the commands of their Enchanters. They can command a Dragon to throw himself into the abyss or tear out his own hearts.”

“No!”

“Aye. Cerissae gave up on the Scroll of Binding, believing it truly lost, or destroyed by Ianthine. She made a bargain with Shinzen which, to my knowledge, has never been consummated. Once, in a drunken rage, I heard Shinzen shouting about it outside this cavern.”

“What bargain?”

“To employ Dragon magic to raise Shinzen’s kin to life.”

Lia wished she had not asked. “Unholy windroc droppings! Can this get any worse?”

“Indeed,” grunted the Tourmaline Dragon, seeming perversely cheered by her reaction. “This fortress once belonged to Dramagon. Shinzen was created here. He covets an army of giants to help him conquer the Island-World.”

C
ome morning, Lia
sprang to her feet and sang out, “Rise with the birds, Dragon!”

“Is it dawn yet?”

“Time to rise and shine! Literally.”

“Crazy Human, what’re you up to?” He resettled his muzzle on the floor. “Do what you wish with me. I’m not–”

“Aye? I will.” Hualiama kicked his stomach as hard as she could without breaking a toe. “I didn’t know wishes could be fulfilled so quickly in this life.”

A chortle absconded from Grandion’s muzzle.

Lia said, “This cage stinks. I refuse to live in a cesspit of ralti sheep bones and Dragon droppings. After all, even the most violently felonious Dragon-fancying Princesses have their standards. We should block up the stream to flood the floor. Then–”

“When we first met, someone I know seemed to think she needed to light fires around a Dragon,” Grandion rumbled. “I feel a different approach is needed.”

“Oh? Now you’re the domesticated one?”

“Well, I don’t have much fire–stop tapping your foot. I can hear what you’re thinking.”

Lia snickered, “Oh, do tell.”

“You plan to insult me to arouse my fires.”

Right. But Grandion had not the first clue how devious a Human female could be. “No, quite the opposite.” The Tourmaline Dragon had barely hissed his confusion, sounding like an overheated steam-turbine, when Lia, infusing her voice with every ounce of slow, sweet seduction she possessed, cut in, “I’m overawed by how
huge
you’ve grown, Grandion. My heart turns somersaults over the moons every time I look at you. You’re one gorgeous, swoon-worthy monster.”

On cue, Grandion belched an impressive fireball.

“Excuse you,” Hualiama chuckled. “Found our fires, Dragon?”

“Aye.” Two of his talons crooked jealously about her waist. “I found my fire.”

A deliciously perilous fluttering filled the pit of her stomach. And Lia, colouring like the most volcanic suns-set, discovered that the joke was on her.

Grandion laughed up a minor thunderstorm, shaking the cavern and eventually falling into a helpless fit of fiery hiccoughs. Wretched reptile! She could cheerfully have throttled him, or rather … what? That was the question which knew no answer. And her decision? Overturned in a millisecond. Her pendulum swung from the depths of the Cloudlands to the heavens above. She must unchain the beast, yet she could not. She’d rather leap off a nearby cliff.

Aiming the Tourmaline’s muzzle with her hand, Hualiama helped him sweep the chamber with fire, turning every scrap of refuse to ash. Then Grandion plugged the water outlet by the amusing but practical method of sitting on it, and the streamlet began to back up. Removing her leggings, Lia waded through the rising water to mop Grandion from head to toe–at least, that was her intent, but she soon realised she had begun a process not likely to take less than a few days.

“You could swim out of here,” he said, at one point. “Or, I could lift you up to that hole in the roof. You could escape, Lia.”

“And leave you behind? Splendid idea. Why didn’t I think of that?”

The Dragon persisted, “From the outside, you could find the way to open this cage. There must be a Dragon-sized door.”

“I’m not leaving you again!” Lia had intended a snarky response, but the emotion betrayed in her voice ambushed and stunned her. “I wasted six years. Six! Never again, Grandion. Do you hear me?”

Grandion reached out. “Don’t. I’m not worth crying over.”

He heard her silent tears? Or had he guessed from other cues only a Dragon’s senses were sensitive enough to detect? Lia pressed her forehead against his paw, muttering, “You’re not worth a few tears? Confoundedly stupid lizard. What in a Cloudlands lava pit do you think I’m doing here? I swear that massively armoured cranial cavity of yours contains nothing but a pile of gravel! I did not fly to Gi’ishior on some girlish whim. You and I are getting out of here
together
–end of Island!”

To her surprise, after a pregnant pause, Grandion began to guffaw.

“What?” Lia demanded, thrusting away from him. “I’m spilling my heart over your paw and you’re laughing at me? I’ll slap your witless Dragon muzzle so hard–look at me! I’m spitting sparks! I’m actually … spitting … oh, flying ralti sheep.”

The Tourmaline Dragon’s quaking shook the cage. How tiny she felt before such a storm, vibrating with the force of his laughter like a leaf in a gale. But his mirth was far from unkind. Alien, aye, and intimidating, but resonant with a delight she suspected was founded in the presence of a Human companion. How … curious. How unbelievable; truly scandalous. What could a person do but yield to the power such moons-tides exerted upon her life–were she the yielding sort? Sweeter by far not to fight it, Hualiama realised, and that was the part that frightened and thrilled her in equal measure.

Her head-decision had no hold on her heart. Lia writhed, at war with herself.

“What I would not have given to see you flatten the Dragon Elders,” said Grandion, “or to be present to savour Razzior’s downfall–although we may yet regret revealing your talents to that rancorous reptile. Lia, my third heart, I do not question your courage. Nor do I question the fires I sense within you. What I question is why you’re bothering with a blind Dragon who has been trapped in this cage for three years, seven months and nine days.”

“You question my heart,” she said, hurt.

Grandion’s massive paw lunged in her direction, but he missed his aim by several feet.
Princess.
She held her breath.
Lia! I can’t … see you.
His huge reptilian muzzle, taller and wider than her, swivelled with a desperation she had never thought to see in a Dragon.
I want to see your eye-fires, I need to …

He spoke to the accompaniment of a deep groan originating in the lowest reaches of his chest, making the Human girl imagine the foundations of an Island groaning beneath the pressure of a tectonic shift. Lia did not know why, but she remained stubbornly unspeaking as the sound swelled. Suddenly it became elegiac, echoing the sound the Dragons had made at Amaryllion’s passing on. Ripples of organic fire chased over her skin like a crazy silver filigree. Her scalp prickled as though charged with electricity, and the entire length of her hair rose about her, before–
kiiiraaack!
A lightning bolt sizzled from Human to Dragon. Grandion yelped, his trigger-response propelling him a hundred feet across the chamber in an eye-blink.

Whirling, the Dragon panted,
Not your heart. Mine. I feel as though I wish to soar to the moons, only, there’s an Island chained to my tail.
Words poured out of him now, taut and hot with emotion.
I try to fly but it’s just dragging me down into the Cloudlands, an impossible burden. I can’t live like this, Lia. I can’t fly. I feel … I suffer …

Call a wing a wing, Grandion,
she whispered.
You’re afraid.

FEEEAAAARRRR!
His roar rolled over her, and she was mute, convulsed by sorrow and the pain of a creature of enchanted Dragon fires, thus abased. He roared,
Content, Human girl? A Dragon admits fear! He scorns the hollow edifice of draconic pride and admits he needs you.

She felt ashamed.

Raising his muzzle with a hint of the old, imperious Grandion, the Dragon added,
We have words for our fires–dark-fire, light-fire, liquid-fire and star-fire … and since you came, Hualiama, both dark- and light-fires rage in my breast, so intertwined that one is the shadow of the other … unbearable sweetness, mingled with hope stolen from the abyss.

Tenderly, Hualiama’s song enwrapped his words, stilling the Dragon:

Let my soul take wing upon dawn’s twin fires …

And fly to thee.

Grandion’s claws flexed, tearing up the flagstones on the floor. His chest heaved, while his tail flicked side-to-side behind him.
You sang that before,
he gasped.
I heard you, but did not believe. I could not.

Grandion, I’ll help you fly.
Abruptly she hurled herself across the cavern, sobbing, running, flying to him. Never again.
I’ll be your eyes. You’ll be the song of the wind, one with my soul’s wings.

Hualiama crashed into his neck, bounced off, and sprang in again, desperate to hold him, to know the clutch of his paw, to be enfolded in his draconic warmth. Grandion’s throat worked spasmodically. Laughter cascaded from the triple larynx of the Tourmaline Dragon’s throat, the thrilling low notes of a draconic trumpet, a series of whip-cracks as if chains snapped in his middle larynx, and a wild, unfettered descant warbling from the upper palate. The sound seized her legs and hurled her away in a dance of pure jubilation. Hualiama pranced about the Dragon, making triplets of leaps in which her legs spread forward and back of her like a Dragon’s wings, and her head arched backward with each jump until it touched the inside of her knee.

Then she spun back into his paw, laughing through tears,
My Dragon. My Dragonlove!

* * * *

“Tell me you came here with a plan,” Grandion chortled.

All was laughter now. Shinzen’s guards must think they were moons-mad. Lia was mad, but it was a peculiar form of madness that transcended the physical structures and trappings of reality, as if she possessed the key to the fabled immortality of the Ancient Dragons. She was boundless. Caged, but free. She had fought storms and battles and Dragons for him, and brought a gift in the form of his egg-father’s unprecedented apology, apart from the treasure of herself.

To think that as a hatchling, when he clasped this wisp in his paw, his Dragon fires had darkened with jealousy and rage. To think that a tiny, green-eyed sprite had matured into this woman he held now, clasped in the loose cage of his talons that he knew she could slip through like smoke whenever she wanted–yet she chose to remain. Hualiama was the ultimate conundrum.

Did she know what she had called him, in the welter of her ecstasy?

Dragonlove.

What Dragon hoard had ever boasted such a treasure? All the softly gleaming gold and glittering jewels of the Island-World’s kingdoms could not compare. The stars sang no greater song. Panic and exaltation surged in his white-fires, the purest, most elemental expression of a Dragon’s being. The word was right. It shivered his bones.

“Plan? What plan?” she imitated his laughter, poorly.

And she was off again, twirling across the cavern floor as he failed to track her efforts by scent and hearing. He ached to revel in that expression of her beauty. There was such a richness of detail conveyed by Dragon sight, he felt as though a heart had been carved out of his chest by its loss. Her feet whispered upon the flagstones. Her heartbeat raced across his senses like a crazed hare, bounding up and down with her dance. Could he not share her fire? Could he not, if he yearned strongly enough, if he reached for her with every ounce of his strength …

* * * *

“We need an escape plan,” Hualiama growled, flexing her wing arches to display forceful irritation. “I–what’re you doing? Grandion!”

“Get out of my mind,” squeaked the Dragon, in ridiculous soprano. Putting his paw to his ear canals, he dug about exactly like a Human rooting for ear wax.

Lia thundered, “Grandion, stop that!”

Only, her thunder was disturbingly mouse-like compared to what the draconic presence within her mind expected. Across from Hualiama, the real Tourmaline Dragon stood on his hind legs, wagging his finger at the impertinent Dragon–or was that Human–opposite. “You put me back this instant, you lumpen overgrown gecko, or I swear …”

Suddenly, with a crack like an overstrained hawser snapping, Lia recoiled back into her own body and landed on her tailbone. “Roaring rajals.” After rubbing her bruised rear, she checked her arms and legs suspiciously. Grandion was doing exactly the same, humming in pleasure as he discovered wings and fangs all in good order. Hualiama wished, just once, that she could do a dint of serious damage to her draconic cellmate. Sweetly, she inquired, “What did you just do to me?”

Grandion’s head snapped up and he swallowed fire with an audible, painful-looking gulp. “Now listen here, you interfering dragonet–”

Lia folded her arms across her torso. “No invading my privacy.”

For a minute or more, all she saw was smoky breath curling in and out between his fangs. The muted storm-susurrus of his belly-fires filled the cavern. Snaking toward her, jarring the ground with every step, Grandion hissed, “You forget you speak to a Dragon.”

The icy claws of Dragon-fear seized her belly. Her chattering teeth rather spoiled the effect of her heated reply, “Well, Dragon, you forget you’re speaking to someone who can touch your soul.”

“True wisdom lies in the fear of Dragons.”

“I don’t like it when you … when you stalk me, all scary and predatory.”

GGRRR!
Grandion sounded incensed.

Hualiama gave up the pretence of bravery. She should not have taunted him, as amusing a pastime as it might be. With a mind of their own, her feet conveyed her backward as the Tourmaline Dragon lumbered toward her. She pressed her shoulders against the cavern wall. Bolt? Hide? Where could she possibly run? These shivers were not delicious–or were they? The heights of adrenalin, the caged-bird thrashing of her heart as Grandion bunted her with his nose, the effervescent, crystalline magic he ignited up and down her spine …